The Race Card

From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities

Tara Fickle

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479884360
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes

As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US.

Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.

PART I

Gambling on the American Dream

The Pitch

Fair Play

1

Evening the Odds through Chinese Exclusion

Does any one suppose the Geary bill, prohibiting Chinese immigration, would ever have passed into law had the Mongolians taken kindly to poker? It was not fear of the introduction of idolatry by these heathens that impelled the congress of the United States to set up a fence against them. To be sure, that was the alleged reason, but members of congress … afterwards confessed that they had been spurred to action mainly by the assertion of the lobbyists that unless Chinese immigration was speedily checked, “fan-tan” would inevitably supplant our national game.

And hence the Geary law … stands as a sort of notice to the world that immigration which might retard the growth of our poker industry, is not wanted in this free country.

—Garret Brown, How to Win at Poker

The above passage, taken from Garrett Brown’s enormously popular How to Win at Poker (1899), is facetious but not entirely fallacious.1 In the late nineteenth-century United States, Chinese immigrants’ affinity for games of chance rendered them not only alien but an active threat to U.S. identity and destiny. Indeed, in the years leading up to the 1882 Exclusion Act—the first in a series of federal laws that barred the immigration of Chinese laborers and denied Chinese Americans naturalization rights—it would be difficult to overestimate the frequency with which the trope of Chinese immigrants as “inveterate gamblers” was invoked in magazine articles, newspaper op-eds, literary fiction, and even official legislation. For example, in the 1877 report of a joint congressional committee convened specifically to investigate “the character, extent, and effect of Chinese immigration into this country,” and whose findings directly contributed to the successful passage of the Exclusion Act, witness after witness testified to the Chinese’s “natural passion” for gambling—an “incurable” addiction, the committee concluded, unmatched by any except the “darker races,” specifically Mexicans and Indians, from whom East Asians, as “Mongolians,” had been distinguished in scientific and popular racial taxonomies since the eighteenth century.2

It was not simply Chinese immigrants’ pursuit of games of chance, but the foreignness of the particular games they played, which became additional evidence of their alien status. From fan tan (番摊) to pai gow (牌九) to baak-gap-piu (白鸽票, later called keno), such ludic alienness could be used not only to support arguments for Chinese exclusion, but, interestingly, to argue for the ideological inclusion of other, non-Asian minorities. Such, in fact, was Brown’s broader intent in the passage quoted above, in using the “Chinese question” as a contrast to an equally irreverent meditation on what, in the postbellum United States, had come to be called the “Negro question.” “If anything were lacking to show the negro’s adaptability to American citizenship,” Brown mused, “his innate love of poker would settle the question. Too much praise can not be bestowed upon those negroes who have progressed from abject slavery to ‘craps’ to complete emancipation by poker.”3 Emancipation by poker is at once as absurd and as cogent as Exclusion by fan tan; for, as this book reveals, games of chance and racial legislation share a far greater intimacy than we might expect, and one that extends far beyond the nineteenth century. Particularly noteworthy in the Brown example, however, is that Asian Americans’ penchant for “foreign” rather than American games turns them into the illegitimate, negative analogue to African Americans, whose “patriotic” embrace of poker can be used to argue for their fitness to be free and full American citizens.4 The triangulation of black, Asian, and white, then, was in fact one crucial way gaming rhetoric was shaped by, and in turn sought to subtly critique, the broader political and social terrain of U.S. race relations.

Scholars in Asian American studies have been somewhat too quick to assume that the consistent invocation of the Chinese as “inveterate gamblers” was as baseless as it was racist, and to dismiss it in favor of focusing on racialized labor as the primary issue in exclusion debates. Yet gambling was minor neither to early Chinese American experience nor to debates over immigration and exclusion. In 1878, San Francisco alone boasted forty exclusively Chinese-run and -patronized gambling houses. In Fiddletown, California, a trading center for mining camps with one of the largest Chinese American communities in the state, a full 10 percent of Chinese residents in 1880 reported their occupations as related to gambling or lottery.5 In addition to gambling houses, lotteries were popular and familiar enough that even in smaller Chinatowns drawings were made twice daily, and the winning numbers posted at all major Chinatown restaurants and storefronts.6 Although, for obvious reasons, the exact number of Chinese American gamblers is difficult to obtain, the industry was sufficiently large and profitable enough to engender specialized Chinese “Gamblers Unions”7 with a roll of dues-paying members and extensive tong protection networks.

While the prevalence of Chinese American gambling was in part the inevitable outcome of bachelor societies comprising young, unattached men with a limited number of recreational outlets, it was also a regular and even expected pastime in the frontier communities in which they resided. Elaine Zorbas reminds us that “everybody gambled in California in the gold rush days”; in 1849, the state even officially recognized gambling as a legitimate profession.8 As one witness before the joint congressional committee remarked, “California was originally settled by gamblers, and this early passion has continued to the present day, till we may almost say today that our population is composed of gamblers!”9 Why, then, given gambling’s widespread cross-racial popularity, was it yet, as Stewart Culin noted in 1891, “often looked upon as one of the distinctive traits of the Chinese, and as such is almost invariably commented upon when any reference is made to them in casual speech”?10 Why, too, given gambling’s legitimization as a productive occupation in California and other frontier communities, would the practice be seized on by white exclusionists in these same communities as definitive evidence of the Chinese’s dangerously immoral influence on American youth?

