What I keep seeing, in theater and in adjacent cultural spaces, is a particular kind of Asian visibility: polished, marketable, easy to read from a distance. A production borrows a few lines of Chinese or Korean. A set leans on East Asian visual cues. A script includes immigrant parents, food, silence, obligation, maybe a joke about pronunciation or assimilation. The audience recognizes the package immediately. The work is praised for specificity.

Yet what often passes for specificity is simply recognizability. Productions such as Jeena Yi’s “JESA” and Zoë Kim’s “Did You Eat?” offer a different possibility. In both plays, language and family dynamics felt embodied rather than ornamental.