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Discussion
Coming into this study, I had a vague sense of what I might find. Progress has always been like riding a bike: while it moves straight forward, its wheels move in a cyclical fashion. I am reminded of this through my second coder. My second coder was my mother. She and her family emigrated to America from Hong Kong in 1968. With more years under her belt, she has witnessed the kinds of horrific, more obnoxiously yellow peril-esque representation that I have only read about. After we watched Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), another program in which the Asian/American character is just the white protagonist’s friend who appears for a handful of minutes in the whole program, my mother said to me, “I like the Lane character. She’s normal. Often Asian characters are portrayed as different, but she’s just a regular person. And a friend.” What I had seen as a living, breathing example of Yoon’s (2008) theories on Asian/American women and affect, the embodiment of “tending the ‘terrain of national culture,’ an affective terrain that they can never fully inhabit” (p. 301), my mother had seen as instead something incredibly positive, given what representation she has witnessed in the past.
Our juxtaposition in sentiments is something not uncommon within immigrant families. As comedian Hasan Minhaj, who has risen to fame through his comedy special and television show on Netflix, puts it:
My dad’s from that generation like a lot of immigrants where he feels like if you come to this country, you pay this thing like the American dream tax: like you’re going to endure some racism, and if it doesn’t cost you your life, well hey, you lucked out. . . . I was born here, so I actually had the audacity of equality. (as cited in Yam, 2018)
While we did not always agree, my mother’s impressions provided me with a more patient perspective. There has been progress made in Hollywood representations, and I tried to remember that. It just became more difficult to watch, the more and more and more programs I saw with underdeveloped or undermining Asian/American characters.
To see that most roles for Asian/American actors within the sample are guest ones, that almost half of the narrative roles for Asian/American characters are that of a tertiary protagonist, is not what stuck the most with me. To see that only a small fraction of the characters engaged in their own romantic or sexual relationships and that so many parts of the characters’ personalities are unknown is not what stuck the most with me.
What stuck with me the most is the numbers that came with these discoveries. 55.7% of the roles of Asian/American actors within the sample are guest ones. 46.4% of the roles for Asian/American characters are tertiary protagonists. Even if the character was billed as part of the main cast (18.6%), only 4.1% of the whole sample were allowed to be protagonists of their story. Only 16.5% of the characters coded had mentioned liking or loving someone. A third of the characters were unnamed. The fact that many characters’ personality traits were coded as “Unknown” was particularly disheartening. While these variables were not, statistically speaking, relevant, they were the variables I had wanted to be relevant the most. After all, within the word personality is the word person. The more we know about someone’s personality, the more we know about who they are. With a series of Unknowns strewn across my coding scheme, it was hard not to consider the characters within the random sample as plot devices more than people.
What personality markers managed to get coded provided provocative insights. For the sake of my analysis, and in light of the swing in public opinion of Asian/Americans from model minority to yellow peril in the era of Covid-19, I found myself focused most heavily on the “Duplicity” variable. What was most concerning is that five out of seven of the characters who were coded as immigrants (and therefore, unassimilated) were coded as duplicitous—heavily reminiscent of the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the early 1900s of the Yellow Peril coming to steal jobs from white Americans and infect them with horrible exotic drugs and diseases in a “uniform, robotic ‘invasion’ or ‘flood’” (Mayer, 2014, p. 22); the kind of rhetoric that led to the Page Act and the Anti-Chinese Immigration Act being passed into law (Marchetti, 1993).
In addition to the programs that work specifically to have Asian/American protagonists and casts, this study also shows how important it is to focus on the shows and films that don’t set out to specifically represent Asian/Americans. 23 out of 53 programs I drew did not even write in an Asian/American guest role. 25 out of 30 programs in the random sample (83.3%) consisted of representation so small that I could fast-forward through most of it—this is where we find all the underdeveloped and fleeting doctors, nurses, spa workers, and restaurant owners. Whether the casting directors and creative producers behind the programs realize it or not, their representations add up in the human psyche and collective cultural memory. While there will always be guest roles to be cast and tertiary protagonists needed in every story, as Pham and Ono (2008) articulate, it is critical that we be vigilant in how we go about telling these narratives.
With the numbers right in front of me, it is hard not to be reminded of Gerbner et al.’s (1986) cultivation theory. One of these programs by themselves may not seem very harmful. However, after watching thirty of these programs and seeing these depictions over and over again, I could not help but feel exhausted not only physically and mentally, but emotionally. As an Asian/American who does not want to be a villain or a nurse that appears in someone else’s story for five seconds, for me to see only that almost all the time while watching this content on Netflix was draining and disheartening. The fact that I chose my sample randomly allowed me to see what was beyond the algorithms that define Netflix, and allowed me to consider Netflix’s library as a whole, to see if representation has made as much progress as Netflix advertises, or if their algorithms were making it seem better than it actually was.
This study has been rather critical of Netflix, and there is potential to read this and take away the study as solely an aggressive callout of Netflix as a company and creative producer. While this study believes in accountability, I also want to state that it believes in what feminist scholars such as Loretta Ross (2019) define as “calling in”: “agreements between people who work together to consciously help each other expand their perspectives.” The aim of the study is for growth going forward rather than a shunning. Netflix has so much potential, and we’ve already seen its power through films like Always Be My Maybe, television shows like Never Have I Ever, and other originals. In fact, for those who are interested in those kinds of representations, it may seem like a great deal more progress has already been made, because the algorithm is designed to pick the best of the best and obscure the whole picture (Benjamin, 2019). The study’s purpose is to add to conversations surrounding representation going forward, especially as streaming competition intensifies with HBO Max, Peacock, and others.
What would Asian/American representation look like, in an ideal world? This is a question many people have asked me upon hearing what the topic for my study is. Would it have a “colorblind” approach, or would race take front and center? Would it be tragic or filled with happy endings? Are protagonists allowed to be morally gray? While this study has touched upon what doesn’t work, it is important to articulate best practices going forward. In the end, I would argue that the best kind of representation is a varied one. Not every Asian/American is a doctor or an immigrant, and while those are important stories to tell, they should not be the only ones told. From my personal experiences, I can say that some days, my race isn’t the most important thing about me; however, on some days, it very much is. My life doesn’t have its own “Very Special Episodes” dedicated towards any race issues I may have, but race influences many aspects, such as food dishes, relationships, and holidays, just to name a few. But my life as an Asian/American is rich and full of joys as well as obstacles, and to be able to see that in films such as Always Be My Maybe brings a sense of validation and euphoria that is indescribable.
Limitations
While this study breaks important ground in the existing literature, it is limited in scope because of its nature of being an undergraduate senior thesis conducted during Covid-19. Ideally, the sample size would be larger—Netflix’s library of original programming contains more than 300 programs, which undoubtedly has more representation to analyze. There would also be more coders to analyze a larger sample, and a more foolproof method than picking names and faces off IMDb could have been determined. Above all, though, the biggest limit to this study was time. With more time there would be more time to code more shows and more time to determine what variables were most critical to the study, which ones weren’t, and which new variables should be created to account for newfound patterns in the data.