Stereotypes & Tropes
Steven Yeun and John Cho's filmographies are so distinct, in comparison to their peers and colleagues, 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 Sidebar, 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 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 always in 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 characterize 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 within the subjectivity of the Asian American themself. 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 popularizing the concept in explicit terms. 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 barriers. 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 remained 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 funny or amusing 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 millennial/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, much of the tensions for these characters would not exist. 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.
The FOB is the new manifestation of this stereotype. Most often used by Asian Americans to describe older generations or perhaps themselves, the FOB has just arrived in the United States. They are characterized with non-normative cultural customs, conservatism, a heavy accent, and a simultaneous desire to keep their culture alive in America and a desire to assimilate. For non-Asian Americans, the FOB is a symbol of immigration and foreign-ness. However, for Asian Americans, it can be a way to protect one's Asian identity and prevent Americanization or a whitewashing of oneself. Writer Louise Hung notes that, while in the past being a FOB was a bad thing, now it is "a reaction against all things “white on the inside.”"
These markers of identity associated with culture and Asian normativity - accents, cultural habits, histories of migration - factor into Yeun and Cho's characters and real-life star personas. They cannot lean too far into being Asian, for they will automatically be seen as a foreign star, not an American one. But should they not mention their Asian identity or habits enough, they may face criticism from the Asian American community itself.
Asian American & Boba Liberals
These two 'stereotypes' - if they can be called that - inject political agency into the character of the Asian American, removing them as a subject of white or colonial gaze (as they are in the Model Minority / Perpetual Foreigner) and into active meaning-makers on their own.
Now most often used as a neutral term to describe an American citizen/habitant of America from Asian-descent, the term Asian American has specific and radical political meanings. In 1968 at UC-Berkeley, two student activists - Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka - named their activist group the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). Yen Le Espiritu claims this is the first public use of the term Asian American. In an interview between Espiritu and Ichioka, the political implications of this term was clear from the beginning: “There were so many Asians out there in the political demonstrations but we had no effectiveness. Everyone was lost in the larger rally. We figured that if we rallied behind our own banner, behind an Asian American banner, we would have an effect on the larger public. We could extend the influence beyond ourselves, to other Asian Americans.” (Espiritu 34). Now, Asian American has been neutralized to define one's objective relation to Asia. But, it must be emphasized that Asian American is constructed as a label, not natural nor necessarily intuitive without its own creation, and a rallying cry to act as a political bloc and recognize our communities ability to advocate for change.
Taken as a noun from the term 'boba liberalism' - a shallow understanding of politics and a focus on short-term, representation-based goals in policy and media - the boba liberal does not have much going on under the surface; just like boba tea, they’re sugary, sweet, and easily digestible. Twitter user diaspora_is_red (now deleted account) coined the term 'boba liberalism' and originally described it as "a type of mainstream liberal Asian-American politics... sweet, not very offensive, but also not that good for you ... it's just empty calories." These shallow goals ignore systemic barriers to reform/activism and take any representative success as meaningful gains - when in reality, this is often not the case.
In film and television discussions, the boba liberal is not concerned with the quality of the representation, rather its monetary success and the mere existence of it. Melissa Phruksachart speaks on these issues regarding the films Searching (dir. Aneesh Chaganty, 2018) and Crazy Rich Asians (dir. Jon M. Chu, 2018), which heavily emphasized Asian faces in its marketing but failed to deliver on quality storytelling nor critical commentaries on the lives that Asian / Asian Americans experience.
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