1. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Vintage, 1990), 34. Subsequent citations in text.
2. At the risk of seeming inconsistent, I place the word “race” in quotation marks only when the context of a sentence might suggest that I am thinking of the term uncritically (for example, when I refer to someone’s “race,” as opposed to when I mention debates about race). This choice reflects the book’s understanding of racial identifications as social constructs (thus, the quotation marks when I use the term to describe particular individuals or peoples) that nonetheless have real effects (thus, the lack of quotation marks when I use the term to discuss how it circulates and functions in society).
3. Performance is a key term in this book because of its dual meanings—“doing” and “presenting”—but its multiple uses can also lead to confusion, particularly when J. L. Austin or Judith Butler’s work on “performativity” is also part of the analysis. I therefore use the term “performativity” only when referring to the notion of the performative as elaborated in speech act theory and in Butler’s theory of gender. In addition, I use the term “theatrical performance” even when it might sound redundant to indicate performances, including those outside the theater proper, that have a theatrical quality; as I explain in the introduction, my understanding of theatricality derives from semiotic and phenomenological analyses provided by Umberto Eco and Bert O. States.
4. I refer here to Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity and Richard Schechner’s definition of performance as twice-behaved or restored behavior. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theater, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82; Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36.
5. The mundane is linked to but does not completely coincide with the affective present and the everyday conceived specifically as a condition of capitalist modernity. The bodily repetitions that it describes are transhistorical, although their shape, significance, and effects vary historically. On the affective present, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). On the modern everyday, see Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vols. 1–3, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1991); and see Yoon Sun Lee’s Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) for an analysis of its representation in Asian American literature.
6. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 14.
7. Ibid., 14–15.
8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 89.
9. Robert E. Park, “Behind Our Masks,” in Race and Culture, ed. Everett C. Hughes et al. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 244–55. For an extended discussion of Park’s work, see Chapter 1.
10. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 56.
11. Y. S. Lee, Modern Minority, 13.
12. Butler, “Performative Acts,” 278, and Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 232; Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 67 and 73.
13. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 73.
14. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 17–20.
15. Ibid., 15.
16. Butler, “Performative Acts,” 279.
17. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classic, 1995), 45.
18. Hartman explains, “The interchangeable use of performance and performativity is intended to be inclusive of displays of power, the punitive and theatrical embodiment of racial norms, and the discursive reelaboration of blackness, and the affirmative deployment and negation of blackness in the focus on redress.” Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 57.
19. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 35.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Umberto Eco, “Semiotics of Theatrical Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 21 (1977): 110.
22. Schechner, Between Theater, 113.
23. Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 57.
24. Role-doubling appears in film and television but less frequently than in theater, and it usually serves a comedic purpose or advances a story about twins or doppelgangers. In terms of cross-racial performance, other than in satires, films and television shows either ask audiences to disregard a possible misalignment of racial identifications or, more controversially, perpetuate practices of making white actors look like another ethnicity or “race.” See extended discussions of cross-racial performances in Chapter 3.
25. Shimakawa, National Abjection.
26. Mary Yu Danico, “Association for Asian American Studies Responds to the Pew Center Report: ‘Rise of Asian Americans’” (Association for Asian American Studies, July 16, 2012).
27. Lefebvre, Critique, 1:12.
28. Butler cautiously differentiates between normative embodiments that “do” gender, and performances in the theater where it is possible to separate acting from the real, but also contemplates the critical possibilities of hyperbolic citations of norms (Bodies, 232). In her reading of Luce Irigaray, Elin Diamond makes a complementary argument about mimesis-mimicry, “in which the production of objects, shadows, and voices is excessive to the truth/illusion structure of [patriarchal] mimesis, spilling into mimicry, multiple ‘fake offspring.’” Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 65.
29. Lefebvre, Critique, 2:226.
30. Ibid., 1:12.
31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 30.
32. De Certeau, Practice, 58.
33. Colleen Lye, “Racial Form,” Representations 104.1 (Fall 2008): 96.
34. Susan Koshy offers an important critique in “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (Fall 1992): 315–46.
35. “CNN/YouTube Democratic Presidential Debate,” CNN, July 23, 2007.
36. Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (London: Virago Press, 1997), 3.
37. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
38. Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the Theatre, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2013), 2.
39. Elin Diamond, “Introduction,” in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London: Routledge, 1996), 1.
1. Thornton Wilder, Our Town (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 4. Subsequent citations in text.
2. Thornton Wilder, “Preface to Three Plays,” in American Characteristics and Other Essays, ed. Donald Gallup (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 109.
3. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco on the Condition of the Chinese Quarter and the Chinese in San Francisco, July 1885” (San Francisco Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1884–1885, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 1885), Appendix 166.
4. Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1.
5. California State Senate, “An Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration,” in Chinese Immigration; Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect. Report to the California State Senate of Its Special Committee on Chinese Immigration (Sacramento: State Office, 1973), 8–9.
6. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee,” Appendix 209.
7. The 1885 municipal report claimed, “The facility with which [the Chinese] put on habits of decency when they become cooks and servants simply adds other testimony to their ability to adapt themselves to circumstances when it is their interest to do so” (San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee,” Appendix 180). Even Mark Twain, who was generally critical of hostility directed at Chinese immigrants, asserted, “[The Chinese] do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. They are imitative.” Mark Twain, Roughing It, vol. 2 (Hartford: American Publishing, 1901), 130.
8. Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 27.
9. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee,” Appendix 174.
10. Shah, Contagious Divides, 17–18.
11. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee,” Appendix 172.
12. Shah, Contagious Divides, 166.
13. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee,” Appendix 184.
14. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 26.
15. California State Senate, “Address to the People,” 47.
16. Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108.2 (April 2003): 377.
17. Kitty Calavita, “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910,” Law and Social Inquiry 25.1 (Winter 2000): 17.
18. McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation,” 391.
19. E. Lee, At America’s Gates, 89.
20. For literacy tests, see E. Lee, At America’s Gates, 89; for the texture of hands and feet, see Calavita, “Paradoxes of Race,” 25; McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation,” 391.