The answers to these questions lie in pejorative shifts in American attitudes toward gambling and toward Chinese immigrants between the 1850s and the 1880s. During this period, as Ann Fabian notes, “the moral values of a world based on production and productive labor gave way before the miraculous fertility of speculative capitalism.”11 Even the San Francisco Illustrated Wasp, arguably the most virulent anti-Chinese publication of the day, saw Chinese gambling as part of a broader social ill stemming from such shifts in economic and social relations. In 1879, the Wasp published a fictionalized letter from a Chinese American laborer to his love back in China. “Ah Fong,” as he was called, was introduced in the paper not simply as “a Love-Lorn Chinaman” but “an Observant Critic” on American social dynamics. Having recently bribed his way out of jail on charges of gambling, he reflected on the injustice of both the charge and his release: “in this country,” he tells his beloved, “I smack justice on each eye with a piece of gold and she becomes blind.” But while he surmises that “in this country I shall always be the debtor and never the creditor,” he yet notes that the very notion of gambling’s criminalization is equally bankrupt:

Why the sages and wise men have declared gaming to be, socially, an evil I am at a loss to know. Life, everywhere, and in this country, perhaps, more than any other, is a risk, a gamble, a chance.… What is called business is but a game of chance. The merchant sends off his ship full of merchandise to where he thinks there will be a good market; if there is not a good market, he loses; if there is a good market, he wins. What is that? The stock speculator buys his securities in the hope of a rise; upon exactly the same principle that the gambler backs a horse in the hope that he will win the race. Where is the difference? Even the very solons who have pronounced against gambling hold their own positions as the result of a successful game of chance—an election.12

As this unexpectedly sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese American dilemma suggests, the perceived linkage between the age’s “most reviled vice” and the age’s most reviled immigrant group was reflective not merely of regional racial anxieties about Asian Americans in particular, but of national anxieties about broader sea changes in material and ideological economies of the period. Gambling was, until well into the century, understood less as a moral failing than an economic boon: lotteries were regularly used to fund state and city projects. It was not until the 1870s—when even California followed other states in criminalizing house games—that it acquired a uniquely vilified status on economic grounds as a parasitic scourge, embodied by the growing numbers of late-century stock and commodities traders who “brought nothing to market and … offered no real exchange for the profits they made.”13

So, too, with early Chinese immigrants, who in the mid-1800s were, if not celebrated, at least tolerated in mining camps and in the United States as a whole—in part for their tax contributions during economic depression.14 It was also not until the 1870s that exclusion grew from a concern of the Western states—which, due to frontier industries like gold mining, had the highest concentration of Chinese immigrants—to a galvanizing issue nationwide.15 Now, their “heathenness,” association with vices like gambling, opium, and prostitution, and “cheap” labor were all marshaled by exclusion proponents as evidence of Chinese immigrants’ unassimilability and their unfitness to be (and to compete with) American citizens. Like stock traders, Chinese workers were then framed as economic parasites, undercutting American laborers’ efforts to secure fair pay and funneling the profits of American industry back to China rather than reinvesting them in the national economy. In short, exclusionists framed Chinese Americans as the embodiment of the moral as well as economic ills of gambling.

Historians of nineteenth-century U.S. culture have identified gambling and games of chance as central sites through which these tensions—and hence U.S. identity—were articulated throughout the second half of the century. Jackson Lears, for example, has suggested that gambling debates revealed the “fundamental fault lines in American character,” counterposing two distinct yet equally influential narratives and images through which the United States had historically defined itself. The first account

puts the big gamble at the center of American life: from the earliest English settlements at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, risky ventures in real estate (and other less palpable commodities) power the progress of a fluid, mobile democracy. The speculative confidence man is the hero of this tale—the man (almost always he is male) with his eye on the Main Chance rather than the Moral Imperative. The other narrative exalts a different sort of hero—a disciplined self-made man, whose success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.16

Given that the very decades in which these struggles over the meaning of gambling were being waged were the same in which the status of Chinese immigrants was most hotly contested, it is striking to note the almost total absence of scholarly consideration given to that group—as either workers or gamblers—in historical accounts. While one frequently finds an entire chapter devoted to African American gaming in studies of nineteenth-century gaming, there are rarely sufficient mentions of Asian Americans to warrant even an index entry.17 Such an omission not only gives the false impression that Asian American gambling was irrelevant or historically minor during these years, but reinforces the tendency to understand gambling, and American race relations more broadly, as an exclusively black-and-white affair.

Work Cheap, Play Cheap

The difference between us and other pioneers, we did not come here for the gold streets. We came to play. And we’ll play again. Yes, John Chinaman means to enjoy himself all the while.

—Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey

The competition over the meaning of gambling as legitimate occupation or criminal enterprise was no more a purely moral debate divorced from economic realities than was the criminalization of Chinese labor immigration purely an economic debate in which gambling served merely as sensationalist fodder. Although gambling was certainly used as ammunition in arguments about Chinese immorality, ultimately its most efficacious role was as a rhetorical vehicle used to influence debates specifically over Chinese labor practices. As one witness noted in his testimony before Congress, “To object to Chinamen because they ‘labor too well’ or because they are ‘cheap, reliable, and industrious laborers’ is void of reason or humanity.… The Chinamen are the first people treated as criminal or objected to because they were ‘reliable, industrious, or economical. With all other people those qualities are considered virtues.’”18 Gambling, as we will see, provided the crucial vehicle that allowed such arguments to transcend “reason or humanity” and successfully rewrite Chinese labor from economic virtue to racial vice.

Although games are popularly understood to be the antithesis to labor, in fact, as Ann Fabian and others have compellingly demonstrated, games of chance were sites through which the ideological and economic tension between contrasting labor systems was materially and rhetorically reconciled in nineteenth-century national culture. The ludic theories of Huizinga and Caillois, discussed at length in chapter 4, defined games as “magic circles” isolated from economic reality. As Michael Oriard observes, however, gaming is more accurately seen as existing along a continuum of work and play, marking “t...