Afterword

The Everyday Asian American Online

The short Internet videos that constitute “Rick’s Man Tutorials” promise their viewers advice on how to attract women, only to reveal the ineptitude of their teacher. In the video “Good Hygiene Gets Girls” (2010), Rick counsels his viewers to wash their face, take showers, and apply lotion, which he pronounces “lo-tee-on” and proclaims an exciting discovery.1 Peppering his advice with homophobic and sexist remarks, Rick exhibits a befuddled machismo that recalls Better Luck Tomorrow’s Virgil. Yet whereas Virgil’s hypermasculine displays become increasingly spectacular in Lin’s film, “Rick’s Man Tutorials” sit firmly in the everyday: in addition to advising good hygiene, Rick gives suggestions on cooking and exercise.2 Ridiculing Rick’s notion of attractive masculine behavior through his ineffectual performances of the mundane, these videos also spoof the Internet tutorial, one of many popular online genres that, through both their form and content, insinuate themselves into the everyday practices of viewers.

“Rick’s Man Tutorials” are the invention of Wong Fu Productions, a company that creates online media featuring Asian American performers and artists. Their short film “Yellow Fever,” which the founders made while students at the University of California, San Diego, became one of the first videos starring Asian Americans to attract a substantial viewership on the Internet when it was posted in 2006. Since then, and in contrast to their small presence in traditionally distributed American films and television shows, Asian Americans have become major producers of online media.3 For performers who have struggled to acquire financial backing and industry access, videos offered through websites such as YouTube provide a valuable new means of circulating their work. The New York Times reported in 2011 that three of the top twenty most subscribed channels on YouTube star Asian Americans: Michelle Phan provides makeup tutorials, while Ryan Higa (also known by his username Nigahiga) and Kevin Wu (KevJumba) produce short spoofs and humorous video logs (or “vlogs”) in which they share their thoughts on a variety of subjects.4 The interest of these videos in the routine concerns of makeup application, dating, and snacking aligns them with the cultural productions explored in previous chapters. They draw even closer to the everyday, however, by presenting the mundane in a form distinctly suited for casual consumption. Given the importance of this new medium for young Asian American performers and artists and its extraordinary dissemination of quotidian performances (even the most banal moments of daily life find themselves captured and broadcast on the Internet), a study of the racial mundane would be incomplete without a consideration of the short online video.

These videos are closer to the newspaper, the radio, and the television show than the theater or the cinema in their chumminess with everyday practices, but they also defy the spatial and temporal confines of earlier media. With the increasingly common use of mobile devices, content on the Internet is often (literally) at hand for multiple viewings at any time. Videos can be consumed in a casual, perfunctory manner, while waiting in line, taking a break, or chatting with friends. YouTube has been especially influential not only in facilitating the widespread consumption of online videos, but also in encouraging their production by anyone with access to digital recording equipment and the Internet. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have noted that the integration of YouTube into the everyday lives of its users blurs the boundaries set by traditional media, expanding and diversifying participation in the creation of online content.5 Amateur videos on YouTube can easily attract as many viewers as those posted by established artists, and with access to computers and cameras growing, producing as well as consuming content on the Internet is becoming more common practice.

Videos by Higa, Phan, Wu, and Wong Fu Productions share several features that enhance the impression that they are part of the quotidian practices of both producers and viewers. They are short (usually about two to eight minutes in length); the performers often establish a sense of familiarity with their viewers by addressing them directly and adopting an informal tone; and new pieces appear continually on their respective YouTube channels and websites, but not according to a fixed schedule. While capturing the rhythms and tenor of daily life, these videos also evince a savvy understanding of the possibilities of defamiliarizing the mundane—for comic effect, to demonstrate expertise, or to establish the ordinariness of Asian Americans. The transformation of everyday activities into spectacles in these videos confers on the Asian American performer the role of the “straight man” (or woman), sometimes to an alter ego or an altered image of themselves. Setting markedly stylized, spoofed, and embellished characters against the more natural personae crafted and maintained by the videos’ stars, these performances emphasize the latter’s familiarity. The mundane thus does double duty: it establishes the videos’ concerns as commonplace, and makes possible a turn to caricature and theatrics that sets the Asian American performer, by contrast, as ordinary.

My choice of the comedy routine term “straight man,” however, also purposefully evokes colloquial associations of “straight” with heterosexuality. A steadfast investment in heteronormative relations across the videos facilitates their efforts to deflate perceptions of racial difference. Yet this investment also limits their reconception of the ordinary. Here, the term “ordinary” describes a quality of seeming common and familiar that sits between the everyday, which has more diffuse and neutral connotations, and the normative, which suggests a more coercive force. Accordingly, in their engagements with everyday behaviors, these videos take advantage of normative conceptions of gender and sexuality to claim the ordinariness of Asian Americans.