21. Calavita, “Paradoxes of Race,” 25.
22. Ibid., 25–26.
23. E. Lee, At America’s Gates, 107.
24. Ibid., 209.
25. Erika Lee emphasizes that the coaching books demonstrate their writers’ extensive and precise knowledge of the kinds of questions asked by inspectors; one book gave more than four hundred sample questions (At America’s Gates, 196).
26. Calavita, “Paradoxes of Race,” 2.
27. Shah, Contagious Divides, 225.
28. Ibid., 15.
29. San Francisco Board of Supervisors, “Report of the Special Committee,” 204.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 205.
32. Henry Yu, “The ‘Oriental Problem’ in America, 1920–1960: Linking the Identities of Chinese American and Japanese American Intellectuals,” in Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era, ed. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 191.
33. Ibid., 194.
34. Park, “Behind Our Masks,” 249.
35. Park, “The Problem of Cultural Differences,” in Race and Culture, 3.
36. Park, “Culture and Cultural Trends,” in Race and Culture, 26–27.
37. Park, “Behind Our Masks,” 251.
38. Park, “A Race Relations Survey,” in Race and Culture, 159.
39. Park, “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups,” in Race and Culture, 206.
40. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University, 1999), 86.
41. The Yellow Jacket, advertisement, New York Times, October 30, 1912, 22, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
42. “J. Harry Benrimo, Actor, Playwright,” New York Times, March 27, 1942, 23, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
43. The play refers to the yellow jackets worn as a sign of imperial favor during the Qing dynasty. While the authors make use of the idea that the jacket is a sign of high social status, the drama does not suggest a familiarity with the actual practices surrounding its distribution and use.
44. Today, Aladdin is more commonly associated with the Middle East; these nineteenth-century theatrical productions, however, were set in China. For an extended discussion of Aladdin and Kim-ka!, see Krystyn Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 23–26.
45. George C. Hazelton, Jr. and J. Harry Benrimo, The Yellow Jacket, in The Chinese Other, 1850–1925: An Anthology of Plays, ed. Dave Williams (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 235. Subsequent citations in text.
46. James Harbeck, “The Quaintness—and Usefulness—of the Old Chinese Traditions: The Yellow Jacket and Lady Precious Stream,” Asian Theatre Journal 13.2 (1996): 241.
47. Moon, Yellowface, 99. Huaju, or Chinese spoken drama, emerged in the early twentieth century. A 1907 adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Chinese students in Japan is generally regarded as the first work of huaju.
48. Colin Mackerras, “The Drama of the Qing Dynasty,” in Chinese Theater: From Its Origins to the Present Day, ed. Colin Mackerras (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 92.
49. I am thinking here of Peggy Phelan’s argument regarding the ontology of performance: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1992), 146.
50. Moon, Yellowface, 112–13.
51. Mackerras, “Drama of the Qing Dynasty,” 112.
52. Nancy Rao, “Songs of the Exclusion Era: New York Chinatown’s Opera Theaters in the 1920s,” American Music 20.4 (2002): 426.
53. Ronald Riddle, Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco’s Chinese (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 61.
54. Su Zheng, Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 94.
55. Dave Williams, Misreading the Chinese Character: Images of the Chinese in Euroamerican Drama to 1825 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 113.
56. Moon, Yellowface, 112.
57. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 28.
58. E. M. Green, “The Chinese Theater,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, February 1903, 7–9, APS Online, http://proquest.umi.org, accessed June 24, 2005.
59. The Yellow Jacket may not have always been performed in yellowface when it was produced on smaller community stages. The Collection of Chinese Theater Images in California at the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design includes a photograph titled Performance of the Yellow jacket [sic] by the Hawaii Chinese Civic Club dramatic chapter in 1950s, which seems to show a Chinese Hawaiian cast. A study of this performance is outside the scope of this chapter, but such a production attests to the unpredictable lives of dramatic scripts, which are open to multiple, variable enactments.
60. R. G. Lee, Orientals, 43; Sean Metzger, “Charles Parsloe’s Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama,” Theatre Journal 56.4 (2004): 651.
61. Moon, Yellowface, 118.
62. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 234.
63. Bret Harte and Mark Twain, Ah Sin, in The Chinese Other, 1850–1925, 82.
64. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Show and the Gaze: A European Perspective (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 79.
65. Williams, Misreading, 172.
66. “Acting, Acting, All the Time, but Not a Word to Speak,” New York Times, December 1, 1912, X8, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
67. Ibid., X8.
68. “Something New and Strange in Drama,” New York Times, November 3, 1912, X6, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
69. Clayton Hamilton, “Yellow Jacket,” Bookman, December 1912, 382, APS Online, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed September 14, 2005.
70. Alexander Woollcott, “Second Thoughts on First Nights,” New York Times, November 12, 1916, X6, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
71. J. Harry Benrimo, “Legend and Truth: The Facts about ‘The Yellow Jacket,’ Again in Revival Here,” New York Times, November 4, 1928, 118, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
72. “J. Harry Benrimo, Actor, Playwright,” New York Times, March 27, 1942, 23, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
73. Arthur Feinsod, The Simple Stage: Its Origins in the Modern American Theater (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 28.
74. Clayton Hamilton, “What Is Wrong with the American Drama?,” Bookman, May 1914, 314, APS Online, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 24, 2005.
75. The Yellow Jacket, advertisement, New York Times, November 15, 1912, 10, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
76. The Yellow Jacket, advertisement, New York Times, December 1, 1912, X8, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
77. “Something New,” X6.
78. “‘The Yellow Jacket’ Is a Real Novelty,” New York Times, November 5, 1912, 13, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
79. Hamilton, “Yellow Jacket,” 382.
80. “Something New,” X6.
81. Fischer-Lichte, Show and the Gaze, 81.
82. Hamilton, “What Is Wrong?,” 314.
83. “Something New,” X6.
84. “Reading the Heart of the East through the Drama,” Current Opinion, January 1913, 35, APS Online, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 24, 2005.
85. “Play That Went Round the World,” New York Times, November 26, 1916, X7, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
86. Woollcott, “Second Thoughts,” X6.
87. Harbeck, “Quaintness,” 241.
88. Feinsod, Simple Stage, 55.
89. Ibid., 28.
90. Helen Caldwell, Michio Ito: The Dancer and his His Dances (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 54.
91. “Play That Went Round the World,” X7.
