UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sg8f0x3 Author Fickle, Tara Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Tara Fickle 2014 © Copyright by Tara Fickle 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature by Tara Fickle Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Rachel Lee, Co-Chair Professor Mark McGurl, Co-Chair “Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature,” argues that games are narrative fantasies of perfectly equal opportunity that can help us reconceive of what it means to be a minority in contemporary America. Race’s idiomatic evolution into a “race card” points not just to identity’s growing immateriality and “virtualization” but to its increasingly intimate relationship with the ludic. Asian American authors in particular have seized upon the possibilities of transforming identity into an object of play, in part because gameplay opens up a space to challenge stereotypes about the group’s “Tiger Mother”-esque obsession with work and apparent allergy to “frivolous” endeavors. Rereading Asian American literature through its literal and proverbial games, from the convivial mahjongg club at the center of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club to the game-theoretical model of the “prisoner’s dilemma” captured in Japanese American internment novels, “Serious Play” reveals that it is not the Asian American ability to work but to play that offers the most cogent insight into identity formation as a simultaneously personal, political, and ludic pursuit. ii The dissertation of Tara Fickle is approved. Jinqi Ling Shu-mei Shih Rachel Lee, Committee Co-Chair Mark McGurl, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION “What Good For?” The Games of Asian American Literature 1 CHAPTER 1 No-No Boy’s Dilemma: Game Theory of the Japanese American Internment 14 What would you do? 23 Conscience v. Contrivance 29 Identifying Systems 37 CHAPTER 2 Racial Role-Play: Fantasies of Identity in The Woman Warrior and Beloved 46 Non-Playing Characters 54 Person v. Persona 60 Multi-Player Games 65 Authenticating Reality 67 CHAPTER 3 American Rules, Chinese Faces: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club 71 The Necessity of Extravagance 78 American Rules 84 Dangerous Games 93 Archives of Possibility 97 CHAPTER 4 English before Engrish: Asian American Poetry’s Unruly Tongue 100 From Engrish to Yingelishi 108 From A to Z 115 Linguistic Miscegenation 125 CHAPTER 5 e(Racing) the Future: The Asian American I Ching 135 Changing the Book of Changes 142 Living in the Present-Indefinite 150 Losing One’s Place 158 Changing the Odds 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Some of the chapters in this dissertation have been published or are forthcoming elsewhere. I am grateful to Oxford University Press (publisher of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), Routledge (publisher of The Routledge Companion to Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies), the Pennsylvania State University Press (publisher of Comparative Literature Studies), and Johns Hopkins University Press (publisher of Modern Fiction Studies) for allowing me to reprint that material here. I also wish to thank Brian Kim Stefans for giving me permission to reprint portions of The Dreamlife of Letters. This dissertation was completed as a result of the generous support provided by the UCLA Carolyn See Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA Graduate Division, the UC President’s Society of Fellows, and the UCLA Friends of English. v TARA FICKLE EMPLOYMENT Assistant Professor, University of Oregon, Department of English, 2014 – EDUCATION M.A. English, 2010 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) B.A. English and East Asian Studies, 2006, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT PUBLICATIONS Refereed Journal Articles & Book Chapters • “English before Engrish: Asian American Poetry’s Unruly Tongue,” Journal of Comparative Literature Studies 51.1 (2014): 78–105. • “Narrative and Gaming.” Asian American Keywords, ed. Rachel Lee (New York: Routledge, 2013, in press). • “No-No Boy’s Dilemma: Game Theory and Japanese American Internment literature,” Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming, Fall 2014). • “American Rules, Chinese Faces: The Games of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (forthcoming, 2014). Book Reviews • Review of Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds by Stephen Sohn, Amerasia (forthcoming). • Review of Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities by Pawan Dhingra, Journal of