The first Asian group to arrive in the United States on a large scale were the Chinese. Between 1849 and 1930, more than 400,000 Chinese workers arrived in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, leaving their homeland to escape poverty, widespread political conflict, and the deleterious effects of contact with Western imperialist countries. Unlike European immigrants to the United States, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants were unmarried males who formed the "womanless households" characteristic of both urban and rural settlements.

There are several compelling reasons a Chinese "bachelor society" developed throughout California and much of the American West. For one, social custom dictated that married women remain at home rather than accompany their husbands, many of whom viewed their visit to Gam Saan or "Gold Mountain" as only temporary. Second, the needs of American capitalism were served nicely by a nonpermanent alien labor force, because, "as a yellow proletariat, Chinese migrant workers would not have families in America, and America would not have a Chinese population granted citizenship by birth. Finally, with the passage of successive Chinese Exclusion Acts inspired by virulent anti-Asian racism, the supply of marriageable females was all but cut off. The imbalance in gender ratio among Chinese Americans was not fully corrected until long after World War II.

The politics of white racial supremacy had become an established feature of American democracy by the time of Jackson. Systematic Indian-killing campaigns, the African American slave trade, and the forced incorporation of Mexicans through territorial annexation served as precedents for the anti-Chinese agitation to follow. Thus the anti-Chinese hostility beginning during the mid-1800s in Far Western states such as California conformed to a long-established pattern of discrimination based upon color or "race." By the latter part of the nineteenth century a coalition of Republican and Democratic leadership combined with white working-class laborers ensured Euro-American supremacy by uniting around the issue of Chinese exclusion. In sum, the "bachelor society" formed by early Chinese immigrants to a large extent is the material outcome of antidemocratic tendencies within American republican rule.

Just as the popular entertainment forms of the previous century helped provide ideological justification for the maintenance of inequality along racial lines, contemporary mass-mediated popular culture on television serves a similar function. For example, such diverse television programs as Bachelor Father (1957-62), Have Gun Will Travel (1957-63), Bonanza (1959-73), Valentine's Day (1964-65), Star Trek (1966-69), the iminently forgettable Highcliffe Manor (1979), and Falcon Crest (1981-90) all featured the stock Chinese bachelor character, a social type that has its origins in the discriminatory immigration policies of the late nineteenth century.

Bachelor Father was a situation comedy centered on lighthearted domestic problems that faced attorney Bentley Gregg (John Forsythe), who, although unmarried, was responsible for the welfare of his orphaned niece, Kelly (Noreen Corcoran). Providing the domestic touch to the Gregg family was "houseboy" Peter Tong (Sammee Tong). The neatly uniformed Peter performed traditional female functions within the household in addition to dispensing sage advice to both the teenage Kelly and her swinging bachelor father. Peter Tong's role within the Bentley household was similar to that of Hop Sing (Victor Sen Yung) in the long-running television Western, Bonanza .

In the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest , created by Earl Hamner, a Chinese butler played by the eponymous Chas-Li Chi was surrogate father to Lance Cumson (Lorenzo Lamas). Lance was the grandson of matriarch Angela Channing (Jane Wyman), who presided over the Falcon Crest winery with an iron hand. Lance was a child of divorce whose father was usually absent from home. Therefore, Lance would often receive instruction in manhood from Chao-Li Chi. The personal relationship between the callow young white male and the sagelike older Asian male is a fairly common pattern in TV drama. It represents a power relationship wherein a social subordinate (Chao-Li) trains his superior (Lance Cumson) in skills that will allow him to achieve and maintain superordinate status after reaching maturity.

A Chinese bachelor domestic with the dehumanizing name Hey Boy (Kam Tong) was seen regularly on the highbrow TV Western Have Gun Will Travel during the 1957-60 seasons and then again from 1961 to 1963. Hey Boy worked in the hotel where the central character, a professional gunfighter who went by the name of Paladin (Richard Boone), conducted business. Hey Boy was replaced by Hey Girl (Lisa Lu) during the 1960-61 season while Kam Tong pursued a more prominent dramatic role in the adventure program Mr. Garlund (1960-61). This short-lived CBS program is of historical interest in that its principal character, businessman Frank Garlund (Charles Quinlivan), was the foster brother of Kam Chang (Kam Tong), the only person the secretive and elusive tycoon could trust. Garlund had been raised by Kam Chang's father, Po Chang (Philip Ahn), himself a businessman. Again, it was a case of a yellow man raising a white male to adulthood.

The characters Frank Garlund and Lance Cumson conform to a common, verging on folkloric, pattern found in popular culture as it concerns yellow-whitel relations. In this relationship, an Asian master tutors a young white male charge and endows him with powers or gifts (such as martial arts prowess or religiomagic wisdom) that are otherwise unattainable from white mentors. Newly endowed with unconvential powers after an extended period of intense training, the white male hero is then able to prevail over both his coethnics and the "bad" Asians who threaten him. In maturity, the hero then is called upon to protect the yellow mentor from abuse at the hands of both whites and "bad" Asians in repayment for the special powers taught him. On the face of it, this form of symbolic "repayment" appears altrustic. In fact, however, this diegetic inversion restores the student to a position of social superiority over his master, thus preserving the overarching white/dominant-yellow/subordinate relationship.

