II. Remembrance Representation

II. Remembrance & Representation Figure 1. Benson Fong, Beulah Quo, and George Takei on the set of My Three Sons. 2016 Amerasia Journal Amerasia 96 Amerasia Journal 42:2 (2016): 96-117 10.17953/aj.42.1.96 The Asian American Next Door Enfiguring the Model Minority on the Domestic Melodrama Melissa Phruksachart In the years between the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans (1942-1946) and the 1965 Immigration Act, what prepared the Ameri- can public to recognize and validate the term “model minority?” This essay proposes a televisual genealogy of the model minority as dis- tinct from the 1966 formulation published by The New York Times in William Petersen’s feature “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.”1 Building upon prior scholarship, I inquire into the early Cold War logics that precipitated the popular rise of the model minority figure in 1966. In particular, I point to network television as an archive that circulated the structures of feeling necessary for the model minority to take hold. By doing so, I place recent histories of Asian American domesticity during the Cold War era into closer conversation with U.S. popular culture, particularly television. While popular media histories lament the rarity of Asian Ameri- cans on television, I identify the trope of the Asian American neigh- bor as increasingly common on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Both the television industry and Asian American communities found themselves rapidly growing in size in mid-1950s California. At stake for both the television industry and Asian American communities was the chance to be “domesticated” into the American home. In multiple instances, Asian integration into white suburban Califor- nia neighborhoods met with resistance (and counter-resistance) that drew local, national, and even international media attention. This essay examines how these stories took fictional shape on two popular MELISSA PHRUKSACHART is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the De- partment of Cinema Studies at New York University. Her dissertation, from which this article is drawn, argues for the historically specific significance of television as a medium through which the incorporation of Asian/Ameri- cans into the U.S. imaginary occurred and was made acceptable during the early Cold War era. 97 and long-running Cold War sitcoms, The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958-1966) and My Three Sons (ABC, 1960-1965; CBS, 1965-1972), to illuminate the understudied intimacy between Hollywood and Southern California’s Asian American communities. The domestic sitcom is an overlooked archive of politically liberal Asian American figuration in the mid-twentieth century, which consciously spoke back to decades of images of Asian Americans as un-American and perpetually foreign. Asian Amer- ican-centered plotlines were manifest as both a crisis and celebra- tion of domesticity in contradistinction to prior media portrayals of “the Asian” as an emasculated man isolated in pathological bachelor societies. The Cold War domestic sitcom attempted to portray Asian American life in a “realistic” way—or at least as re- alistically as the bounds of the sitcom genre allowed. But rather than assert whether these representations were accurate, positive, or realistic, I am more interested in interrogating these representations’ claims as such, and how and to what ends those claims were made. By doing so, these programs offer further insight as to how the racial referent of the model minority became stabilized for a nationwide audience. Scholarly work on the emergence of the model minority figure has firmly placed its origins in the period after World War II and during the emergence of the Cold War. Broadly writ, this scholarship could be said to fall into two camps: a cultural studies model and a historical model. In the cultural studies model, the model minority emerges through an examination of the attitudes es- poused by U.S. cultural productions, particularly via Hollywood. According to Robert G. Lee, the model minority was produced by “the triumph of liberalism and the racial logic of the Cold War.”2 Specifically, the figure of the “Asian American” resolved the three principal menaces haunting Cold War America: “the red menace of communism, the black menace of race mixing, and the white menace of homosexuality.”3 By modeling the appropriate orienta- tions toward capitalism, the nation, and reproductive racialized heterosexuality—all meant to bolster the success of U.S. liberalism—the Asian American in films such asSayonara (1957) or Flow- 2016 er Drum Song (1961) went from excoriated other to welcome im- migrant. Christina Klein extends this argument by delineating the cir- culation of sentimentality, friendship, and cross-cultural exchange in cultural productions like Flower Drum Song to secure the posi- 4 Amerasia Journal Amerasia tion of the Asian American model minority. She points especially 98 The Asian American American Asian Next The Door to the U.S.’s desire to secure an economic and geopolitical position of power in postwar Asia as reason for staging imaginative and affective situations of Asian integration. Caroline Chung Simp- son, meanwhile, locates the origins of the model minority figure in a desire to disavow the histories of Japanese American incarceration during World War II through the redeemable figure of the Japanese war bride.5 Examining films such as Sayonara, Simpson argues that the early 1950s were characterized by an “unacknowl- edged political or national urgency to stave off the encounter with the various histories of racism in favor of a redeemed drama of cultural pluralism.”6 Simpson is also attentive to the domestic sphere, outlining ways in which the fantasy of the integrated war bride covered over the War Relocation Authority’s failed resettle- ment plan for formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans. Since the publication of these studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of scholars have more recently moved toward a historical examination of the changing racial formations of Asian Americans during the early Cold War period. Work by Charlotte Brooks, Cindy I-Fen Cheng, and Ellen D. Wu has focused on the importance of housing integration—and resistance to it—in limn- ing the acceptability of the model minority.7 My intervention here is in bringing these two bodies of scholarship into conversation while also paying attention to technologies of domestica- tion, like television. The archive of Cold War Asian America has been primarily limited to big-budget Hollywood films, such as the aforementioned Flower Drum Song and Sayonara. These films al- legorized and managed Cold War geopolitical tensions between a strong and dominant U.S. and a feminized and submissive Asia through the trope of romance. Yet film was not the only avenue through which race was imagined in popular culture: television, too, dealt with issues of immigration and integration, albeit in different ways given the experiential settings, logics, and expecta- tions particular to each medium. Hollywood’s competition from the television industry led it to produce films that were longer, grander, and more spectacular than what could be found on television. Forms like the musical or the romance compelled a final ending in tragedy or marriage, while television programs refused such finality through their episodic nature. In what follows, I examine the basis upon which television became a site for negotiating meanings around race and racism after World War II, in particular via the genre of sitcom that has been termed the domestic melodrama. I then explore how the domes- 99 tic melodrama made available ways of theorizing the introduction of Asian Americans into white suburban televisual communities during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ultimately, I probe how these programs’ investments in realism produced racial knowl- edge. In doing so, I rely on the term “enfiguration” after Laura Kang, who has pointed to the different work this word performs from the more common “representation.”8 Enfiguration signals the way in which the idea of the gendered and racialized body is not merely re-presenting that which already exists, but rather indexes a process of confining or making legible something into or as a figure. Negotiating Race on Television Television’s growth, both as a technology and in terms of programming, closely paralleled the material and psychic rebuilding of the postwar nation. It then played a crucial role in shaping public opinion about subsequent wars both international (Korea and Vietnam) and domestic (the civil rights movement). As a domes- tically received medium so different from the public experience of cinema-going, television spoke to the inward turn of American culture after decades of international and civic-minded engage- ment. After the production shutdown caused by World War II, home television sets were available for purchase again by 1946. They became cheaper, and broadcast programming more plenti- ful, such that by 1960, 90 percent of U.S. homes owned one.9 Ac- cording to Lynn Spigel, television grew into the quintessential ap- pliance for the Cold War home and served as a locus for questions about the social relations and formations related to “white flight” from densely packed urban spaces to sheltered suburbs.10 As such, television served as a key nodal point for negotiating discourses of race on local and national levels. As an aesthet- ic mode based around the convention of the family, the domestic sitcom was and is in conversation with popular understandings of what families look and feel like. The production of what we have come to understand as the model of the nuclear family in the mid-twentieth century necessitated a new mode of represen- 2016 tation. This changed how families were arranged on television, how queerness and non-normative sexualities (i.e., single adult- hood) were expressed, how plots and jokes were constructed and timed.

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