Wong Fu Productions’ “Yellow Fever” stands as an early example of this dynamic.6 The fifteen-minute film was initially available for download through the creators’ website and later posted on YouTube by fans. The popularity of “Yellow Fever” helped to launch Wong Fu Productions,7 which continues to make a steady stream of short Internet films and music videos, including collaborations with Ryan Higa and Kevin Wu. Like Better Luck Tomorrow, “Yellow Fever” defamiliarizes the mundane to engage with stereotypes of race and gender specific to Asian American men. Yet in contrast to Better Luck Tomorrow’s stylized depictions of hypermasculine behaviors, “Yellow Fever” emphasizes the ordinariness of Asian American masculinity by satirizing the racialization of desire.

Accompanied by portentous music and shots of a college campus, a voice-over begins “Yellow Fever” with a provocative statement: “There is an enormous injustice plaguing our country right now, a social issue that has been kept under the rug for far too long.” The injustice, we soon learn, is that a disproportionately large number of white men are dating Asian American women. The opening of “Yellow Fever” thus echoes the 1974 preface to Aiiieeeee! which reported that “more than 50 percent of Japanese American women were marrying outside their race” and that Chinese American women were also following this trend.8 For the anthology’s editors, these numbers reflected more than a simple dating preference; they also exposed a deeper crisis in Asian America: “These figures say something about our sensibility, our concept of Chinese America and Japanese America, our self-esteem, as does our partly real and partly mythical silence in American culture.”9 “Yellow Fever” and the preface to Aiiieeeee! decry the tendency of Asian American women to partner with non-Asian men, and frame this statistic as part of a broad social problem, “an enormous injustice plaguing our country,” or a crisis of self-esteem in Asian America. Each work moreover positions itself as an effort to counter silences—either the silence surrounding imbalances in dating habits, or the general silence of Asian Americans in mainstream American culture.

The popularity of “Yellow Fever,” which was produced several decades after Aiiieeeee!, suggests that its interest in interracial dating resonated with contemporary viewers, or that it at least lent the subject a renewed currency. The film, however, quickly undermines the grave tone of its opening by presenting a series of humorous exchanges between college students, and its focus on dating rather than marriage also gives it a less serious edge. In the course of the film, Phil, an Asian American college student, attempts to account for dating patterns that indicate racial preferences. For Aiiieeeee! editors Jeffrey Paul Chan and Frank Chin, the stereotype of Asian and Asian American men as submissive and unmanly manifested white “racist love” and patterns of exogamy revealed the internalization of racism;10 by contrast, Phil regards discrepancies in dating habits more as a personal inconvenience than as a manifestation of larger social dynamics. When he announces that he will investigate the matter in order to improve his own chances of securing a date, the film reveals—and mocks—the self-interest that drives his critique of interracial dating.

An ambivalence about the contemporary significance of race percolates through “Yellow Fever” as it maneuvers around the question of whether or not race continues to influence social possibilities. The film repeatedly implies that the situation troubling Phil is a matter of individual choice and resolve, only to cast doubt on this idea by shifting to stylized presentations of the mundane. Phil’s conversation with Richard, a South Asian American student who speaks with an accent and performs a stereotypical “guru” persona, exemplifies this equivocation. Reprimanding Phil for being self-centered, Richard advises him “to always look at the big picture” and launches into a passionate speech: “The blame is not on the white boys or the Asian girls, the blame is on the individual. It is because Asian guys just don’t have the confidence and the assertiveness needed to start up a conversation with a girl. It’s not because white boys have this or that or have this magical power. It is because the majority of Asian guys are too pansy, and they have very very small . . . [long pause] confidence.” After Richard’s lengthy monologue, Phil concurs, “You’re totally right. Thank you so much for opening my eyes.” Richard then drops his “guru” accent and tells Phil, “Good. Well, I’m glad I could help, but I gotta go. Catch you later, all right?”

This exchange, which the film presents as resolving Phil’s concerns, is playfully contradictory despite Richard’s blunt message. Richard vacillates throughout his speech between making generalizations about racial groups (including reiterating stereotypes of Asian men), and insisting that only individuals are to blame for social patterns they find unfair. Thus, while asserting that Asian American men simply need to be more confident, Richard also echoes the very stereotypes that have associated them with a deficient masculinity, that is, one presumably diminished by its proximity to femininity and queerness. When Phil then claims that Richard has offered sound and illuminating advice, their conversation seems to affirm prevalent stereotypes of race, gender, and sexuality, while conferring the responsibility of making them untrue on those who are stereotyped.

