4

Homework Becomes You

The Model Minority and Its Doubles

The controversial memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother opens with a list of activities forbidden to the author’s children: “attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin.”1 These lines provocatively set the banal quality of the restricted activities against the exceptional behaviors that were to be the norm. Author Amy Chua explains that these regulations were part of her efforts to raise her American daughters in what she calls “the Chinese way,” that is, with a firm hand (or, some would say, an iron grip) and an eye toward Carnegie Hall and the Ivy League.

When the Wall Street Journal published a preview excerpt of Chua’s book as “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” it triggered hundreds of angry comments from readers.2 I focus here on just two strands of this criticism, which help elucidate Asian American racial formation’s tendency to generate and close divides, to produce—as this chapter will elaborate—doubles as others and others as doubles. First, Chua’s implicit embrace of the model minority myth jarred with long-standing attempts to dislodge the perception that Asian Americans have triumphed over obstacles—racial or otherwise—through good values and hard work. Since the 1970s, scholars, community advocates, and artists have denounced the model minority stereotype, pointing to its damaging psychological and social effects. It has been linked to mental health issues among Asian American students, to political justifications for cutting welfare and affirmative action programs, and to increased tensions between minority groups, such as those explored in Chapter 3. In rejecting the stereotype, critics have emphasized socioeconomic differences among Asian Americans and drawn attention to communities whose struggles might be overlooked or discounted because of this racial preconception.

These communities constitute what one article calls “the other half”3 of the Asian American picture. “Asian-Americans: A ‘Model Minority,’” a story in Newsweek published in 1982, opens by establishing a clear dichotomy: “In this centennial year of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the assimilated anchorwoman and the unskilled member of an obscure Indochinese minority embody the extremes of the fastest-growing segment of the nation’s population.”4 In emphasizing a gap between the most successful Asian Americans and those who are at the very edges of American society, the article seems to ask whether the former are actually representative of Asian Americans in general. Yet insofar as the model minority myth promises that the latter can become just as successful, the persistence of struggling communities does not necessarily refute the stereotype; it can instead offer a useful image of what comes “before.” By always projecting ahead (from hardship to triumph), the model minority myth makes efforts to repudiate it a Sisyphean task.

Furthermore, as Susan Koshy and erin Khuê Ninh point out, not all who might identify as Asian American oppose their designation as the model minority.5 Some, such as Chua, regard it as a point of pride or a standard to emulate. From this perspective, examples of Asian Americans who do not fit the paradigm serve less to undermine the model minority myth than to drive it. In her memoir, Chua explains that in order to motivate her children, she invoked the experiences of first-generation immigrants, those who came with little money and never quite lost their outsider status. Revealing the class bias that informs the entire book, she limits her sample of first-generation immigrants to skilled workers and graduate students (20–21). Chua nonetheless recounts that she required her children to learn classical music because of her fear that they would exhibit signs of “third-generation decline” (i.e., “laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness” [22]): “I knew that I couldn’t artificially make them feel like poor immigrant kids. There was no getting around the fact that we lived in a large old house, owned two decent cars, and stayed in nice hotels when we vacationed” (22). The everyday realities of the upper-middle-class family might embody the model minority as fait accompli, but do not offer the more grueling experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants, which ostensibly propel their hard work. Chua insists that hardship must precede success, and that the model minority cannot do without its others.

When these others actually appear in Chua’s book, however, their presence disrupts rather than facilitates her attempt to draw a line from her life to theirs. In her critique of Chua’s idealization of the economic limitations and social alienation of immigrants, Grace Wang argues, “To celebrate immigrant toughness as a privilege, cultural exclusion as a form of capital, and institutionalized racism and downward mobility as a personal challenge to succeed, allows us to turn racism into individual failure.”6 Wang points out that despite romanticizing these figures, “when Chua finds herself face-to-face with her fetishized immigrant subjects, she feels distance rather than affinity.”7 She cites Chua’s account of taking one of her daughters to audition for Juilliard: “In the waiting area, we saw Asian parents everywhere, pacing back and forth, grim-faced and single-minded. They seem so unsubtle, I thought to myself, can they possibly love music? Then it hit me that almost all the other parents were foreigners or immigrants and that music was a ticket for them, and I thought, I’m not like them. I don’t have what it takes” (142).

This moment, when Chua encounters those whom she had been seeking to emulate, evinces a contradictory mix of identification and dissociation. The distance that Wang observes is clear in Chua’s portrayal of the other parents as a crude Asian mass. Aesthetic appreciation seems impossible; music for them, Chua believes, is a financial investment. Yet what initially seems like a dismissal of the other parents becomes something else with the thought, “I don’t have what it takes.” Wistfulness suddenly exposes itself alongside condescension. If the difference Chua first describes is one that sets her above the other parents, their positions are soon reversed in her mind. According to her logic, because she is not a foreigner or a recent immigrant, she simply cannot compete with their determination. Chua reveals that for all her claims to be a “tiger mother” (and her dislike of drama as an extracurricular activity for her children), she is playing a role that she has studied and carefully put into practice. What forces a crisis in this performance is an encounter with her doubles: the “real” tiger parents.

Yet how does Chua determine that the other parents are the real thing? The pacing and grim faces might be suggestive, but certainly not enough to discern that they are “foreigners or immigrants.” Chua identifies something un-American or not-yet-American about the others, as well as something that reveals their need for a ticket, a meal ticket or a ticket to a better social status. One can only guess that Chua was assessing the other parents’ ways of speaking, behaving, and interacting, and finding them incongruous with her own. These differences presumably reflected back the inadequacy of her performance as a “Chinese mother,” even as they indicated to Chua the other parents’ inadequate performances of a particular cultural and social status that she might claim. The question nevertheless remains, how precisely do the textures of the mundane connect to actual material circumstances? And while Chua clearly sees herself as separate from the others, do they see her in the same way? If Chua had hoped to simulate the experiences of “foreigners and immigrants” while remaining distinct from them, their meeting forces a confrontation with an unverifiable difference, and a similarity that she both rejects and desires.

This brief scene in Chua’s memoir exemplifies a distinct form of Asian American doubling, one that also energizes director Justin Lin’s film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Lauren Yee’s play Ching Chong Chinaman (first produced in 2008). An unlikely trio, these cultural productions all highlight the contradictory identifications prompted by the model minority stereotype. The model minority rarely goes without its “other half,” whether manifest as the yellow peril perpetually threatening the West, or as figures of economic and cultural alienation who seem to contradict the stereotype (or, according to Chua, to hold the secret to its perpetuation). If Asian American racial formation maintains a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” Asians, “good” and “bad” minorities, the double lives and alter egos that gradually take over Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman illuminate how this split can serve as a provocation to be like the other, and expose the complex system of incentives that compel such appropriations.

The film and the play, as well as a significant portion of Chua’s book, focus on Asian American teenagers who seem to typify the model minority. Like the accounts of Chinese immigrant laborers, Japanese “war brides,” and Korean American merchants examined in previous chapters, contemporary depictions of Asian American youths evince a fascination with the racial mundane—that is, with habitual, quotidian behaviors that come to exemplify the possibility and the limits of crossing racial boundaries. Since the 1980s, the apparent academic achievements of Asian American students have drawn attention to their daily practices as the potential source of their success. With an opening parallel to that of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a New York Times article published in 1986 claimed to examine why, as the title observed, “Asians Are Going to the Head of the Class.”8 It begins, “Le Thi Ngoc, a 32-year-old computer technician in Fremont, Calif., follows a set schedule when she comes home from work. After preparing dinner, she spends the next two hours helping her 10-year-old son, Alan, with his homework. Alan is not allowed to watch television on weeknights, and if he plays with his G.I. Joe toys when he is supposed to be doing his schoolwork, his mother throws them away.”9 Like Chua, the writer stresses the regular schedules, dedicated hours, and restrictions on play that organize Alan’s days. Yet while this sketch of mother and son launches a story on the lack of consensus about why Asian American students are ostensibly doing so well—and then presents everything from genes to Confucian values to the background of the parents as potential explanations—Battle Hymn proposes that a strictly enforced routine of study and practice is the key.

The second, predominant strand of criticism directed at Chua focused on her defense of these parenting methods. Responding to the furor, Chua informed an interviewer that some readers found the book comforting: “Everybody wants to know why so many Asian kids are good at math and achieve so much, and many readers said, ‘This is such a relief: it’s not genetic, it’s not in the rice! It’s about hard work, so we can do this!’”10 The memoir, in Chua’s view, rejects the idea that achievement is the result of racial differences owing to genes or culinary preferences, and instead posits that success is the result of hard work, as embodied in everyday practices such as playing the piano for hours and doing extra exercises for school.

In narrating her readers’ steps toward revelation, Chua moves from genes to rice to work. Rice, as discussed in Chapter 1, became the focus of anti-immigration polemics, which claimed that it endangered the very substance of the nation: as a cheap alternative to meat, it fed (cheap) Chinese labor and threatened American vigor. Placed between genes and work in Chua’s account, rice bridges what seems purely bodily with what seems purely behavioral. It thus mediates the shift from race (Chinese mothers are superior) to practice (anyone can be a Chinese mother). While Chua celebrates the possibility of cultivating successful children through a change in habits,11 an anxiety not unlike the one that fed early efforts to restrict Chinese immigration pervaded conversations about her book. Time magazine succinctly put it, “Though Chua was born and raised in the U.S., her invocation of what she describes as traditional ‘Chinese parenting’ has hit hard at a national sore spot: our fears about losing ground to China and other rising powers and about adequately preparing our children to survive in the global economy.”12 Other publications captured these trepidations with titles such as “Tiger Cubs v. Precious Lambs.”13 Such responses, however, are hardly unique to Chua’s book. Earlier accounts of the achievements of Asian American students also characterized them as Asia’s challenge to American and Western dominance. The aforementioned 1986 New York Times article, for example, claimed, “suddenly they [successful Asian American students] seem to be everywhere,” and described, “they are surging into the nation’s best colleges like a tidal wave.”14 These images of startling growth and ubiquity imply a dangerous propagation through seemingly praiseworthy stories about Asian American youth.15 It is in this context that the title of the Pew Center’s 2012 report, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” takes on a more ominous tone.

In these depictions, long-standing fears of Asian masses (the yellow peril) converge with tales of unlikely success (the model minority).16 Koshy contends that while the model minority myth was initially engaged to counter demands, originating from the civil rights era, for domestic policies to address racial inequality, it has more recently come to express global economic concerns.17 She observes, “The model minority has become an anxious figure of the prized human capital needed to navigate the insecurities and volatility of the global knowledge economy.”18 In the slippage between “Asian” and “Asian American,” which Chua’s loose use of the term “Asian” perpetuates, the “tiger cub” comes to embody concerns that the United States will soon lose its economic edge to Asian countries. As both ideal and threat, the product of tiger parenting unites the model minority and the yellow peril. Arguing that these two figures, “although at apparent disjunction, form a seamless continuum,”19 Gary Okihiro points out that they can look more like twins than antitheses: “‘Model’ Asians exhibit the same singleness of purpose, patience and endurance, cunning, fanaticism, and group loyalty characteristic of Marco Polo’s Mongol soldiers, and Asian workers and students, maintaining themselves at little expense and almost robotlike, labor and study for hours on end without human needs for relaxation, fun, and pleasure.”20 Associated variously with an American work ethic, Confucian values, or an inhuman mechanical efficiency, the same model minority traits lauded for exemplifying American self-sufficiency can just as easily signify an un-American lack of playfulness, and even forebode the ascendance of Asia. The “tiger cub” then not only updates the model minority myth but also extends fears of the yellow peril, joining a line that includes “Marco Polo’s Mongol soldiers,” Fu Manchu, and, more recently, the figure of the Asian gangster.21

Chua’s detractors indeed seized on the very characteristics that Okihiro identifies as blurring the line between the model minority and the yellow peril. As Wang observes, “Parenting blogs reviled her mothering style as child abuse, pathologized the (narrowly defined) success achieved by Asian American kids as the product of excessive discipline and rote practice, and extolled the virtue of balance, sleepovers, and play.”22 In defending “Western” parenting, critics found fault in Chua’s practices and the kinds of children her practices presumably shaped. They asked, even if “tiger” mothers produced children better equipped for contemporary economic challenges, would that be the ideal outcome for Americans? Such concerns echo allegations in the late nineteenth century that white workers would have to eat rice, live in deplorable conditions, and otherwise lower their standard of living to compete with Chinese labor. Exemplifying a pattern documented throughout this book, the purported habits of Asian and Asian American children simultaneously embodied the promise and the threat of dissipating difference.

The stereotype of Asian youths as uncreative test-taking machines, used to rebuff Chua, makes a strange appearance in the memoir itself when she recounts that she did not want her daughters to turn into “one of those weird Asian automatons who feel so much pressure from their parents that they kill themselves after coming in second on the national civil service exam” (8). Chua suggests a desire to distinguish her ideal children from this stereotype, but implies that such perceptions of Asian students are accurate and that fears of propagating more automatons are warranted. Her description of the Juilliard waiting room, with “Asian parents everywhere, pacing back and forth, grim-faced and single-minded,” then renders these adults, with their robot-like determination, older versions of “those weird Asian automatons.” Just as responses to her memoir expressed fears of becoming and not becoming like the “Chinese,” Chua reveals her own ambivalent relationship to those whom she holds up as models when she encounters her “doubles” in the Julliard waiting room.

