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This chapter aims to address the question, “How does an audience watch/read an imported cultural drama series?” It develops a comprehensive, relatively formal, conceptual framework for the analysis of pan-Asian, transnational pop culture consumption. It specifically explores the circulation and reception of media products in locations where an ethnic-Chinese population predominates, namely the People Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The possible emergence of a pan-East Asian “community of consumers” and its implication is also investigated. Before exploring the reception of imported drama series, one significant peculiarity of their circulation in Pop Culture China should be noted. It then deals with the question of dubbing and its effect on the audience. Regional marketing of pop cultures is now configured into their production cost. The predominantly ethnic-Chinese locations constitute a subset within East Asia and can be conceptually designated as Pop Culture China, with histories of established networks of production and consumption of Chinese language based genres of pop culture.

Chapter 15 looks at how raciality is made visible not only through the Asian American bodies of characters in four graphic narratives—Yang’s American Born Chinese, Kim’s Good as Lily, Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro, and Tak Toyoshima’s Secret Asian Man—but also in practices, media, and material culture, specifically Asian-manufactured and Asian-themed items, that appear in the narratives. She argues that these narratives create new visual conventions and meanings of Asianness, moving them away from a rootedness in tradition and single-nation status to practices related to popular culture and transnationalism, forging identities for Asian Americans that are no longer based on mutually incompatible Asian and American frameworks.

According to Laura Anh Williams’s “Queering Manga: Eating Queerly in 12 Days,” Asian Americanness is usually associated with heterosexuality while queerness is associated with whiteness. June Kim’s OEL manga 12 Days, however, queers manga tradition to valorize the same-sex love at the novel’s core. Its disorienting temporalities and often confusing visual style re-locate it within queer time and place.

In chapter 8, Tim Gruenewald uses Yang’s earlier graphic narratives, such as American Born Chinese and Level Up, to explore the conflict among cultural inheritance, imagined racial categories, and identity formation. Using the casting controversy surrounding The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan’s filmic adaption of the TV series Avatar: The Last Air Bender, Gruenewald explains that because Yang and other Avatar fans regarded the cultures they viewed in the graphic TV series as Asian and Inuit, their protests against Shyamalan’s casting of non-Asian actors suggests an uncomfortable one-to-one-correspondence between culture and race. However, Gruenewald’s careful readings of Yang’s graphic narrative oeuvre argue that Yang’s creative work is more sophisticated than the simplifications of the (political) fan protest movement. Bloodline or race is hardly inherent in Yang’s comics work, but rather taught or adopted, and thus Gruenewald explores the thorny relationship between culture and race to reveal Yang’s own ambivalence about their tight correspondence.

Ralph Rodriguez’s essay on Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings advocates for readings that are mindful of the systems, conventions, and expectations that affect our (Western) reading of texts. Rodriguez’s “surface reading” cautions against immediately seeking and finding race and/or racism in Asian American literature or using the snap judgments about race that Tomine’s characters consistently reference. Rodriguez proposes that we de-naturalize this now-naturalized reading impulse.

Chapter 2 argues that Kim’s graphic narratives are a complex and ambivalent reaction to the emergence of postethnicity, the popular belief that racial and ethnic identities have become much less important to how Americans describe the nation. Kim’s writing and art—by reimagining the literary trope of rite of passage and maturation—are ironic and subtle depictions of how race and ethnicity still matter.

While Gene Luen Yang is well known for his Printz Award-winning graphic narrative American Born Chinese, Lan Dong examines his lesser-known work in “The Model Minority between Medical School and Nintendo: Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham’s Level Up.” She first calls attention to the nuances and impact of the model minority myth on Asian Americans and then demonstrates how Level Up re-visions Asian American representation through interactive racialization in video games. Level Up’s discursive and visual elements provide multiple opportunities for protagonist Dennis Ouyang to conform to, play with, or challenge the rules of his status as a model minority, haunted by his deceased father’s wish that his son become a doctor. The novel also demands that readers confront their discomfort with racial stereotypes when these types appear in varied recognizable forms (the model minority, for example). The reader’s and Dennis’s position of mediating among troubling ethnic identities presents a gamification of social and cultural life.

Chapter 6 provides a careful examination of the cultural influences behind some common Albanian criminal activities. Should one blame the Albanian customary Kanun laws for the increased involvement of Albanians in trafficking women for sexual exploitation? Basically, how do Albanian criminals select illicit markets? Do cultural and emotional factors play a role in the selection of criminal activities? This chapter elaborates on the nature of the criminal activities in which Albanian offenders are commonly engaged. It reflects on the neutralization techniques used by Albanian organized crime figures to justify their crimes. It also examines links between culture and gender, human trafficking and subordination of women, illicit trade in firearms and gun culture, and extortion and hospitality.

