{"id":317714,"date":"2021-09-19T04:00:45","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T04:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=d9b305473b2af100be501652a1b8f6ae"},"modified":"2021-09-19T04:00:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T04:00:45","slug":"as-a-korean-american-professor-here-is-what-i-think-the-chair-gets-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/09\/19\/as-a-korean-american-professor-here-is-what-i-think-the-chair-gets-right\/","title":{"rendered":"As a Korean American Professor, Here Is What I Think \u201cThe Chair\u201d Gets Right"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Sandra<\/a>

Amid the surge in anti-Asian violence<\/a> over the past year and a half, more persistent scrutiny has emerged surrounding issues of whitewashing in Hollywood, and the lack of representation of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) both in front of and behind the camera. For me, this scrutiny is something that has turned viewing TV shows and films into a constant cultural critique of the representations, stereotypes and discourses that center certain voices, diminish or exclude others, and affirm or deny a cultural sense of identity and belonging.<\/p>\n

As an incoming tenure-track assistant professor of English literature, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard news about the new Netflix show, \u201cThe Chair,\u201d starring one of my favorite actors, Sandra Oh. Oh herself is Korean Canadian, and her career has been a marvel to behold as a Korean American woman myself. In the show, Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim, the first woman to chair the English department at the fictitious Pembroke University. Ji-Yoon is a Korean American woman taking the helm at a failing department where there are few staff members of color. Like Ji-Yoon tells her college\u2019s dean, the faculty at Pembroke is \u201c87 percent white.\u201d<\/p>\n

I started my first tenure-track position in an English department this fall, so the specificity with which the show is able to depict both Ji-Yoon\u2019s personal and public lives in terms of ethnic Korean identity and the ins and outs of straddling multiple cultures at once made it easy at first to feel connected to Ji-Yoon. Watching Ji-Yoon\u2019s father (played by Ji-Yong Lee) speak Korean and break through the \u201c1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles<\/a>\u201d brought multiple moments of Korean and Korean American identity affirmation.<\/p>\n

Rather than reviewing the show\u2019s plot points and divulging too many spoilers, however, I want to focus on the symbolism that the show conveys in terms of larger questions of the representational politics of academia and the role of professors in an increasingly corporatized higher-education world. I write from the honest perspective of a Korean American woman in the professoriate, and the situations that I have navigated on the way to this coveted and increasingly rare tenure-track position.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a moment in the show when Ji-Yoon notes, \u201cWhen I started, it was like, \u2018Why\u2019s some Asian lady teaching Emily Dickinson?\u2019\u201d It reminded me of the student evaluations I have gotten over the years questioning my suitedness and ability to teach not only Dickinson, who I teach with enthusiasm, but my ability to teach literature at all.<\/p>\n

Like many women of color in academia and beyond, Ji-Yoon\u2019s embodiment does not match the longstanding, persistent stereotypes of who gets to not only teach but lead departments. What Ji-Yoon experiences isn\u2019t new to me or many women of color, because like many of us, she is working in a system that sets expectations for her that don\u2019t match the reality of what it takes to get the job done.<\/p>\n

As the only other faculty of color in the department, Yasmin \u201cYaz\u201d McKay (Nana Mensah), tells Ji-Yoon, \u201cYou act like you owe them something. Like you\u2019re here because they let you be here, not because you deserve it. I mean, what are they without us at this point?\u201d The department of English is in a moment of transition and luckily has a star tenure-track professor in Yaz who teaches classes like \u201cSex and the Novel\u201d rather than other classes of outdated interests and struggling enrollment numbers. Ji-Yoon tells Yaz that she is \u201cgoing to be the first tenured Black woman in this department,\u201d but the chair of Yaz\u2019s tenure committee, Elliot Rentz, becomes a roadblock to Yaz\u2019s journey.<\/p>\n

Both the university and college which houses Ji-Yoon\u2019s department are going through a budget crisis and need increased enrollment. Many of their students are frustrated with the lack of faculty diversity on campus and the dearth of critical race and ethnic studies approaches in their classes. These are questions that colleges and universities around the country are facing, and through the parodic lens of the show, they do become relevant to a broader audience.<\/p>\n

One of the show\u2019s clearest shortcomings, however, is the absence of adjuncts \u2014 the actual professors keeping higher-education teaching afloat<\/a>. Some 73 percent<\/a> of all faculty positions are not tenure track, so their seeming absence at the fictional Pembroke reinforces a glaring lack of awareness about what keeps colleges and universities running. This lack of representation reifies the \u201civory tower of academia\u201d ideal and erases one of the most urgent problems higher education must tackle: how to turn the profession of teaching into a livable and fair wage job for everyone. The current status quo of grim adjunct life and its necessity for keeping, among other things, higher education budgets, course catalogs and enrollment numbers afloat, may not be camera-ready, but it is more relevant than ever to the world \u201cThe Chair\u201d is trying to represent.<\/p>\n

In one key scene, Ji-Yoon tells Yaz, \u201cI don\u2019t feel like I inherited an English department; I feel like someone handed me a ticking time bomb because they wanted to make sure a woman was holding it when it exploded.\u201d As Nancy Wang Yuen notes, \u201cThis is a documented phenomenon called \u2018the glass cliff<\/a>,\u2019 in which institutions elevate women and BIPOC to positions of power during crises that puts them at risk of \u2018falling off\u2019 and failing.\u201d<\/a> As we see, Ji-Yoon is ultimately disempowered by this system, which is truthful of what happens to many of us. By the show\u2019s end, the cyclical nature of the \u201cmodel-minority\u201d trope is clear: No matter how hard we work or how much we go \u201crunning around playing nice,\u201d as Yaz reminds Ji-Yoon, the entrenched systems of white privilege which we enter continue to function and, in fact, function better with us \u201cmodel minorities\u201d firmly in place as proof that meritocracy works.<\/p>\n

Critiques and disappointments notwithstanding, watching Ji-Yoon walk into her brand-new office as the incoming chair of English at Pembroke in the first episode, I not only felt represented, but also a type of wonder. Art can do that, I guess. The next scene finds her sitting down in the chair at her desk and having it break beneath her. Was this a reality check for the truth of her situation and the long-established practices that she is soon forced to navigate? My English degree has made me turn everything into a symbol, but whatever it was, I laughed out loud and deeply understood the feeling.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Latest \u2013 Truthout<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Sandra<\/a><\/p>\n

The show features a Korean American English professor working in a corporatized system that sets unreal expectations.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":8586,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10641,14340,13044,250,35520,94,868,4711,4020],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317714"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317714"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317715,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317714\/revisions\/317715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}