Of Kierkegaard and Matel
Michael Hahn's "Play It Again Asian Ken"
Once, on a walk to the bar, me and Michael talked about Soren Kierkegaard. The Dane had been on Michael’s mind. He’d also been thinking about Esther Yi’s novel, Y/N, how her protagonist (obsessed with K-Pop stars) suffered from Kierkegaardian despair. In the book review he would publish on this, Michael explained that despair is a kind of “living death,” the promise of “religious transcendence” coupled with “dread.”[1] But, unlike Kierkegaard, Yi’s characters suffer, not from religion or philosophy. Their “critical doubt” stems from “systemic forces beyond [their] control.”
In his recent essay, “Play It Again Asian Ken,” Michael writes his own story of despair and systemic forces.[2] It’s an existential map charting the psychological problem of race itself, and offering, I’ll argue, something of a solution. I’m fascinated by the shape this solution takes and want to place it in a larger conversation about race and identity.
This is an act of criticism, so what I conclude here shouldn’t necessarily be what Michael meant in writing it. I wholly expect him to disagree with some of my conclusions. I just hope this essay—what is, essentially, a literary chat with Michael— leads to where they have in the past: a wet bar with cheap wells.
The essay begins with a stranger calling Michael Asian Ken. This sends him back to think about other experiences with racism. To help, he develops a term: avatar, what he calls the “manifestation of an idea.” Avatars work to translate “what is inscrutable” “into the devil you know.” He uses it to show how verbal memes like “Asian Ken” articulate the terms of what an Asian man can be.
But Michael also wants us to pay attention to what is lost in translation, or rather what is gained. For when the unknown, the racial other, is translated, it is as a devil, one that is familiar. How does this work? In a sensitive and vulnerable series of reflections, Michael deconstructs avatars, helping us toward an answer.
He notices two affects Avatars have. First, they work from the outside-in. Asian men in the essay are constrained by their terms—the heartbreaking scene where Michael’s father shakes his head and says, “he thinks I am just another short Asian man.” But, maybe more insidiously, they work from the inside out. Michael recalls a school assignment for which he pasted a picture of his own head on a promo poster for the movie Fight Club. He describes it as a “way of believing, on behalf of my white classmates, the plausibility of my face in an American blockbuster.”
Bitterly, this image, what Michael calls an “assemblage of parts,” fails to work where Asian Ken succeeds. Michael says, “he would not resemble the paragon I desired to be…the Tyler Durden of my Korean American subconscious was unmistakably white.” So, unlike the direct racism his father experienced, Michael’s pain is subtler and psychological. It's in the realization, not of a suppressed self, but an incoherent one, estranged all the way down.
This is how Michael expands Kierkegaard’s idea of despair. He also deepens our sense of the form that despair can take. To receive Asian Ken is to reject the self. To project Asianness on Brad Pitt’s body is to fail. The result is an existential crisis in an identitarian key. This is what causes his younger self to wonder if identity, in white terms, is attainable at all, “whether there would be another path…undeterred by American narratives of exclusion? Would another nurture be possible?” If American identity ends up being white identity, perhaps his true identity was in a “Korean nature” all along?
To test this, he flies to Korea to meet his uncle for the first time. And it's in the cab ride from his hotel to meet his uncle at a restaurant that Michael begins to suspect that this identitarian gambit too is destined to fail. He realizes that to other Koreans, those with whom he allegedly shares the same “nature,” he is either “just another American summering in Seol,” or “a bastard son with a blunted tongue.” While Michael is busy trying to “belong in the land of his ancestors,” the cab driver picks him out as a gyope, “a child of the diaspora.”
Here, Michael becomes doubly alienated, “less Korean American than an Americanized Korean, a subaltern version of the white avatar.” Therefore, it's even by positive appeals to identity that the idea of race continues to fall apart: bids to claim a “Korean nature” also, ironically, turn him into Asian Ken. This is how, as a sort of refugee of racial identity, Michael arrives at the restaurant to meet his uncle.
But the essay concludes with some relief. Struggling with language in a room resembling, importantly, his grandmother’s house, Michael and his uncle become acquainted. As they help each other with pork, they connect in the silence between their broken sentences, “seeing [Michael’s] late mother, his [uncle’s] sister, in each other’s face.” Slowly, Michael realizes his uncle is joyful, a man whose child had recently died (Michael learns) seeing his dead sister’s son.