Not all viewers of “Yellow Fever” will read against or beyond Richard’s words to Phil, but the film nevertheless presents a more ambiguous perspective than the one explicitly articulated by their dialogue. The choice to have Richard adopt an exaggerated accent and a stereotypical persona at the beginning of their conversation and then abandon them by the end of the scene suggests that the film is interested at some level in critiquing racial representations. This project is at odds with Richard’s advice, which perpetuates rather than rejects stereotypes of Asian men. Furthermore, the sudden transformation in Richard’s character implicates the audience in a moment of comic self-reflexivity that makes viewers complicit in enjoying both a caricature of South Asians commonly found in American popular culture and a reversal that mocks the caricature. The film thus draws attention to its management of audience expectation and engagement, and casts doubt on how seriously we are to take Richard’s insistence that Asian American men simply need to behave differently—particularly when he makes this argument in a “guru” voice that he later discards. The sudden shift in Richard’s speech simultaneously enacts the fantasy of willfully casting aside stereotypes and exposes the thickly mediated lens through which viewers might read his performance. Embodying similar contradictions, the laughter that the reversal incites registers the heavily accented speech as caricature; yet it also contributes to the caricature of accents (including those not purposefully exaggerated) by affirming one kind of speech as “normal” and the other as comical, and thus establishing the casual talk of American college students as the Asian American ordinary.

Two parallel scenes that bookend Phil’s investigation further undercut Richard’s confident assertions by again switching between representational modes. Phil explains to a friend that an incident involving his white roommate Andrew sparked his curiosity about interracial dating. He had invited two Asian American students, both women, to his apartment, and as they were walking past the kitchen, his guests suddenly became mesmerized by Andrew, who stood at the counter making a sandwich. The film first offers a naturalistic shot of Andrew spreading peanut butter on bread. Then, presenting Andrew as the women might see him, or as Phil imagines they see him, it shifts into a more stylized shot of Andrew with wind blowing through his hair and extradiegetic rock music accompanying his suddenly seductive poses. Recounting this moment, Phil explains to his friend, “I don’t get it. It’s like they saw something I didn’t see.” This scene then repeats at the end of the film—after Phil’s decisive conversation with Richard—but with one key difference. Phil, ostensibly comforted by Richard’s advice, is playing poker with an African American friend, who asks if he can make himself a sandwich. When Andrew and his date, an Asian American woman, walk into the apartment, the woman stops at the kitchen and stands captivated by Phil’s friend. Like Andrew, the friend is shown first in a naturalistic shot, and then in a more stylized fashion reminiscent of a glamorous photo shoot, complete with jazzy music and provocative poses. While Andrew looks on with a horrified expression, Phil gloats and the film ends.

The repetition of the sandwich-making scene, first with Andrew and then with Phil’s African American friend, suggests that what Asian American men lack is not confidence, but a flattering screen through which others might see their everyday behaviors as irresistibly alluring. While Richard argues that white men do not have a “magical power” that allows them to attract women more effectively than Phil, these scenes imply that racialized conceptions of manhood (or gendered conceptions of race) frame bodies differently, lending some a magical aura (manifested in the film by the extradiegetic music, stylized shots, and contrived performances of seductiveness), while leaving others without this advantage. Thus, instead of countering stereotypes of Asian American men as sexually “unnormal” through opposing images of hypermasculine behavior,11 “Yellow Fever” sets Phil’s persistent ordinariness against exaggerated depictions of his roommate and his friend. The choice to have the other two men mesmerize women while performing overtly banal activities in the kitchen—a space associated, moreover, with women’s domestic work—emphasizes that what makes them attractive is less an inherent quality than the mediation of desire by race. The exaggerated shots expose the historically and socially developed lens through which bodies exert their force, or settle innocuously into the background. In this context, Richard’s advice to Phil—and not just Phil’s grievances—misses the “big picture”: given the power of established, pervasive patterns of seeing, individual action is inseparable from this mediating lens.

“Yellow Fever” converges here with Better Luck Tomorrow in presenting these negotiations with existing perceptual habits as a particularly vexing problem of representation. The two films moreover highlight this problem by shifting to a more stylized mode when presenting the desire incited by other racalized masculinities (“Yellow Fever”), or displaying the machismo of young Asian American men (Better Luck Tomorrow). Yet they persist in naturalizing certain types of desire even as they critique others. As I mentioned above, it is unclear whether the exaggerated sandwich-making shots in “Yellow Fever” represent how the men appear to women or how Phil envisions they must appear to women. Nevertheless, the direction of desire (from men to women, and women to men) is unambiguous. Furthermore, women’s desires are seen through and understood only in relation to the desires of straight men. (Phil strangely does not solicit advice from Asian American women while on his mission to uncover why they ostensibly choose not to date Asian men.) In Better Luck Tomorrow, Stephanie also serves primarily as the love interest of three boys, although the film strives at moments to portray her as a complex character.

