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Asian evasion

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And television has not been especially welcoming to Asian characters. Medical series Presidio Med and MDs came under fire last fall for being set in San Francisco but having a grand total of one Asian regular between them. (Presidio Med, which had no Asian regular,later added at least one recurring character played by Emily Karoda, who also recurs on Gilmore Girls as Mrs. Kim.)

Actresses like Karoda and Keiko Agena, who plays Lane Kim on Gilmore, rejoice that they're not playing stereotypical roles. "Parts are very rare for Asian Americans, and parts as good as this are even rarer,'' Agena said.

That's the case in spite of a long history of Asians in America.

"Globalization isn't new to America in the 21st century,'' Zia said. "I've been doing some research now about Asian-Americans in the Civil War, and there were literally hundreds.... Some actually continued on to serve in the different cavalries (after) the Civil War. There's this one guy who ended up... guarding Sitting Bull.

"This Chinese face in a Yankee uniform, standing guard in this pioneer outpost with the chief of the Indian nations.... Even the image of it brings a lot of enrichment.''

Which has largely been lost on TV.

"I never saw Asian people on television or in the movies,'' comedian Margaret Cho says in her concert video Notorious C.H.O. "So my dreams were somewhat limited. I would dream, "Maybe someday I could be an extra on M*A*S*H.''

Cho did get her own sitcom, 1994-95's All-American Girl. But making the series was a long struggle against stereotypes about race and body size.

And if she were a child today, she might also find her dreams limited -- perhaps to being a martial arts star.

On American Idol on Tuesday night, Sean Campos of Holly Hill, Fla., announced his wish to be "the first successful Asian R&B singer.'' After he passed the audition, Idol host Ryan Seacrest asked if he knew kung fu.

Black Sash, the latest network dramatic series to star an actor of Asian descent, is about a martial arts expert played by Russell Wong. It comes three years after the end of the last Asian-led network drama, Martial Law, which starred martial-arts movie actor Sammo Hung.

Although long a fan of martial arts, New York-born Wong began his performing career as a dancer. But to really get his career going, he went to Hong Kong, became an action star -- then returned to the United States as one.

"My attitude in the past has been, OK, I've got to do martial arts to be on TV,'' he said. The alternative: "just be another unemployed actor.

"I think the networks are fearful about casting an Asian lead into the center of a show, based on the race issue,'' said Carlton Cuse, executive producer of both Black Sash, premiering later this season on The WB, and CBS' Martial Law.

"It's a shame. And it's one of those things where someone has to prove (the networks) wrong,'' Cuse said.

But people have been trying to prove Hollywood wrong for decades.

The detective Charlie Chan was often played by non-Asian actors -- and the civil rights movements of the '60s tried to end such biased casting. One Hollywood casting director said recently that there just aren't a lot of Asian actors available. If she sought, say, an Asian-American actor in his forties to sixties, "we're going to get, like, 30 pictures. We're not talking about hundreds of people out there.''

But is that because there are not enough actors, because the casting directors do not know where to look for them, or because available actors just grew tired of being rebuffed?

The actor Mako often struggled, even though he was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor for his 1966 performance in The Sand Pebbles.

He has continued to work, appearing in Pearl Harbor and co-starring in Black Sash. But overall, he said, "It was very frustrating.''

As an outlet for Asian-American actors, he helped found the East-West Players theater company in California. As an activist, he joined in protests in the early '70s, when the white actor David Carradine was cast as the Chinese-American lead in the action drama Kung Fu.

The Kung Fu protests did pressure the studios to add Asian-American technical advisers, he said, but "the people that they hired on our behalf... were always ignored.'' He recalled one TV executive flatly proclaiming that if you had an Asian lead in a show, "the viewers... would turn it off in less than a minute.

"So 30 years go by, it's 2003 now, and we see Russell Wong as a leading character,'' Mako said. "And 30 years in mankind's history is nothing.''

But it's not just about getting major roles. It's about what those roles are. Wong and Cuse hope that Black Sash -- with Wong as a martial artist who is also a mentor to young students -- will broaden networks' ideas of what an Asian-American actor can do.

"What I liked about Black Sash was that there were elements that had nothing to do with the martial arts,'' Wong said. And Cuse saw in the relationship between Wong's character and his students a revision of the white mentor/black student relationship in a show like The White Shadow.

"This is sort of flipped, isn't it?'' Cuse said. "You've got an Asian-American advising kids who are white, and one kid who is African-American.''

Changing long-held ideas is important, and not just for Asian-Americans. Zia, whose books include Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, noted that prejudice against Asians can affect everyone.

The treatment of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee -- spied upon, wrongly accused and imprisoned for espionage in the late '90s -- should warn everyone about how their freedoms may be curtailed, Zia said.

"Some of the things that happened to Wen Ho Lee were illegal,'' said Zia, who co-wrote Lee's memoirs. And since Sept. 11, 2001, she said, "Laws have been passed... that actually make it OK to do what was done to Wen Ho Lee. I think all Americans need to pay attention to that.''

And they need to see Asian-Americans in all their cultural glory. To notice the Chinese laborers that Stephen Ambrose wrote glowingly about in his history of the transcontinental railroad. To see Lane Kim as another rock 'n' roll kid who can speak just as glibly and quickly as her white counterparts. And to hope for a day when an Asian-American can star in a drama without kicking butt along the way.

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R.D. Heldenfels writes about television for the Beacon Journal. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or [email]rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com[/email]