After dinner they Karaoke, that for which, significantly, Michael needed “no translation.” When they get there, his uncle goes to the bar to get beer, and Michael reflects, beginning to see past the terms of racial avatars—whether Asian Ken or “Korean Nature.” His uncle returns and looks at him with pride, hands him the microphone, and they belt out “Hotel California.”
What the essay is about is bound up in this ending. The constructs of race that seem to dog Michael’s life are answered, not with new constructs—a new language or identity—but with concrete experiences. White, American, Asian, man are beautifully countered by beer, acid reflux, and family ties. What is it about the face of Michael’s late mother, glimpsed in his uncle’s smile, that transcends avatars?
It's interesting, Michael’s remix of Kierkegaardian despair, introduces a very un-Kierkegaardian solution. Famously, the Dane overcame his avatars (the abstractions of Lutheran legalism and Hegelian reason) with his notion of the leap, the exercise of radical choice. He thought leaps were unavoidable if one wanted to avoid despair. After all, the choice to act for this or that reason is, necessarily, unsupported by reason in the final reckoning. We must start somewhere, and the way we do is by faith.
But this strikes me as something like Michael pasting his head on Brad Pitt’s body. The hope we sense at the end of his essay is rendered in hard facts: the shape of a face or the smell of pork work like steppingstones, not chasms over which to leap. Such is the opposite of Esther Yi’s “systematic forces.” In fact, by the end, Michael possess nothing but reasons to identify in something which isn’t race.
What is particularly Korean or Asian or white about his dinner with his uncle? Why does the place of resolution resemble his grandmother’s living room? It may be too much to say that Michael’s solution is anti-identitarian. But it is at least identity-agnostic. If anything, his solution is familial, not racial, a matter of real, practical ties. It is the fact of his relation to his uncle, the face of his mother, that makes the question about something else. The joy of Karaoke requires no translation.
This all reminds me of Karen and Barabara Fields’ collection of essays, Racecraft. In it, they argue that the modern conversion of “race” from “a named group of people” to “a statistically defined population” is itself racist.[3] Physiological characteristics—colors, eye shapes—ultimately fail to identify anything.
Walter Benn Michaels in his essay “Believing in Unicorns” argues, for instance, that “the determining factor in susceptibility to sickle cell anemia, long thought of as a ‘black disease,’ is whether you have ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do.”[4] This is just one example of how race falters as a way of speaking, requiring leaps instead of reason. Indeed, since the “relevant genetic information about a person is individual and familial,” race ends up being useless, as far as medical facts are concerned.[5]
This is also true of cultural taxonomies. As Thomas Chatterton Williams argues in Self Portrait in Black and White, race loses traction even in questions of cultural identity. He wonders,
What even is black culture? There are the tastes, traditions, values, achievements, aversions, beliefs, superstitions… We may feel close to these and cherish and preserve them, even feel personally defined by them. Yet, within those many different confines, human life still remains far too surprising to end up with sweeping statements that can hold up in the face of scrutiny.[6]
As surprising as Karaoke in the suburbs of Seol.
If these theorists are right, I think they agree with Michael. Any use of race to ground identity draws on the avatars it hopes to avoid; it results in Kierkegaardian despair. This is what the cab driver taking Michael to the restaurant knew. It doesn’t matter what race you are. Belonging is something real. Only your uncle looks like your mother.
What I take to be Michael’s ultimate insight, the discovery of belonging outside of race, ends up shifting the way we talk about identity and revealing deep pathologies in American culture. This emerges when Michael tries (and fails) to embrace his “Korean nature”—whatever that could be. At the Karaoke bar, Michael wonders whether he can possess a non-American identity, “a life where I could tread the soil my ancestors walked.” He concludes that he can’t, he’d “still be subject to a different Avatar,” one that would erase “the person I saw in the mirror.”
This represents a moment of disarticulation, the abandonment of race for something like family ties and experience, and in so disarticulating, other constructs, like national and historical identity, fall away too. But why should we take this as any kind of solution? What is it about ideal constructs—racial but also historical—that in rejecting them, Michael resists avatars? The key, I think, is in realizing that concepts like “nation” and “race” proport to be natural—just like Ken’s plastic limbs. Our “races,” like our “nations,” are factory made, not natural.
