as a “genre problem” utterly failed to satisfy critics’ skepticism, which, as Chua herself observed, boiled down to the question “When we read your book, how do we know what to believe and what not to believe?”44
The magic circle Bateson and Huizinga described as the result of a straightforward, almost automatic boundary-drawing exercise is, as Chua’s fruitless requests for playful consideration suggest, itself a representational privilege of the non-racialized. This is, once again, a ludic site where what it means to represent and be read as a representative of “Asian America” models the way such circumscribed ways of reading afflict minority expression as a whole.45 For if magic circles, in Huizinga’s account, are “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart,” then what it means to be Asian American, in classic works like Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and John Okada’s No-No Boy, is to struggle to map the difference between these two worlds, to, as Kingston put it, “figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.”46 The magic circle has traditionally been regarded as a liberating, pleasurable demonstration of the extent to which fictional narratives can feel real despite the fact—or more properly, because of the fact—that they are fabricated or imaginary. But there is an Other side to this story. For Kingston’s narrator and so many others, being Asian American is inextricable from the maddening incapacity to tell fact from fiction: to distinguish, as she puts it, between “real” and “made-up” stories, to be able to “tell a joke from real life.”47 Life becomes a game one plays at playing: in the words of Chinese American author Jade Snow Wong, “a constant puzzle” that “no one ever troubled to explain,” a guessing game with all the breath-holding tension of Hasbro’s Operation where “you figure out what you got hit for and don’t do it again if you figured correctly.”48 One is not provided with the rules beforehand but forced, as one often is in contemporary video games, to deduce the rules through the very act of playing. The connection is made even more explicit in recent works like Gene Yang and Thien Pham’s graphic novel Level Up, where the arcade classic Pac-Man is used to represent the quintessential Asian American experience of being “a little yellow man running through a maze,” chased by ghosts (fig. I.1).49
Figure I.1. Ghosts chasing the Asian American protagonist of Level Up (A) in imitation of the Japanese classic arcade game Pac-Man (NAMCO, 1980) (B). From Level Up © 2011 by Gene Luen Yang. Illustrations © 2011 by Thien Pham. Reprinted by permission of First Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership. All rights reserved.
Non-Playing Characters
While playful figures like the confidence man, the trickster, or the “signifying monkey” have greatly shaped 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