While Asian American graphic artists often grapple with the politics of identity, as iterated throughout this collection, Acosta argues that OEL manga, an amalgamation of Asian American and Japanese popular print cultures that might provide a ready and authentic Japaneseness for Japanese American artists, is a visual style and not a politics. After thoroughly explaining manga’s conventions (reading practices, visual cues, page layout, and the driving influence of a strong fan base), and after mapping the rocky history of manga and OEL manga in the United States, Acosta’s argument revisits and revises how race and manga work, or how manga’s iteration of an “authentic Japaneseness” interrupts the American notion of an “ethnic” work created by an “ethnic” author. Rather, she concludes, OEL manga contributes to the changing parameters of American comics not by introducing a Japanese perspective and thus limning an artist’s so-called inherited Japanese sensibility, but by adhering to accepted manga conventions and referencing Asian media and pop culture material objects that find their way into OEL manga.

Berndt, in her “Skim as Girl: Reading a Japanese North American Graphic Novel through Manga Lenses,” interprets the reception of Tamaki and Tamaki’s Skim within a Japanese manga audience once it was translated into Japanese. But the translated version suffers from aesthetic losses and misunderstandings, argues Berndt. She carefully investigates how manga conventions and Japanese readers’ expectations, including standard responses to a subject who is deemed “other,” stymied the book’s success abroad as the audience struggled to decipher Tamaki and Tamaki’s graphic reading cues uniting and separating Skim from her peers, that heavily influence interpretation.

Cathy Schlund-Vials examines how two issues of Spiderman recount and thus re-imagine (visually) the consequences of an American policy of Vietnamization instigated by President Nixon. In Nixon’s proclamations, made thirteen years into American involvement in the war, the United States was to cede control of military operations to the South Vietnamese government. However, this stance of withdrawal and non-interventionism unraveled in the eventual revelation of the devastating, clandestine bombings of Cambodia and the “secret war” in Laos. In chapter 9, The Amazing Spider-Man 108 (“Vengeance from Vietnam!”) and The Amazing Spider-Man 109 (“Enter … Dr. Strange!”) illustrate what she calls a “multivalent American policy catastrophe” that conjures up typical or accepted narratives of the soldiers’ return (especially the Vietnam veteran), Southeast Asian refugees, and the Asiatic character. Schlund-Vials devastates the expected trajectory of these concepts, arguing how both of these Spiderman issues highlight, instead, domestic (atypical, unexpected) anxieties about Southeast Asians on US soil, US foreign policy abroad, and the outcome of the war itself.

In chapter 10, Catherine Ceniza Choy offers a close reading of Jenifer K Wofford’s 2008 graphic novel and kiosk poster project Flor de Manila y San Francisco in the historical and contemporary context of international health worker migration and, specifically, the immigration of Filipino nurses to the United States. Flor de Manila y San Francisco imagines six years (1973–78) in the life of the fictional Flor Villanueva, a young woman who has emigrated from Manila to San Francisco. Wofford’s graphic novel was also exhibited as public art, as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s “Art on Market Street” in 2008. Choy argues that a significant contribution of Wofford’s Flor de Manila y San Francisco is its ability to humanize the Filipino immigrant nurse and by extension health worker migrants for a general public. Although such migrants are featured actors of globalization in public policy studies and scholarly books and articles, they are often barely visible to the general public except as stereotypes and sound bites.

In Chapter 12, Acosta contributes her own hand-drawn, manga-esque version of a scene from Yang’s American Born Chinese while Jaqueline Berndt discusses how it depicts differences between the two genres, especially manga’s ability to highlight characters’ emotions and their private interpersonal relations, through technical and artistic means. “Manga-fying American Born Chinese” demonstrates and argues how these artistic approaches invite affective participation over critical observation, the latter more typical of Western comics scholarship.

Kuilan Liu’s essay finds Yang’s image of the Monkey King in American Born Chinese offensive, given the rich history both in Chinese literature and media, of the revered Monkey King. Her essay examines the meanings appended to Yang’s decidedly ugly and dishonorable Monkey King, interpreted through Chinese reviews and her undergraduate students’ gut reactions to the text’s images. What does not get translated across nations becomes Liu’s focal point.

In Chapter 6, Stacilee Ford finds that while the “cartoonification of history” assists students in grasping the past by cutting through dense historical narratives and eliminating jargon, Fleming’s filmic and graphic biography of her great-grandfather, Long Tack Sam, a famous but now forgotten Chinese-born vaudeville magician and performer, poses unique issues for her students. Under Ford’s scrutiny, Fleming’s undercurrents of self-orientalism mirror those of her great-grandfather. They are both performers of sorts, one consciously for entertainment reasons (Long Tack Sam), while Fleming the documentarian is, unfortunately, unconscious of her own filmic and literary tricks, thus both using and misusing the past.

Jeffrey Santa Ana argues how the work of Australian-Chinese-Malay Shaun Tan figuratively illustrates how Australia has been slow to acknowledge its past discrimination against Chinese immigrants and Aboriginal people prior to and under White Australia Policy (from the 1850s to 1973). His images suggest that to forget this racist century is to be dislocated and alienated from history and from the land. In his essay “Emotions as Landscapes: Specters of Asian American Racialization in Shaun Tan’s Graphic Narratives,” Santa Ana makes further connections to the discrimination suffered by Chinese laborers to North America, referencing Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, to forge connections between two histories of Chinese immigration across two continents.