Now That’s Reality TV

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It goes without saying that the secret to Family Feud—and its beauty—is that you have to reach for the lowest common denominator. The highest scores accrue to the most common answers in a survey of a mythical 100 people. If you fail to come up with an answer that the majority of middle Americans might come up with, your opponents get the chance to steal the board. Forget eccentricities, regionalisms, or human uniqueness; winning the game depends upon answers everyone else would say.

The game started promisingly with Nancy, our most competitive and most spunky, acting as team captain. She faced off against a teenager wearing a lowest-common-denominator kind of outfit—his shirt ordered us to FALL INTO THE GAP! I suspected he might be an albino; blond eyelashes seem so, so wrong.

At the moment the stand-in emcee announced our first category—Patriotic Songs—we realized we were sunk. But my sister rammed the fake button so hard at this announcement that she almost toppled the makeshift lectern marked “Property of the Burlingame Marriott.” “America the Beautiful!” she cried.

“Good answer! Good answer!” We supported her enthusiastically, thinking that it was spirit and good looks that counted most. Her competitiveness won us the right to guess America’s top nationalist melodies first, and we did well going down the line: “The Star-Spangled Banner!” “My Country ’Tis of Thee!” “Yankee Doodle!” we shouted.  We wanted to be on TV. We wanted to be the Hatfields or the McCoys, it didn’t matter which.

Then the emcee reached my father. “Dixie!” he hollered. I don’t think you could find another Chinese man in the continental United States who conceives of this song as patriotic, but my father is from an anomalous Chinese American enclave in the Deep South and old habits die hard. I guess “Dixie” would be patriotic if you lived in the Confederacy in, say, the 19th century. Still, we gamely screamed “GOOD ANSWER! GOOD ANSWER!” as if to make up for his deficiency. And then, “HOOray! HOOray!”

The eccentricity cost us. In desperation, my sisters and I began bouncing up and down, clapping loudly for added measure, our cotton dresses flapping around us in the frigid air of the hotel room. Be spunky; nobody hates spunk—that’s what we’re all about. We still believed that it was not accuracy—how best you could approximate the norm and parrot it back—but personality, charm, and good old-fashioned can-do spirit that ultimately mattered. We thought that post-1970s America was ready for the spectacle of racial competition. So what if Detroit was losing ground to Japanese automakers? So what if Chinese kids were destroying the curve in math classes around the nation? So what if the country was still smarting from having failed to heed the wisdom—never get involved in a land war in Asia—later offered by Vizzini in The Princess Bride? We were wearing sundresses, dammit. We were Chinese, yes, but we were cute.

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