struggle over representative legitimacy, for disputing one’s claim as a representative also implies recognition that one is in the game and must be taken seriously. The indeterminacy of this situation is compounded for those outside the game who lack the means of recognition and are therefore incapable of distinguishing among various claims to representative status.34
Here we have a very different understanding of racialization as itself a game of representation, rather than as the product of in-game representation that video game scholars have tended to see it as.35 Chiang brings Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into the competitive games we play in everyday life for the prize of social and cultural capital in conversation with Louis Althusser’s famous example of interpellation to emphasize how, as Chiang puts it, “the subject is not simply an effect of ideology but (re)produces ideology by playing the game.”36 “Asian American,” in short, functions as both an immaterial form of capital—one inextricable from “real” economic capital—and a form of ideological (re)production, a means of putting race into play.
In other words, if Asian American representation is itself a game, then the ludic here becomes a way of representing the problematics of representation in the first place: that is, by giving it expression in the form of a game. Here, as in so many other places, the term “game” is one we tend to read over or through, as a throwaway metaphor meant merely to connote a sense of conflict, competition, and strategy. Yet, as we will see throughout this book, such a perception limits our ability to recognize the critical potential, as well as the disciplinary perils, of gaming discourse. Indeed, the very fact that we so effortlessly gloss over a phrase like the “game of representation” is itself, like our ability to effortlessly deploy the word “game,” a peculiar and important phenomenon. After all, as anyone who has tried to apply traditional interpretative frameworks to decode a term like the “race card” quickly discovers, it does not, in fact, function very well at all as a metaphor, in the sense that we are stymied when posing queries like “Is race like a joker or a deuce?” or “What does the rest of the deck look like?” And yet, such questions and hence contradictions rarely arise: not because we are “lazy” readers or speakers, but because these ludic idioms make a kind of inherent sense to us. We respond to a phrase like the “race card” as we do to anything we call a game, immediately grasping—or at least thinking we are grasping—the intended meaning. It seems like a “logical” connection.
And it is: but only because games are wholly guided by their self-determined, self-enclosed, absolute logic. Hence their sense cannot be adequately expressed through the language of other logical systems: this is why the “race card” looks like nonsense by the general standards of figurative language use.37 And it is also part of what makes ludic logic so powerful as a conceptual technology. It allows us to make sense out of what looks like nonsense, but also to render meaningless what might normally be considered highly deterministic aspects of a situation: for example, the difference between a chess piece made of gold and one made of wood, or a recent Chinese immigrant and a sansei (third-generation Japanese American). For it is these same “rules of irrelevance,” to use Erving Goffman’s phrase, which make racial representation, Asian American or otherwise, not simply a contest or a feud but a game.38 The game of strategic essentialism, of which Asian American representation is one particular version, works by flattening particular differences between individuals and reifying other, arguably equally arbitrary, similarities in order to ideationally construct the sense of coherence crucial for making meaningful political moves, for getting into the game.39 To speak of the game of representation, then, is not merely to observe the similar ways in which political representation and games work: it is to recognize that games provide the logic that allows a fiction like “Asian American” to function as a politically meaningful category in the first place.
Reading the Magic Circle
The perception of Asian Americans as inherently “unplayful” has effectively migrated from cultural stereotype to a methodological injunction in Asian Americanist scholarship, where, with few exceptions, sociological and humanistic accounts of Asian American racial formation have focused exclusively on the realms of labor and law. This association with labor is certainly not without basis. But we need to better understand what work is being constructed against and through—particularly as the perceived antithesis of play and leisure. In doing so, we discover how variable and complex are the representational meanings of both work and play. This complexity becomes visible once we augment the political and economic stakes of the game of representation to include its literary stakes—to shift, that is, from the particular kinds of fictions that gaming technologies license to the way they teach us how to read those fictions. For if material games license immersive fictions for their players, representing something as a game—“gamifying” it—can also imbue the representation with certain essential features that games are understood to possess.
Among these is the ludic integrity and sanctity known as the “magic circle,” a term Johan Huizinga described as a membrane that encloses in-game activities and distinguishes them from out-of-game ones, as “forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.”40 In this book, I use the term “magic circle” to refer both to the physically isolated, dedicated locations of many games, and to the metaphysical frame enclosing them: the invisible contextual scaffolding that allows in-game actions, as sociologist Gregory Bateson observed, to mean something other than what they would signify in daily reality. This conversion is most often made visible as shifts in language—in blackjack, to say “hit me” is not to invite a physical assault—or in legality—the actions performed on the on-screen football field or within games like Grand Theft Auto are the same that, if conducted in real life, would lead to a charge of battery or worse. The magic circle of the playground or the video game is thus intended to function as what Bateson calls a metacommunicative message, tacitly informing the players (and spectator) that what is occurring is play rather than “real” life.41
The message “this is play,” whether explicitly stated or instead implicitly communicated through, for example, a puppy’s playful nip as opposed to a bite, is not only descriptive but also didactic. It provides the receiver with instructions for how to understand the events occurring inside the magic circle—just as a picture frame, in Bateson’s example, “tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of thinking in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wallpaper outside of the frame.”42 That it seems strange to speak of “interpreting” wallpaper is in part the point: the frame, in other words, differentiates picture from wallpaper by placing the former in the realm of interpretation and the latter in the instrumentalized realm of what we might call “social fact.” This phrase comes from Colleen Lye’s critique of Asian American literary studies and its tendency toward reading practices that have elsewhere been described as “historical instrumentalism.” That is, as Jinqi Ling and Sau-ling Wong (who pioneered the concept of the “Asian American Homo Ludens”) have cogently noted, we too often instrumentalize Asian American texts in terms of necessity and extravagance (a dyad Wong draws from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior), limiting the bulk of critical discussion to only “the useful parts” of such scenes, particularly in terms of their perceived authenticity and historical “realism.”43 In short, we reduce such texts to the status of wallpaper rather than picture, subordinating the work of interpretation to that of fact-checking.
The public outcry that followed the 2011 publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother suggests that the perception of Asian American writers as always already outside the magic circle has profoundly shaped the way these texts are read by Americans as a whole. For it is precisely the inclination to “believe in” Asian American texts—to regard them as “real,” nonfiction stories—that has led reviewers to praise an explicitly fictional work like Woman Warrior for its “authenticity” and “honesty”—or to reprimand one like Tiger Mother for its “misleading” portrayal of Asian parenting and its putative “endorsement” of child abuse. Chua responded to critics’ subsequent excoriation of these “Chinese” parenting practices—which included threatening to burn her daughters’ stuffed animals and never allowing them to “attend a sleepover”