A persistent trope in Asian American cultural productions, the double surfaces in Chua’s memoir to express a fraught desire to identify (provisionally) with the model minority’s others. In Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman, the performances to which I now turn, the double becomes a means of critiquing as well as expressing this desire. In her seminal work on the “racial shadow” in Asian American literature, Sau-ling C. Wong cites numerous literary examples in which “a highly assimilated American-born Asian is troubled by a version of himself/herself that serves as a reminder of disowned Asian descent.”23 Building on psychoanalytical theories, Wong argues that this racial shadow elicits both “revulsion and sympathy” from the protagonist, who in “disowning” the double realizes their connection as much as their difference.24 Josephine Lee engages with Wong’s study to offer a modified view of the double in works of Asian American drama: she proposes that the double conveys not just a struggle within the psyche of Asian Americans, but “the interactions of Asian Americans caught up in myths of individual success promoted by a capitalist ideology.”25 Lee contends that while the Asian American characters in these plays initially reject ethnic ties in favor of individualism, their relationships with their doubles hint at ethnic affiliations that might offer an alternative to capitalist notions of self and other.26

The characters in Ching Chong Chinaman and Better Luck Tomorrow exhibit an impulse to reject associations with “Asianness” that recalls Wong’s study of the “racial shadow” and an acceptance of individualist notions of success that resonates with Lee’s analysis. Yet in these recent performances, attraction and wishfulness exert as strong a force in the production of doubles as the mix of repulsion and sympathy at the crux of Wong’s theory.27 Like the parents whom Chua encounters at Juilliard, these doubles are objects of envy and vehicles for furthering personal ambitions. Furthermore, unlike the plays examined by Lee, which suggest the oppositional potential of ethnic affiliations, Lin’s film and Yee’s drama link the double’s appeal to the contradictions of the model minority stereotype, which incentivizes both intimacy with and distance from those who seem to constitute the model minority’s others. These performances demonstrate both the longevity of the double in Asian American cultural productions and the new forms and meanings it has developed as a result of increasing divides within Asian America, a situation that Wong predicted would be “most conducive to formation of the double.”28

What I call the mundane, although not the focal point of Wong’s study, nevertheless emerges as a crucial facet of her argument when she shows in her reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior that the double forces the Chinese American narrator to recognize “manner can be changed, but not skin color.”29 The racial shadow reveals, in other words, an apparent disjuncture between the narrator’s “race” (or what Robert E. Park might describe as her “racial uniform”) and her everyday behaviors. This dynamic is also evident in Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman, but quotidian enactments in these works serve more crucially to facilitate and constrain relationships between characters with model minority aspirations and the others who become their doubles. The former adopt different habits, exchange daily tasks, and generally stretch and manipulate the mundane to accommodate their desire to be another kind of Asian or Asian American. They thus attempt to take advantage of the ostensible paradox of Asian American racial formation, its vacillations between the yellow peril and the model minority, performing its inconsistencies to expand and change their lives. Yet they come to a point of crisis when confronted with those who reflect back the deficiencies of their performance, either by demonstrating its dependence on the affirmation of an unreliable audience or by revealing their material investment in privileges they seek to deny. Furthermore, the mundane, which initially seems to offer a way to double as the other, becomes a force of resistance when the lines between self and other become blurred.

Through various forms of doubling, Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman highlight the sharp economic stratifications that have come to characterize Asian America, stratifications that are alternately uncovered and covered over in debates about the model minority. They capture the fantasies and the anxieties generated by these divides, and the material and imaginative forces that compel as well as circumscribe crossings.

Playing the Part, Burying the Body

Heralded as a breakthrough work in Asian American cinema, the feature-length narrative film Better Luck Tomorrow became the center of controversy at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.30 The film portrays a group of Asian American high school students who run scams, sell drugs, and hire prostitutes—when not applying to top universities and participating in respectable extracurricular activities like the Academic Decathlon. The film’s plot bears many similarities to the 1992 murder of teenager Stuart Tay in a suburb of Southern California. News stories dubbed the crime the “honor roll murder,” emphasizing the victim and the perpetrators’ reputations as good students and stimulating interest in the apparent inconsistency between this reputation and the grisly murder. While only loosely following the details of Tay’s death, Better Luck Tomorrow builds on the premise of studious Asian American teenagers who lead double lives.

During a postscreening discussion at Sundance, an audience member criticized the film as an amoral depiction of Asian Americans and asserted that the filmmakers had a responsibility to represent their community more positively. This comment in turn incited an angry response from film critic Roger Ebert, who countered that he would not have similarly reprimanded a white filmmaker. Asian American characters, Ebert insisted, “do not have to ‘represent’ their people.”31 In an article about the incident, he elaborated, “[Director] Justin Lin said he senses a moral disconnect in some of today’s teenagers and wanted to make a movie about it. His cast was all Asian-American because—well, why not?”32 Quoted in the same piece, Lin explained that the film reflected “a reality among teenagers of any race.”33

Although both the audience member and the film critic claimed to speak on behalf of Asian Americans and indicated that they recognized a history of racial discrimination, by giving precedence to either appearances or behaviors, they directed their accusations of racial insensitivity at separate targets. In other words, by privileging either how the characters in the film looked or how they acted, they located responsibility for racial identifications—or for color blindness—at different sites. The audience member suggested that given the visibility of the characters’ “race,” their behavior reflected badly on an entire community. Meanwhile, Ebert and Lin argued that the characters’ behaviors resembled those of teenagers in general, and viewers therefore should not have seen their “race” at all.

These divergent attributions of responsibility reveal opposing assumptions about the point at which racial difference materializes and disappears: on the body of the actor, in the behavior of the characters, or in the vision of the spectator. Missing, however, is a sense of how these points might align or clash, thus prompting the kind of dispute that arose at Sundance. The terms of the argument moreover elide the conceptions of class and national identity couched within claims about the film’s relationship to race. Although most accounts of the dispute mention only that the audience member deplored its negative depiction of Asian Americans, Daniel Yi reports that he actually criticized the filmmakers for making a movie “so empty and amoral for Asian Americans and for Americans” (emphasis added).34 If Yi’s report is accurate,35 Ebert’s response may have deflected attention away from the film’s depiction of Americans (as well as Asian Americans) and the question of how its representations of “Asian Americans” and “Americans” might be related.

Curiously, the film itself explicitly engages with the issues of race and representation debated at the Sundance screening. The prominent place it gives to these issues belies Ebert and Lin’s insistence that it is not specifically about Asian Americans, even as it cynically predicts the kind of audience response that first provoked Ebert’s defense. In a case of life unwittingly imitating art, both the film and the argument that followed the screening manifest the contradictory demands of racialization, understood as the framing of corporeal traits as markers of innate differences, and assimilation, understood as the adoption of normative behaviors (here, within a particular national context). These dual pressures are crystallized in Better Luck Tomorrow by the characters’ double lives, which parallel—too neatly for coincidence—the stereotypes of the model minority and the yellow peril. The film asks how one body might simultaneously hold the model minority and the yellow peril as identifications—both burdensome and useful—that must be constantly managed in negotiation with others. By splitting Asian Americans between “good” and “bad,” the model minority and the yellow peril create a space of desire as well as a restrictive dichotomy. These figures offer different temptations to the teenagers of Better Luck Tomorrow. Simultaneously seduced and threatened when they encounter images of themselves and others as stereotypes, they move between roles by expanding their repertoire of the mundane.

In its depiction of high school students who alternately embrace and resent their identification as Asian, Better Luck Tomorrow reflects a distinctly contemporary ambivalence about race. This ambivalence is the peculiar offshoot of the major social and institutional changes brought about by the social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reaction against identity-based politics that followed. Racial identity in the film is not a clear basis for either oppression or resistance, but exerts a more nebulous force. Situated firmly in the middle class and headed for an elite university, Ben, the central character, seems to exemplify the success—or, as some argue, the current obsolescence—of efforts to combat racial inequality. Yet even as Ben initially rejects the idea that race has any bearing on his life, he continuously finds escape either impossible or undesirable. As Ben and his friends shift between reluctant and deliberate enactments of the yellow peril and the model minority, the abject body (figured unambiguously as a corpse in the backyard) warns of the deeper stakes of their performance.

The film begins with a tall gate sliding open, inviting viewers into a clean suburban community lined with identical, pastel-colored homes. An ice cream truck then rolls down the street, chased by a group of excited children. With this belabored first image of American suburbia, Better Luck Tomorrow emphatically sets itself in the United States (more precisely, in Southern California) before focusing the camera’s gaze on two teenagers, Ben and Virgil, as they lounge in a backyard. Virgil asks Ben, “Are you done yet? Early admissions? Ivy Leagues love it. Gets ’em all wet. All that studying finally pays off and you get to leave this hell-hole a year early.” As Ben silently tolerates Virgil’s rambling, an electronic ringing interrupts their leisurely sunbathing. When the two boys realize that the noise is coming from the ground instead of their pockets, they look at each other with alarm and frantically begin to dig into the yard, eventually coming upon a lifeless hand. As Ben contemplates in a voice-over, “You never forget the sight of a dead body,” the film flashes back four months to show the series of events that led to this moment.

The first scenes of Better Luck Tomorrow emphasize that it is telling a distinctly American story, one set after those once excluded from entry have passed through the gates and made themselves at home. As David Palumbo-Liu argues, “The move to the suburb by assimilated ethnics underscores the perpetuation of a particular narrative of ethnic mobility deeply linked to a closing off of space to any who have not passed through a specific process of becoming American.”36 From this perspective, the presence of two Asian American teenagers in an idyllic American suburb seems to represent the end of a journey from outsider to insider, hardship to success. Furthermore, the complete absence of parents, who are mentioned but never shown, distinguishes Better Luck Tomorrow from earlier Asian American films, many of which, as Jun Xing points out, are family dramas.37 Lisa Lowe contends that familial relations in Asian American novels often symbolize a process of swapping an “original” Asian culture for an American one, an argument also applicable to Asian American films.38 With parents and older generations kept out of sight, Better Luck Tomorrow establishes firm spatial and temporal boundaries around its characters, neatly avoiding any suggestion of migration or transnational affiliations.

Under the sun’s glare, however, Ben and Virgil look simultaneously relaxed and uncomfortable. In the spotlight, they are not only the central subjects of the film, but also objects of scrutiny, and the deceptiveness of the innocent ice cream truck that traverses the opening scenes becomes quickly apparent. Virgil’s monologue, despite its focus on college applications, describes early admission in explicitly sexual terms and reveals that he sees college as an opportunity to leave “this hell-hole,” presumably the pristine suburban setting. The ringing of the cell phone further disrupts the prosaic scene, and the appearance of the hand, which recalls the dismembered ear found at the beginning of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), reveals that the pleasant surroundings disguise a grim underside. As the camera fixes on a worm crawling on the corpse, it becomes clear that the seemingly passive American backdrop can suddenly intrude into the narrative and pull the characters from their rest. Although the scene begins as a picture of suburban ease, the unearthing of the dead body, which leads into the flashback that absorbs most of the film, suggests that Better Luck Tomorrow will expose what the teenagers’ presence in this landscape buries and erases.

When the film moves into the past, presumably to explain the corpse, it presents two possible beginnings to the story. Ben selects one beginning himself. Early in the flashback, Ben successfully tries out for the school basketball team, only to have Daric, the editor of the campus newspaper, ask him, “How do you feel about being the token Asian on the team?” Although the question bewilders and angers Ben, Daric subsequently writes an inflammatory story that incites students to protest Ben’s benchwarmer status and eventually leads to his withdrawal from the team. The incident appears to be a humorous interlude and a jab at identity politics without significant consequence, particularly since Ben and Daric become friends. Yet near the end of the film, after Ben and Daric have murdered another student (the one buried in the backyard) and Virgil has attempted suicide, Ben asks Daric why he wrote the story. Daric responds with a confused look, suggesting that he does not understand why the article is relevant in the aftermath of such violent events. Daric’s article, however, is significant for drawing attention to Ben’s racial difference. Claiming that racialization begins with the article would ignore the larger social forces from which ideas of “tokenism” emerge. Daric’s story nevertheless seems to activate Ben’s awareness that his body is racially marked. However firmly he is planted in the film’s overstated depiction of American suburbia, Ben must reckon with the susceptibility of his body to signify “otherness.”