While these recent productions are more explicitly self-reflexive and ironic than early cultural nationalist writings when they include homophobic and sexist remarks, David Eng’s observation about Asian American cultural nationalism applies to them as well: “racial problems consistently manifest themselves in questions of sexual relations between Asian American men and women, with the figure of the Asian American homosexual entirely banished from this heterosexual landscape.”12 By tracing the shape of ordinary Asian American masculinity over dominant patterns of sexual relations and gendered behaviors, “Yellow Fever” ultimately stakes narrow parameters. Many of the videos made by Wong Fu Productions after “Yellow Fever,” including “Rick’s Man Tutorials,” echo its focus on heterosexual relationships, although not all share its explicit concern with how racialized perceptions inform dating habits. The robust collection of videos, performers, collaborators, and viewers brought together by Wong Fu Productions suggests the culmination of the project of Asian American cultural nationalism without its polemic anger and working-class affinities: namely, the creation of a community of Asian American artists and audiences defined as much by normative gender and sexual identities as by ethnic affiliation.13

Although the increasing participation of young Asian Americans as creators of online content is shifting the center of Asian American cultural expression away from traditional forms and reshaping contemporary popular culture more generally, the intimate relationship between these productions and the mundane has ambiguous implications. On the one hand, their success demonstrates the potential for those who are underrepresented in mainstream media to produce widely circulated works that target everyday practices. These videos facilitate the redistribution of the familiar and the unfamiliar through their incisive depictions of quotidian behaviors and advise habits of interaction and perception. On the other hand, by making such strong claims on the everyday, these videos also encourage viewers to see the specific lifestyles and concerns they portray as typical.

Along with Wong Fu Productions, other Asian American performers and entrepreneurs have taken advantage of the new opportunities afforded by Internet media, with Higa, Phan, and Wu among the most successful. In addition to making short narrative films like “Yellow Fever” available to a wide audience, YouTube has helped to propagate a number of video genres that focus on quotidian matters. For example, Phan is famous for her makeup tutorials, while Higa and Wu first established themselves with their video logs or “vlogs.” In these videos, form and content align as the qualities of online media that allow for casual consumption and production complement their everyday subject matters. All three began uploading videos to YouTube around the same time (Higa in 2006, Phan and Wu in 2007), and since then, they have each garnered millions of subscribers on their channels. Although each performer has diversified her or his offerings over the years, their videos collectively reveal an aspiration (more or less serious) to influence viewers’ quotidian behaviors, whether through advice on personal care and interpersonal relationships, or through caricatures of daily habits. Phan’s videos most clearly exemplify this objective with their step-by-step instructions on makeup application, or item-by-item review of products, all given in the manner of a helpful friend. Higa and Wu likewise cultivate the sense that they are addressing familiar audiences. Whereas Phan’s videos largely employ voice-overs (presumably so that she does not have to talk as she applies makeup on herself), the “vlog” form that Higa and Wu favor calls for them to speak directly into the camera and thus creates the impression that they are sitting in the room with the viewer or engaged in a personal video chat. Anecdotes, rants, and reflections on everything from ice cream to pimples occupy the “vlogs” and inspire the spoofs and web series also on their YouTube channels.14

The appeal of these videos depends on their stars’ proficiency in dissecting experiences and concerns that seem common—that is, shared, pervasive, and recurrent. Higa, Phan, and Wu collect audiences by demonstrating that they are adept at articulating the nuances of quotidian activities and interactions. While Phan carefully explains the layers of products required to achieve even a “natural,” everyday look, Wu and Higa identify what is funny about apparently unremarkable situations such as living in a college dormitory or shaking someone’s hand. These videos’ domains of expert and satirical insight, however, extend beyond the quotidian to the spectacular offerings of popular culture, which are then set against their engagement with daily concerns. For example, in “Expectations vs. Reality: Romance,” Higa juxtaposes scenes that illustrate the unreasonable expectations generated by romantic films (chance meetings, emotional conversations, and symbolic gifts) with those that show the realities of contemporary dating (contacting someone through Facebook, reconciliations via text, and criticisms of the other person’s appearance).15 Higa skillfully spoofs both the contrived plots and grave language of Hollywood love stories, and the more cavalier attitudes expressed in the “reality” segments, but begins and ends the video by directly addressing his audience and offering frank thoughts on being single. He accordingly establishes an additional layer of contrast, namely between the humorous side-by-side comparison of “expectation” and “reality,” and the “actual” reality suggested by the framing monologues. He thus presents himself as a cutting eye on popular culture and quotidian interactions, but ultimately assumes a pose of familiarity that establishes him as the viewers’ everyman.

