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Not only did Disney turn to Asia for a global animated feature in 1998, but it chose a traditional Chinese tale of a woman who fought like a man to break stereotypes. Later, in a television broad-cast, Olympic medalist Michelle Kwan interpreted the story on ice.
Somehow, after all the spectacle, one could not still believe that American media had made a great leap forward in the understanding and incorporation of Asian Americans as subjects, creators and participants. But history, in fact, may guide that interpretation.
Early American cinema used stereotypes of Asians as foreign/exotic, servile, wise but enigmatic and often untrustworthy. Few actors of Asian origin made it in Hollywood— Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong often played mysterious Oriental villains. Many Asian/Asian American roles were played by Anglos in series like Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr Moto (Peter Lorre), while Katharine Hepburn (!) became Mei Ling, a “tall” Chinese peasant, in Dragon Seed (1944). Furthermore, there has long been confusion of place and identity, between Asian American and imported Asian films and readings, which become lumped together.
American media have been slow in reflecting the burgeoning Asian American population since 1965. Breakthroughs in documentary and independent film led to Joy Luck Club (1993); however, it was still marked as an “Asian story.” Images of urban gangs and drug connections have also overshadowed Hollywood films, especially as they interpret the gender roles of Asian American men as both strong enemies and weak, nerdish citizens.
One of the most vibrant areas of Asian American media is its independent voices, especially documentary. These voices of opposition, advocacy and cultural intimacy tackle issues marginal to the mainstream media, from the murder of a Chinese American in Who Killed Vincent Chin (1987) to a light-hearted detective story Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing (1981).
Television inherited cultural stereotypes, while giving Asian Americans even fewer positions of independence from which to challenge them. Servants were long the predominant male role in the old western (Bonanza, 1959–73, NBC) or new West primetime soap operas (Falcon Crest). Jack Soo as a policeman on Barney Miller (1975–82, ABC) opened wider visions of Asian citizenry. Females have been more scarce—The Courtship of Eddies’ Father offered a subservient Japanese woman, while the 1980s sitcom Night Court introduced a Vietnamese woman married to an African American court clerk over both families objections. Margaret Cho’s Korean family sitcom, AllAmerican Girl (1994–5) was a short-lived breakthrough. Connie Chung’s brief career as television news anchor also made Asian Americans visible in non-narrative settings.
But the most famous Asian Americans on TV have been Bruce Lee in the 1970s Green Hornet and George Takei (Mr Solo) in Star Trek. It may also be telling that satellite television, videos and paid retransmission make it possible for recent immigrants to watch Korean, Chinese and other shows rather than relying on American television. This experience may not suffice, however, for emergent American generations, nor does it reach beyond the language community.
One striking footnote points to the emergence of Asian Americans in a different way: advertising. Both multicultural commercials and faces/families promoting a wide range of products show Asian Americans gaining face and agency against stereotypes not yet overcome in other media.
Industry:Culture
Now a staple in ESPN’s X-Games, skateboarding took off as a fad in the 1960s. As portrayed in the movie Back to the Future (1985), it started with children tinkering with go-carts and roller skates, yet quickly migrated from playgrounds to downtown as skateboarders sought the best surfaces for their fast-developing techniques and tricks. The sport’s novelty its athletes’ penchant for practicing in places where “suits” carried out their business and the inheritance of some surfing etiquette gave skateboarding an antiauthoritarian aspect. This lessened with growing commercialization and the establishment of custom parks designed to keep the skateboarders away from “public” space. New urethane wheels and fiberglass for the boards, introduced in the 1970s, increased costs, but also made boards more able to ride over bumpy terrains like uneven sidewalks. But the main thrills remain in the skating parks, where the boarders have developed tricks ranging from aerials and grinders to rock and rolls.
Industry:Culture
Offbeat cartoonist Matt Groening created this animated half-hour program television series that gained widespread popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the premier offering of the then upstart FOX television network. While loathed by some parents for its portrayal of a family headed by a boorish, unintelligent father named Homer and plagued by an irreverent, rambunctious boy named Bart, the show was enormously popular with young people (not surprisingly) and critics (more surprisingly). Just below the surface the show offered a social critique built on a myriad of references to politics and popular culture. In its first two seasons, the show sparked a merchandising craze, largely through the sale of T-shirts portraying Bart uttering one of several catchphrases.