The tenacity of this white-yellow power relationship on television can be seen in more recent programs as well. The June 1992 debut of the action adventure program Raven conforms to the convention of the white martial artist trained by an Asian master. In an episode titled "Return of the Black Dragon," Jonathan Raven (Jeffrey Meeks) works by night as a bartender at a posh Honolulu nightclub that caters to a primarily Asian clientele. By day, Raven searches for his long-lost son. As a teenager, Raven had received instruction in the martial arts from his Japanese sensei (master). As an adult, Raven uses his martial arts prowess to defeat the "bad " Asians and to defend the weaker "good" Asians. By this formula, the white man appropriates an Asian counterhegemonic cultural practice such as the martial arts (which originated as an unarmed response to official state power) and puts it to his own heroic use.

Rocky Sin (Jack Soo) was an "Oriental" valet employed by playboy publishing executive Valentine Farrow (Tony Franciosa) in Valentine's Day . Rocky Sin and Valentine Farrow had been friends in the army, where presumably they were equals. In civilian life, however, Rocky is content to receive vicarious pleasure through Val's amorous adventures. Jack Soo's career was in many ways emblematic of the struggles Asian American performers have endured. "Soo" was born and raised in Oakland, California, as Goro Suzuki. Hoping to pursue a career in entertainment, Suzuki changed his name to the slightly less offensive Soo to overcome residual anti-Japanese hostility on the West Coast. Soo later held down the role of the world-weary figure Sergeant Nick Yemana (1975-78) in the police sitcom Barney Miller (1975-82) before dying of cancer in 1979.

The Gene Roddenberry space opera Star Trek featured a multicultural supporting cast including an Asian named Hikaru Sulu (George Takei). Mr. Sulu sat at the helm of the starship U.S.S. Enterprise and guided it along its five-year interplanetary mission to contact alien life-forms and civilizations. Unlike his television predecessors, Sulu did not do the crew's laundry or prepare their meals. But the controlling image of the Asian-American bachelor domestic servant is so thoroughly steeped in U.S. popular culture that it was spoofed in a skit on the Fox Television comedy program In Living Color (1990-present). Created by filmmaker Keenen Ivory Wayans, the irreverent if sometimes sophomorically humerous program was awarded an Emmy for outstanding variety, music, or comedy series in its first season.

In the skit "The Wrath of Farrakhan," Minister Louis Farrakhan (Daymon Wayans) of the Nation of Islam comes aboard the Enterprise to liberate its nonwhiter crew members from the white command of Captain James T. Kirk (James Carrey). In this confrontation, Captain Kirk orders Mr. Sulu (Kip Shiotani) to have Minister Farrakhan removed from the spacecraft. But Farrakhan plants a mutinous seed of doubt in Sulu's mind by asking the socially and sexually repressed helmsman, "Who does the laundry around here?" Sulu turns on Kirk in anger, recalling how the skipper has called him "Buddha-head" and "pie-face."

Before turning control of the Enterprise over to Minister Farrakhan, Mr. Sulu lodges a final protest against his desexualization under the rule of Captain Kirk. "I've been in space all this time and I haven't had one woman yet," Sulu complains. "You even take the ugly ones, Captain. My loins are about to explode. I want to do the nasty." "Well all right then my horny Asian brother," Farrakhan says approvingly. "Warp factor five. We're going home. Destination, 125th Street." Mr. Sulu's days as an intergalactic eunuch and glorified houseboy are over. Having at last achieved his long-deferred sexual and social liberation with the help of Minister Farrakhan, Mr. Sulu will pilot the starship back to earth, to Harlem, the cultural capital of Black America.

In this otherwise silly skit, Wayans perceptively plays the controlling images of African Americans as hypersexual beasts against that of the desexualized Asian male. In her gloss on Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks , Mary Ann Doane poses the question, "Why is it sexuality which forms a major arena for the articulation of racism?" Leaving aside the empirically unfalsifiable psychoanalytic hypothesis she advances concerning the conflation of "fear," "desire," and "otherness" with sexuality, it nevertheless can be observed that sexuality is "indissociable from the effects of polarization and differentiation, often linking them to structures of power and domination." In reference to Mr. Sulu, the yellow man's desexualization attends his social subodination by the white patriarchal power structure represented by Captain Kirk.

The desexualization of the Asian American male is closely bound with the inability to form a family with his female counterpart because of racially specific barriers erected by the state. By contrast, the hypersexuality attributed to the African American male reflects the anxiety of the master race, whose ability to affect Black family formation is much more limited. But in both cases, controlling images are useful in the reinforcement of legal-juridical constraints that selectively target nonwhite peoples.