Ben’s unexpected reference to the article after the murder connects it to the dead body, and consequently links the racial awareness that it sparks to the corpse that haunts the film. While Better Luck Tomorrow insists on depicting its characters as quintessentially American, it unsettles the teleology of assimilation by inserting racialization as a lurking, interruptive force. Abrupt jumps in chronology and repeated images of gates opening and closing throughout the film capture these disruptions by undermining a sense of temporal linearity and spatial stability. In contrast to the passage from racial difference and conflict to assimilation conceptualized by Robert E. Park’s “race relations cycle,”39 the film’s more erratic rhythms suggest continual movement between inclusion and exclusion. Lowe argues that narratives of immigrant inclusion are paradoxically “driven by the repetition and return of episodes in which the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation.”40 The variable position of Asian Americans, which makes inclusion always tentative, reveals a symbiotic rather than oppositional relationship between racialization and assimilation: Anne Cheng contends, “Racialization in America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others.”41 In a circular process, the persistence of racial hierarchies, however implicit, encourages racialized minorities to seek assimilation and sets racial limits on its fulfillment, such that the promise of assimilation maintains the very racial hierarchies that it would seem to undermine. This contradictory dynamic exemplifies what Lauren Berlant calls a relation of “cruel optimism,” one that exists “when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”42

When Ben names Daric’s article as the origin of the violent events that subsequently take place, he assumes that racialization and assimilation are separate processes; by racially marking him, the article disrupts his progress toward a good life. Yet the film coyly undermines this assumption by showing that assimilation is itself deeply racialized, and that notions of racial difference persist through, and not despite, the teleology of assimilation. Whereas Ben traces the corpse back to Daric’s article, the actual beginning of the flashback is a sequence of images of Ben diligently working, studying, doing community service, and applying to college. Quickly displayed photographs of Ben and each of his friends—Daric, Han, Virgil, and Stephanie—then give a glimpse of their backgrounds and interests. While not all of the characters match Ben’s proximity to popular conceptions of the model minority high school student, many of these photographs associate them with typically American experiences: Ben singing in a church choir and wearing a cub scout’s uniform; Daric smiling with President George W. Bush; and Stephanie holding a hunting rifle and wearing a cheerleader’s outfit. Pictures of hapless Virgil and cool Han fill out Better Luck Tomorrow’s breakfast club.

In addition to these photographs and the opening shots of the ice cream truck and suburban homes, the camera lingers early in the film on a fast-food restaurant, a baseball diamond, and high school hallways full of the adolescent types that invariably populate American teen films and television shows. As Cheng points out, “We so often think of stereotypes as about the minority that sometimes we fail to see that the norm is of course itself a stereotype: a stereotype that has been legitimated, a performative expression par excellence.”43 By overloading its introductory scenes with activities and places that collectively accentuate the characters’ Americanness, Better Luck Tomorrow arguably caricatures these expressions of national identity, offering the kind of “hyperbolic citation” of norms famously theorized by Judith Butler in relation to gender performativity. Butler argues that “acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are the fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and their discursive means.”44 Asserting that behaviors that seem to reflect an identity are what produce and maintain it, she theorizes that gender is not something one displays, but something one does. Butler moreover emphasizes that the citation of norms is compulsory to the extent that it is necessary for the formation of legible subjects, as well as exclusionary in its production of a constitutive “outside” of abject bodies and disavowed identifications.45 The impossibility of perfectly occupying any normative identity and the possibility of repeating conventions inappropriately or excessively, however, allow for a space of potential resignification. Butler posits, “Paradoxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is ‘queered’ into public discourse through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive convention that it also reverses.”46 Without assuming the subversiveness of such exaggerated and improper performances, Butler proposes that they may hold critical potential.

It is tempting to apply Butler’s analysis to the initial scenes of Better Luck Tomorrow and to argue that its portrayal of prototypical American settings and lifestyles “mimes and renders hyperbolic” conventions of Americanness, the performativity of national identity. The model minority stereotype, however, complicates this argument by insinuating a ready frame through which to see the characters’ behaviors. To the extent that the model minority stereotype “renders hyperbolic” the assimilation of Asian Americans, and thus racializes assimilation itself, it casts supposedly normative behaviors as performances of racial difference. In other words, the stereotype characterizes as remarkable and peculiar the very movement engrained in the national imaginary as the natural course of becoming American.47 While praised for being hard-working and self-reliant, the model minority can never be American, but can only mimic Americanness, performing it badly, partially, or so well that the performance elicits incredulity.

Better Luck Tomorrow asks viewers to attend to Ben’s daily activities by presenting them in a highly exaggerated, repetitive style that lends them an uncanny quality. The flashback begins with Ben at work in a fast-food restaurant, where the employee of the month plaque shows that he has held that honor for several months: shots of these awards in quick succession emphasize the repetitiveness of this achievement. Similarly, when Ben practices free throws at a neighborhood basketball court, abrupt cuts move the film quickly through multiple images of the ball flying toward the basket; these recurrent shots then match the regular series of Xs that he records in a notebook to track his progress.

Yet what is the relationship between the activities depicted in these scenes and the representational modes used to depict them? Is the film attempting to convey the repetitive, excessive quality of Ben’s behaviors, or are its formal manipulations instead generating the impression of excessive repetitions? By introducing each character through a series of photo stills—through images that are explicitly cut, framed, and stacked—Better Luck Tomorrow highlights the selectiveness of its depiction; yet when it shows Ben’s many awards and his diligent basketball practice, it blurs the line between what Ben does and how his activities are represented. Locating strangeness in the execution of these activities renders Ben a figure of robotic dedication, the “weird Asian automaton” eschewed by Chua and implied in characterizations of Asian and Asian American students as adept at rote exercises, but not creative thinking. Locating strangeness in the representational mechanism, by contrast, exposes the dangers (or the redundancy) of defamiliarizing the American mundane through bodies already regarded as imitative, suspicious, and alien. By making it difficult to distinguish between enactment and representational apparatus, the film simultaneously mimics and critiques the naturalization of racialized perception, a process by which the racially marked body comes to seem expressive of—and thus becomes confused with—the mode in which it is seen.

Thus, although Daric’s question about tokenism seems to mark the moment when Ben becomes cognizant of his racial identification, the exaggerated, repetitious quality of the preceding scenes that show Ben’s daily activities slyly evokes popular depictions of the model minority high school student. A 2005 Wall Street Journal article titled “The New White Flight” exemplifies these depictions, even as it concurrently documents their pernicious influence.48 The article reports that white students in Northern California are leaving schools with large numbers of Asian Americans because of the latter’s intense competitiveness and focus on math and science over the liberal arts. According to some of the white and Asian American parents and students interviewed, Asian Americans are not just successful in school, but excessively and inappropriately so. The article concludes with the story of a white student who decides to move to a school with lower test scores where “Friday-night football is a tradition,” in a revealing conflation of a smaller population of Asian American students with the retention of hardy American athletic traditions.49

This article sheds light on why, despite their stylized portrayals, none of Ben’s activities attract much attention within the film until he joins the basketball team, after which Daric’s story and a student’s joke that Ben is the “Chinese Jordan” explicitly frame this activity as peculiar.50 These distinct modes of “defamiliarizing” Ben’s everyday behaviors (loosely, extradiegetic and diegetic) suggest that although the Asian American model minority and the Asian American athlete are both objects of curiosity, the former has been naturalized—body, behavior, and perception aligned in stereotype—while the latter, at least at the time of the film’s release, contradicted accepted distributions of bodies and behaviors. Although Ben would like to be “just” another basketball player, the other students continue to remind him of a disjuncture between his racial identification and his choice of extracurricular activity. Together, the curiosity directed at the model minority as a racial type and the keen attention given to the Asian American basketball player as a racial anomaly regulate racial boundaries by flexibly calibrating standards of “typical” behavior for different groups. Although Ben continues to practice free throws by himself after leaving the basketball team, it is only when basketball becomes a purely personal and often solitary activity with no connection to public spectacle or to college applications (he notes earlier that even if he is a “benchwarmer,” he can include the team as an extracurricular activity) that the film conveys his time in the basketball court more naturalistically. Only then does basketball become a reprieve from his other pursuits, which pull him toward the opposite extremes of Asian American racial formation.

The film reveals early in the flashback that Ben enjoys occasionally deviating from his routines of work and study to run small cons and pranks with Han and Virgil. “I guess it felt good,” Ben explains, “to do things that I couldn’t put on my college application.” He insinuates that these transgressions provide him with a measure of independence, a space outside the voracious college application, which demands and consumes countless academic achievements and extracurricular activities. Soon after Ben leaves the basketball team, Daric invites him to join a lucrative cheat-sheet scam, and while initially reluctant, Ben develops a tentative business partnership and friendship with Daric. Such activities, however, remain largely contained affairs. The significant break occurs when an athlete at a party ridicules Ben as the “Chinese Jordan.” Daric instigates a fight in response and eventually brandishes a gun. As the other student lies helplessly with Daric’s gun aimed at his head, Virgil begins gleefully kicking him and encourages Ben to participate. When the group returns to school the next day, rather than face punishment from school officials, the police, or parents as they had expected, they find that the other students now treat them with fear and respect.

The film therefore presents the fight at the party as a transformative moment for the group: with their new reputation, Ben and his friends become the center of illicit activities at their school. Yet the filmmakers insert a curious encounter immediately following the fight that shadows the double life that they subsequently cultivate. As they drive away from the party, Virgil talks excitedly while Ben, Daric, and Han sit in silence. While Virgil remains oblivious, a group of young men (whose ambiguous racial identifications I address below) drive up next to them and begin yelling and making threatening gestures. One even holds up a gun much more intimidating than Daric’s. As Virgil recalls the fear on the student’s face when Daric wielded his gun (“Did you see the look on that guy’s face? You put the fear of God into him, man. The fear of gods”), the camera focuses on Ben’s nervous visage as he stares at the car next to them (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Meanwhile, Daric lowers the volume on the music that had been playing in their car. The film never allows us to hear what those in the other car are actually shouting; Virgil’s chattering is the only audible speech during this scene, and he eventually shifts from reveling in the scuffle to panicking at the thought of being punished. As the group waits tensely, the other car finally drives way.

The scene establishes both a parallel and an opposition between the two cars, which seem to mirror each other even as they clearly divide the two sets of occupants. Given that Ben and his friends seem to be middle-class high school students, the appearance of the other car might point to the dangers of conflating the performances of these relatively privileged teenagers with the experiences of those who live in conditions of daily violence and economic hardship, experiences the boys cite but from which they are insulated by the gates of the suburban community that open Better Luck Tomorrow. Yet how do we determine that those in the other car are more real as gangsters than the main characters of the film? Such a reading depends on the assumption that the performances of those in the other car more accurately reflect their everyday conditions within the world of the film. Their masculine displays, however, are no less hyperbolic than those of Ben’s group: they blast music while flashing a gun and looking intensely at the teenagers. The threat they pose seems, within the limited space of the film, less affirmed by evidence of their fearsomeness than by the fear evident in the expressions of Ben, Daric, and Han, whose faces and behaviors reflect back the “authenticity” of the performance. The dynamic between the bodies in the two cars, then, constructs a reality for the other group of young men retroactively, generating a network of relationships between their performance and the experiences and material pressures it might index. Thus, although the scene accentuates the difference between the two cars and casts the film’s central characters’ performance as inadequate, this difference is ultimately as unverifiable as that perceived by Chua in the Juilliard waiting room. The space between the cars constitutes an opening, an invitation to cross, as well as a divide. Similarly, when Virgil’s recollection of the other student’s terrified look converges with Ben’s uneasy expression while staring at the other car, this juxtaposition undermines the triumphant tone of Virgil’s story (reinforcing a sense of difference between the cars) and conjures a moment when they were also able to instill the “fear of gods” in others (suggesting a resemblance between the cars).

Figures 4.1 and 4.2. Ben stares nervously as young men in a car begin yelling and making threatening gestures. Better Luck Tomorrow, directed by Justin Lin. MTV Films, 2003.

This strange moment in Better Luck Tomorrow marks a crossroads in the film. The turn in Virgil’s long speech from excitement to anxiety and his friends’ subdued demeanors as they watch the other car suggest that they accept their performance at the party as a brash and unsustainable act that they already regret. Yet they find at school the next day that their peers now mirror the apprehensive expressions that they transmitted to the other car, realizing them as figures of threat. The lesson that they consequently absorb from the other car is not that they should be wary of trying to emulate the model minority’s others, but that the efficacy of their performance depends on its persuasiveness, on what gets reflected back by their audience. Ben recounts, “We had the run of the place. Rumors about us came and went fast and furious. One had us linked to some Chinese mafia. It was fine with us because it just put more fear into everyone.” Although Daric’s branding of Ben as a token Asian and the teenagers’ reputation as part of a “Chinese mafia” derives from a similar stereotyping of their bodies, Ben willingly accepts the latter for the power that it offers him. Daric’s article indeed gives Ben his initial education on the measurements made on the racialized body. If, despite Ebert’s appeal, Ben is made to represent Asians and Asian Americans, that is, if he cannot elude the racialization of his body, what are his options for performing within its constraints? Newly wise to the ease with which racialized bodies get attached to certain roles and not others, Ben seeks alternate experiences by assuming the role of the model minority’s other, in this case, the yellow peril gangster.