92. Jack Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Cultures (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 292.
93. “Play That Went Round the World,” X7.
94. Tchen, New York, xx.
95. “When Grandees Give ‘The Yellow Jacket,’” New York Times, March 11, 1917, X5, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed June 16, 2005.
96. Woollcott, “Second Thoughts,” X6.
97. Benrimo, “Legend and Truth,” 118.
98. Ibid., 118.
99. Ibid., 118.
100. Ibid., 118.
101. Hamilton, “Yellow Jacket,” 382.
102. “Acting, Acting,” X8.
103. Feinsod, Simple Stage, 67.
104. Sang-Kyong Lee, East Asia and America: Encounters in Drama and Theatre (Sydney, Australia: Wild Peony, 2000), 89.
105. Hazel Durnell, Japanese Cultural Influences on American Poetry and Drama (Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, 1983), 171.
106. Ibid., 166.
107. Edwin Schallert, “‘Our Town’ at Biltmore Wins Acclaim as Inspirational Stage Production,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1939, 13. See also Brooks Atkinson, “How They Used to Live,” New York Times, February 13, 1938, 155.
108. See Atkinson, “How They Used to Live,” 155; Brooks Atkinson, “Frank Craven in Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ Which Is the Anatomy of a Community,” New York Times, February 5, 1938, 18; Schallert, “‘Our Town,’” 13; E. F. M., “Boston Takes No Wilder Chance,” New York Times, December 18, 1938, 153.
109. “Wilder Tells Why ‘Our Town’ Is Sentimental,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1938, E2.
110. Wilder, “Preface to Three Plays,” 109.
111. In addition to the articles about Our Town mentioned above, see Nelson B. Bell, “Strong Family Inheritance Prompted Writing of ‘Our Town,’” Washington Post, December 11, 1938, TS3.
112. Nancy Bunge, “The Social Realism of Our Town: A Study in Misunderstanding,” in Thornton Wilder: New Essays, ed. Martin Blank et al. (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1999), 358.
113. Wheatley is specifically criticizing the anthology American Drama Colonial to Contemporary, ed. Stephen Watt and Gary Richardson (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1995). Christopher J. Wheatley, “‘Acts of Faith: Thornton Wilder and His Critics’: Public Popularity—Academic Neglect,” in Blank et al., Thornton Wilder: New Essays, 23.
114. “Wilder Tells Why,” E2.
115. Wilder, “Preface to Three Plays,” 109.
116. Thornton Wilder, “A Preface for Our Town,” in Gallup, American Characteristics, 100–101. It was also published in the New York Times, February 13, 1938, 155.
117. Paul Lifton, “Theatrical Ragout from a Master Chef,” in Blank et al., Thornton Wilder: New Essays, 285.
118. Wilder, “Preface for Our Town,” 101.
119. Wilder, “Preface to Three Plays,” 109.
120. Bunge, “Social Realism,” 351.
121. M. C. Kuner, Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), 67.
122. Bert Cardullo, “Whose Town Is It, and Whither Goes It? An Historico-Aesthetic, Comparative-Influential Inquiry into Our Town,” Studies in the Humanities 25.1–2 (1998): 14.
123. Bunge, “Social Realism,” 358.
124. Mary F. Brewer, Staging Whiteness (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 33.
125. David Palumbo-Liu, “Universalisms and Minority Culture,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 7.1 (1995): 188.
126. Brewer, Staging Whiteness, 33.
127. Bunge, “Social Realism,” 358; and David Castronovo, Thornton Wilder (New York: Ungar, 1986), 83.
128. Bunge, “Social Realism,” 357.
129. “City Children Find ‘Our Town’ Alien,” New York Times, August 14, 1969, 26, New York Times Historical, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed October 4, 2007.
1. William L. Worden, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?,” Saturday Evening Post 227.21 (November 20, 1954): 133, Academic Search Premier, http://ebscohost.com/, accessed April 2, 2008.
2. Ibid., 39.
3. Ibid., 134.
4. Ibid., 133.
5. Ibid., 134.
6. In this chapter, I use “Japanese American” to designate those of Japanese descent residing in the United States and “Japanese Canadian” to designate those of Japanese descent residing in Canada, although I recognize the problematic use of “American” to refer only to the United States.
7. Greg Robinson documents Franklin D. Roosevelt’s support for dispersing Japanese Americans after the internment camps, and connects it to his endorsement of similar international projects for resettling Jewish refugees after the war. See Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), particularly chap. 1.
8. Roy Miki and Cassandra Kobayashi, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 46.
9. Ibid., 50.
10. Lye, “Racial Form,” 96.
11. I am mindful of critiques by Canadian literary scholars of a tendency in Asian American studies to appropriate Asian Canadian texts—particularly Kogawa’s Obasan—as examples of Asian American literature, and to insert them into U.S.-based frameworks. In my reading of Itsuka, I strive to attend to the specificities of the Canadian internment and dispersal policies. Furthermore, by juxtaposing Itsuka and Tea, a play about “war brides,” I hope to avoid conflating the two internments while acknowledging both parallels and differences in the representation and treatment of Japanese North Americans during this era. See Guy Beauregard, “What Is at Stake in Comparative Analyses of Asian Canadian and Asian American Literary Studies?,” Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (Winter 2001): 217–39; and Marie Lo, “Passing Recognition: Obasan and the Borders of Asian American and Canadian Literary Criticism,” Comparative American Studies 5.3 (2007): 307–32.
12. Donald C. Goellnicht, “Joy Kogawa’s Obasan: An Essential Asian American Text?,” American Book Review 31.1 (November/December 2009): 5.
13. My discussion of Obasan rather than Itsuka in relation to these controversies reflects the relatively little critical attention received by the latter.
14. Angela Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 59–60.
15. In his preface to the revised edition of Beginnings in Ritual Studies, Ronald L. Grimes acknowledges accusations of conceptual fuzziness, but also suggests that defining ritual too narrowly might limit interdisciplinary collaboration. Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), xiii.
16. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58.