Exemplified by the “Expectations vs. Reality: Romance” video, interactions between men and women are a common concern in Higa and Wu’s works and, as in “Yellow Fever,” simultaneously affirm the ordinariness of Asian American masculinity and the ordinariness of normative sexual relations. But whereas “Yellow Fever” explicitly connects this project to racial stereotypes, race occupies a more nebulous place in Higa and Wu’s videos. As a short narrative film, “Yellow Fever” has more clearly defined boundaries than a “vlog,” which, diary-like, implies regular entries and extended relationships. Higa and Wu’s respective YouTube channels add to the impression that they are establishing a casual, ongoing relationship with their viewers. Other than the date of upload, the number of views and comments, and, on rare occasion, a number in the title that places the selection in a series, the channels do not offer any logic of hierarchy or order among videos. Videos are gathered together but loosely organized, uploaded frequently but not systematically. While a short, relatively coherent series may appear within the channels, the performances collectively lack an overarching message or trajectory. These YouTube channels therefore complement the mode of the “side-by-side” that Yoon Sun Lee discerns in many works of Asian American literature, a form of the everyday that she argues manifests “a reluctance to single out a dominant, continuous chain of causality initiated by a human act.”16

Cultivating a sense of informal continuity, the common genres and distribution systems of online media allow race to appear in the videos of Asian American performers as a significant but not totalizing influence. In a study focusing on the works of Asian American singer-songwriters, Grace Wang argues that race is both visible and incidental in the “Asian movement” (so named by one of the artists) that is purportedly taking place via the Internet. While these performers disavow the centrality of race, they also invoke an Asian American community of artists and fans.17 By contrast, some of Higa and Wu’s signature videos address issues of racialization and racism directly. One of Wu’s earliest successes, for example, offers a sustained diatribe about racial stereotypes.18 Yet with over a hundred videos on each of their channels, race is, as Wang argues, both visible and incidental in their body of work. With one performance poking fun at racial stereotypes and another ruminating on handshakes, the videos suggest that race informs some of their everyday experiences, but not the entirety, and that these experiences are both ordinary and exceptional. The YouTube format allows these topics to move flexibly between primary and secondary importance, to prompt a lengthy rant in one work and a bemused pause in another.

Even within videos, race can suddenly move from background to foreground, and vice versa. Phan and Higa offer strikingly similar representations of their early encounters with racism in their respective “Draw My Life” videos.19 These videos, which became popular in 2013, consist of short illustrated autobiographies: users draw stick figures on a whiteboard to depict scenes from their lives, which they explain through voice-over narration. Thousands of “Draw My Life” videos have appeared on YouTube, and Internet personalities receive fan requests to add their own. In both of their videos, Phan and Higa recount their experiences of being taunted and bullied at school. Whereas their narrations offer more general accounts of the difficulties they faced in their youth, the specific racial epithets and stereotypes that other students threw at them are only written into the illustrations. Unlike Phan, who at one point talks about feeling different because of her “race” in the voice-over for her “Draw My Life” video, Higa never mentions in his narration that the bullying he experienced was racially inflected. This silence, however, only makes the sudden appearance of racialized goading in his drawings (a bully telling him to “Go back to China”) all the more startling, and all the more revealing. The incongruity between the explicit drawing and the vague narration suggests that not only is racism uncomfortable to recount, but it has also become something unacceptable to discuss in a pointed, serious way. Even as the videos seem to pass over these incidents, to speak around them in order to move ahead to the happy ending, they nevertheless pause long enough for the derogatory words to be written out. The parallel manners in which Phan and Higa present these moments suggest that although race exerts a palpable force in their everyday lives, they must accommodate a simultaneous pressure to treat it parenthetically. In the uneven alignment of spoken and written words, the videos manifest a tension between recognizing and obscuring the influence of race on how they draw their lives.

In contrast to the sober deflections of these videos, Wu’s series on his father, “My Dad Is Asian,” offers an extended engagement with racial caricature not as the object of critique—humorous or otherwise—but as a vehicle for comedic expression.20 In the series, Wu plays the straight man to his father’s exaggerated performance of the “Asian parent,” now an established type in popular culture as a result of Internet memes and books such as Amy Chua’s memoir. Wu’s father explodes in rage and threatens to whip his son when he does not excel at school, sings karaoke songs, practices tai chi, and goes to extreme measures to save money. Yet while these videos perpetuate certain stereotypes, it would be unfair not to mention their deviations from blatant racial caricature. The father’s blissful swaying to hip-hop music and energetic role-playing as James Bond, for example, reveal a loving portrayal of a quirky parent. Furthermore, the father’s inability to keep a completely straight face in the videos lets slip that he is ultimately a parent indulging his child’s requests to play for the camera. The absurd character of Kevin’s dad thus serves as a foil to both Kevin, the Asian American teenager whose embarrassment proclaims his relative ordinariness, and the off-camera father who occasionally peeks through.