Industry:Culture
Off-road vehicles adapted to unpaved excursions emerged in California in the 1970s; their impact on wilderness areas was soon decried nationwide. In the 1990s, however, nature and freedom have been repackaged in massive, luxurious cars far distant from the functional dune buggies or jeeps of the past. Sports utility vehicles, which are trucks, have been attacked for gas guzzling, dangerous designs in collisions and sheer bulk that strains urban roadways and the environment. Yet they connote status and security in a hot market dominated by American automakers building ever-more elaborate vehicles that will never ford a stream or climb a mountain, despite their ads. In 2000, Ford acknowledged that SUVs cause serious safety and environmental problems.
Industry:Culture
Often called “the common cold of mental health problems”—10 percent of all Americans suffer from it, with one out of six experiencing a serious episode. Its causes are unclear.
Its treatment (pharmacological and psychotherapeutic) costs the nation $43 billion a year, and its numbers are (inexplicably but surely) on the increase. Rates of clinical depression have increased in each succeeding generation after 1915. While it remains prevalent among the elderly the age of diagnosis is gradually dropping. With the drug Prozac— arguably the panacea of the twentieth century—appearing on pediatricians’ (as well as veterinarians’) prescription pads amid a conspicuous arsenal of psychiatric pharmacopoeia, depression is still not being defeated.
So what exactly is it? An imbalance of neurotransmitters—the chemical messengers of the brain—is one answer. Hence the rebalancing by means of anti-depressant drugs, including SSRIs, MAO inhibitors and tricyclics, all but replacing electroconvulsive therapy. But why the imbalance? The answer to this is as comprehensive as whatever life may bring: family context, loss, poor self-esteem, womanhood, adolescence, drug abuse and possibly genetics.
While the ontology of depression belongs to medical discourse, depression exists within a discursive matrix of social relationships, themselves constrained by a variety of socialized and often tacit norms; for example: what behavior may be interpreted as depressed, how to talk and behave around a depressed person and the process of diagnosis. An understanding of depression cannot be divorced from the social and discursive processes in which it is embedded.
Industry:Culture
Often considered the forgotten war in American history, the Korean War arose amidst fears of the spread of communism and the loss of China. It was called a “police action,” undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations, without a formal declaration of war.
As such it was a prototype of the kinds of wars later engaged in by the United States and/or NATO against Iraq and Yugoslavia, though with considerably less success.
At the end of the Second World War, Korea had been divided across the middle at the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union controlling the North, and the United States controlling the South. The conflict began on June 24, 1950, when North Korea surprised Americans by invading the South. Although the Truman administration had recognized Syngman Rhee’s nationalist regime in the South, it had only made public its intention to defend the Philippines and Japan, thereby seeming to indicate that South Korea would be left to fend for itself. But when the invasion occurred, Truman quickly responded by sending the Seventh Fleet to the region and ordering General Douglas MacArthur to prepare his forces for combat. Truman sought and received international support from the western European states (many of whom were hoping for American funding to aid rebuilding their economies), the British Commonwealth and both the Philippines and Thailand. With the Soviet Union boycotting the United Nations in support of China, the world body passed a resolution committing troops to repel the North Koreans.
In September, after the fall of Seoul, General MacArthur began his counteroffensive, landing troops at Inchon and cutting off communist forces in South Korea. The American strategy was an unqualified success and within a month the North Korean army was all but destroyed, leaving UN forces in possession of the entire region south of the 38th parallel.
Now convinced he was infallible, MacArthur decided to reunite Korea by continuing north-wards. Truman and the State Department hesitated to support this, knowing that the Chinese had promised to intervene if the Americans moved beyond the 38th parallel, but McArthur assured them that the Chinese would not be able to cross the Yalu River. The wave of 200,000 Chinese soldiers quickly proved him wrong and drove his UN forces back into South Korea.
At this point, the Soviets proposed a truce to a receptive Truman, but MacArthur wanted to escalate the conflict to blockade Chinese ports and bomb military installations across the Yalu River. Determined to force the issue, MacArthur was publicly insubordinate to his commander-in-chief, threatening to destroy China if it did not concede defeat. For this he was relieved of command on April 12, 1951, returning to the United States to a hero’s welcome of ticker-tape parades. Truman’s action incensed his foes and further contributed to the anti-communist hysteria, with senators like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy claiming that the State Department was in the hands of communists.