17. Ibid., 59.
18. Bernhard Leistle, “Ritual as Sensory Communication: A Theoretical and Analytical Perspective,” in Ritual and Identity: Performative Practices as Effective Transformations of Social Reality, ed. Klaus-Peter Kopping et al. (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 49.
19. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ, 1982), 82–83.
20. Gerd Baumann, “Ritual Implicates ‘Others’: Rereading Durkheim in a Plural Society,” in Understanding Rituals, ed. Daniel de Coppet (New York: Routledge, 1992), 99.
21. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 130.
22. Ibid., 74.
23. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 45.
24. Joseph C. Hermanowicz and Harriet P. Morgan, “Ritualizing the Routine: Collective Identity Affirmation,” Sociological Forum 14.2 (June 1999): 200.
25. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Introduction,” in Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xv–xvi.
26. Ibid., xxi.
27. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 7.
28. Ibid., 26.
29. Grimes, Beginnings, 69.
30. Pamela Sugiman, “Memories of Internment: Narrating Japanese Canadian Women’s Life Stories,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 29.3 (Summer 2004): 378.
31. Joy Kogawa, Itsuka (New York: Anchor, 1992), 9. Subsequent citations in text.
32. Grimes, Beginnings, 72. Grimes’s distinction between space and place both resonates with and diverges from that of de Certeau. The latter describes space as “practiced place” (de Certeau, Practice, 117).
33. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 91.
34. Leistle, “Ritual as Sensory Communication,” 49.
35. Bell, Ritual Theory, 109.
36. De Certeau is interested in how “users make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules” (Practice, xiii–xiv).
37. Kogawa herself was active in the National Association for Japanese Canadians and served as a consultant for its pamphlet, Justice in Our Time, which chronicles much of the history fictionalized in her novels.
38. This shift in the novel also seems to mark a move away from Obasan to Emily, both as a role model for Naomi and as a model of a distinct literary style. Scholars have read Obasan as setting Obasan and Emily as contrasting models for Naomi. See Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories: Maternality in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan,” Feminist Studies 16.2 (Summer 1990): 288–312; Minh Nguyen, “‘It Matters to Get the Facts Straight’: Joy Kogawa, Realism, and Objectivity of Values,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula Moya and Michael Hames-García (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 171–204; and Meredith Shoenut, “‘I Am Canadian’: Truth of Citizenship in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan,” American Review of Canadian Studies 36.3 (Fall 2006): 478–97.
39. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 58–59.
40. As Itsuka comes to a close, the referent of Naomi’s “we” gradually narrows from members of the redress movement to Cedric and herself; the repetitions of “we” then lessen in the final passages as Naomi reflects on what Settlement Day means for her personally.
41. The redress movement’s insistence on both individual and community compensation could similarly be seen as affirming the importance of considering personal and communal losses in tandem.
42. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Antioch Review 50.1/2 (Winter–Spring 1992): 62.
43. Sugiman, “Memories of Internment,” 383.
44. Roger Daniels, “The Decisions to Relocate the North American Japanese: Another Look,” Pacific Historical Review 51.1 (February 1982): 71–77.
45. From this perspective, the U.S. government’s agreement to acknowledge the injustice of the internment and to provide redress was not inconsistent with the conservatism of the Reagan administration. According to Palumbo-Liu, “The success of the Japanese Americans was used to dispute a structural critique of the U.S. political economy. Yet the very racism away from which conservatives tried to draw attention reappears strongly in the logic of the model minority myth” (Asian/American, 172).
46. Tetsuden Kashima, “Japanese American Internees Return, 1945 to 1955: Readjustment and Social Amnesia,” Phylon 41.2 (1980): 115.
47. Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Salvage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).
48. Caroline C. Simpson, “‘Out of an Obscure Place’: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3 (Fall 1998): 65.
49. A series of legal enactments after World War II enabled the immigration of Japanese women married to U.S. servicemen during a period when immigration from Japan was still restricted. The Soldier Brides Act (1947) and Public Law 717 (1950) gave couples a small window of time to wed and apply for a visa to enter the United States.
50. Simpson, “‘Out of an Obscure Place,’” 49–50.
51. Worden, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?,” 133.
52. Ibid., 134.
53. Ibid., 133.
54. Ibid., 134.
55. Although anti-miscegenation laws were still in effect in the United States, Worden interestingly casts disapproval of such relationships as a problem in Japan, but not in the United States (ibid., 39).
56. Ibid., 38.
57. Janet Wentworth Smith and William L. Worden, “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives,” Saturday Evening Post, January 19, 1952, 27, Academic Search Premier, http://ebscohost.com/, accessed August 14, 2008.
58. Among the many subjects taught at these schools were child rearing, cooking, housekeeping, Christianity, and American history and customs. For an extended description and analysis of these schools, see Regina Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations: Marriages between Japanese Women and American GIs, 1945 to the Present” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1999), particularly chap. 4, “From Chopsticks to Forks: Turning Japanese Brides into American Housewives.”
59. Smith and Worden, “They’re Bringing Home Japanese Wives,” 79.
60. Elena Tajima Creef, “Discovering My Mother as the Other in the Saturday Evening Post,” Qualitative Inquiry 6.4 (December 2000): 451, SAGE Journals Online, http://qix.sagepub.com/, accessed April 2, 2008.
61. Creef observes that whereas the army extensively examined the backgrounds of the women, the men only had to show “proof of citizenship, single status, and proof of ability to support a wife” (ibid., 452).
62. Velina Hasu Houston, Asa Ga Kimashita (Morning Has Broken), electronic ed. (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2004), 38.
63. Velina Hasu Houston, American Dreams, 1st electronic ed. (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2004), 83.
64. Houston, American Dreams, 112.
65. Roberta Uno, “Introduction to Tea,” Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women, ed. Roberta Uno (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 157.
66. Velina Hasu Houston, Tea, in Uno, Unbroken Thread, 171. Subsequent citations in text.
67. Uno, “Introduction to Tea,” 157.
68. J. L. Austin distinguishes perlocutionary acts as “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading.” J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 109.
