Now That’s Reality TV

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We were not invited back. We would never lock lips with the esteemed host. Our ability to mimic national fealty was only adequate, not prize-winning. We were crushed, but it wasn’t about the money. It was also not difficult for me to suspect that our inflated opinion of our ethnic attractiveness might be inaccurate—as Joe Jackson sings, they say that looks don’t count for much and so there goes your proof. Or maybe there was another reason; the thing about being a minority is that you never really know for sure.

My Chinese American family had lost fair and square to the real Americans, but I couldn’t help but wonder if the temporary emcee had had it in for us and selected that category purposely, not sharing our collective belief in our ready-for-prime-time qualities, our trust that times had changed, our faith in television itself.

But to think this way would mean that you had developed the kind of consciousness that would cause you to steer clear of subway tracks, suspecting that at any moment someone was going to mistake you for a communist and push you into the path of an oncoming train, no matter how pretty you were.

Leslie Bow is associate professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion and the forthcoming book Partly Colored. Reprinted from the Michigan Quarterly Review(Spring 2008); www.umich.edu/~mqr.

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