American Born Chinese: seeing people who look like you on tv and meta-structure.

I rarely watch Netflix or Disney but made an exception for my distant cousin Michelle Yeoh. She is part of the team in American Born Chinese, which is an 8 part adaptation of the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang. 

The TV departs significantly in plot (and in part in characterization)  from the novel but stays true to the themes of identity and coming of age while adding in some different complexities. Judging the whole of a work of art is complex, and as I’ve written before, one of the important functions of these types of story is by increasing narrative plenitude.  The 1800s was (mostly) men writing stories. 1980s and 1990s Hollywood had few Asian diaspora films. More recently we’ve seen a brilliant explosion of women writing (non-fiction) stories. Understanding our humanity by the stories we tell ourselves - seems to me - an important aspect of who we are.

Think about the stories we are telling ourselves now about AI.

So, rather than judge the whole of the series - and I think the series is worth watching - I wanted to dwell on two aspects: meta-structure dramaturgy and identity narrative plenitude.

By meta-structure dramaturgy I mean where a creative work is self-referential either to its own work, or to some aspects of its own structure, an acknowledgement of aspects of the work that might be fiction or authored. You observe this more obviously in films like Being John Malkovic, or in performance theatre which plays with unreliable narrators or the nature of theatre and performance itself. The so-called breaking of the 4th wall, where performers speak direct to audience as a technique (metalepsis) that often plays with this. I am interested as I rely on meta-structure and ideas through some of my own performance-lecture work.

As its worse, meta-structure is inward looking, obscure and unrevealing. But, at its best it elucidates commentary which is impossible by a straight telling. This is because a performer or a character acknowledging the fictions we tell ourselves or asking an audience to think about that can bring a nuance that a straight telling or a straight metaphor does not.

I think meta-structure may be useful in unpicking some of the complexity or “wickedness” of the climate challenge. The same for systems impact and thinking. This is because - we the people - are a part of the problem and the solution, and the system interacts with us, as we interact with the system. When a performer comments, or an audience influences, the direction of the work this echoes - in part - the interactive nature of the system.

These thoughts do not directly pass through most people’s minds when viewing art, but I think there is impact. There is a long build up repetition of a racist meme epitomised in a dated fictional tv show in this world. The fictional tv show is an analogy or metaphor for the whos in our own world. An actor (Ke Huy Quan) plays this as Jamie Yao, (in this world) a former actor known for playing the accident prone Freddy Wong in the sitcom Beyond Repair.  There is then an arguably self-conscious scene from Quan playing Yao commenting on Wong makes a direct to (studio) audience address which is also an address to us all.

This meta-structure scene demonstrates to me how far Disney come in thinking about these issues. One can argue that much of the series has been “disney-fied” in that this is American teenage life, and the ability to be the hero in your own story is one of the longest running myths / ideas that Disney narrates. The original novel did not contain such a clear but here as ABC does.

Many recent (Marvel/Disney) series - She-Hulk, for instance - have contained these meta-structure parts, but to the extent ABC argues for the agency of being our own heroes, and the self-reference to know we make our own myths, we influence our own systems then I find this intriguing.