69. Production choices can, of course, radically change the implications of these remarks. For example, in the Horizons Theatre production, actors wore transparent kimonos over “Western” clothes, inverting the notion of a Japanese “inside” covered by an Americanized exterior. This costuming choice would thus complicate or contradict Chiz’s comment that Himiko’s death “made me remember that underneath my comfortable American clothes, I am, after all, Japanese” (170). Susan Haedicke, “‘Suspended between Two Worlds’: Interculturalism and the Rehearsal Process for Horizons Theatre’s Production of Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea,” Theatre Topics 4.1 (March 1994): 89–103.
70. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), 95.
71. Turner, From Ritual to Theater, 80.
72. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), 50.
73. Kimberly Jew, “Dismantling the Realist Character in Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea and David Henry Hwang’s FOB,” in Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Rocío G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 195.
74. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 53.
75. In her reading of the play, Josephine Lee offers an analysis of this distribution of roles that both converges with and diverges from my own. While Lee argues that the role-doubling sets the other characters as extensions of the “war brides” and thus encourages a conception of Asian American women as vessels that contain and endure hardship, I focus on the indeterminacy of the relationship between the central “war bride” character and the minor roles. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 204.
76. Shimakawa proposes that this juxtaposition of characters reframes and complicates their seemingly stereotypical traits by encouraging comparisons between and among the women rather than against conceptions of normative American behavior (National Abjection, 105–7).
77. See Walter Goodman, “‘Tea,’ End Of Trilogy,” New York Times, October 21, 1987, late ed., C23, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com; Alvin Klein, “Japanese Wives in U.S. Are Portrayed in ‘Tea,’” New York Times, November 5, 1989, New Jersey Weekly Desk, late ed., sec. 12, 20, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 1, 2008; Lloyd Rose, “‘Tea’: Steeped in the Familiar,” Washington Post, March 24, 1993, final ed., B2, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 1, 2008; Ed Siegel, “Souls Struggle in Limbo in the Berkshires,” Boston Globe, August 18, 1999, D1, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 1, 2008.
78. Anne Midgette, “Steeped in Female Bonding, Shared with a Troubled Ghost,” New York Times, May 31, 2007, E7, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 1, 2008.
79. Grimes, Beginnings, 63.
80. Schechner, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), 157.
81. Schechner aligns efficacy with ritual and entertainment with theater, although he emphasizes that no one performance is solely efficacious or entertaining (Performance Theory, 130).
82. Kogawa claims that the bad review led her to publish a substantially revised version of Itsuka in 2005 under the new title of Emily Kato. As she relates, however, this book received little publicity and fared worse than Itsuka in sales. Michael Posner, “Restoring a Book to Life,” Globe and Mail, March 9, 2006, R3, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 26, 2008.
83. Stan Persky, “Itsuka pales in Obasan’s shadow,” Globe and Mail, March 28, 1992, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 26, 2008.
84. Even favorable reviews of Itsuka often echo Persky’s criticisms of the novel as too documentary and sociological, and assume an incongruity between politics and aesthetics. See Claire Rothman, “Political Clamor Drowns out Kogawa’s Voice,” Montreal Gazette, March 14, 1992, final ed., H2, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 26, 2008; and Brendan Bernhard, “In Short: Fiction,” New York Times, March 13, 1994, late ed., sec. 7, 18, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 26, 2008.
85. Mary di Michele, “Wearing the ‘Hairshirt of Ethnicity,’” Toronto Star, March 28, 1992, Saturday ed., G17, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed November 26, 2008.
86. Schechner, Between Theater, 99.
87. Ibid., 101.
88. Haedicke, “‘Suspended between Two Worlds,’” 89.
89. Ibid., 98.
90. Lark, “They Challenged Two Nations,” 384.
91. Ibid., 384–85.
92. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 99.
93. Ibid., 98.
1. The image of “the fortuitous encounter upon a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” comes from Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, first published in 1868. Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror (New York: New Directions, 1965), 263.
2. Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 101. Subsequent citations in text. In the published script, the line breaks are meant to capture the rhythm of each character’s speech.
3. Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 47.
4. Elizabeth Wong, “Kimchee and Chitlins,” in But Still Like Air, I’ll Rise, ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 441. Subsequent citations in text.
5. Ivan Light and Edna Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles 1965–1982 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 22–23, 122–23.
6. Peter Morrison and Ira Lowry, “A Riot of Color: The Demographic Setting,” in The Los Angeles Riots, ed. Mark Baldassare (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), 24–27.
7. Philip Kasinitz, Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 198, 201.
8. Regina Freer, “Black-Korean Conflict,” in Baldassare, Los Angeles Riots, 190.
9. Heon Cheol Lee, “Conflict between Korean Merchants and Black Customers: A Structural Analysis,” in Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans, ed. Kwang Chung Kim (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 119.
10. Rhonda Richards, “Two Sides of American Dream,” USA Today, May 12, 1992, Money: 1B, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007.
11. Kathryn Tolbert, “Out of the Mainstream,” Boston Globe, October 25, 1992, Magazine: 20, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007.
12. Kyeyoung Park, “Use and Abuse of Race and Culture: Black-Korean Tension in America,” in Kim, Koreans in the Hood, 69.
13. Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), x.
14. H. C. Lee, “Conflict,” 125.
15. Ibid., 119.
16. Garry Pierre-Pierre, “Something in Common; To Bridge a Gap Korean Grocers Try a Little Creole,” New York Times, October 18, 1997: B1, LexisNexis http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007; Joyce Shelby, “Teaching That Smiles Can Take a Biz Miles,” New York Daily News, August 7, 1996, 3, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007.
17. Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, 163.
18. See Light and Bonacich, Immigrant Entrepreneurs.
19. Freer, “Black-Korean Conflict,” 185.
20. Freer observes that during the 1991 boycott of John’s Liquor Store in Los Angeles, members of the Brotherhood Crusade and the Korean American Grocers Association insisted that “a solution to the conflict had to come from the two communities alone” (ibid., 193). Thus, they perpetuated the notion that only the parties most visibly involved in the boycott should be responsible for alleviating tensions.
21. Ella Stewart, “Communication between African Americans and Korean Americans before and after the Los Angeles Riots,” in Los Angeles—Struggles toward Multiethnic Community: Asian American, African American, and Latino Perspectives, ed. Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 41.