In 1952 an armistice was signed, but the fighting continued. While negotiations bogged down over the issue of prisoner exchange and the territorial integrity of North Korea, a new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, pushed for the war to be won, or at least for peace with honor. The new vice-president, Nixon, advocated the use of the nuclear option, and nuclear brinkmanship became part of American strategy to keep the Soviet Union out of the conflict and to force Koreans to the bargaining table on American terms. Not until July 1953 was a final settlement reached, ending with the lines that had been drawn prior to the beginning of the conflict.
The impact of the war on American society and culture was considerable. The increase in tensions between the two major superpowers contributed to the rise of McCarthyism, exacerbating fears of communism already heightened by the “loss” of China and the Soviet Union’s development of an atomic bomb. In addition, the fact that North Korea had been under the control of the Soviet Union prior to its invasion of South Korea, and that it was China who came to its defense once MacArthur moved north of the 38th parallel, cemented the idea of an indivisible communist bloc. This image of communism as a single political entity would stymie American foreign policy long after the tensions between the Soviet Union and communist China, which were becoming manifest during the Korean conflict itself, were evident, with particularly tragic consequences in Vietnam.
The failure in Korea also led to new foreign policy initiatives. Tainted by his inability to bring about a victory in Korea, leading John F. Kennedy to paint him as someone who was tied to the “containment” strategy Eisenhower began actively to encourage nations to combat communism around the world. The “Eisenhower doctrine” offering support to countries in the Middle East was one part of this approach, as was his employment of the CIA in Iran and Guatemala. Moreover, the attempt to dislodge Castro in Cuba, which would come to be known as the Bay of Pigs, was begun under Eisenhower, though it was left to Kennedy to engineer the debacle.
The stalemate in Korea, however, limited American commitment to such cavalier initiatives (even during the Kennedy administration’s celebration of counter-insurgency) and increased the nation’s reliance on what John Foster called a “new-look” policy contained in the threat of nuclear weapons and “massive retaliation.” The war in Korea had accelerated work on the hydrogen bomb, and its completion facilitated a shift from costly conventional forces to the relatively cheap nuclear stockpile.
The war also had a considerable impact on the domestic front. Over 5½ million Americans served in the war (for the first time in integrated units). Many returned after experiencing North Korean POW camps, and 103,284 came back wounded. The deaths of nearly 37,000 Americans were also devastating for all families losing relations. Yet, unlike in the case of the Vietnam War in the next decade, the war did not create vocal, widespread opposition. In part this was because of the anticommunist hysteria brought on by Truman’s Cold War policies and by Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign. In addition, the economy, fuelled by the war expenditures, was booming. What Eisenhower would call the “military-industrial complex” was established during the Korean War. The need for armaments and military installations acted in a way similar to deficit spending in the Keynesian model. With GIs and defense-industry workers securing good wages and having plenty to spend them on, such as new housing development and automobiles, the economy could expand without the problem of inflation.
As “a forgotten war,” the Korean conflict received little of the kind of attention from movies and television that other wars received. No major Korean War monument was built comparable to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. Pork Chop Hill (1959) was one of the rare movies made soon after the conflict, while The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which began with the conflict, was not shown for many years owing to its association with assassination. M*A*S*H, the popular movie (1970) and television series (CBS, 1972–83), which focused on a doctors’ unit during the war, was shaped in part by a sensibility derived from the Vietnam War, though the sense of futility involved in a war marked by stalemate and diplomatic stumbling was also a constant feature of the Korean conflict.
Industry:Culture
Often portrayed in mass media as subservient female helpers to the male physician, American nurses fought in the last half of the twentieth century to be recognized as skilled care-givers whose roles include assessment and diagnosis of health situations as well as the care-giving process itself, which may establish intimate and crucial bonds with patients. In the early twenty-first century nursing remains predominantly female (roughly 95 percent) and white (90 percent), although male and minority participation are growing.
