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 have long treated Asian American gambling as a minor phenomenon or exaggerated stereotype, gambling was a significant source of 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,