22. News stories that addressed both cultural and economic factors tended to conceive of them as separate if cumulative ingredients. In addition to the articles above, see William Schmidt, “For Immigrants, Tough Customers,” New York Times, November 25, 1990, sec. 4, 5, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007; Seth Mydans, “Shooting Puts Focus on Korean-Black Frictions in Los Angeles,” New York Times, October 6, 1991, sec. 1, pt. 1, 20, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007; Douglas Martin, “Seeking Ties and Clout, Korean Grocers Join Voices,” New York Times, March 22, 1993, sec. A, 1, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007.
23. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 54.
24. Ibid., 60–61.
25. Containing these tensions in economically depressed urban areas could, however, help maintain the constancy of the habitus in wealthier areas.
26. Bourdieu notes, “Sociology treats as identical all biological individuals who, being the products of the same objective conditions, have the same habitus” (ibid., 59).
27. H. C. Lee, “Conflict,” 127.
28. Diamond, “Introduction,” 5.
29. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 67.
30. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001), 192.
31. The play in this respect echoes complaints directed against the media by those involved in and affected by the boycott and the uprising. Abelmann and Lie, Blue Dreams, observe that Korean-language newspapers spent much time analyzing mainstream reports of the “Black-Korean conflict,” and that Korean Americans organized protests against their local media for their coverage. The interviews recorded in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight, such as the statements by Allen Cooper quoted at the beginning of this chapter, capture similar objections to media coverage of the uprising.
32. Pao, No Safe Spaces, 27.
33. Ibid., 5.
34. Ibid., 26–30.
35. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 68.
36. Freer, “Black-Korean Conflict,” 176.
37. Phelan, Unmarked, 22.
38. De Certeau, Practice, 127.
39. Wong scripts Matilda’s dialect for both Soomi’s reenactment and Suzie’s interview, but it is slightly more exaggerated in the former. The variations in how Wong writes such simulated speech suggest the degree to which characters feel sympathetic toward one another, with more marked distinctions when they perform members of the opposing Chorus.
40. Tania Modleski, “Doing Justice to the Subjects: Mimetic Art in a Multicultural Society: The Work of Anna Deavere Smith,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 65.
41. Modleski recalls, “After seeing the way white women were portrayed in this version my first reaction was one of anger. . . . If Smith was not prepared to acknowledge my oppression as a woman, I felt, I would not recognize hers as an African American” (ibid., 70).
42. Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (New York: Anchor, 1993), xl.
43. Smith, Fires, xxxix.
44. My use of the term “articulation” is inspired by Stuart Hall’s reading of Gramsci: “[Gramsci] draws attention to . . . the complexity of the processes of de-construction and re-construction by which old alignments are dismantled and new alignments can be effected between elements in different discourses and between social forces and ideas. It conceives ideological change, not in terms of substitution or imposition but rather in terms of the articulation and the disarticulation of ideas” (23). Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 5–27.
45. See Charles Lyons and James Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith: Perspectives on Her Performance within the Context of Critical Theory,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 9.1 (Fall 1994): 45; Dorinne Kondo, “Shades of Twilight: Anna Deavere Smith and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” in Connected: Engagements with Media, ed. George Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 316; and Modleski, “Doing Justice to the Subjects,” 60–62.
46. Smith, Fires, xxiv.
47. Ibid., xxvii.
48. Debby Thompson, “‘Is Race a Trope?’: Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity,” African American Review 31.1 (Spring 2003): 127–28.
49. Ibid., 133.
50. Lyons and Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 47.
51. Ibid., 50.
52. Ibid., 50.
53. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 198.
54. Ibid., 105.
55. Lyons and Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 60; Thompson, “‘Is Race a Trope?,’” 129.
56. Smith’s attention to the speaker’s body is evident in the published performance script, which notes those moments when a subject’s effort to verbalize his or her understanding of an issue intersects with a specific corporeal expression.
57. My analysis here is based on the published script and the performances included in the film version of Twilight (dir. Marc Levin, PBS, 2001); it is also informed by my attendance at Smith’s performance Let Me Down Easy at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
58. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 58.
59. Lyons and Lyons, “Anna Deavere Smith,” 45.
60. Modleski calls attention to the problematic assumptions behind such understandings of Smith’s work, which reinforce conceptions of black women’s bodies as empty vessels (“Doing Justice to the Subjects,” 60–62).
61. Kondo, “Shades of Twilight,” 316.
62. Smith, Fires, xxviii.
63. Phelan, Unmarked, 13.
64. Anna Deavere Smith, “Not so Special Vehicles,” Performing Arts Journal 17.2/3 (May–September 1995): 87.
65. Sandra Kumamoto, “Teaching Identity Politics in a Post-identity Age: Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight,” MELUS 30.2 (2005 Summer): 202.
66. Modleski, “Doing Justice to the Subjects,” 65.
67. For an extended study of nontraditional casting practices, see Pao, No Safe Spaces.
68. Ann Geracimos, “In her Element, Anna D. Smith Serves up Life’s Drama Stage,” Washington Times, January 30, 1997, pt. C, 8, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, accessed October 25, 2007.
69. Smith, Fires, xxxix.
70. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 68.
71. Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 163.
72. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 73.
1. Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, paperback ed. (New York: Penguin, 2011), 3–4. Subsequent citations in text.
2. Amy Chua, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2011, online.wsj.com, accessed June 14, 2013.
3. Richard Bernstein, “Asian Students Harmed by Precursors’ Success,” New York Times, July 10, 1988, late ed., sec. 1, 16.
4. Martin Kasindorf, et al., “Asian-Americans: A ‘Model Minority,’” Newsweek, December 6, 1982, U.S. ed., 39.
5. Koshy notes that the figure of the model minority sets critics who see it as “assimilationist, homogenizing, and heterosexist” against those “who see it as an economic confirmation of the veracity of their cultural values and have invested it with their class aspirations, plural national attachments, gender norms, and heterosexual arrangements” (Susan Koshy, “Neoliberal Family Matters,” American Literary History 25.2 [Summer 2013]: 348). For Ninh, a serious consideration of the latter is exactly what has been lacking in investigations of the model minority stereotype: “The heart of the issue is not whether an Asian immigrant family currently meets the socioeconomic or professional measures of the model minority. Rather, the issue is whether it aspires to do so, whether it applies those metrics: not resentful of the racializing discourse of Asian success as a violence imposed from without, but implementing that discourse, with ingenuity, alacrity, and pride, from within.” erin Khuê Ninh, Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 9.
