Masculinity in Transit: Steven Yeun, John Cho, and the Korean American Diaspora Onscreen Main Menu

Appendix A: Stereotypes

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Stereotypes

Steven Yeun and John Cho's filmographies are so unique because they are so versatile. You could make a claim that some of their earliest roles may have been stereotypical, or at least were based on stereotyped humor. But the sheer range of the rest of their careers make these blips in otherwise very fascinating character choices that often battle stereotypes, explicitly or implicitly. 

Through this project, I have often cited the effects of the Model Minority, Perpetual Foreigner, and other stereotypes that plague Asian American depictions. In this Appendix, I wish to outline their meanings, historical emergences, and importance to this project. These are the media images that construct the popular imagination of Asian American actors, and thus, these are the expectations that Yeun and Cho face while picking any role and performing these roles. Unlike many white actors, Yeun and Cho's character type (cite Richard Dyer) are embedded onto their body, by way of their Korean ethnicity and phenotypic features. Without either an inventive casting agent or determination on the actors' parts, they may have been relegated to Kung Fu Masters, nerds, or immigrants that take on xenophobic imagings for the whole of their career. 

I find this appendix necessary for the project to both supply additional information for terms that are only briefly mentioned in other places, but also to characterize that each stereotype - regardless of time of origin or level of harm - arises due to a specific political reason, most often engaging with narratives of migration and racial difference. These stereotypes are often subtle, despite their violence, and are a part of the American subconscious. With each stereotype, I list a 'traditional' version - the one that establishes all other expectations and tropes of the Asian American - and one specific way in which that stereotype has become somewhat co-opted by Asian Americans, although not in necessarily restorative ways. 

The Model Minority & YAPpie

The Model Minority and the YAPpie (Young Asian Professional) are two strands in the same cloth. Perhaps the most banal, yet efficiently violent, stereotype used to encompass Asian Americans, these two focus on productivity & contributions to American labor while at the same time proving to be a convenient weapon for white supremacy. In short, the Model Minority illustrates Asian Americans as hard-working, polite, and rising above discrimination and harassment to achieve monetary success. The YAPpie is much in the same vein, yet more focused on the subjectivity of the Asian American. The YAPpie is only business and career-focused, with little-to-no interest in much else. The yappie is self-centered and shallow. 

The concept of the Model Minority really took flight in the mid-1960s, after the Moynihan Report (1965), which targeted Black 'family values' as the reason for Black racial degradation - and the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) was signed into law, which restored the right to immigrate to the United States to many Asian countries. Laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) & the Immigration Act of 1924 largely banned, or imposed strict quotas, on immigration. I cannot seem to find where the exact term 'model minority' originated, but many scholars accredit William Peterson for creating the concept in popular culture. His 1966 NYT article "Success Story, Japanese-American Style; Success Story, Japanese-American Style" cited the Japanese American's hardworking ethos, along with success in assimilation, for their financial upward mobility and relative lack of systemic racism. While this in itself is essentialist and harmful to Asian Americans, Peterson uses this Model Minority stereotype to characterize Black Americans as lazy and lacking a 'fatherland' home culture. He notes that Black Americans have had the most time in America to find success and can only blame themselves now for the lack of it. Obviously, this rhetoric is racist and white supremacist, but comes at the expense of Asian Americans and Black Americans. 

Peterson's template - acknowledging racism as an individual issue, noting how Asian Americans use their ingrained abilities and cultural ethics to disregard oppression and achieve success through accumulation of wealth, and then posturing Asian Americans as the good minority and Black Americans as the bad minority - has remain unchanged since its inception in 1966. The Model Minority has become a set of expectations for the lived reality for Asian Americans across the nation. For actors such as Yeun and Cho, the Model Minority excludes them from being able to easily access creative arts, with the assumptions Asians will prioritize pragmatic or STEM careers in order to achieve financial stability. Yeun's character, Glenn Rhee, in The Walking Dead was a type of model minority: good-hearted, polite, and proud of his people. While these traits were not necessarily used to the detriment of other groups nor for the erasure of his own problems, Yeun found this creatively restricting anyways, saying he could only ever be "one thing" with Glenn. For Cho, his breakout character of Harold works largely because of the Model Minority. Everything Harold does is unexpected because he is expected to be the Model Minority: instead of a hard-worker, he's a lazy stoner. More explicitly, Cho wrote for the L.A. Times in 2020, decrying Asian American harassment in the face of COVID-19 paranoia. Specifically, he writes:

Like fame, the “model minority” myth can provide the illusion of “raceless-ness.” Putting select Asians on a pedestal silences those who question systemic injustice. Our supposed success is used as proof that the system works — and if it doesn’t work for you, it must be your fault.

Never mind that 12% of us are living below the poverty line. The model minority myth helps maintain a status quo that works against people of all colors.

But perhaps the most insidious effect of this myth is that it silences us. It seduces Asian Americans and recruits us to act on its behalf. It converts our parents, who in turn, encourage us to accept it. It makes you feel protected, that you’re passing as one of the good ones.

Yeun and Cho are not ignorant to the ills of the Model Minority, nor other stereotypes. Even for characters that do not engage with politics at all, these images and expectations loom, as long as the character (and the actor) is Asian. The YAPpie then presents another challenge - the internalized white gaze within Asian Americans. Popularized in 2018 through the WongFu Youtube Series, the YAPpie is at once symptomatic of a millenial/Gen-Z apathy, but also deeply entrenched in the ideas that the only way to measure success for an Asian American is to become the Model Minority. 

The Perpetual Foreigner & FOBs

Another long-lasting stereotype, the Perpetual Foreigner and the FOB (fresh off the boat) depict Asians in America as always immigrants, culturally excluded from America, and not belonging unless proving themselves as worthy of value (by adhering to the Model Minority). The Perpetual Foreigner stereotype emphasizes accented language/dialect, different nuances of home culture (home being home country and the house one lives in), and physical appearance. Most often, this stereotype manifests itself in the single question: “No, but where are you really from?” The political efficacy of this stereotype lies in its ability to affirm America as a white-state. 

As far as I can research, Frank H. Wu, in his book Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, first coined the term 'perpetual foreigner'. With so much immigration happening in the mid-century and on, Asian Americans are a relatively new constituency in America and thus are subject to questions of loyalty, legal citizenship, and familiarity with American culture. These issues are not tackled head on Burning or Columbus, yet without the basis of the Perpetual Foreigner, perhaps much of the tensions for the characters would not arise. For example, Jin Lee's questioning of his heritage, family values, and cultural displacement are authentic and unique to his own individuality, but are absolutely exacerbated by questions regarding his foreign-ness. The first time Casey meets him, who is friendly and polite, she still asks if he can speak English and seems surprised by his fluency. This interaction shows just how ingrained the idea that Asians in America do not really belong or are foreign immigrants is, if Casey has to ask him this question and Jin Lee seems unfazed by it anyways. 



Asian American & Boba Liberals



 
The following three stereotypes are three of the most widespread and well-known ways to imagine Asian Americans. All three engage heavily with U.S. politics and white supremacy in explicit ways.

The Model MinorityThe Perpetual ForeignerAsian American

Media Stereotypes
 
The following stereotypes emerge in film/literature and are largely on Orientalist assumptions. These stereotypes conquer the American imagination and continue to affect representations in media and real-life expectations of Asian Americans. Most of these stereotypes originate to target specifically Chinese Americans, but are still understood as representative of East Asian Americans in general. I list them here mostly to expand on a history of media images of Asian Americans and to show how pervasive these images still are in modern society. 
 
Fu Manchu

Charlie Chan

Mr. Miyagi

Contemporary Stereotypes
 
The following stereotypes may be more accurately described as tropes as they are not perhaps as pervasive as any of the more long-standing stereotypes. Nonetheless, these images and associated traits resonate across the Asian American community as both in-community jokes and ways to be categorized by normative society. 

FOBsYappieBoba Liberal

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  1. Appendixes Jackson Wright