Although the father is the star of these videos, the comedic vision that they manifest is clearly that of the son. This difference reflects the distinct opportunities that online media provide to younger, tech-savvy Asian Americans attuned to American popular culture and older immigrants who remain objects of caricature, if ironically and even lovingly rendered. Born in 1990, Higa and Wu were teenagers when they became recognized Internet celebrities; born in 1987, Phan is only slightly older. While websites like YouTube provide a more democratic platform for distributing media, they are nevertheless not available to everyone, or at least not available to everyone in the same way. As Burgess and Green note, “Access [on YouTube] to all the layers of possible participation is limited to a particular segment of the population—those with the motivations, technological competencies, and site-specific cultural capital sufficient to participate at all levels of engagement the network affords.”21 Lisa Nakamura similarly points out, “The Internet is a paradox: notable for the ways in which scholars have predicted its ‘ubiquity,’ it is nonetheless far from universally accessible inside or outside the context of the living room.”22 This “digital divide” is starkly evident within Asian America. Although a Pew report in 2001 (and then again in 2011) identified Asian Americans as the demographic group with the heaviest Internet use,23 Nakamura notes, “As the Pew report did not sample non-English-speaking respondents, it is unlikely that it was able to survey immigrants or recently arrived and undereducated Asian Americans, exactly those people most likely to work as the ‘interacted’ in the circuit of informatic labor.”24 Missing from the Pew survey, Nakamura suggests, are those who provide the material labor for technological products and systems, but are unable to participate fully in the production and consumption of online media. This group constitutes part of the global underclass of workers who make possible the Internet Age through their labor, yet are largely absent from the cultural productions that circulate through digital networks.

Despite these significant limitations on the accessibility of online media, the emergence of overnight YouTube sensations perpetuates the appearance of boundless opportunity. The success stories exemplified by Internet personalities like Higa, Phan, and Wu entwine the narrative of the model minority with seductive tales of ordinary people who become web celebrities. When Phan or Higa emphasize the isolation, failures, and disappointments of their pasts in their “Draw My Life” videos, they provide encouragement to adolescent viewers who might face similar struggles, but also turn their vehicle of representation into a vehicle for salvation. The medium of the online video is simultaneously the mode of communication and the path to success.

Phan’s “Draw My Life” video offers a particularly compelling account of her background, stressing her family’s financial struggles and even hinting at an abusive home environment. Coming after Phan had already become an Internet celebrity and successful entrepreneur, the video provides a narrative in which to situate the tutorials that have made her famous. Over the years, Phan’s tutorials have taken on an increasingly polished look, accruing numerous global sponsors, including cosmetics companies whose products appear in the videos, and leading to Phan’s own makeup line. Phan epitomizes the cosmopolitan professionalism that Nhi T. Lieu finds in the many “makeup guru” videos by women of Asian descent that have appeared in recent years.25 The rags-to-riches story narrated in her “Draw My Life” video affirms a particular model of uplift in which economic disparities and racial bigotry are challenges for an individual to overcome and Asian American women can become paragons of a new kind of global entrepreneur.

Phan’s “Draw My Life” video nevertheless leaves traces of what remains unspoken and unseen: her generally upbeat narrative suddenly becomes eerie when she recounts her gambling-addicted father’s sudden departure from the family in a quiet voice or mysteriously scratches out the face of her stepfather, only later explaining in vague terms that he made her miserable. While these tiny fissures do not significantly unsettle Phan’s glossy image, they nevertheless introduce an unexpected element of disquiet into the video and set the routines of beauty and fashion over which she asserts expert control in tension with her day-to-day coping with precarious father figures.

Although makeup tutorials might seem less amenable to the intimate anecdotes and commentary that are common in “vlogs,” a popular video or channel can allow (sometimes oblige) performers to cultivate a distinct personality. The genre of the “Draw My Life” video enables YouTube personalities to participate in a playful, collective project of sharing biographical details without disrupting the style and form of their trademark productions. Phan’s usual makeup tutorials offer occasional glimpses into her private life, but they primarily convey intimacy through the tone of her voice-over and the friendliness of her facial expressions. The popularity of Phan’s videos indeed depends on a balance between establishing a cozy relationship with her viewers and retaining a professional distance that affirms her expertise. Furthermore, while the performance of a specific personality helps to distinguish her videos from dozens of similar tutorials, Phan must ultimately offer advice that appears widely applicable; in other words, her skills in this context are valuable insofar as they are transferable. The differences that matter in the tutorials are those between the “makeup guru” and the novice viewer, and those between the face as it appears in the beginning and the face as it appears in the end. The videos must promise simultaneous passage between these points: as Phan changes her face with makeup, her viewers must concurrently acquire the skill to change their faces in the same way. Whatever distinctness Phan claims as a personality, her success depends on the possibility of passing on her abilities and her finished “looks.”

