‘All-American Girl’: Is It Good or Bad Television? : Asian Americans Put on Trial

Like many others in the diverse Asian American viewing audience, I anxiously awaited the debut of “All-American Girl” on ABC starring Margaret Cho, starved as we are for substantive representation on prime-time network television. And as a student of America’s most potent art form--the situation comedy--I wondered how well the Cho show would fare among competitive programs. Moreover, I hoped for a commercially successful program that did not compromise Cho’s formidable talent as an Asian American performer.

Despite its sometimes feeble humor, flaccid gags and prodigious underutilization of talent--B. D. Wong and the other co-stars probably could carry a program by themselves--I found “All-American Girl” to be no more, no less banal than most other sitcoms. But what rankles most is the underlying assumption that people of Asian descent living in the United States are somehow less than “All-American.” The very title of the program begs the question.

In a book I wrote about the relationship between postwar American society and the TV sitcom, “Nervous Laughter” (1989), I discuss the proliferation of shows beginning in the late 1960s that featured African Americans. Until “Julia” appeared in 1968, African Americans had been virtually excluded from TV as featured performers. Today, African Americans are actually overrepresented on TV, according to a recent report issued by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington.

Beyond their respective superficial differences, 1970s-vintage programs such as “Julia,” “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times,” “That’s My Mama,” “The Jeffersons,” “What’s Happening!!” and “Diff’rent Strokes” attempted to normalize and “regulate” a restive African American population after nearly two decades of civil rights struggle. Sitcoms such as these helped admit African Americans into mainstream society on a “probationary” basis. It might be argued that Asian Americans--currently the fastest-growing immigrant population--are undergoing a process akin to that of African Americans more than 20 years ago.

Although Asian Americans have become an increasingly foreign-born population due to the 1965 revision of national immigration law that once discriminated against Asians, it should be kept in mind that Asians have had a productive presence in the United States over 150 years. Like immigrants from Europe, people of Asian descent have contributed to the vast social wealth of the United States for most of the Republic’s existence. Yet as each of the episodes of “All-American Girl” has dramatized, Asian Americans are still very much on “probationary” status. This time it is the fictional Kim family who bears responsibility for “normalizing” a diverse group that is beginning to assert its presence in institutions that were once the exclusive preserve of European Americans.

The controversy surrounding the week of interviews with Judge Lance Ito granted to reporter Tritia Toyota of KCBS news notwithstanding, the most noteworthy aspect of the broadcasts was that for the first time the viewing public was permitted to observe a bright, articulate, witty, compassionate and wryly humorous Asian American individual speak for himself without others scripting the words, as in “All-American Girl.”

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Comedian Henry Cho does a great job hosting “Friday Night” (NBC) during fringe hours (1:30 a.m.) while Johnny Yune presides over a Korean-language program on KSCI, but it was the television appearance of Ito that ironically demonstrated the virtual absence of Asian Americans capable of speaking for themselves on perhaps the most important of communications media.

Although the program represents a significant step toward democratic representation on TV, it is not enough for “All-American Girl” to feature a predominantly Asian American cast. For Asian Americans to escape this insidious form of social containment, they must gain access to positions where substantive decisions are made: producing, writing, directing. But for this to occur, the television industry must reform exclusionist practices that prevent minorities from occupying such positions.

For example, the “Hollywood Writers’ Report” (1993) commissioned by the Writers Guild, West,states that “non-minority writers still account for over 95% of employment in television.” There are few professions so racially segregated as TV and film writing. The situation is simply unacceptable in a multiracial, democratic society.

Cho can be applauded for her welcome efforts in making the absurdities of Asian American life the basis of her art. (Yes, why is it that Asian Americans--regardless of Asian ethnicity--always celebrate family occasions at Chinese restaurants?) Still, it is the art of the probationer, an adaptive strategy derived from continually being pressed to justify one’s existence in a society where Asian Americans are viewed as a perpetually alien presence. It is this undercurrent of anti-Asian racial intolerance that put the parents of Lance Ito in a relocation camp for most of the war years.

The temporary media-induced celebrity of Ito should not blind us to the fact that even his presence on the bench has little effect on the probationary status of Asian Americans so long as exclusionist practices reign in key institutions such as those selfsame media industries.