The Race Card. Tara Fickle
recreation and revenue for Chinese American communities and, further, took center stage in exclusion debates. Exclusionists depicted Chinese Americans as “inveterate gamblers” and dissolute cheaters whose “cheap labor” constituted not only unfair competition for other immigrant laborers but an affront to the “fair play” on which U.S. democracy was ostensibly founded. This chapter analyzes the congressional and literary record of these debates to show how ludo-Orientalist rhetoric crucially elevated economic arguments to the transcendent realm of ethics and ideals. By aligning (white) American values with ludic ideals and Asian immigrants with the degradation of these ideals, exclusionist rhetoric weaponized Asian Americans’ association with gambling, a process made possible in part through the “misreading” of satirical works like Bret Harte’s “The Heathen Chinee.” This first chapter also sets the stage for the rest of the book by showing how Orientalist fictions about Asiatic threats are inextricable from national fictions about the United States as an idealized gamespace.
Chapter 6, “Game Over? Internet Addiction, Gold Farming, and the Race Card in a Post-Racial Age,” shows how the recent gold farming controversy revived “cheap play” as a tool for condemning Chinese “cheap labor,” powerfully informing how internet gaming addiction is itself culturally and spatially represented in popular and psychiatric discourse. Twenty-first-century American anxieties about ludic immersion, compounded by the nation’s own destabilized position in the global economy, have led American game developers as well as medical professionals to pathologize gold farming as exclusionists had Chinese gambling: symptomatic of an “Asian” psychosis that fails to respect normative boundaries between play and work, virtual and real world.
Chapters 2 and 5, in turn, examine the mid-century ludic discourses and twenty-first-century traces of World War II and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor through the game-theoretical logic underlying Japanese American internment narratives and the atomic history underlying the Japanese Pokémon franchise. Chapter 2, “Just Deserts: A Game Theory of the Japanese American Internment,” argues that the lay understanding of games as fair and unbiased allowed World War II military officials to invoke game theory to resolve the thorny contradictions of imprisoning American citizens on racial grounds. A branch of applied mathematics that would eventually form the backbone of 1950s U.S. foreign policy as a “scientific” means of predicting enemy behavior, game theory has often been considered a defining discourse of Cold War America. Juxtaposing internment-era novels and military correspondence alongside game theory textbooks and popular media accounts, this chapter reveals, however, that a decade before it was applied to the “red menace,” game theory amplified and then neutralized the threat posed by the “inscrutable intentions” of one hundred thousand Japanese Americans by reframing their fervent claims of U.S. loyalty as little more than a bluff.
I read the literary works in chapter 2 alongside the military documents because, first, they illustrate the symmetry of the problem that Asian racial difference created for both the U.S. government and Japanese Americans even before the internment and the loyalty questionnaire: that of a zero-sum conception of Asian and American identity. And second, because they show how that problem, although it seemed to be one of military necessity or of conscience, was from a formal perspective about issues of representing or accounting authentically for the interiority of Asian individuals, and in particular the role of race as chance (how to “read” or represent it). In other words, game theory was a response not just to a military threat but to a literary problem with which Asian American writers (and readers of Asian American fiction) have also struggled.
Chapter 5, “Mobile Frontiers: Pokémon after Pearl Harbor,” reveals the unacknowledged legacy of Japanese racial ideologies, imperialist ambitions, and wartime losses that lurk beneath the game screen. Whereas U.S. military officials during World War II rationalized internment on the basis of an imagined transnationality linking Japanese Americans to imperial Japan, Japanese video game developers like Nintendo have developed sophisticated marketing and aesthetic strategies to erase signs of any Japanese “cultural odor” from their products. The illusion of ahistorical universality crucially buttressed the fantasy of Pokémon GO as a truly “free” game, masking the invasive and dehumanizing data mining structures that make it enormously profitable for its developers. At the same time, Pokémon and other “cute” character franchises have become instrumental ambassadors in soft power efforts to increase the value of Japan’s “global domestic cool” in the international (and especially Western) eye through a series of national branding campaigns.
Finally, Chapters 3 and 4 function as the bridge connecting the two parts of the book.56 At issue in both chapters are how Asian Americans and East Asia, respectively, served as ludic models closely associated with games of chance. Chapter 3, “Against the Odds: From Model Minority to Model Majority,” uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as risk-taking opportunities. Gambling served an ideational narrative function, which is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions: to gamble is not just to wager money on an uncertain outcome, but to tell a story to yourself about what could happen (“What would I do if I won the lottery?”), or to explain why something did happen (“It was bad luck,” or conversely, “The game is fixed!”). The model minority myth, from that perspective, was essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.
In model minority discourse, Asian Americans were held up as heroic gamblers in order to discipline other minorities as well as working-class whites. In the foundational ludic theories examined in chapter 4—namely Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games—Orientalist notions of the mystical East and rational West profoundly structured the way Huizinga conceptualized the relation between “play” and “ordinary life,” and Caillois the taxonomic division of games into the binary of competition (agon) and chance (alea). Chapters 3 and 4 thus both, individually, revise our understanding of the foundational narratives that have become the bedrock of Asian American studies and game studies, respectively. Chapter 3 leverages the theoretical potential of ludo-Orientalism to upend the reigning assumption that the model minority myth involved the banishment of Asian associations with gambling in favor of hard work; and chapter 4, to upend similarly entrenched assumptions about game theories (and games) as inherently disinterested, universal intellectual inquiries having nothing at all to do with race and culture.
Reorienting our perception of signal moments in modern U.S. race relations, The Race Card develops a new set of critical terms for understanding the literature as well as the legislation that emerged from these agonistic struggles. The book offers a pointedly new approach to both Asian American racialization and the “gamified” discourses of daily life, going beyond the explicitly visual and textual stereotypes through which people have traditionally challenged the idea of gameplay as racially free as well as exposed the “techno-Orientalist” intersection between Asian and machine.
In attending to race as it