In criticizing the film’s preoccupation with the teenagers’ subsequent spiral into criminal behavior, the audience member at Sundance registers the negative impact it may have on perceptions of Asian Americans, but fails to recognize the appeal that such depictions may hold for Asian American men who find themselves frequently portrayed as weak, effeminate, and asexual. When the preface to the influential Asian American anthology Aiiieeeee! (1974) made its rallying figure the “wounded, sad, angry” yellow man,51 it tied Asian American cultural nationalism to the project of recuperating Asian American manhood. The continuing influence of this project is evident in Asian American cinema, about which Celine Parreñas Shimizu observes, “Contemporary Asian American male filmmakers and actors see the Asian American male body as a site of racial wounding, gender grief, and sexual problems in ways haunted by the framework of falling short of the norm.”52 Shimizu suggests, however, that films like Better Luck Tomorrow also make it possible to explore alternate forms of manhood through their representation of “the plenitude of Asian American male actualities and desires.”53 The film indeed presents a diverse set of Asian American men, from clownish Virgil to quietly assured Han. Yet while offering several models of manhood, Better Luck Tomorrow also highlights the continuing allure of hypermasculine roles for those who are racialized—and gendered—as less than men. The antics of Virgil and Daric in particular express a desire to be other than the emasculated Asian man, other than the model minority—even by adopting an equally stereotypical role. As Josephine Lee points out, “Stereotypes of Asian Americans are no longer simply the seductive images of the Orient rendered for consumption by white audiences. Instead, they have become woven into the complex fantasies Asian Americans have about identity, community, and gender.”54

Embracing the label of the “Chinese mafia” for the fear it incites and charging the role with hypermasculine displays, the characters’ performance of a sexualized yellow peril is symptomatic of the temptation, against which Butler warns, to regard the enactment of social identities as simply a matter of voluntary role-playing. As the friends repeatedly embody the Asian gangster before those who assume the “reality” of their performance, the lines between “self” and “role” prove difficult to sustain. Becoming increasingly invested in his performance, Ben recounts, “I soon learned along with image came maintenance. I needed something to expand my days. It’s literally a full-time job just to make people believe who you’re supposed to be.” While Ben still insists on making a distinction between who he is “supposed to be” and the person he actually is, when he wakes up one morning with a bloody nose from taking too many drugs, we are reminded of his remark while memorizing words for the SAT test: “They say if you repeat something enough times, it becomes a part of you.” Following this advice, Ben repeats SAT words and their definitions at regular intervals in the film, and the word that he recites reflects some aspect of his life or behavior at that moment. The first word, “punctilious,” and its definition are superimposed on a shot of Ben as he lies in bed while memorizing the word; the word is therefore literally impressed on his body as it is being impressed on his mind (Figure 4.3). As he then moves through “temerity,” “quixotic,” “catharsis,” and “inextricable,” the alignment of these words with the action of the film insinuates that the words themselves are shaping him, are indeed becoming a part of him. The designation of “Chinese mafia” has a similar effect on Ben: thus interpellated by the other high school students, Ben finds the words infiltrating his body. Repeatedly enacting the role of the Asian gangster, he is unable to maintain his sense of certainty in a “self” separate from the character he plays. Although Ben would like to believe that his act as a member of a “Chinese mafia” is “not him,” his embodiment of the stereotype also makes it “not not him” (the double negativity that Richard Schechner ascribes to performance), and he must grapple with the uncertain boundary between the two. Through their daily repetition, the very performances that Ben initially understands to be artificial infiltrate the mundane, forcing him to “expand [his] days” to accommodate their demands on his body and routines.

Yet even this taxing blurring of “self” and “other” proves insufficient to secure with consistency the audience’s belief in his various roles. Enjoying their new wealth and reputation as the “Chinese mafia,” the teenagers hire a stripper for one of their parties. At the end of the night, she asks, “So what are you guys?” Although her question initially suggests that she sees them as mysterious Asian gangsters, when Virgil tells her that they are a club, she responds, “Oh, like a math club, or something?” The expression of displeasure on Daric’s face indicates that she misinterpreted their performance. If Ben and his friends want to play racial stereotypes, they must also accept the highly contextual and audience-dependent nature of all performances. While they might try to change what their racialized bodies signify, they can never fully dictate the effects of their performance. Whether the characters demonstrate their assimilation by adopting behaviors that promise the American dream or attempt to take advantage of racial fears, their conferrals and struggles with multiple audiences delimit what they ultimately perform, and what their performances ultimately do.

Figure 4.3. Ben memorizes words for his SAT exam. Better Luck Tomorrow, directed by Justin Lin. MTV Films, 2003.

Furthermore, whether the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow see the embodiment of stereotypes as a burden or an opportunity, their performances take shape and significance not just in their encounters with other bodies, but also against other bodies in a complexly multiracial and gendered landscape. The backdrop of American suburbia is itself a racialized space, and the emphatic images of a middle-class neighborhood and high school that open the film make the setting particularly salient. Implicitly, it is whiteness against which the teenagers’ achievements are assessed, while activities that fall outside its bounds tend to evoke other racial stereotypes. In his comparative study of the works of Frank Chin and Ralph Ellison, Daniel Y. Kim draws attention to a scene in Chin’s essay “Confessions of the Chinatown Cowboy,” in which Chin bitterly recalls a police officer berating his black and Latino friends for not being more like the (well-behaved) Chinese. Reading this moment, Kim argues, “In the multiracial culture [Chin] describes, in which none of the acknowledged models of racialized masculinity are yellow, the only way for an Asian American male to pass as masculine is to engage in a kind of interracial performative mimesis. Yellow manhood is presented here as a signifying practice—as something one communicates through the repetition of stylized bodily gestures that belong, properly speaking, to men of other races.”55 Kim contends that in Chin’s writings, popular conceptions of Asian American masculinity as lacking become connected to a “kind of defective or failed mimesis . . . a certain impoverished modality of assimilation.”56 The apparent unavailability or illegibility of “yellow manhood” means that imitating the “stylized bodily gestures” of other men comes to serve as limit and possibility. The frustrations expressed by Chin find an echo in Better Luck Tomorrow as efforts by characters to assert their manhood often misfire, returned as unconvincing or as derivative. The epithet “Chinese Jordan,” used to taunt Ben, and Virgil’s cringe-worthy citations of blackness,57 for example, revive stereotypes of other racialized bodies while casting Ben and Virgil’s behaviors as imitations, whether through the voice of another character or through the excesses of the performance itself.

Racial identification is a necessarily comparative exercise, one that involves making simultaneous assessments of the fit between bodies and behaviors across multiple racialized groups. The film dramatizes this process in the moments described above, particularly in skeptical responses to Ben’s membership in the basketball team. Yet the process also becomes evident in responses to the film, as Manohla Dargis’s review for the Los Angeles Times demonstrates. Referring to the fateful scene when the two cars drive next to each other, Dargis describes, “Without warning, the beats floating off the car stereo are drowned out by a louder, more insistent rhythm as a car carrying four Latino gangbangers slides next to the Mustang.”58 Reading this review, I was struck by our discrepant perceptions of the so-called gangbangers’ “race,” for I had presumed that the actors were Asian American. This scene would then establish a contrast between the double lives of Ben and his friends, and the doubles who embody the role of Asian gangsters more persuasively, a meeting that stages the paradox of Asian American racial formation as an unraveling dichotomy, spinning between opposition and equivalence. On the one hand, Dargis’s review is a useful reminder that the model minority’s “other” comprises not just the yellow peril (as an opposing stereotype) or struggling communities within Asian America (as a counterexample), but also the minority groups against which Asian Americans are set as the “model.” On the other hand, the review also raises the uncomfortable question of how she came to see the actors as Latino. The review does not necessarily affirm the stereotype of “Latino gangbangers” (in other words, it does not assume the validity of the representation), but it nevertheless replicates its alignment of bodies and behaviors, while implicitly casting such performances by Asian American men as a “defective mimesis,” the enactment of bodily gestures that “belong . . . to men of other races.”59 Stereotypes are not simply attached to bodies already categorized by race, but impact how such identifications are made.

Discrepancies in racial identification evince the fundamental untenability of such classifications, yet they also illustrate that regardless of “accuracy” (already a dubious criterion for assessing questionable distinctions), such identifications are always meaningful and efficacious. For those who are racially marked, the credibility of a performance, determined in often swift and half-articulated assessments of the relationship between how one looks and how one behaves, has significant consequences that extend beyond casting questions to questions of who gets to live and how. Despite changing conceptions of race that have weakened essentialist claims, racialized measurements of the fit between body and behavior continue to shape how people and institutions distinguish between the normative and the deviant, the credible and the implausible. These measurements influence everyday social relationships and play an important if often implicit part in debates about domestic and foreign policy and the distribution of resources. Both the model minority and the yellow peril stereotypes, for example, imply that certain groups are more or less deserving of economic aid and success. While policymakers have deployed the model minority stereotype to argue against affirmative action and welfare programs, the yellow peril found renewed salience in the 1980s amid fears that Japan posed an economic threat to the United States. The murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American man, by two automobile workers in Detroit allegedly resentful of the Japanese car industry, is but one infamous example of how racialized perceptions take on a reality with significant material consequences, in both the corporeal and the economic sense.60

The Better Luck Tomorrow teenagers, however, embrace the stereotypes of the model minority and the yellow peril for the privileges they afford: monetary gains from their various ventures, the trust of adults who assume their good behavior, and the respect of students who fear them. In their efforts to play the “Chinese mafia” while continuing their academic and extracurricular pursuits, they dwell in the space between their car and the car of their more intimidating counterparts. They seek to manage this ambiguous space—which, as I argued above, is both a divide and an opening, a threat and a temptation—by becoming similar enough to their doubles to benefit from the proximity, but not so similar that they erase the difference between them. Hinting at the impossibility of this task, the film continuously draws attention to the various factors that affect the teenagers’ attempts to make these partial crossings: the fear in the eyes of other students facilitates their passage, but the stripper’s cheerful query about their math club obstructs it; the demands of maintaining their grades and winning Academic Decathlon competitions keep them close to a certain kind of life, while the expansion of days through drug use pulls Ben too far into another kind of life.

Better Luck Tomorrow’s version (or reversal) of the coming-of-age narrative tracks Ben’s unraveling sense of self as he struggles to retain control over his numerous performances—those required to meet standards for school and college admissions, as well as those he adopts to play a member of the “Chinese mafia.” Although he initially clings to his activities as a responsible high school student as his real life and even attempts at one point to give up the group’s illegal schemes, his rival for Stephanie’s affection—her boyfriend Steve—undermines his remaining sense of agency. Claiming that Ben is working toward submission rather than achievement, Steve entangles him in a minor plot to reject the system of incentives that encourage “model” behavior. In the violent struggle that then transpires, Ben’s most vehement assertion of will materializes the very constraints that Steve had intended to challenge with his help.

A rich private school student, Steve is an enigmatic figure who appears largely untouched by the anxieties and desires of the other teenagers. When Ben and his friends approach Steve’s home, they encounter a gate that prevents them from entering. Steve seems to have passed through a second “gate” dividing the model minority middle class from the wealth and privileges of the elite classes. Despite his perfect grades and certain future at an Ivy League university, Steve emphasizes connections, rather than diligence, in achieving success. He offers to get Ben an internship, saying, “I know some people, I’ll give them a call.” Steve is not the stereotypically hard-working model minority; instead, he seems to have access to the “old boys’ network” associated with white privilege.

Steve moreover explicitly dissociates himself from other Asian Americans. Arriving at a party inebriated, he jokes, “So this is where the Asians hang out.” When Daric sarcastically affirms, “Yup, the library was closed,” Steve responds, “Hey, you’re a funny guy. For an Oriental.” By insisting on his lack of familiarity with the routines of other Asian Americans, Steve emphasizes his difference. Daric’s reply registers the importance Steve places on not engaging in the “typical” behaviors of Asian Americans by, for example, hanging out in the library. Yet the fragility of the distinction that Steve tries to enforce between himself and the other characters nevertheless becomes clear when Virgil sees Steve in his characteristic long, dark coat and jeers, “I’m Chow Yun-Fat,” comparing Steve to a well-known Hong Kong action star. By taking on Steve’s voice, Virgil implicates himself in the name-calling he directs at Steve, highlighting their mutual interpellation as, and attempted disaffiliation from, “Orientals.” Attaching his insult to the exceptional rather than the ordinary, Virgil’s remark suggests that even if Steve could distance himself from everyday activities associated with Asian Americans, he would not be able to extricate himself completely from the spectacle of racial difference.

