‘List of Good Asian sand Bad Asians’ speaks to inching past TV stereo types
I have a list of names in my mind. This is a secret list, one I share with rarely anyone because I’m afraid it can be damning or seen as petty. Though there are complex rules that govern this list, it is at its core as simple as Santa Claus’s. This is the List of Good Asians and Bad Asians.
Some of the Good Asians in the pop-culture realm are Aziz Ansari, John Cho and Constance Wu. Bad Asians are Ken Jeong, Margaret Cho and the Asian actors in “Silicon Valley” and “Two Broke Girls.”
The Good Asians are ones whom Asian Americans want to celebrate — minorities who, in the face of the oppressive white mainstream, defy and expose racism. They are intelligent, cool, sexually viable and appropriately “woke.” Their roles push the medium forward, paving forth progress for future generations.
The Bad Asians, on the other hand, are often seen as nerdy, asexual, foreign or threatening. They play into stereotypes, choosing to accept roles that may compromise the Greater Asian Cause because, well, there are no other roles out there. They are not unaware of racism. Rather, they choose to disregard it, seeing their minority status as a joke or burden instead of a superpower.
Last week, a group of researchers in California published a study on Asian and Asian-American representation on television, finding that Asian Americans are so frequently slighted that even shows set in diverse cities leave them out of the picture.
Released the week before the Emmy Awards, which are Sunday night, the study can be seen as a critique of the whitedominant television industry, exposing how the mainstream continues to tokenize and stereotype Asians in media.
“Tokens on the Small Screen” has all of the findings that are at once sad and unsurprising for the Asian-American television viewer: 64 percent of all shows don’t feature a single regular cast member of Asian-American or Pacific Islander descent. Whites make up 70 percent of series regulars, compared to 4 percent for AAPIs. On shows that do feature AAPIs, the white characters have three times as many romantic or familial relationships as Asians, conforming to the fantasy that Asians are asexual.
You could say the authors of this study have their own little Good/Bad Asian list. On the good side are those involved in the shows that the study has deemed “exemplary”: “The Night Of,” “Master of None,” “The Walking Dead” and “Fresh Off the Boat.” These are programs that portray Asians as many things — complex, badass, conflicted, angry, sexy, heroic, petty and so on. These shows have good Asian representation.
But the study also looks at all the Bad Asians that appear on television: “Major Crimes” features Korean Americans running a criminal plastic-surgery ring. Han Lee on “Two Broke Girls” is short and lame and terrible with women. Jian-Yang, who speaks broken English, is constantly made fun of for being Asian on “Silicon Valley.”
On the surface, what their study and my list say about Bad Asians are different. The study says the industry is bad, not the Asians, but my list seems to place blame on the Asian person. Yet both the study on tokenism and my Good/Bad List speak to the idea that representation is complicated. They show that the presence of Asians on a show isn’t enough — it has to be a good presence, one that promotes rather than detracts from progress.
Margaret Cho, whose “All American Girl” was the first true Asian-American television show, remains a pioneer. She is no doubt a radical game-changer in the industry. But she’s on the other side of my list because her comedy — like that terrible impersonation of Kim Jong Un — positions Asians in a bad place, where we are strange and foreign and easy to mock.
Bad Asians like Cho aren’t really bad, though. They’re a manifestation of a broken system. The actors who take these roles and create these shows are just trying to make it in an impossible industry. Cho has risked more than any critic of her has. The Good/Bad List seems to focus on her failings, when in fact it points to how harshly all Asians on television are judged.
Asians can be criticized by anyone. They’re seen by producers, and if they fail the producers might not make another show with Asians in it (both “Marco Polo” and “Dr. Ken” were canceled this year). They are seen by other minority groups, and criticized, often fairly, for issues of LGBT, female, trans, black or Hispanic representation. And they are judged by members of their own group, and put on an imaginary list with the moral wiggle room of a Christmas myth.
I used to have a different list in the ’90s. It was just the Asian List — a small and sad compendium of every Asian on TV. The fact that the list has had to evolve into a binary proves that the field is more diverse now. It’s a silly idea that a Santa Claus list can be a sign of any progress. But it is a sign. The list, like the study, reminds us that the aphorism is still true: We’ve come a long way, and we still have a long way to go.