6. Grace Wang, “On Tiger Mothers and Music Moms,” Amerasia Journal 37.2 (2011): 134.
7. Ibid., 132.
8. Fox Butterfield, “Why Asians Are Going to the Head of the Class,” New York Times, August 3, 1986, late ed., sec. 12, 18.
9. Ibid., 18.
10. Lori Gottleib, “Amy Chua,” Atlantic Monthly, November 2011, 50.
11. In a new book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (New York: Penguin, 2014), Chua and her coauthor (and husband) Jed Rubenfeld claim to identify the characteristics that explain the success of certain groups in the United States. Rather than the everyday practices of parents and children, this book focuses on three broad “cultural” traits. Critics of Triple Package argue that it perpetuates notions of racial hierarchies and ignores the impact of sociohistorical circumstances on the various groups that it discusses.
12. Annie Murphy Paul, “Tiger Moms: Is Tough Parenting Really the Answer?,” Time, January 20, 2011, time.com, accessed June 14, 2013.
13. “Tiger Cubs v. Precious Lambs,” Economist, January 20, 2011, economist.com, accessed June 14, 2013.
14. Butterfield, “Why Asians Are Going,” 18.
15. Less blatant than the New York Times article by Butterfield, stories about Asian Americans that appeared during this time in Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post similarly insinuated a potentially threatening rise in numbers. See John Dillin, “Asian-Americans: Soaring Minority,” Christian Science Monitor, October 10, 1985, National sec., 3; and Spencer Rich, “Asian Americans Outperform Others in School and Work; Census Data Outlines ‘Model Minority,’” Washington Post, October 10, 1985, final ed., sec. 1, A1.
16. See Gary Okihiro, “Perils of the Body and Mind,” in Margins and Mainstream: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 118–47.
17. Koshy, “Neoliberal Family Matters,” 345.
18. Ibid., 345–46.
19. Okihiro, “Perils of the Body and Mind,” 141.
20. Ibid., 141.
21. Doobo Shim and Joann Lee observe an increasing number of depictions in the late twentieth century of Asians as gangsters in films and news stories, respectively. Doobo Shim, “From Yellow Peril through Model Minority to Renewed Yellow Peril,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 22.4 (October 1998): 385–409; Joann Lee, “A Look at Asians as Portrayed in the News,” Editor & Publisher, April 30, 1994, 56–57.
22. Wang, “On Tiger Mothers,” 130.
23. Sau-ling C. Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 92.
24. Ibid., 92.
25. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America, 168.
26. Ibid.
27. This chapter focuses on what Sau-ling C. Wong describes as a variation of the racial shadow but leaves for future studies to investigate: doubles that manifest what the protagonist idealizes and desires, rather than (or in addition to) what she disowns (Reading Asian American Literature, 117).
28. Ibid., 111.
29. Ibid., 90.
30. Better Luck Tomorrow (dir. Justin Lin, MTV Films, 2003).
31. Roger Ebert, “No Place for Political Correctness in Film,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 18, 2002, http://www.betterlucktomorrow.com, accessed November 29, 2003.
32. Ebert, “No Place.”
33. Ibid.
34. Daniel Yi, “They’re the Bad Seeds?,” Los Angeles Times Calendar Live, April 6, 2003, http://www.betterlucktomorrow.com, accessed November 29, 2003.
35. Subtitles in video footage of the debate affirm Yi’s account, although the audience member’s remark is cut off by the voice-over. Video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSzP9YV3jbc.
36. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 281.
37. Jun Xing, Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1998), 125.
38. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 62.
39. Park, “Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific,” in Race and Culture, 150.
40. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 6.
41. Anne A. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10.
42. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.
43. Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 59.
44. Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 173.
45. Butler, Bodies, 12.
46. Ibid., 232.
47. Although theories of American assimilation vary in their assessment of the transformation effected by the contact between different groups (Milton Gordon lists “Anglo-conformity,” “the melting pot,” and “cultural pluralism” as different models), I focus primarily on the dynamic implied by the model minority myth and depicted in the film: the incorporation of a minority group into the majority through socioeconomic advancement and the appropriation of normative behaviors and values. Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
48. Suein Hwang, “The New White Flight,” Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2005, A1, http://proquest.umi.com, accessed March 3, 2007.
49. Ibid., A1.
50. The “Chinese Jordan” joke is indicative of the film’s production before Yao Ming and Jeremy Lin became two of the NBA’s most popular players. In their study of the “flexible marketing” of Yao Ming, Thomas Oates and Judy Polumbaum show that praise of his ostensible gentleness and discipline could imply criticism of the behaviors of black players. See Thomas Oates and Judy Polumbaum, “Agile Big Man: The Flexible Marketing of Yao Ming,” Pacific Affairs 77.2 (Summer 2004): 187–210.
51. Jeffrey Paul Chan et al., eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974), viii.
52. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 4.
53. Ibid., 125. In addition to Shimizu’s book, other critical works on Better Luck Tomorrow have emphasized its dialogue with stereotypes of Asian men as asexual and Asian women as readily available sexual objects. See Margaret Hillenbrand, “Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian America Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47.4 (Summer 2008): 50–75; and Ruthann Lee, “Ambivalence, Desire and the Re-imagining of Asian American Masculinity in Better Luck Tomorrow,” in Pimps, Wimps, Studs, Thugs and Gentlemen: Essays, ed. Elwood Watson (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 51–67.
54. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America, 91.
55. Daniel Y. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 211.
56. Ibid., 212.
57. In the film, Virgil refers to his friends as his “niggers,” and the mock website created for him to publicize the movie drives the point home: http://www.betterlucktomorrow.com/character_sites/virgil/homepage.htm, accessed November 29, 2003.
58. Manohla Dargis, “Death of the ‘Model Minority,’” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2003, http://www.betterlucktomorrow.com, accessed November 29, 2003.