Distinguished from Ben’s group by his easy privilege, yet sharing an uneasy racial association, Steve offers a seductive model of what they might attain. When he subsequently rejects the privilege that inspires the other teenagers’ envy and resentment, he triggers a violent response that reinforces the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Success, Steve warns Ben, demands compliance with existing social structures while giving the illusion of agency. At a batting cage, Steve asks, “You happy, Ben?” to which Ben replies, “I don’t know.” Steve responds, “Fuck. That’s the most truthful thing I’ve ever heard. At least you have a choice. I have everything—loving parents, top grades, Ivy League scholarships, of course, Stephanie. . . . I’m so fucking happy I can’t stop it.” Slamming baseballs throughout his monologue, Steve continues, “It’s a never-ending cycle. When you got everything, you want what’s left. You can’t settle for being happy. That’s a fucking trap. You got to take life into your own hands, do whatever it takes to break the cycle.” The image of Steve partaking in a traditional American pastime as he gives his monologue evokes the reproduction of national values and customs, with Steve embodying the attainment of the American dream. The scene, however, emphasizes Steve’s sense of confinement rather than accomplishment, affirming that his present happiness is one of passive acceptance, a “trap” that brings success without agency. The batting cage, enclosing Steve on three sides, visually re-creates his feelings of imprisonment, while his repetitive acts of hitting the ball suggest the “never-ending cycle” of acculturation and accumulation. Cinematic techniques further stress a sense of endless, inescapable repetition: the scene switches strangely from day to night, and abrupt cuts juxtapose in an unrelenting series multiple meetings of bat and ball and Steve’s persistent question of “What?” when Ben begins to laugh.

In order to “break the cycle” and “take life into [his] own hands,” Steve proposes giving his parents a “wake-up call” by robbing them. The significance of this puzzling scheme (how exactly would this liberate Steve?) is legible only within the particular symbolic associations established in the film. Steve’s idea of breaking the cycle perpetuates the wider disavowal of parental figures in Better Luck Tomorrow, but it also reflects his resistance to a broader societal parenting. If, as Steve insists in his rant to Ben, the comforts of abiding by established conceptions of achievement deplete real agency, asserting control requires a complete rejection of the privileges they afford. While this scheme exposes Steve’s avaricious impulse to possess even lack if that is what remains after having everything else, its aborted execution reveals the other characters’ collective investment in safeguarding the possibility of being as “happy” as Steve. Steve’s plot to see what might happen by breaking the cycle not only fails, but it also ends with his death when those whom he solicits as accomplices—Ben, Daric, Virgil, and Han—turn against him and decide to give him, rather than his parents, a “wake-up call.”

The scenes that depict their assault on Steve repeatedly disrupt the viewer’s expectations by switching between styles. Thus disorienting the audience, the film replicates the confusion between real and fake, self and role, experienced by Ben and his friends in their double life, and insinuates that this confusion reaches a crisis point with Steve’s murder. As Steve enters a dimly lit garage, Daric, Virgil, and Han surround him with menacing looks. Daric even coolly smokes a cigarette. The spotlight of a garage lamp adds an exaggerated quality to the encounter, imbuing their behaviors with an affected air and suggesting that the teenagers created an overtly theatrical scene. Once they begin beating Steve, however, close-ups and erratic lighting replace this distanced view with a sense of immediate, palpable chaos, which escalates in the subsequent struggle for a gun. The gun goes off, but the film then cuts to an image of Ben, Virgil, Han, and Daric in a car heading to a New Year’s Eve party. The sudden break leaves the viewer in a state of suspense but insinuates that Steve has been shot.

The film eventually returns to the scene in the garage to show what transpired: Ben, who had been acting as a lookout, rushes in upon hearing the gun fire and finds that no one has been hit by the bullet. The filmmakers thus manipulate the theatrical convention of the gun that appears in an early act and goes off before the play’s end, encouraging then undermining the viewer’s assumption that someone will be shot. Instead, Ben suddenly begins to beat Steve with a baseball bat, spraying blood across Han’s face. The close-ups of the expressions of terror and disbelief on Han, Virgil, and Daric capture their visceral reactions to the beating, and invite the audience to share their repulsion. The film then shifts from graphic violence to discordant comedy when the owner of the garage, Jesus, enters and exclaims, “What the fuck? We didn’t agree to this. This is going to cost you extra.” The wider shot of the dramatic solo lighting that accompanies Jesus’s response further lends the moment a farcical quality. When Steve’s body begins to shake, however, Daric completes the murder by stuffing his mouth with a gasoline-soaked cloth while Virgil holds his head. Close-ups again directly involve the audience in the unpleasant physicality of Steve’s murder. Moving between a visceral, graphic style and a more distanced view with comedic shades, the film encourages continual adjustments in audience expectation and perspective without destroying our faith in its narrative realism: the characters must clean up the blood, get rid of the body, and contend with questions once people begin to notice the victim’s absence. Collectively, these scenes induce viewers to experience the destabilizing interface between styles in shifts that are registered by the body as it laughs or turns away. If the real effects of illusory roles are what drew Ben to his double life, the discomfiting realness of these scenes and the momentary relief offered by the comical interludes simulate an impossible desire to turn back the doubling, to assume, as before, a neat alignment of identity and identification, and a clear boundary between voluntary and involuntary enactments.

A shadow of the Vincent Chin murder crosses the film during this climatic scene: Ben beats Steve with a baseball bat, the very object used to kill Chin, as well as one of the weapons used to beat Stuart Tay. Despite the very different circumstances surrounding the murders of Chin and Tay, they were national scandals in part because they unsettled the notion that Asian Americans were on the right track, that they constituted a chosen minority immune to racism and untouched by the violence that troubled other racialized communities. That a baseball bat was used in these attacks connects these incidents, with lamentable poignancy, to a symbol of national belonging. The baseball bat moreover directly links Steve’s death to his speech at the batting cage. Repeatedly pummeling Steve as Steve had pummeled baseballs, Ben offers him the absolute abjection of “what’s left”: in becoming the buried, the invisible, and the shattered, Steve embodies not a break in the cycles he deplores, but their constitutive remains. Ben indeed enacts the unspoken demands of total assimilation directly onto Steve’s body, fulfilling the process that he had wished to disrupt. Josephine Lee muses, “If the Asianness of the body is read as a nonpermeable boundary, passage of the Asian body through the boundaries of racial categorization requires radical violence.”61 It is exactly through “radical violence” that Ben offers Steve a final transcendence of his racialized body. By then burying Steve, he incorporates him directly into the land itself.

The execution of the imperative to assimilate oneself invisibly into the American landscape by those similarly racialized points to the difficulty of “breaking the cycle” when it continues to promise “better luck tomorrow.” This promise still calls to Ben’s group, as the friends disarm whatever threat Steve may have posed, then avoid, each in his own way, the consequences of the murder. Yet as the ringing of Steve’s cell phone at the beginning of the film reminds them, they will have to continue to reckon with the bodies that refuse a neat suburban burial. Returning near its conclusion to the scene of Virgil and Ben sunbathing, the film seems to accept, through its circular structure, the persistence of the cycles so frustrating to Steve. Importantly, however, it reimagines a tale of progress and triumph as one of burials and hauntings. Although the film initially presents Ben as a paragon of the model minority stereotype, it resists the embrace of what Palumbo-Liu terms “model minority discourse”:

Model minority discourse provides a particularly potent site of subject construction and ideological containment because it achieves its force from the fact that it appears, by dint of mobilizing “ethnic dilemmas,” to be contestatory. Yet the sublation of ideological contradiction within the recuperative operations of individual “healing” vindicates the dominant ideology while rewarding the subject with a particular form of individual well-being freed from both the constraints of collectivity (that is, “I am no longer ‘labeled as Asian American,’ I am an individual”) and its obligations (“I am myself first, and my ‘Asian Americanness’ only partially coincides with that Self, and I can access it at will”).62

According to Palumbo-Liu, the “model minority discourse” prevalent in Asian American literature replicates the ideology it seems to critique by privileging individual achievement over collective responsibilities. This discourse charts a movement from “ethnic dilemma” to “individual ‘healing,’” a trajectory that Better Luck Tomorrow overturns. The image of Virgil, lying with bandages around his head in a hospital bed after attempting suicide, makes clear that rather than moving toward progressive “healing,” the film receives its momentum from the resurfacing of violence. Insisting on the constant intrusion of the abject body into axiomatic tales of assimilation, the film gestures toward the ghosts hidden beneath their well-groomed settings.

As Better Luck Tomorrow draws to a close, we see Ben back at school, sitting alone at a lunch table while students move about him. He later goes to a basketball court, but just as he is about to shoot the ball, he puts it under his arm; he then stands still as the camera captures him from various angles. The film’s emphasis on Ben’s immobility in the midst of movement (whether that of the other students or the camera) suggests his inability to choose between two evident options: to turn himself in for murder and face the legal repercussions of his actions, or to continue his life as before. Ben’s “choices,” however, merely ensure that the same cycles of racialization and assimilation will continue by casting him in the familiar molds of the yellow peril or the model minority. His stillness, then, seems to come from standing outside these pressures, which not only propel the film’s plot, but also constitute Ben as a legible subject.

Ben’s passivity is nevertheless not offered as a solution; instead, it calls attention to the unfeasibility of acting in a vacuum without an audience or a script. It thus sets Ben in what Berlant calls an impasse, “a space of time lived without narrative genre.”63 Finding Ben as he walks home from the basketball court, Stephanie invites him into her car and expresses some concern that she has not heard from Steve. She further implies, however, that she has chosen Ben over Steve, and kisses him. The camera focuses on Stephanie’s tentative smile and Ben’s more ambiguous expression. As the film closes with an image of the two riding off together, through a sunny street lined on each side with identical suburban homes, Ben reflects in a voice-over, “For the first time in my life, I don’t know what my future will hold. I don’t even know what the other guys are going to do. All I know is that there’s no turning back.” Deferring any solution or resolution until “tomorrow,” the film poses the question of how to move forward after confronting the limits of potential action, when the scripts that guided one’s decisions no longer seem viable. It offers a conventional denouement (the protagonist finally winning his love interest), but only as an impossible ending. When the film suddenly cuts to a black screen in the middle of Ben’s last sentence (following “All I know”), it insists on concluding not with an image of an illusory happy ending, but with a brief void (before the credits) that reflects a state of unknowing.

Trading Places: Servants, Orphans, and Gaming Champions

The doubles that the Better Luck Tomorrow teenagers encounter while driving reflect back the inadequacy of their performance and showcase the fierceness they wish to emulate. Although the fearful response of Ben and his friends suggests that they “don’t have what it takes,” the teenagers, like Chua, dedicate themselves to becoming more like their doubles while retaining their privileges.

A desire to be like the model minority’s others also preoccupies Desdemona Wong, an ambitious American high school student in Lauren Yee’s satirical drama Ching Chong Chinaman. Since its first readings in 2007, Ching Chong Chinaman has received productions by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York, Mu Performing Arts in Minneapolis, and Impact Theatre in Berkeley. The play depicts the foibles of the Wong family, particularly the two children, Desdemona and Upton. While sharing some resemblance to Ben, Desdemona is not interested in living as both the model minority and the yellow peril, but seeks to secure her status as the model minority by associating herself with those who lack her privilege. In an echo of Chua, Desdemona believes that in order to get into Princeton, her dream school, she has to borrow from the experiences of those who have struggled. Yet what she hopes to borrow is not a particular way of living (for example, the focus and discipline that Chua tries to re-create through classical music), but rather a story that bridges suffering and success, poverty and comfort. In contrast to Desdemona, her brother Upton is concerned only with winning an online gaming competition in South Korea. While Desdemona focuses on excelling in every task demanded of an American high school student, Upton finds that fulfilling his daily obligations to school and family prevents him from devoting all of his time to gaming. He consequently feels that he must, like Ben, expand his days. Rather than turning to drugs to fuel a double life, however, Upton hires someone to carry out his everyday duties.

Desdemona and Upton therefore seek to supplement their lives with, respectively, the narratives and the labor of others. While Desdemona solicits tales of hardship for her college applications from an orphan in Korea whom she decides to sponsor financially, Upton also looks to Asia to meet his goals and employs a man from China to act as his “indentured servant.” Through Desdemona and Upton’s relationships with these surrogates, Yee dramatizes the desires and the anxieties generated by the class divides that cut across Asian America and, more broadly, the Asian diaspora.

Ching Chong Chinaman portrays Desdemona, Upton, and their parents Ed and Grace as emphatically assimilated, much like the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow. While the drama is unable to show the accoutrements of middle-class American life with cinematic verisimilitude, it exaggerates the family’s investment in this identity, which expresses itself most clearly in how they continually differentiate themselves from those who are working class, immigrants, or foreigners. Such tendencies show themselves most strongly in Ed and Grace. Grace insists that she cannot understand her Chinese American doctor’s fluent English, while Ed assumes that peripheral Asian characters are all undocumented immigrants or maids.

Although Upton specifically hires Jin Qiang, or “J,” to do his schoolwork and chores while he trains for his gaming championship, J is soon engaged in or at least proposed for a variety of activities for the entire family. Between completing homework assignments for Upton and Desdemona, J becomes Grace’s lover and Ed’s confidant. Both of these roles make him a vehicle for highlighting the couple’s befuddlement when confronted with seemingly basic tasks. However confident they are as American suburbanites, Grace and Ed are unable to satisfy the expectations of family and home attached to this identity. Ed tells Jin Qiang, “Sometimes I think my wife’s silly. Sometimes I think her demands are stupid. ‘Take out the trash.’ ‘Mow the lawn.’ ‘Make me a baby.’ What does she want me to make it out of? Money?”64 Ed, whom the play implies is impotent, sets procreation at the end of a list of chores, suggesting that Grace’s unfulfilled desire to get pregnant has taken on the character of an everyday burden. Meanwhile, Grace is simply inept at all quotidian functions. Ed explains to the audience, “My wife, she’s just not very good at anything. She can’t work, she can’t turn on a computer, she can’t cook—we’re always ordering takeout—but there it is” (287). Grace’s clumsy attempts to manage the household bear out Ed’s characterization. As soon as Grace remembers to wake her children for school, alarm clocks go off and make her cries superfluous. Desdemona then enters the scene already getting ready for school, and Grace offers vain assistance (281). Desdemona’s independent execution of her morning routines only emphasizes the redundancy of her mother’s attempts to help.