For this process to be maximally effective, however, differences in physical appearance, including specific attributes that have been utilized to classify people by race, must also seem malleable, ready to be copied, enhanced, obscured, or altered by makeup. Phan offers the possibility of drastically changing one’s features in tutorials that show the viewer how to use makeup to look like a specific actor, type, or character, such as celebrity Angelina Jolie, a Korean pop singer (as a group, not a particular performer), and Disney “princesses.” While some of these videos simply display a look inspired by these figures, others strive toward meticulous imitation. The specificity of Phan’s references allows her to defer to accuracy when instructing the viewer to contour the face with darker makeup to create the illusion of a narrower nose (Angelina Jolie), draw dramatic “cat eyes” that slant upward (Korean pop stars), and use bronzer to darken the skin (Jasmine, from Disney’s animated film Aladdin).

Yet in reproducing the appearance of others, whether living actors or cartoon characters, Phan enters the controversial territory of racial masquerade. Although Phan’s detailed tutorials show that the features of any one figure resist neat categorization into racial types, they nevertheless recall practices of making actors look like characters of a different “race,” most commonly, attempts to make white actors resemble other racialized groups, which extend from minstrel shows and plays like The Yellow Jacket to the contentious yellowface performances in the musical Miss Saigon (1990).

A video in which Phan re-creates the Chinese folk heroine Mulan as she is drawn in Disney’s animated film (1998) reveals a careful avoidance of the problematic history of yellowface and other cross-racial performances that her tutorials might evoke.26 Yet Phan’s attempt to emulate this character, with whom she would be racially categorized, also generates suggestive tensions. Sianne Ngai has shown the persistent associations made between animatedness, both as a condition of liveliness and its simulation, and those who are racially marked; she argues that these associations establish the latter as “excessively emotional, bodily subjects.”27 Ngai further proposes, however, that animation might nevertheless afford a “nexus of contradictions with the capacity to generate unanticipated social meanings and effects.”28 Phan’s video is replete with such contradictions as the racialized subject is both the object of animation and the one who animates.

Wearing a pink silk robe, Phan begins the five-minute tutorial by applying heavy white face paint and explaining that in China at the time (presumably Mulan’s time), pale faces were favored as a sign of the privileged classes. She then builds dramatic “cat eyes” with thick coats of black eyeliner before moving on to the rest of her face (Figure A.1). The painstaking process by which Phan transforms herself into Mulan and the highly exaggerated look that she creates highlight the work required to become the character, despite a shared racial identification. The video thus shows that Mulan is not simply a representation of an Asian woman, but a highly contrived image, a conglomeration of unlikely features that only give the impression of semblance. When Phan declares, “I don’t think I’ve ever been this pale,” while brushing on white face paint to mimic Mulan’s makeup, she visually and verbally sets herself at a distance from the character. Paradoxically, it is by drawing Mulan on her face that Phan is able to insist that she is not Mulan. Yet while the tutorial dramatizes the labored process by which the ordinary Asian American becomes the animated Asian of American creation, it also includes moments in which Phan implies a particular intimacy with Mulan. For example, Phan’s remark that white skin was desirable “back then” in China is revealingly vague (when exactly is this time?), but assumes an authority to speak on this matter. Phan also uses this video to respond to speculation that she had plastic surgery to create folds on her eyelids. Rejecting this idea, she explains that not all Asian people have “monolids,” and adds that Asian eyes come in “all shapes and sizes.” She makes these assertions just as the video shows her trying to imitate Mulan’s face by creating sharp black angles at the corners of her eyes. Visually, this moment further stresses the difference between Phan and Mulan; the voice-over, however, conveys Phan’s recognition that she is viewed through a racial lens, one that sees identity rather than difference between her and Mulan. Even as she must apply exorbitant layers of makeup to look like Mulan, the Disney character’s eyes already inform how her eyes are seen (i.e., as unusual for an Asian woman). By taking on the task of animating Mulan herself—and on herself—Phan is able to stage the misalignment of their faces as well as the tendency to superimpose narrowly racialized features over less neatly defined ones.

Figure A.1. Makeup tutorial on how to look like Disney’s Mulan. “Mulan Bride,” YouTube video posted by Michelle Phan, 2011. http://youtu.be/ebcc1WXJS6A.

Although Phan explains early in the video that Mulan is one of her favorite Disney characters because she is a warrior, she chooses to emulate instead an image of Mulan as a bride. When disguised as a man to take her father’s place in the army, Mulan wears no makeup (thus, no white face paint needed), ties her hair back, and dresses in much simpler outfits. Replicating this more ambiguously gendered figure would have entailed a much less intensive transformation. It is the exaggerated femininity of Mulan the bride, with her painted face, coiffed hair, and pink robe, that allows Phan to showcase the dramatic contrast between her own features and those of the cartoon. This choice intensifies a sense of spectacle that is concomitantly racialized and gendered, but also exposes its careful engineering.

