The Race Card. Tara Fickle
the ways we read, teach, and evaluate American literature, particularly the genres of Native American and African American literature, this has definitively not been the case for Asian American literature. In that sense, examining games in Asian American literature allows us not simply to contest false assumptions about the “non-playing characters” of the Asian American canon but to reevaluate what it means for ethnic bodies and texts to be seen as “playful” in the first place. That is, literary critics like Henry Louis Gates Jr. have compellingly illustrated how play in African American texts can function as a means of escaping one’s liminality—or more properly, exploiting the blind spots it creates—by “gaming” the system. Insofar as these subversive games have themselves subsequently been read as representative of an African American literary tradition, however, they risk being once again reduced to the status of wallpaper. Indeed, we might understand the comparatively instrumentalist ways in which games in Anglophone literature have historically been read as pure allegories—I am thinking here of the famous chess scene in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women, or the poker game in William Faulkner’s short story “Was”—as part of a similarly reductive racializing logic, one that both writers clearly grasped in their strategic use of parlor games to represent the constrained agency created by race, class, and gender dynamics.
In short, literature is a crucial site to examine ludo-racial dynamics. Stuart Moulthrop recently observed of contemporary game studies that “it has become unfashionable to speak of antipathy between games and stories, after some defining schoolyard moments in which early ludologists faced down their literary harassers, winning a grudgingly respectful truce.”50 Although it is now acceptable to speak of games as stories, one is struck by the unaffected status of games in stories. Literary representations of games have never engendered analogous territorial disputes, with both parties evidently perceiving them as the rightful and obvious province of literary studies.51 Yet the games found in stories, even more than the stories found in games, constitute a kind of semiautonomous borderland between ludology and narratology, resembling “real” games in their dynamics but literature in their execution. This formal problematic of being both-yet-neither is arguably part of why games feature so prominently in Asian American literature as expressions of racial liminality.
Games in Asian American literature are where the “invisibles” of race and culture become especially apprehensible to both character and reader. They serve a narrative function analogous to the ¶ function button in word processing software (currently called “Show Invisibles” in Apple Pages or “Show Editing Marks” in Microsoft Word), rendering visible the white spaces that we generally perceive simply as the absence between words, but which in fact lend structure and hence sense toachaoticundifferentiatedseriesofletters. Yet this in-text “activation” of race by way of games is, as we saw in Pokémon GO, a profoundly disorienting experience, making it difficult to read the forest for the trees. Indeed, Asian American writers consistently draw our attention to games as sites where racial, cultural, linguistic, and economic differences are not erased but magnified: and which, not coincidentally, tend to crop up in these texts precisely at the moments where the characters’ interpretive faculties are most compromised.
The use of the playground as the stage for racialized trauma—the dramatic revelation of being “Asian Americanized”—found in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter, one of the earliest and most influential Asian American works of the mid-twentieth century, is a convention found throughout Asian American bildungsromans. In the book, Jade Snow’s earliest inklings of being “different” are a direct result of her aberrant relationship to normative notions of American child’s play. Relegated to the sidelines at an after-school game of softball—“Jade Snow did not do well in such games because Mama always discouraged physically active games as unbecoming for girls”—Jade Snow is struck by a stray ball.52 Her teacher, a young Caucasian American woman, rushes to hug the injured girl, who is dumbstruck by the unfamiliar physical intimacy, for her own parents “never embraced her impulsively when she required consolation.” The “wonderful comfort” of the teacher’s arms, however, soon turns to “embarrassment” and then to “panic”; fleeing the ball field, Jade Snow returns home weighted with the newfound burden of consciousness that “‘foreign’ American ways were not only generally and vaguely different from their Chinese ways, but that they were specifically different, and the specific differences would involve a choice of action.”53
This zero-sum conception of Asian and “foreign” American practices—and of the effect they have on the way one plays—is further dramatized in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, when one of the Chinese immigrant women scoffs at her American-born niece’s claim to know how to play mahjong from having been taught by Jewish friends:
“Entirely different kind of playing,” [Lindo] said in her English explanation voice. “Jewish mah jong, they watch only for their own tile, play only with their own eyes.”
Then she switched to Chinese: “Chinese mah jong, you must play using your head, very tricky. You must watch what everybody else throws away and keep that in your head as well. And if nobody plays well, then the game becomes like Jewish mah jong. Why play? There’s no strategy.”54
When Lindo’s own daughter, Waverly, is learning to play chess and confounds her brother with constant questioning of the rules—“But why do [pawns] go crossways to take other men? Why aren’t there any women and children?”—the ludic logic of Asian American assimilation is made unmistakable:
My mother patted the flour off her hands. “Let me see book,” she said quietly. She scanned the pages quickly, not reading the foreign English symbols, seeming to search deliberately for nothing in particular.
“This American rules,” she concluded at last. “Every time people come out from foreign country, must know rules. You not know, judge say, too bad, go back. They not telling you why so you can use their way go forward. They say, don’t know why, you find out yourself. But they knowing all the time. Better you take it, find out why yourself.” She tossed her head back with a satisfied smile.55
It is precisely through scenes like these, where Asian American writers’ representations of games constitute a doubling of the game of Asian American representation, that we can begin to discern the “American rules” that keep the race card in play.
Operating System
The Race Card’s organization formally mirrors the critical analysis developed in its chapters, emphasizing how ludo-Orientalism functions as a nation-building discourse which defines the United States and the “West” in relation to abstract game ideals of fairness and freedom; as a racializing discourse that makes Asian difference meaningful by characterizing it in gaming terms, and that Asian American artists, activists, and game designers also play with and at times subvert; and as a contingent, protean discourse that produces different outcomes for different ethnic, temporal, spatial, and generic configurations.
The book’s structure is guided by the formally playful, ludic logic of a six-sided die. The opposing faces of modern dice, as a rule, add up to seven: that is, 1 and 6 are arranged on opposite sides, as are 2 and 5, and 3 and 4. Thus, on the single-step progression of numerical sequence (1, 2, 3, etc.) we have a secondary ordered coherence created by a common sum (1+6 = 7, 2+5 = 7, 3+4 = 7).
Such is the oppositional yet complementary coherence implicitly at play in this book: chapter 1 examines the intersection of racialized play and labor in the context of nineteenth-century Chinese American gold miners; chapter 6, in the context of twenty-first-century gold farmers, players of World of Warcraft who make a living acquiring in-game virtual currency and selling it for real money to (mostly Western) players looking to accelerate the tedious “grind” of the leveling-up process.
Chapter 1, “Evening the Odds through Asian Exclusion,” uncovers the influential role of gambling in the passage of late nineteenth-century immigration laws barring Asian laborers. Although historians