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Asian Americans, the model minority myth tells us, are winners. They don't just work longer, study harder, and do math better than anyone else around. Moreover, as the last few Olympic Games have demonstrated, their counterparts across the Pacific can also swim faster, jump higher, and hit a shuttlecock farther than seems humanly possible. Indeed, as the recent doping scandal that erupted over Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen and the American media's many exposés of China's draconian athletic training schools for young children collectively suggest, the Asian body's capacity for play, like its capacity for toil, is something more (or less) than human.
In this essay, I attend to that racialized ludic potential as it became an increasing source of national anxiety during one of the most unplayful moments in American history: the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent evacuation and imprisonment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans. Through my readings of three internment-era Japanese American novels, I demonstrate that games, as both formal and thematic vehicles, fundamentally shaped representations of racial and national identity for both Asian American novelists and for state-sponsored discourses surrounding the nation's entrance into the Second World War. Drawing on a Cold War phenomenon that Steven Belletto has recently dubbed "the game theory narrative," I suggest that the concepts of strategic play and gaming are crucial to understanding broader questions in Asian American literature about identity, authenticity, and national belonging- and to recognizing, furthermore, the fundamentally gamelike attributes that inhere in the internment as a site of historical memory.
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the longstanding stereotype of the inscrutable Oriental, which had been a source of national consternation,1 took on peculiarly ludic resonances in the American imagination. According to the Roosevelt Administration, the 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent who called the West Coast home were problematic essentially because they were as superhumanly good at playing games as they were at farming. Their inscrutability, in other words, was troubling precisely because it constituted the ultimate poker face, making it impossible as Dillon S. Myer, Director of the War Relocation Authority, complained to tell whether they were thinking "what we think they are thinking" (55), which meant after Pearl Harbor that their outward...