In tracing the ideologies of race in America, the historian David Hackett Fischer says that the aristocracy of Virginia suffered from “younger son syndrome.”[7] These men came to America because they had not inherited their father’s estates. They lacked serfs and so replaced them with slaves, those for whom race was invented as a kind of rationalization. This New World society, without a cooperating lower class inherited as tenants on the estate, needed, therefore, an ideology to justify the buying and selling of souls. Adolph Reed points this out. He says, “over the course of the seventeenth century… race and racism took shape,” was invented.[8] This happened because of a “contest between free and slave labor systems,” not because any real traits separated Africans from Europeans.[9] Thus, slaves were so by concept, an avatar fit for a younger son economy.
This motivated race relations in California a few centuries later (remember what Michael and his uncle sang?) As Chinese immigrated East, their labor was used for the worst jobs in railroad construction and mining. The undesirability of this work is what kept them employed, tolerated by their white counterparts. Race emerged as a solution to ensure their social stagnancy, to keep them working the worst jobs for the lowest pay. Not as lucrative as slavery, but close.
Thus, Legislation like The Foreign Miner’s tax and Chief Justice Murray’s decision in People vs. Hall guaranteed the class weakness of Chinese. But it was a weakness achieved by the pseudo-science of race. In his decision, Murray gave a rationale for why Chinese testimony was inadmissible in court. It was because “‘ethnology,’ having recently reached ‘such a high point of perfection,’” provided a basis for understanding that the “Asiatic” race were “the same human species” as Indians, those whose testimony was also inadmissible.[10] Here we see the same technology invented by the Virginians. Human “species,” a category of being, of nature, was what separated Americans from Asians.
Ethnology, the sanctifier of race as a concept, also scientizes an allegedly real, natural difference between the two. From an economic perspective, this is predictable, exactly how race ends up being used in America. And this is true even in progressive uses of race by neoliberal corporations, like—I don’t know? —Matel™. As Harry Chang observed, the “rason d’etre of racial categories lies in the ironclad social validity which is possible if relations are objectified as the intrinsic quality of ‘racial features’...”[of which the original Asian Ken is a perfect example.[12] Introduced in 2011, Japan Ken, part of Matel’s Dolls of The World line, expressed the goals of its We Are Barbie campaign. Matel explains that “Barbie has changed over the years to be more inclusive and mirror the world around us.”[13] A mirror supposed to be accurate, an objective representation. Chang’s notion of “intrinsic quality” should be ringing in our ears.
Racial categories, “mirrored” by Matel, thus transcend their old use to a neoliberal plane. No longer used to construct a subjugated working or slave class, they now operate to open a wider consumer base. And this is the explicit reason Matel produced the Barbie movie. As its chief brand officer explains, “we’ve opened up our business to a broader fan base now. Millennials are now thinking about Barbie and Ken in a new way and I’m really excited to see the long-term benefit that this broader audience brings us.”[14]
This helps us understand the use of racial categories in the film. Again, Adolph Reed explains: by treating race as a “transhistorical social category” to mark difference, critiques of race in terms of race, differs from racism only in “rhetorical flourish, not content.”[15] Therefore, even as The Barbie Movie ironizes racial representation, it enforces the pseudo reality of race. This helps us understand the existential bind Michael dramatizes in his essay. It is not only the overtly racist Avatars like Asian Ken that alienate him, it is the attempt to transcend race, by race, in his school project, and in the notion of a “Korean nature.” Therefore, what Michael uncovers is something deeper and darker than mere insensitivity, its glossed pinkness notwithstanding. What he discovers is neoliberal racism, a construct capable of box office success to the tune of 1.4 billion. Perhaps, instead of buying a ticket, we should have given our uncle’s a ring and invited them out for noodles and pork.
[1] https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/y-n/
[2] https://www.southeastreview.org/single-post/42-2-michael-hahn
[3] Fields, Karen E. (Karen Elise), 1945-. Racecraft : the Soul of Inequality in American Life. London ; New York: Verso, 2012.
[4] Michaels, Walter Benn, and Adolph L. Reed. No Politics but Class Politics. Edited by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora. London: ERIS, 2023. 131.
[5] Ibid
[6] Williams, Thomas Chatterton. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. 1st ed. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2019. 149.
[7] Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. 1. issued as paperback. America, a Cultural History 1. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991. 214.
[8] Michaels and Reed 27.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Nelson Limerick 261.
[12]Paul Liem and Eric Montague, eds., “Toward a Marxist Theory of Racism: Two Essays by Harry Chang,” Review of Radical Political Economics 17, no. 3 (1985): 43.
[13] https://shop.mattel.com/pages/barbie-diversity
[14] https://www.raconteur.net/marketing-sales/mattel-brand-chief-barbie-movie-impact
[15] Michaels and Reed 31.