59. D. Y. Kim, Writing Manhood, 211.
60. The work of social psychologists on the impact of stereotypes on educational testing, policing, criminal sentencing, and other areas makes a compelling case for how racial representations deeply influence life possibilities. For example, see Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (New York: Norton, 2010).
61. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America, 196.
62. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 398.
63. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 199.
64. Lauren Yee, Ching Chong Chinaman, in Asian American Plays for a New Generation, ed. Josephine Lee et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 314. Subsequent citations in text.
65. Josephine Lee, “Introduction to Ching Chong Chinaman,” in Lee et al., Asian American Plays, 266.
66. From 1988 to 1990, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights conducted investigations to determine whether or not universities had discriminated against Asian American applicants. Several universities also conducted self-studies in the 1980s, with some acknowledging unconscious bias and others denying discriminatory practices. For more on these investigations, see Dana Takagi, The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
67. The briefs for Fisher v. University of Texas, including those in support of the petitioner and the respondent, were published on the website of the University of Texas at Austin: http://www.utexas.edu/vp/irla/Fisher-V-Texas.html.
68. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1989), 5–6.
69. My thanks to Tabitha Kenlon for a useful discussion of the possible significance of Desdemona’s name at the 2013 ASTR Everyday Life working session.
70. The report is available online at http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/.
71. Association for Asian American Studies, “Association for Asian American Studies Response to the Pew Center Report: ‘Rise of Asian Americans’” (press release, July 16, 2012), http://aaastudies.org/content/index.php/77-home/117-whats-new, accessed July 29, 2013.
1. “Good Hygiene Gets Girls,” YouTube video, 4:30, posted by Wong Fu Productions, January 18, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZfAYWbhQP8.
2. “Good Cooking Gets Girls,” YouTube video, 4:23, posted by Wong Fu Productions, January 14 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14HjPdvV8go; “Working Out Gets Girls,” YouTube video, 5:23, posted by Wong Fu Productions, September 12, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub_ltTBnCtE.
3. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center reported that more Asian Americans use the Internet than any other racial group. Lee Rainie, “Asian-Americans and Technology” (Pew Internet and American Life Project, January 6, 2011), http://pewinternet.org/Presentations/2011/Jan/Organization-for-Chinese-Americans.aspx, accessed May 25, 2012. I consider criticism of these reports later in the chapter.
4. Austin Considine, “For Asian-American Stars, Many Web Fans,” New York Times, July 29, 2011, New York ed., ST6, accessed October 27, 2013. Videos are available on their respective YouTube channels: www.youtube.com/user/nigahiga; www.youtube.com/user/MichellePhan; www.youtube.com/user/kevjumba.
5. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 57.
6. “Yellow Fever (2006)—Re-release Official,” YouTube video, 20:32, posted by Wong Fu Productions, January 28, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC_ycDO66bw.
7. The company name comes from the nickname of Philip Wang, one of the three founders. See interview by Ho Chie, “From East to West with Wong Fu Productions,” http://taiwaneseamerican.org/ta/2008/11/14/from-east-to-west-with-wong-fu-productions/.
8. Chan et al., Aiiieeeee!, viiii.
9. Ibid., viiii.
10. Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, “Racist Love,” in Seeing Through Shuck, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 65–79.
11. Shimizu, Straitjacket Sexualities, 15.
12. David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 21.
13. I use the term “ethnic” here rather than “racial” to borrow a distinction made in Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Moya’s Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century (New York: Norton, 2010). Stressing that in practice this distinction does not always hold, Markus and Moya conceive of ethnicity as a “more mutual, power-neutral, and positive process” than race, which is connected with the perpetuation of hierarchies and inequalities (21–23). As this chapter argues, the cultivation of a nonhierarchical concept of ethnicity can nevertheless perpetuate hierarchies based on gender or sexuality.
14. For example, see “Elbow Zit,” YouTube video, 2:10, posted by KevJumba, May 18, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9czIVC9p8BA; and “Dear Ryan—Klondike Bar,” YouTube video, 1:43, posted by Nigahiga, July 2, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQvdOLxkGc0.
15. “Expectations vs. Reality: Romance,” YouTube video, 4:56, posted by Nigahiga, February 15, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvAJt3VM0uk.
16. Y. S. Lee, Modern Minority, 15.
17. Grace Wang, “A Love Song to YouTube: Charting a ‘So-called Asian Movement’ Online” (paper, Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference, Seattle, April 18, 2013).
18. “I Have to Deal with Stereotypes,” YouTube video, 4:54, posted by KevJumba, March 8, 2007, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbZ9zJ22WfQ; “Dear Ryan—Can You Open Your Eyes?,” YouTube video, 1:19, posted by Nigahiga, May 30, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZsTBucXSFw.
19. “Draw My Life—Ryan Higa,” YouTube video, 7:35, posted by Nigahiga, April 10, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPmoDYayoLE; “Draw My Life—Michelle Phan,” YouTube video, 11:25, posted by Michelle Phan, May 19, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=05KqZEqQJ40.
20. For example, see “My Dad Is Asian Ep. 1,” YouTube video, 2:08, posted by KevJumba, August 31, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqSCOPvPJ7g; and “My Dad Is Asian Ep. 2,” YouTube video, 1:50, posted by KevJumba, March 2, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw_vzLw4xyA.
21. Burgess and Green, YouTube, 81.
22. Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 178.
23. Tom Spooner, “Asian-Americans and the Internet” (Pew Internet and American Life Project, December 12, 2001), http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2001/AsianAmericans-and-the-Internet.aspx, accessed May 25, 2012; and Rainie, “Asian-Americans and Technology.”
24. Nakamura, Digitizing Race, 179.
25. Nhi T. Lieu, “The Makeup Guru as Neoliberal Entrepreneur: Post-feminism, Self-Management, and Asian/American Women in the DIY Age of YouTube” (paper, Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference, Seattle, April 18, 2013).
26. “Mulan Bride,” YouTube video, 5:00, posted by Michelle Phan, June 18, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebcc1WXJS6A.
27. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 125.
28. Ibid., 125.
29. “Acting, Acting,” X8.