Asian American Studies 12 (2009): 226–29. Other Publications • “Inside the Japanese American Internment: a Gamebook,” Text Adventures (2013). http://bit.ly/1aCUKK4. • “Text Adventure Games and Interactive History: Educational Questing,” Text Adventures Blog (2013). http://bit.ly/1dYmXtD. • “A History of the Los Angeles City Market: 1930-1950,” Gum Saan Journal 32 (2009): 14–39. • “Vanguards of Modernity: David Eng Considers the Queer Space of Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu,” UCLA Center for the Study of Women Newsletter (2008): 11–13. HONORS & AWARDS 2014 UCLA Ben & Alice Hirano Academic Prize for Most Outstanding Graduate Essay on Asian Pacific American history and/or experience vi UCLA Wei-lim Lee Memorial Prize for Most Outstanding Graduate Essay on Chinese Immigrants 2013 UC President’s Society of Fellows Award ($10,000; one of five recipients across all UCLA Humanities departments) UCLA Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship ($34,000) UCLA Friends of English Summer Research Support ($2,000) 2012 Carolyn See Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA ($20,000) 2009 UCLA Graduate Student Research Mentorship ($18,000) UCLA Graduate Student Summer Research Mentorship ($4,700) 2007 University Fellowship, UCLA ($17,000) SELECTED CONFERENCE & LECTURE ACTIVITY Presenter/Invited Speaker 2014 “How (and Why) to Build an Academic Website,” Invited Guest Lecturer, M/ELT & Center for the Digital Humanities, UCLA, May. “Reading Algorithmic Translations Roundtable,” Participant, Friends of English Conference, UCLA, June. 2012 “The Rise of Game Theory and Japanese American internment literature,” Americanist Research Colloquium, UCLA, November. “The Game of Ethnic Literature,” Modernist/Experimental Literature & Text Art Working Group, UCLA, March. 2008 “Cyborg Identities: Mixed-Race Asian Americans and Progressive Modernity in Science Fiction,” Association for Asian American Studies, Chicago, April 16–20. 2006 “Jack, Jill and Benjamin Koo: Racial Identity and Korean Adoptee Children’s Literature,” Association for Asian American Studies, Atlanta, March 22–26. Organizer 2010 “Afterlives: 21st Annual English Graduate Student Southland Conference,” UCLA, June 4. Conference Organizer. 2008 “Containment, Hybridity and Expression: Mixed Race Asian Americans and the Popular Imagination,” Association for Asian American Studies, Chicago, April 16–20. Panel Organizer. SERVICE 2013 Senior Moderator, Digital Humanities Graduate Lab, UCLA Invited Peer-Review Referee, MELUS 2012–Present Webmaster, Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC), UCLA 2010 Graduate Student Liaison, Department of English Web Committee, UCLA 2009 Graduate Student Mentor, UCLA vii INTRODUCTION “What Good For?” The Games of Asian American Literature “The difference between us and other pioneers, we did not come here for the gold streets. We came to play. And we’ll play again. Yes, John Chinaman means to enjoy himself all the while.” —Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey “To define play is at the same time and in the same moment to define reality and to define culture. As each term is a way to apprehend the two others, they are each elaborated, constructed through and on the basis of the two others.” —Jacques Ehrmann, “Homo Ludens Revisited” Equal parts memoir and instruction manual, Amy Chua’s infamous Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother (2011) opens with the observation that “a lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids.” The self-professed Tiger Mother accordingly offers up some pointers for those American parents looking to produce their own versions of the model minority stereotype; the “secret,” evidently, is all about prohibition. “Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do,” Chua informs us, providing a bullet-point list that includes the following examples: • Have a playdate • Be in a school play • Watch TV or play computer games • Choose their own extracurricular activities (3) Chua’s scorn for such “unproductive” activities as school plays and computer games is, for her, clearly inextricable from what it means to be an Asian parent as opposed to an American one: indeed, she complains throughout the book that her “Chinese” parenting model is constantly being undermined by her “American husband’s” belief “that childhood should be fun” (46). Her 1 linking of “Chineseness” to “anti-fun,” however, echoes a broader cultural assumption which is likely shared by Chua’s husband as well as herself: that Asian American success as a whole is predicated on a wholesale cultural