The historical record reveals that the dominant society and its institutions have exerted extraordinary destabilizing pressures against the diverse Asian Pacific American communities. Such chronic destabilization is often masked by an outward show of normalcy, adjustment, and adaptation among community members. Contrary to the myth of Asian American hypernormality and psychosocial adjustment, racial prejudice and social discrimination take a measurable toll on Asian and Pacific Americans. History gives the lie to romanticized attempts by liberal and neoconservative commentators to herald the presumptive triumph of Asian Americans. Such revisionsist tales do not square with the lived experience of Asian American peoples, who have confronted all manner of hostile challenges to their collective presence within U.S. sociey. Deracination and insecurity, not stability, characterize many Asian American communities.

Despite the best efforts of white supremacist institutions to stymie the social ascent of Asian Americans, the data show that a large percentage of this diverse population has attained middle-class status. A select few have even entered upper-level management within major U.S. corporations. Yet by other indices, such as wages and career advancement, Asian Americans lag behind their white counterparts with equivalent years of education and experience. As Margaret Fung of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund observs, "We hear the same grievances again and again-that they come in at entry-level jobs, but the white employees hired at the same time have received promotions while they remain in technical or low managerial positions."

Asian Americans, then, are both beneficiaries and "victims" of the system of abstract rewards, benefits, and opportunities that defines the United States as a democratic, pluralist, "open" society. It is the function of network television sociodrama to mediate symbolically the contradiction between the promise and the reality of American liberal democracy. Images of control are used as an iconic shorthand to explain, justify, and naturalize the subordination of Asian Americans within a society that espouses formal equality for all. Network television can never come close to representing the full depth and scope of Asian American life, because to do so would be to expose disturbing core truths about America itself.