The difficulty that Grace has inserting herself into the routines of her family paradoxically seems to intensify her desire for a baby, for someone, she explains, who needs her. In an attempt to distract her, Ed tries to occupy her with the very activities that disorient her:

Ed: You have to drive Desi to her thing today. That’s probably very important. What you need . . . you need a hobby. Garden. Bake. Knit. No, wait, don’t knit.

Grace: Music. I love music. And dancing.

Ed: Or crosswords. There’s one of those every day.

Grace: It takes two to tango.

Ed: What about tap dancing? Takes two feet to tap. (Beat.) Wait. Wait a minute. You know what came this morning? (Sings, as he retrieves a box.) “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” (Ed hands Grace a large box of cards and a list. He pulls out a Christmas card.) Someone’s got a nice family, hmm? (280)

Dismissing the shared activities that Grace proposes, Ed directs her to solitary hobbies that, instead of fulfilling her wish for a baby, will simply fill up her days. His one momentary concession to her desire for something more exciting than driving her daughter to school and writing Christmas cards is tap dancing. When Grace subsequently takes up tap dancing with J, who is secretly an aspiring dancer, and finally tap dances away from Ed with a girl who represents her “love child” with J, she not only contradicts Ed’s notion that tap dancing is only a two-feet activity, but also rejects his attempts to keep her in the family by absorbing her in chores and hobbies that require her regular attention.

Desdemona and Upton share their parents’ assurance that they are not like any of the other Asian or Asian American characters and presences in the play, but they are savvier about developing relationships with the latter that might help them achieve certain goals. While Ed and Grace struggle to perpetuate the everyday practices of their middle-class life, Desdemona and Upton actively work to manage its limitations without giving up their place within it. As Upton explains in a recording he makes for a school essay, his basic academic and familial duties conflict with his larger ambitions:

Podcast for Yankee Ingenuity, an essay by Upton Sinclair Lewis Wong. Take one. (Beat.) Now say I am a fifteen-year-old male whose greatest ambition is to qualify for a coveted spot in the World of Warcraft international arena tournament. An objective that requires several months of diligent playing. Now I’m on this computer game, World of Warcraft, eight to ten hours a day. The rest of the time I am at school or I am asleep or I am doing homework/chores. In order to win my spot at the international arena tournament, I must play during nearly all of my waking hours. Yet there are also tasks in my life that must be fulfilled—education, family obligations, food, sleep, personal hygiene. But is there a way I can get both done? (273)

Despite having a name that combines references to two authors known for their critiques of American society, Upton expresses his unabashed faith in “Yankee Ingenuity.” He understands that the reiteration of everyday practices, whether it involves doing homework or training for a gaming championship, is necessary to cultivate and maintain a certain social position. Yet the repetition and persistence required of the mundane makes it difficult to be two people at once. Upton’s solution to this quandary takes advantage of the perceived flexibility of the mundane, its uncertain relationship to the body that carries out its exercises. By delegating some of his everyday practices to J, Upton believes that he can sustain two lives. Yet as J takes on more and more of Upton’s duties and even begins developing close relationships with his parents, Upton finds that the rest of the family easily accommodates his absence. By the time Upton learns that he has qualified for the championship in Korea, they largely ignore him. Betting that he can control the mundane’s distribution of tasks and roles, Upton realizes that by not participating in the routines of his family, he has lost his position within it.

Upton mistakenly believes that he is too different from J to be replaced by him. His identity, in other words, seems safe from threat, even if he gives away its associated practices, since J is his indentured servant, a “displaced person,” as Desdemona calls him, who comes from poverty and does not speak English. Yet from J’s first appearance, the play casts doubt on the distinction that Upton makes between them, and, more generally, on the family’s sense of difference from anyone and anything that is legible as “Asian.” When Ching Chong Chinaman opens, the Wongs breezily chat about Manifest Destiny, racism, and anti-Semitism while posing for a family portrait; meanwhile, “In the middle is a Chinese man in his twenties doing math homework. He would blend right in if he weren’t wearing traditional Chinese clothing and a coolie hat” (267). By introducing J as a silent, busy presence at the center of the picture before showing the family’s quick embrace of his labor, the play proposes to explore what quietly sustains middle-class American life. In an introduction to Yee’s script, Josephine Lee argues, “As the play progresses, elements of their American home, Ivy League schools, leisure activities, white-collar jobs are increasingly exposed as fantasies of invisible labor.”65 The play thereby conveys how thoroughly the mundane of American middle-class life is dependent on the unrecognized work of others. If J’s main task—doing Upton and Desdemona’s homework—bends credibility for comic effect, his continuing presence in the family as Upton’s indentured servant emphasizes the conditions of inequity that become quickly normalized as intrinsic to maintaining a certain standard of living.

J’s invisibility—first suggested when he is ignored by the family as they take their picture—is reinforced in the following scene when Ed and Grace come into the kitchen where he is working but do not seem to notice him. The reason they disregard him at this moment, however, is that they mistake him for their son. However much the family might disavow any resemblance to J, he is unseen not only because of his unrecognized labor, but also because of his similarity to the Wongs. The stage directions, which stipulate that J resemble the Wong family except for a stereotypically “Chinese” costume, reinforce this idea and give J’s invisibility an added valence. The difference between J and the Wongs must be both spectacular and precarious. J is like the family and yet not like the family, and what holds the border is his overtly outrageous costume. If J were to take off his costume, he might very well “blend right in” with the family and attain a different kind of invisibility. The reverse is also presumably true: if the entire Wong family were to put on J’s hat and clothes, they would be indistinguishable from him.

Yee’s drama thus sets as a primary point of interest the line between the Wong family and those, including J, who are similarly racialized but occupy different social positions. Although Yee initially intended to write a play about a white family hiring a Chinese indentured servant, she decided instead to make the play about a Chinese American family that is “ultra-assimilated” (267). The play humorously presents their detachment from anything that might seem Chinese through their inept use of chopsticks, their limited understanding of Chinese food, and an extended dialogue in which Grace and Ed’s inability to pronounce Jin Qiang’s name (they only hear it as “Ching Chong”) compels Upton to shorten it to “J.” Yet while Ching Chong Chinaman extracts much humor from the family’s uncomfortable relationship to ethnicity, it also lends the play a critical edge as an exploration of the stakes of identification.

The weakness in Upton’s plan to hold onto two lives through a surrogate lies in his inability to see the two-sidedness of J’s invisibility: J is invisible both because of his difference from the Wongs (he embodies the unseen labor that sustains the family’s way of living) and because of his similarity to them (without his costume, he could be mistaken for one of them). Missing this duality, Upton depends on J’s difference to prevent a slippage between J’s execution of familial duties and his inclusion within the family. The performance moreover situates Upton’s oversight in a broader “post-identity” context in which established modes of identification no longer exert the same influence. The audience learns that Upton’s idea to hire an indentured servant comes from his knowledge of the Chinese laborers who worked on the American transcontinental railroad. In a lengthy monologue framed as another recorded essay, Upton explains,

In 1865, in the midst of construction on the Transcontinental Railroad, building superintendent Charles Crocker was faced with a conundrum. Due to the harsh conditions and back-breaking labor, his workforce was hemorrhaging at an alarming rate. He needed able-bodied men, and fast. It was not until he finally started hiring Chinese workers—workers who could not have gained entry into America otherwise—that Crocker began to make progress. Four years later, thanks to Chinese sweat and Crocker’s ingenuity, the railroad was completed, leading the country one step closer toward Manifest Destiny. This example from yesteryear can provide us with ways to improve our own lives today. So say I want to progress in World of Warcraft AND lead a healthy, normal life. How can I achieve both? The answer can be found in Crocker’s brilliant scheme from nearly 150 years ago: indentured servants. Workers from Third World countries whose time is worth far less than my own. I, hypothetically speaking, of course, buy them a one-way plane ticket to America and forge a student visa. They complete my homework, my chores, and my familial obligations. Like Crocker, I am able to achieve my goals painlessly, and they receive opportunities far beyond what they could get in their home countries. (278–79)

The crucial role that Chinese laborers played in the construction of the railroad and the subsequent erasure of their contribution have been important subjects for Asian American history and cultural productions. This topic has received major dramatic treatment in off-Broadway stagings of Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad (1981), which was revived in New York in 2013. While not without humor, these plays took seriously the project of recuperating an erased history. In Ching Chong Chinaman, a narrative that has deepened the historical reach and the political stakes of an Asian American identity serves an entirely different kind of lesson. In his retelling, Upton echoes the mistaken belief that these early Chinese laborers were indentured servants or “coolies.” He moreover identifies not with the workers, but with Charles Crocker, the construction supervisor and a key railroad investor, whom he regards as a model of “Yankee Ingenuity.” What Upton derives from this history, in other words, is not a sense of solidarity with the workers, but a justification for benefiting from cheap labor. The call of Manifest Destiny, the betterment of lives that are “worth less” than his, and the preservation of his way of life become the grounds for bringing J from China.

Yet even as Upton’s monologue undermines the expectation that because he is Chinese American he will automatically identify with the Chinese railroad workers, the story he provides to explain why he hired J as a so-called indentured servant also transmits a lesson from Asian American history and—if read ironically—a critique of global labor practices. The play thus asks what happens when narratives used to advance a political sensibility and a historical basis for identifying with the struggles of immigrants and workers no longer hold power. In a context where personal goals are accommodated through flexible identifications, what might compel someone to align herself or himself with those who are less advantaged?

Ching Chong Chinaman provides one cynical answer to this question through Desdemona. The relationships that appeal to Desdemona are those that link her to the hardships absent from her middle-class life. Determined to get into Princeton, Desdemona feels disadvantaged by her advantages as well as her racial identification. She complains to her mother, “If I had cancer, if you disowned me, then I could be myself. Then I’d have a chance. Then I could say something interesting in my personal statement” (282). She explains, “I’m an Asian American female with a 2340 [a very high SAT score] and a 4.42 GPA at an elite public high school. That’s like the worst thing in the world. Nobody’s gonna want me” (282). Desdemona’s crude complaint about her too-easy life reveals her blindness to how the very advantages of class and education that she wishes to deny have brought her to the threshold of an elite university, if not yet into its halls. When she explains, however, that she is a less desirable candidate because admissions officers see her as indistinguishable from other Asian American women, she echoes the real frustrations of Asian American students who have suspected universities of imposing racial quotas to suppress their numbers. Such frustrations have spurred government investigations from the 1980s to the present, and various institutions have acknowledged that implicit biases in admissions criteria as well as explicit preferences for legacies and athletes have worked against Asian American applicants.66

In addition to its salience for Asian American college aspirants, the issue of Asian American acceptance rates—namely, their possible subjection to racial quotas—has also been raised to support arguments for barring all considerations of race in college admissions. Most Asian American organizations have consistently voiced their support for affirmative action, but the recent Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin highlighted the issue’s polarizing effects. Abigail Fisher, a white applicant who was denied admission, claimed that the university violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating on the basis of race. A handful of Asian American organizations filed briefs in favor of Fisher (thus complementing the primary brief in which Asian Americans were repeatedly invoked to buttress Fisher’s case), while close to a hundred Asian American groups responded with competing briefs on behalf of the University of Texas.67 Despite the former’s much smaller numbers, efforts by the 80–20 Educational Foundation to bring organizations together to support Fisher represent a major break from what has been the more common position taken by Asian American organizations vis-à-vis affirmative action.

Desdemona’s obsession with being admitted into Princeton thus sets a particularly fraught issue for Asian Americans at the center of the play, but empties it of any significance beyond its implications for fulfilling personal goals. Desdemona is unconcerned with why one might either defend or reject affirmative action, or with changing the overall system. She is interested only in how existing preferences might be manipulated to support her own application. In a perversion of efforts by Asian American organizations to defend affirmative action by emphasizing the crucial opportunities it provides to certain Asian American communities and other racial minorities, efforts that prioritize broader social commitments over the fate of individual applications, Desdemona associates herself with those less advantaged only to make a case for her own admission. Yet as Desdemona assumes the stories of others, these figures begin to exert unexpected pressure on the facile analogies and links that she attempts to construct.

