On Tables and Rooms Where Things Happen: A POV of Asian American Media Then

The Museum of Asian Texans does this thing where the crowd doesn’t sort itself the way academic panels usually do — no clean line between historians in the front row and community members drifting in after work (well, sometimes!), no seam between people who read the flyer and people whose cousin is on the DAAFF/DAAHS board. Vo's talk keeps the community engagement flexible and in fact, Vo asks us to get to know each other more in parallel rather than as modeled as the sage on a stage. For Vo and the content of her talk, she spans roughly a hundred-year survey lecture and asks us for something specific within this room: she asks the skeptics, publics, and “experts” to sit next to each other, trusting all can find something to hold onto. 

On July 15th, 2026, they did.

Dr. Vo opened with two difficult questions — what are we looking for when we ask for representation, and how do we even recognize a narrative as being "about" Asian American identity in the first place — and then let the questions silently orient our point of views. She didn't rush to answer them. She built a hundred years of context instead and let the questions sit there, open, the whole time, trusting the history itself to do the arguing, ranging between the Chinese Exclusion in 1882 and the Yellow Peril logics, Hollywood yellowface )as the industrial extension of that logic, making actors literally paint themselves onto and into a threat the U.S. defined). It brought to mind Nancy Yuen's work on typecasting which defines the entertainment industries logic of commodifying and caricaturing people of color.

Vo gave us room to work as this space was full of people who acted as a framework whose similar bodies and labor built decades ago kept these historical patterns extended, demonstrating this story still meant something to them that night.

As the synapses of my brain kept firing, I was reminded of the problem of the color line. Du Bois wrote about it in a Black-white register in the context of U.S. racial segregation, and Vo's timeline prompted me to ask: what did it mean for Asian American actors, filmmakers, and industry workers to "pass" across that line in the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the history of that line itself had been made invisible by historical and entertainment industry standards? Asian America, not fully inside the exclusion the line justifies, nor fully outside the surveillance it authorizes. 

I'd jotted down something like “extensions/evolutions of multiracial challenges" in my own margin before Vo said it, which reminds us how far a hundred years of exclusion law travels through a body, generations later. 

The Cold War section briefly introduced the model minority myth which, for me, always feels familiar in the atmosphere of the Asian Texan conversations— a lot of people in this room have either been used as the myth or perceived it through someone else. Sitting with this, I followed the international thread a little further – Homi Bhabha's hybridity and Lowe's Immigrant Acts, the Cold War as a geopolitical performance as much as a domestic one and the ways in which the U.S. needed a model of racial tolerance to sell against Soviet propaganda, the discourse around Asian Americans was cast as the evidence, whether they auditioned or not. 

Then the seventies, and the orientalizing of martial arts — East as spiritual, West as hungry for the spiritual — a thread we could spend a semester on, distilled by Vo into a few sharp minutes — naming exactly the tools and mechanisms I’d unpack soon: Asian American as an aesthetic coded as authentically "other" becoming the thing that sells. Vo moved forward — the nineties brought Joy Luck Club, and the early two-thousands into the late twenty-teens, a period I lived through as my own adolescence and twenties. 9/11, Obama, the entirety of the Trump run — even as a shadow of a memory, the conversations, shifts in domestic security, and different observations about surveillance continued to surface.

The title phrasing in this lecture — finding a seat at the master's table — carries a lot of work and maybe I believe this phrase can't only gesture toward Lorde, toward the tools and the house, because once we hear that, it echoes and sits with questions about whether representation was ever about pulling up a chair at all, or whether the wanting itself — wanting to be recognized at a table we “didn't build” — is where our story actually starts. 

That's where I (re)discovered the door into my own thinking: Vo gestured towards a question which is framed as why Hollywood remains the marker of success at all — what it means that an indie filmmaker or a community archivist still gets measured against a studio system never built to hold or truly recognize them. 

I've spent years on that same question trying to understand how, if Hollywood is The Table, then the mechanisms of racial exchange get sold back to us as “liberation” or progress. In fact, racial exchange for me was framed through a variation of racial triangulation. 

So, when Dr. Vo mentions Claire Kim's racial triangulation 1999 framework, I’m immediately interested in its new weight being carried in 2026. After all, Kim’s triangulation was built before streaming flattened distribution, before one platform could triangulate a dozen racial positions in the same streaming/media library on the same evening. 

I'd offer racial exchange as one way of carrying the weight of identity politics forward: not replacing triangulation, but demonstrating what happens once race gets industrialized, once positioning stops being cultural common sense and becomes an economic pricing model. Okihiro's work on the Third World Liberation Front sits alongside that same question from another angle — coalition as one answer, solidarity as the refusal of being sorted at all. 

Without repressing my psychoanalytic fidelity, somewhere in the middle of this I found myself thinking about the process of sexuation  — Lacan's logic of exception, the way a category only closes once something gets positioned outside it — because that's what "no more seats at the master's table" displays historically: this inclusion that requires an excluded remainder to make sense of itself.

I didn't resolve this feeling after we put up folding chairs at the MAT. I had to write it down and let it follow me home like the way Vo let Lorde's ghost follows her, follows us.

The line that's stayed with me the longest, though, is a repetitious phrase throughout academia, social media, and other activating spaces. There is no ethical consumption. Vo didn't need Marx or Adorno to make this phrase stick (though maybe gesturing towards them could’ve been helpful) — and instead in just a room full of people who buy festival tickets, stream the shows/films we were talking about, we are asked to confront our own participation and to understand what consumption means as political action. 

I felt implicated, generously, in the best sense of that word to be named as part of the thing being studied rather than outside of it. It’s important to me to be critiquing an industry I also can't stop loving. Vo's talk reminds me of the language for holding both critique and love at the same time instead of resolving them one after another.