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” or “get any grade less than an A”—by insisting that Tiger Mother was a “satirical memoir. It’s intentionally self-incriminating.… [It’s] supposed to be funny, partly self-parody.” Yet Chua’s reframing of the issue 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