Recalling the early montage of Ben in Better Luck Tomorrow, Desdemona moves swiftly among self-care, schoolwork, college applications, and extracurricular activities. These tasks bring her closer to her goals, but she regards them as ultimately insufficient because her life lacks crucial experiences of hardship. Whereas Steve conspires to reject the system of incentives that traps him in a “never-ending cycle,” Desdemona understands that effectively narrating one’s relationship to deprivation (namely, how it was overcome) is an integral part of perpetuating those cycles: such tales ensure continued participation in the system while casting failures as expressions of individual shortcomings. Desdemona accordingly sponsors a parentless seventeen-year-old girl in Korea, Kim Lee Park, who becomes the subject of her college application essay on “a person who has influenced you in a significant way.” The inspiration that Desdemona draws from Kim for the essay is staged in the play as a dialogue between the two characters. With Desdemona’s prompt, “Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea,” lights rise on Kim, who continues, “. . . at the mouth of a river, under the full moon of August” (277). Kim then recounts that she was an abandoned “love child without love,” who was saved only by Desdemona’s donation. The money, she explains, allowed her to buy a yak that provided her with food, heat, and transportation. Kim concludes dramatically, “Without Desdemona, I do not know where I would be. Her passion for academics and dedication to instigating community change have been the factors that prevented me from throwing myself into the river” (277).

The moon, the love child, and the water together recall “No-Name Woman,” the memorable opening chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in which the narrator tells of her aunt’s suicide after giving birth out of wedlock. Yet the story that in Kingston’s seminal work propels the narrator’s efforts to recuperate a condemned aunt becomes, in Yee’s satire, a letter of recommendation—disguised as personal statement—attesting to one teenager’s fitness for Princeton. Furthermore, in contrast to Kingston’s narrator, who ponders, “What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?”68 Desdemona is not particularly concerned with parsing truth from fiction. Instead, as her attempts to revise her essay demonstrate, she exploits the difficulty of verifying her claims about Kim’s life:

Kim Lee Park: I’m not very well at English. I don’t feel anymore like doing this. (Kim Lee Park sighs. Desdemona grabs her roughly.)

Desdemona: Now listen, you stupid little girl: I need an essay and I can’t wait ’til you FEEL like it! (Desdemona slaps Kim Lee Park. Pause.)

Kim Lee Park: I apologize. Do you want to start again?

Desdemona: “Seventeen years ago, Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, at the mouth of a river, under the full moon of August. Abandoned by my mother—”

Kim Lee Park: “Beaten by my mother?”

Desdemona: Oh, good. “—beaten by my mother, I was headed for a life of emptiness and sadness—” (Stops.) That just seems a little vague. What kind of emptiness?

Kim Lee Park: Malnourishment?

Desdemona: “. . . malnourishment and . . . abuse . . .”

Kim Lee Park: That sounds sad.

Desdemona: Yeah, that’s better. (Pause.) You’re my best friend, Kim. I’m glad I didn’t let you die.

Kim Lee Park: Me, too, Desdemona. (278)

As benevolence turns to rage, Desdemona’s exertion of physical force makes tangible the power that she holds over Kim as her sponsor. In return for providing the financial means to turn a particularly bleak life into a slightly more viable one, Desdemona seeks to adopt the story of that transformation: the more maudlin her description of Kim’s life, the more compelling the change that Desdemona ostensibly helped effect. To give her personal statement interest and thus differentiate herself from other applicants, Desdemona looks to Asia to extract an appropriately purple narrative. As Desdemona herself comments, however, the essay “seems a little vague.” Changing “emptiness” to “malnourishment” and “sadness” to “abuse,” she attempts to fill out the essay with details that might lend credibility to her account. Kim’s hesitant additions, punctuated with question marks, suggest her understanding that it is not veracity that matters, but the cultivation of its likeness through more concrete language. In her nonchalant willingness to deceive, Yee’s Desdemona embodies the version of her Shakespearean namesake that torments Othello’s imagination.69

During the process of writing the essay, however, the pronouns shift to conflate Desdemona and Kim, and the lines between them begin to blur. By slapping Kim, Desdemona also breaks the conceit that the two are corresponding from a distance, and thus lends their interaction a more physical and a more fantastical quality. In other words, by hitting Kim and thus giving her a more real presence on the stage, Desdemona raises the possibility that Kim (or at least this version of Kim) is a figment of her imagination—available for such attacks because she is not in Korea, but in her mind. The play gives other indications that Kim might be more imaginary than real. If the preposterous descriptions of the all-purpose yak are not enough to render Kim suspicious, her name raises a flag for those familiar with Korean appellations, as Kim Lee Park is simply an amalgam of three common last names.

Whether Kim is real or fictive in the world of the play, Desdemona soon abandons her as a source of struggles to enhance her essay. Coming across another one of Desdemona’s essays about Kim, Upton points out that the prompt asks, “Tell us about a major struggle in your life” (286), and thus solicits an account of the hardships that Desdemona herself has faced. Desdemona subsequently turns her attention to the film version of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and a genealogy website, InstantHeritage.com, in search of a more personal link to suffering. Desdemona is particularly delighted to find out through InstantHeritage.com that because her great-great-grandfather was denied entry to the United States, he immigrated to Mexico instead. This, she happily announces to her less pleased father, would have made their family Chinese Mexican:

Ed: But Mexicans are so poor. And noisy.

Desdemona: Dad, those are totally not the right adjectives for your ancestors.

Ed: Mexicans don’t even speak English. (Contemplates this news.) Sorry it turned out like that, Desi. Hope you’re not disappointed.

Desdemona: About being Latino? Are you kidding? This is SO much better. I’ve researched it: Hispanic girls like me face huge obstacles in their lives. Discrimination, lack of access to education and contraception, machismo—(301)

Stereotypes and generalizations are the norm in this exchange between Desdemona and Ed, as Desdemona protests Ed’s choice of adjectives but makes similarly sweeping claims. While Ed lists stereotypes about class and behavior to differentiate himself from his “ancestors” and hints at a fear of transfer, Desdemona seizes on everyday challenges that she hopes to adopt as part of her identity, but not her life. It is the broad reach of such characterizations that Desdemona anticipates will connect her to the obstacles faced by those “like” her. The analogous relationship that she asserts here performs a distinct function. The link opened up through a weakly shared Mexican heritage allows Desdemona to claim the experiences associated with certain communities as her own without “facing huge obstacles” herself. Her imagined relationship to “Hispanic girls” sounds remarkably like her relationship to Kim, but she embraces the direct familial connection as a justification for telling this narrative as her own.

Although Desdemona’s ploy could be read as either a critique of affirmative action or a mockery of certain understandings of affirmative action, her turn to Mexico as a new direction for her college essay and her great-great-grandfather’s detour to Mexico are both responses to the inconsistent gatekeeping of opportunities and access. The stories of Chinese immigrants that inspire Desdemona and Upton underscore the arbitrary regulation of borders, which facilitated the passage of laborers to help build the transcontinental railroad, but closed entry after its completion and compelled later immigrants to enter via Mexico. Similarly, while the bracero programs brought Mexican workers to the United States, Mexican immigrants were later subject to nativist ire and calls for new immigration restrictions. Desdemona thus misses the larger connection between the histories of Chinese American and Mexican American immigration suggested by her great-great-grandfather’s path. While the play gives Desdemona’s frantic efforts to get into Princeton a satirical treatment that elicits little sympathy, it sets her misguided endeavor in a historical frame that illuminates what she might actually share with those whose experiences she casually borrows.

Yet while Desdemona like Chua looks to prior generations of immigrants to aid her ambitions, and like the teenagers of Better Luck Tomorrow, seeks to supplement her middle-class life by identifying with other minorities and Asian and Asian American types, she forgoes one crucial component of their performances: their sustained enactments of the mundane. Whereas Ben becomes so enmeshed in carrying out the tasks of the “Chinese gangster” alongside his usual routines that his body begins to degrade and Chua translates the discipline she identifies with first-generation immigrants into a regular schedule of practice and study, Desdemona’s attempt to embody the narratives she solicits from others remains purely rhetorical or decorative.

Desdemona’s understanding of her “Mexican” identity becomes clear during a family trip with Ed and Grace, presumably to celebrate her (already passed) fifteenth birthday. Yee asks that performances spare no detail in caricaturing Desdemona and Ed’s superficial embrace of their “Mexican” heritage. The trip is interrupted, however, when Kim suddenly reappears:

Mexican hotel room. Desdemona in a hideous quinceañera dress. She hums “Feliz Navidad” as she applies sunscreen. Kim Lee Park, looking emaciated and desperate, enters.

Kim Lee Park: Desdemona . . . Desdemona . . . I am so hungry.

Desdemona: Go eat your yak. (Ed enters with a Corona, a piñata, and piñata bat, which he leaves on the bed. Desdemona appeals to him and points to Kim Lee Park.) Dad! (Ed shoos Kim Lee Park out.)

Ed: All right, nothing to see here. You can make the room up in half an hour. (307)

From Desdemona’s quinceañera dress to Ed’s Corona beer and piñata, the scene emphasizes their specious conception of ethnic identity. This critique becomes more serious when Kim enters the scene to remind Desdemona of her previous dabbling in the suffering of others. Although her appearance here arguably manifests Desdemona’s feelings of guilt after abandoning Kim, Ed’s interactions with Kim make her presence real. By pointing to Kim when Ed returns, Desdemona indicates a character visible to her father as well as herself. Thus, while slapping Kim in the earlier scene turned the figure from an embodiment of someone corresponding with Desdemona from a distance to a more ambiguous and potentially imaginary presence, pointing at Kim in this scene makes her real to both characters. Yet the gesture that makes Kim visible to Ed also initiates her banishment. To point to something is to draw attention to it, but also to signal one’s distance from the object. By pointing, Desdemona indicates her separation from Kim, and just as Kim establishes a more concrete presence in the play, she is quickly sent away. While Desdemona embraces the possibility of conjuring Kim whenever necessary, she enlists Ed to control her when she appears at an inconvenient moment. When Ed tells Kim, “nothing to see here,” he suggests that Kim should not be seeing Desdemona; yet by ushering Kim out at the same time, he also insinuates that Kim herself should not be seen. Interpellating Kim as a maid by telling her to make up the room later, Ed enforces a strict divide between his family and the invisible labor that Josephine Lee identifies as a central aspect of the play.

When Kim next appears, however, she does so specifically as the double that forces Desdemona to see resemblance where she only saw difference. After sending Kim away, Ed gives Desdemona a bracelet as part of her quinceañera celebration and reveals that it came from her birth mother in Korea. Desdemona is distraught to realize that she is an abandoned child, and Kim materializes at exactly this moment to articulate her fears:

Kim Lee Park: Dear Desdemona: Mother Superior told me the wonderful news. I cannot wait until you come to visit me at the orphanage, where we will become best friends.

Desdemona: Shut up, you are not me!

Kim Lee Park: I am also working on my application to Princeton for next year. Thanks to you, I am inspired to write about deep and tragic things. (Reads from essay.) “Eighteen years ago, Desdemona Wong was born in Seoul, South Korea—at the mouth of a river, under the full moon of December. Abandoned by her mother—” (Desdemona tackles Kim Lee Park and beats her up.) (309)

In giving Desdemona the bracelet, Ed gives her exactly what she had purportedly sought: a story of “deep and tragic things” that she can claim as her own. Unlike her discovery of a “Mexican” heritage, however, this news does not delight Desdemona, but horrifies her, belying her wish for difficult experiences to include in her personal statement. The difference between discovering she is adopted and finding out about her “Mexican” heritage is subtle as both disclosures involve her lineage and are accompanied by prescribed stereotypes and narratives. Yet when Desdemona learns that she is adopted, the “like” that separated her from “Hispanic girls like me” collapses, leaving her not like Kim, but as Kim. When Kim then claims that they will be best friends, Desdemona notably responds, “Shut up, you are not me!” While “I am not you” would emphasize Desdemona’s fear of becoming Kim, “You are not me” more strongly suggests a fear of Kim becoming Desdemona: “you,” she insists, cannot be “me.” While the stories and lives of others must seem permeable for Desdemona to borrow from them (thus, for her to become like them in her college essays), she anxiously protects her own deliberately concocted identity from appropriation. Kim affirms Desdemona’s fear of reciprocal infiltrations when she begins reading her application essay to Princeton, which exactly mimics Desdemona’s essay about Kim. When Desdemona begins to beat Kim, it is specifically Kim’s use of Desdemona’s story, which was once a story about Kim, that provokes her. The recursivity of this relationship threatens to collapse the border between them, a border that Desdemona had carefully regulated to allow certain passages, and not others.

In Better Luck Tomorrow, the two cars that drive next to each other create a mirror that illuminates their incongruity, a divide that tempts crossings. In Ching Chong Chinaman, Kim’s “letter” to Desdemona upon learning that she is also adopted similarly holds up a mirror, but one that threatens to negate their difference. In both of these scenes, characters confront doubles that force a crisis of identification. While the Better Luck Tomorrow teenagers and Wong siblings all want to stretch their identifications as much as possible—to play multiple parts, to maintain and change their identities simultaneously, and to be the model minority and its antithesis—the limits of their efforts become clear when the others they invoke come close enough to reflect back the inconsistencies in their performance, or threaten to become them.

Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman moreover share critical scenes in which beatings lead to incomplete erasures. As discussed above, Steve’s corpse in Better Luck Tomorrow rests uneasily beneath the film’s suburban landscape as a reminder of the contradictory demands placed on the racialized body. In Ching Chong Chinaman, Kim’s body holds parallel significance as the threat of Desdemona and Kim converging is augmented by their common racialization. Comparable to the stylistic shifts that accompany the scene of Steve’s murder, Desdemona’s last interaction with Kim switches between the imaginary and the actual to capture the confusion that Desdemona experiences once she realizes that her “real” relationships (with her family) are invented, and her “invented” relationships (with Kim) are real. In beating Kim, Desdemona seeks to make her disappear, yet paradoxically makes her more present by interacting with her physically and requiring Ed to stop the attack: “Ed rips Desdemona off Kim Lee Park, who remains bashed on the floor for a moment. They wait awkwardly” (309). Ed suggests to Desdemona, “We’ll just wait until she, uh, goes away,” and after a moment, Kim finally “dematerializes” (309). The pause before Kim dematerializes recalls the first sight of the unearthed hand in Better Luck Tomorrow as the characters are compelled to be with a body that reminds them of a shared racialization, a body that is the repository of desires as well as apprehension. In both the film and the play, these damaged bodies refuse to disappear on request, forcing Desdemona and Ed to “wait awkwardly,” and Ben and his friends to wait fearfully.

When Desdemona beats Kim, she rejects the idea that the difference between them is mere illusion and that they might therefore be exchangeable. Her enraged response is ironic given her earlier appropriation of Kim’s stories, but it is also especially fitting because of the multiple roles that the actor playing Kim takes on throughout the play. Aside from the Wong family, the play’s character list includes two additional roles, Chinese Man and Chinese Woman. Chinese Man is J, and remains a consistent character throughout the performance. By contrast, Chinese Woman moves between several roles, including Mrs. J (J’s mother), Kim Lee Park, a reporter, an Asian schoolgirl, and the Little Chinese Girl, who represents the child conceived during Grace’s affair with J. Furthermore, Mrs. J is a character that takes on multiple voices, a Midwestern accent when working as an Intel customer service agent and an “imitation Eastern European accent” (304) when working for a phone sex hotline. Thus, the roles assigned to Chinese Woman seem to proliferate, as role-doubling breeds even more role-playing. All minor roles, these characters materialize and dematerialize around the family. Some of them, like Grace’s doctor and J’s mother, are presumably characters that exist alongside the Wong family in the world of the play. A few of the characters embody objects such as a fortune cookie message, Desdemona’s essay on her ancestors, and a Spanish-speaking pregnancy test that Grace buys in Mexico. Other characters, like the Asian schoolgirl whom Upton envisions will worship him when he wins the World of Warcraft championship, the not-yet-born Little Chinese Girl, and Kim Lee Park, are situated more ambiguously within the play’s distribution of “real” and “imagined” characters. As mentioned above, when the actor plays Kim, she could be embodying someone corresponding with Desdemona from a distance, a figment of Desdemona’s imagination, or a hotel maid. Kim’s name, stitched together from three different last names, matches the conglomeration of roles that the actor must play.

Despite their differences, all of the characters that fall under the category “Chinese Woman” are similarly racialized and gendered. Even the character of Pregnancy Test, which initially seems to differ from the others by not having any connection to Asia, is revealed to be “Hecho en China” (313). It seems that either race and gender limit the range of roles that the actor takes on during the performance, or they are what enable her shifts in character. The other alternative, of course, is that they do both: the perception of similarity—articulated in Desdemona’s complaints about female Asian American applicants’ lack of distinctiveness in the eyes of admissions officers—makes the characters seem interchangeable, but only within the bounds of race and gender. If J’s mother can, by contrast, pretend to be a Midwestern Intel employee or a Bulgarian seductress, she can do so only as a voice that projects a different body.

When Desdemona beats Kim, she is also attacking the body of the actor who has been performing the very shifts among Chinese, Korean, and American; doctor and phone sex worker; and real and imagined that Desdemona intensely fears. Until this moment, Desdemona staves off the threat of becoming too intimate with those not middle-class and American (except as useful to her) by turning to the mundane as an impermeable border, or at least one that should not be crossed. When presented with the possibility that the figures represented by Chinese Man and Chinese Woman might infiltrate her life, Desdemona insists that a lack of knowledge about their habits imposes a limit on their interactions. The need for each person to stay in her or his “natural environment” becomes Desdemona’s refrain. When J first joins the Wongs, for example, Desdemona protests, “We need to return him to his natural environment. We don’t know anything about his diet, his lifestyle, his basic wants. We don’t even have the right sensitivity training to even begin to cater to his needs as a displaced person” (270). Similarly, when Ed suggests adopting Kim to alleviate Grace’s unhappiness, Desdemona declares, “Kim is staying in Korea, her natural environment. And she is not mine; she is an independently sponsored child” (270). In statements replete with contradictions, Desdemona characterizes a relationship between financial unequals in terms of independence and turns to the idea of a “natural environment” to stress that passages must be regulated, even as she herself violates these strictures as a tourist and the progeny of immigrants.

Lecturing Ed on how to interact with J, or someone outside their “natural environment,” Desdemona advises, “If you don’t speak his language, don’t talk to him. It’s insulting” (273), and later instructs him, “Just sit there. Don’t look at him [J]; don’t acknowledge him” (274). In suggesting that one should neither leave one’s natural environment nor engage someone who is displaced, Desdemona uses the mundane as an alibi: differences in “diet, lifestyle, basic wants” as well as language become the grounds for not bringing someone into her space and for not seeing those who nevertheless enter. For Desdemona, the cultivation of bodies by different “natural environments” establishes firm borders.

Yet like the shifting state borders that confronted earlier generations of Chinese immigrants, distinct patterns of daily life form a boundary that is fiercely but inconsistently patrolled. Indentured servants, railroad workers, and maids make it possible for those who employ them to, as Ben puts it, “expand [their] days.” Despite her protests that J and Kim should stay in their natural environments, Desdemona nevertheless uses J to do her calculus homework and cultivates a financial relationship with Kim to strengthen her college application. In order to sustain and improve their lives, both Upton and Desdemona depend on unequal relationships with those whose everyday possibilities must be distinct from their own.

The play’s mysterious conclusion, however, suggests a profound breach in the border that Desdemona erects between the Wongs and Chinese Man and Woman. After Ed leaves to drop J off at the U.S.-Mexico border and Grace tap-dances away with Little Chinese Girl, Upton and Desdemona find themselves alone with only food to keep them company. Reaching his sister on the phone, Upton tells her that he received a Christmas card from their family. At that moment, a family portrait in which Ed and Grace sit with J and Little Chinese Girl briefly appears:

Lights up on Ed and Grace posing for the picture. J and Little Chinese Girl stand where Desdemona and Upton should be. Upton and Desdemona look at the family portrait warmly.

Upton: It’s nice.

Desdemona: Yeah. We do look happy. (Flashbulb. The family portrait dematerializes.)

Upton: What time is it there?

Desdemona: Right about midnight. (The clock strikes twelve. A snowflake. Another. It’s unclear whether we are in Korea or Mexico. Upton and Desdemona watch the snow fall.)

Upton: The snow sure is pretty, huh?

Desdemona: Yeah.

Upton: Merry Christmas, Des.

Desdemona: Merry Christmas.

Upton: See you at home.

Desdemona: OK. (Desdemona and Upton don’t hang up but stay on the line as they watch the snow. We perhaps hear “Feliz Navidad” in the background.) (317)

In placing J and Little Chinese Girl where Upton and Desdemona should be, the play suggests that Upton may have been replaced by J, to whom he had outsourced his everyday tasks, while Desdemona may have been replaced by another love child, her mother’s “real” daughter, or, more abstractly, a figure that represents the instability of identity. Finding her claim to the family “illegitimate” given the criteria of blood and natural environment that she had propounded, Desdemona, like Upton, finds herself discharged from the Wongs.

The substitution suggested in the family portrait makes sense as a reversal of Upton and Desdemona’s fortunes and a critique of their conceptions of the mundane, but it nonetheless presents some mysteries. As a portrait of Ed, Grace, Grace’s lover, and their love child, it might show a modern family. Read symbolically, however, it also materializes a different kind of Asian American family. The portrait of a highly assimilated, model minority family becomes one that includes “indentured servants” and, through the actor playing Little Chinese Girl, a range of figures from the Asian diaspora. Yet if we consider Upton and Desdemona’s relationship to the portrait, other readings offer themselves. From Mexico and Korea, respectively, Desdemona and Upton might well be staring at a portrait of their imagined family, one which they have not yet joined. The wistfulness with which Desdemona and Upton admire the portrait might then move the play from a satire of the model minority stereotype to an expression of its continued power: in other words, it becomes a fantasy of the life that Desdemona and Upton seek to have.

The distinct forms of communication staged in the performance lend support to the idea that Upton and Desdemona have become, or perhaps always were, its “displaced persons.” The surrogacy offered by J and Kim, then, does not simply allow Upton and Desdemona to delegate certain responsibilities and functions; it enables them to displace their position as the model minority’s others onto imagined figures. The play frames Upton and Desdemona’s respective accounts of the history of the Chinese railroad workers and the personal struggles of Kim Lee Park as essays required for school assignments and college applications. Such essays are critical to assessing their fitness as model minorities, and the examples read in the play emphasize American enterprise and triumph over adversity. They thus parody the kinds of narratives into which Upton and Desdemona must insert themselves in order to fulfill their roles in an ideological project that carefully manages the terms of acceptable difference. Because Desdemona and Upton overhear or read each other’s writings, the essays also serve as an indirect form of communication between the two siblings throughout the performance. At the end of the play, however, Desdemona and Upton converse over the phone, which until that moment is primarily a medium of communication between J and his mother. The loneliness and displacement expressed in these earlier phone calls are shared in the play’s last moments by Upton and Desdemona, even as all their wishes—for Upton, to become a gaming champion and to be free of familial duties, and for Desdemona, to have a story of triumph over hardship and to get into Princeton—have come true. Communicating directly through the phone, rather than indirectly through essays that justify their use of surrogates, Desdemona and Upton end the play in a quiet moment of being both together and apart.

Ultimately, however, the play gives few definite clues about how to understand Desdemona and Upton’s place within the revised family portrait. Ending with Desdemona and Upton admiring a picture they claim represents their family, yet from which they are conspicuously absent, the drama concludes with an image of surrogacy not as the solution to their adolescent dilemmas, but as an unresolved mystery. A comprehensive reading of Ching Chong Chinaman requires establishing a relationship between Desdemona and Upton and their doubles in the final family portrait, yet the similarities and the differences that give meaning to earlier exchanges fail here because the reversal makes all four characters suddenly unknowable. After playing for scenes with the potential for one character to become another, Ching Chong Chinaman ends with a substitution that suggests only an unarticulated connection.

* * *

In 2012, the Pew Center echoed a familiar narrative in its report “The Rise of Asian Americans”: it claimed that while a century ago, “most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers crowded into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination,” they now constitute “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”70 In response, the Association for Asian American Studies issued a statement that countered, “The reality is, there is a significant body of our community who are not happy, educated, or high-income earners. In fact, these invisible Asian Americans are among our poor and with limited opportunities for education.”71 In emphasizing the socioeconomic diversity of the Asian American community and warning that the Pew report affirms seemingly positive but ultimately harmful conceptions of Asians and Asian Americans, the AAAS press release reiterated arguments put forward to counter the model minority stereotype. These arguments generally stress the inaccuracy of the stereotype and its damaging effects. They also, however, have an important—if less recognized—performative function. Namely, they continually pledge responsibility to the very populations whose needs may be pushed aside by the model minority stereotype and encourage reassessments of the borders of Asian America. Rebuttals of the model minority stereotype therefore insist on building affiliations based on difference, not sameness, and assume the accountability of the majority to the minority, of those who are successful to those who are struggling. They are performances of collective interests, even as they emphasize the diversity that makes difficult the uniformity of those interests. Rejections of the model minority stereotype by Asian Americans, Asian American organizations, and Asian Americanists are not attempts to claim a perpetually oppressed status, but efforts to perform solidarity in difference. In other words, they lay bare and resuture the seams that, always precariously, hold Asian America together.

In their insistence on disrupting the narratives of ambitious, successful characters with the presence of the model minority’s others (from the yellow peril gangster to the effectively indentured worker), Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman share something of the spirit that propels these rejections of the model minority stereotype. While neither the film nor the drama is interested in engaging with questions about the accuracy of the stereotype or in seriously presenting its consequences, they use the model minority stereotype as an occasion for dramatizing gaps, both seductive and threatening, within Asian America. These fissures are provisionally crossed with the mundane as accomplice, but never completely bridged. Ending with Ben and Stephanie driving away without resolving Steve’s disappearance, and Desdemona and Upton staying on the phone but not speaking, Better Luck Tomorrow and Ching Chong Chinaman offer images of the tentative companionship that follows their efforts to turn others into their doubles, and then their doubles into others. With these ambiguous and open endings, the film and the play suggest that given the stratifications that put pressure on articulations of an Asian American identity, differences must be confronted not to dismantle affiliations, but to redefine them.