Demands for recognition have been accompanied by increasing professionalization as hospital two-year apprentice-based programs have been replaced generally by two- and four-year programs in colleges and universities. The nursepractitioner, who may operate in basic healthcare settings where physicians are not readily available, represents another strengthening of nurses’ roles since the 1960s. Meanwhile, medical service workers have taken over roles not related to healthcare expertise (office management, maintenance services, etc.).
The 2.6 million registered nurses in the US have a strong lobbying and professional association in the American Nurses Association, which has sought to situate nurses within ongoing healthcare reforms and public consciousness. Recognition of nurses in military settings like Vietnam has also increased. Nonetheless, while medical shows and movies in the 1990s developed images of stronger nurse characters, with more gender and racial diversity, these shows often make nursing roles secondary, caught in romantic as well as medical subplots.
Industry:Culture
Often taken as the demise of American identity local and regional, franchises also represent an economic negotiation of individual aspirations and cultural expectations.
Behind McDonald’s, Holiday Inn motel rooms, many gas stations, camera stores, florists and weight-loss centers there is both a tested plan and an individual entrepreneur striving for success while meeting the franchiser’s (and customers’) demands for uniformity.
Franchises offer dreams of independence and wealth, although they also may lock owners and families into work as self-exploitative and struggling momand-pop stores.
Franchising involves a “parent” company which negotiates an agreement with an individual owner to market products and services, as well as reputation. This entails both an initial fee (and establishment costs) and an ongoing relationship through royalties.
Franchising also entails negotiation not only of appropriate buyers, but also of sites, localizations and business relations, which may include more direct co-ownership.
Early franchise arrangements in place by the 1920s included automobile dealerships, soft-drink bottlers and service stations, which accounted for 75 percent of franchise income in the 1990s. These include franchise empires of chains within chains. In the postwar period, new opportunities in fast food and motels, responding to new lives built around cars, highways and suburbia, spurred renewed interest in franchises. Franchises soon turned to cities, smaller towns and increasing diversity within shopping centers and malls, while Century 21, founded in 1972, has revolutionized real-estate sales through interconnected offices nationwide.
Franchise sales in 1999 reached 11,000 billion, and franchises employed 8 million people—as many as the automobile industry Despite the commitments under which owners operate, however, their failure rate is significantly lower than the failure rate for independent businesses (8 percent for franchises in their first five years as opposed to 77 percent for independent businesses).
Among the most common franchises encountered by Americans are many fast-food services, convenience stores, home-care stores, motels, real estate, clothing, athletic wear, computers and travel. Franchises cater to varying class demands, although issues of racial opportunity in ownership as well as service have erupted as public issues, most notably with the food chain Denny’s. This model has also allowed for both the extension of American forms and products abroad and imitation by other chains in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Industry:Culture
Often visible in the parks around major American cities, chess was nicely captured in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993). In 1972, at the height of the Cold War, chess caught the attention of the American public with the contest between American Bobby Fischer and Soviet Boris Spassky. The American prevailed, but, hating the limelight, Fischer became a recluse and refused to compete for the title again. With no American grandmasters of note to replace him, Americans had to satisfy themselves by watching different Russian champions compete, and trying to determine which Russian was “good”—a man with dissident leanings like Gary Kasparov, and which Russian was “bad”—a man who seemed to represent the Soviet system, for example Anatoly Karpov.
A flourish of interest in the sport occurred with the brief re-emergence of Fischer, but otherwise the end of the Cold War has diminished attention paid to chess and relegated it to its former image as an elite, intellectual and, in high school, nerdy pastime. The emergence of computer chess has popularized the game in new venues.
Industry:Culture
Oil spills can occur on land or in rivers and lakes, but the most serious spills tend to involve tankers that travel the open seas. Spills represent a serious environmental risk as they threaten a wide range of marine species that can die when they or the food they need become coated with oil. The largest oil spill in US history occurred when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989, dumping about 260,000 barrels of oil, which eventually affected about 1,100 miles of Alaskan coastline.
In response to the spill, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which enabled the federal government to issue new rules to prevent spills (such as ensuring that tanker captains and crew are fully qualified and not operating under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and limiting where tankers can operate) and which established the liability and financial responsibilities of any entity involved in an oil spill. Advances continue to be made in the technology to clean up oil spills, including the use of bacteria that can break down the oil into less harmful substances.
Industry:Culture