The process of re-creating some form of idealized feminine beauty is, of course, depicted in all of Phan’s makeup tutorials, as she begins with a clean face and slowly adds layers of cosmetics until she achieves a desired look. The success of her videos, however, depends on not a critique of this meticulously constructed face, but a naturalization of it, with excursions into cartoons, celebrities, and fantastical creatures affirming the unaffectedness of the other looks. The Mulan tutorial offers a rare deviation when it sets images of Phan’s profuse application of eyeliner as the backdrop to her rejection of narrow conceptions of “Asian eyes.” This incongruent intersection of performance and commentary hints that naturalized conceptions of physical appearance, gendered and racial, are not far from the exaggerated representations circulated in cartoons. Yet whatever critique might be smuggled into this strange juncture in the video, it remains a tutorial intended to show viewers how to fashion a feminized yellowface look, complete with exaggerated “Asian” features and bridal costuming and accessories. Phan’s brief disquisition on eyes is quickly followed by instructions for creating the two-dimensional look of a cartoon. When Phan, as a final touch, draws a black curl on her forehead to represent a lock of hair, the same black lines that changed the shape of her eyes insist that Mulan is, after all, just an animated character, not to be taken too seriously. At the same time, it completes the process of transforming the racialized subject into an animated object, reducing her to a collection of exaggerated features by drawing over her actual body.

In offering to show her viewers how to look like someone else by cultivating their skills in makeup application, Phan affirms the notion, traced throughout The Racial Mundane, that the execution of seemingly minor tasks opens up the possibility of traversing racial demarcations. What Phan proposes more dramatically, however, is an opportunity to change physical features themselves, not through permanent bodily alterations, but through the development of certain quotidian skills. Her videos claim that with the right tutorials and practice, anyone can layer other faces over her or his own. Phan mediates as the one whose hands must be imitated in order to effect such transformations, but she must ultimately disappear in order for her tutorials to achieve their ostensible goal: the simultaneous transmission of everyday proficiencies and new looks. The viewer, after all, is hoping to look like Mulan, not Phan-as-Mulan, and in the process, to assimilate Phan’s abilities so that the tutorials become unnecessary. Yet for those like Phan who maintain YouTube channels, continued success requires that viewers keep returning for more, as the number of views serves as the key barometer of a video and a channel’s relevance. The necessity of securing habitual, long-term viewing thus conflicts in some ways with the actual adoption of Phan’s specialized skills as daily practice. As a “guru” of the everyday, Phan must hover between the ordinary and the exceptional, continuously performing a partial disappearance while remaining a part of her audience’s routine viewing practices. The mundane returns as a contradictory force, promising passage, and thwarting it.

As this book has argued, the mundane equivocates thus when rendered available for dissection, transformation, and transmission—in gloomy reports on Chinatown living conditions, through the ritualization of routines to counter pressures to disappear, through an actor’s efforts to replicate another’s voice and posture, and in debates about the proper balance of study and play for American students. And yet, as the Mulan tutorial hints, the mundane also has untold currents that continually escape capture, scrutiny, and staging. In Phan’s final transformation into Mulan, these currents press against the thick lines of simulated animatedness to hint at the untenability of the performance. In the very closing moments of the tutorial, as she displays her finished look, Phan explains through the voice-over that she is going to end the video because “all this posing is getting kind of awkward.” In jokingly pointing out the endurance required to sustain her performance, Phan recalls the skills attributed to the actor who played the Property Man in The Yellow Jacket: “For two hours and a half this property man moves among the actors as though invisible to them and to the spectators. The slightest bit of overplaying, the least stooping to buffoonery, the merest suggestion of theatricals on his part would ruin his impersonation and mar the whole play.”29 The Yellow Jacket asks that the actor who plays the Property Man maintain the impression that his performance is natural, which will paradoxically make his behaviors seem even more peculiar to the audience. Emphasizing the difficulty of this performance is necessary in order to affirm the boundary between the white actor and the Chinese role, particularly since the play itself repeatedly stages the permeability of racial and cultural lines. In other words, the actor’s attempt to inhabit the everyday body of the other must remain a challenge in order to preserve their difference.

By contrast, when Phan remarks on the difficulty of posing at the end of her Mulan video, she is trying to maintain not a role that must seem unaffected, but one that embraces its own artificiality, its explicit fusion of cartoon and racial caricature. If this yellowface performance is hard to sustain, it is not because racial difference is indelible, but because it is a perpetually collapsing project. In pointing to the moment after the performance’s end, when the recursive production of yellowface unravels, the video exposes the impossibility of sustaining what might be called the racial foreshortening of the live body—that is, not the lively animated body, but the one that is present and continues on in the everyday.