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Introduction
“Where is he?!” The title of this study comes from a quote spoken by none other than myself. It’s a Monday afternoon, right in the thick of quarantine. I’m towards the end of coding my sample, and my brain is truly exhausted. I keep scanning, scanning, scanning the screen, when the words slip out of my mouth in pure frustration: “WHERE IS HE?!”
My hands motion at the screen. My eyes, manic, turn over to my brother, who is about to microwave his lunch. He gives an awkward grin, no clue as to who I am talking about. “Antarctica?” he replies, trying to get me to smile. I’m deep in my research though, unable to fully appreciate the joke, and wave furiously again at the screen. “IMDb told me there were two Asian guys in this movie.” The movie is The Perfect Date (2019), one of the many romantic comedies Noah Centineo has starred in for Netflix. “I found one. Where is the other?!”
Five minutes later, I finally find him, my elusive mystery man: he appears for 10 seconds in the beginning half of the movie to look up before silently and disinterestedly checking out Noah Centineo’s fly new clothes. We never hear him speak once, and we never see him again. We never even find out if he has a name.
A now humorous anecdote shows a broader picture of this study. After all, rhetoric, as defined by Mao & Young (2008), is not just words, but a “knowledge-making process . . . situated in every specific occasion of language use . . . [and] always socially and politically constructed” (p. 4). As a person of Asian American descent, and a scholar of Asian American history and media studies, I am desperately searching for the characters that the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) claims are there. With Covid-19 exacerbating historical and contemporary anti-Asian sentiments and harassment, humane and prominent representation of Asian and Asian American people is increasingly important to shift away from a narrative of dehumanization. But in the end, it’s a game of racially charged Where’s Waldo: the Asian and Asian American characters are near impossible to find, and my eyes are hurting from how hard I have to search.
There is a special type of disappointment that comes with this because media and Hollywood, just like language at large, “provides the possibility to realize the rhetorical construction of identity and write oneself literally into the pages of history and culture” (p. 6). Netflix, a new Hollywood innovation, is rising in prominence due to recent stay at home orders and is ripe with opportunity for fresh, diverse programs that could allow for Asian Americans to write themselves into America’s pages, if they are given the platform. In this study, the primary methodology of content analysis provides definitive numbers to inform ongoing conversations surrounding representation of Asian Americans in Hollywood; the secondary methodology of autoethnography adds my own experiences as an Asian American, watching people like myself being represented on screen.
There is good reason to be hopeful about Netflix: some great films like Always Be My Maybe (2019), To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), Over the Moon (2020) and television shows such as Never Have I Ever (2020) and The Babysitter’s Club (2020) have been produced. Beyond these exceptions though, highlighted by Netflix’s algorithms, the same problems persist. Many roles for Asians and Asian Americans are fleeting and one-dimensional, more breadcrumbs than fully developed characters, while white actors are given numerous bread loaves. More often than not, they are the supplements to a white protagonist’s overall arc (or on other occasions, obstacles complicating it). We are still caught up in what Ono and Pham (2009) define as media racial hegemony: “a particular way of thinking about race exists within and across media . . . [that] guides and regulates beliefs and actions of those within society” (p. 191). As a consumer and a researcher, I am finding myself still asking: WHERE IS HE?!