Asian Solidarity and Cultural Conundrums

Watching "Hawaiian Five-O" has turned into a minefield. Not an episode will go by when someone won't comment the next day that all Grace Park does is stand there and look sexy, or all Daniel Dae Kim does is fill in exposition while Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Caan get all the good lines. Why is that the two Asian leads always get shunted off into the background, and when they are featured, like Park was a few weeks ago, why must there always be Caucasian male guest stars like Kevin Sorbo there, seemingly as insurance? I've seen constant online castigation of "Hawaii Five-O" for racial issues, such as failing to cast the character of Kono Kalakaua with a native Hawaiian, as the original show did, for sidelining its minority cast in too many episodes, and for playing up the exoticism of the Hawaiian setting and reinforcing stereotypes.

I can't disagree with any of these criticisms. On the other hand, we have a television show currently airing on network television that features two Asian-American characters who do not speak with funny accents, who appear in every single episode, and who largely avoid most of the usual media clichés about Asians – being foreign, inscrutable, geeky, emasculated men, submissive women, etc . Twenty years ago that would have been unthinkable, and I still find it surprising. I watch "Hawaii Five-O" and "Nikita" every week and I have friends of Indian descent who watch "Outsourced," even though we can spot all the flaws. It's Asian solidarity, the same driving force that prompted my parents to tune in for Michael Chang's tennis matches in the 90s, despite not knowing anything about tennis, and switching from the Lakers to the Houston Rockets after Yao Ming's debut.

I vividly remember tuning in to every single episode of "All American Girl," the 1994 ABC sitcom starring Margaret Cho that featured a full Asian-American cast. The family was supposed to be Korean and most of the actors weren't, but that didn't matter. I could appreciate the effort it must have taken to convince the studios to assemble that cast. It wasn't a very good show and didn't last a full season, cancelled after being retooled to remove nearly all the Asian cast members aside from Margaret Cho. The same thing happened to "Vanishing Son," the 1995 syndicated action series starring Russell Wong that used to follow "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" before "Xena" took its place. Asian leads were such a novelty back then, I couldn't help gawking. And I tuned in week after week, knowing full well that both shows were doomed, because I wanted to support the programs and see more people like me on television who actually behaved like people I knew in real life.

Fifteen years later, minority representation has become an awfully touchy subject in the online circles that I frequent. I know it's important for watchdog groups not to rest on their laurels and keep pushing for more roles and better roles for minority actors. On the other hand, I wish more of them would take a minute to acknowledge how far we've come and to remember that changing the culture always takes time. Yes, Grace Park's Kono is underdeveloped, but the fact that she is the female lead on a popular network action show gives her the kind of visibility that Asian actors in the past could only dream of, and it creates the potential for something better. As a friend of mine recently commented about "Outsourced," there's so much wrong with it, but when was the last time you saw so many Indian characters interacting on television together?

There need to be not only good roles for actors of Asian descent on television, but bad roles too. That way we can have standards to compare against and more easily point out ways for representation to be improved. Kono is clearly inferior to Maggie Q's Nikita and Grace Park's prior role as Boomer on "Battlestar Galactica," but imagine if those latter roles didn't exist. Also, we need to get to the point where Asian roles are no longer exceptional just for being Asian. The more there are, and the more accustomed the audience becomes to seeing them, the quicker that happens. Then television writers will have to work harder to distinguish their Asian characters from the ones who came before. I'm hoping at some point people will be able to think of Kono as Kono, instead of the Asian girl from "Hawaii Five-O." Even if that doesn't happen, I still appreciate her being there for us to debate about.

I keep watching, because I know we need to have more characters like Kono – in order to have the ones in the future who aren't.