The New Faces Of TV Series

Ling Woo, the newest cast member on "Ally McBeal," says, "Objection, your honor, I'm bored." She buys her sister a breast augmentation and sues the doctor for false advertisement. She helps a young cancer patient "sue God," or the Catholic Church, even demands a judge to "hurry up" while announcing the verdict. She is mean and beautiful and altogether intriguing. She is also Chinese.

Some say she breaks stereotypes. Anything but the timid, soft-spoken Asian, she is loved for being brassy.

Some say she cultivates stereotypes. With upturned eyes and acerbic tongue, she is dismissed as yet another cold, angry Asian.

Either way, Ling's arrival heralds an end to the Margaret Cho era, when there was only one stereotype of Asians to be broken. Today, there are so many stereotypes to consider thatperhaps the typical or atypical Asian no longer exists.

Four years ago, Margaret Cho played a Korean--merican 21-year-old on the former ABC sitcom "All American Girl." She broke, back then, the prevalent quiet-Asian prototype: She dated American boys and dressed immodestly. She was loud, disrespectful to elders and far from subservient.

Today there are many Margaret Chos, many Ling Woos, and also many shy immigrants. Numerous TV sitcoms now include the one token Asian, like the once-token African-American, as do several American movies -- Pierce Brosnan's 007 co-star, Michelle Yeoh, kicks higher than a Rockette. In other words, the stereotypical Asian is both every Asian and no Asian.

Jenny Huang, 21, a senior at Johns Hopkins University from Potomac, is an "Ally McBeal" fan. She had always thought Lucy Liu's character funny, but recently took a liking to her after an episode where Ling was seen sobbing."

I realized that this cold thing that she's putting on is completely not real, and after that I really started liking her a lot more."

But when Huang watches Ling, she forgets she's watching an Asian. "The producers of the show haven't really brought it up as an issue," she says. "I don't know whether it was unconscious or not, but I haven't thought about it -- that she's Asian."

Perhaps Huang is oblivious to the fact because Ling is portrayed as American as Ally. Ling could easily be any other Asian female walking around New York's Flushing or L.A.'s Korea Town. She has long, straight black hair. She has an angular face and porcelain skin, and dresses mostly in dark hues.

Physically, she fits what could be called the International Student Stereotype -- the ones with long black hair and black clothes, with the straight-backed gait and catwalk-expression.

Internally, she is reminiscent of Margaret Cho -- abrasively assertive, independent and hilarious. In this sense, she is somewhat the Second-Generation Female Asian-American Stereotype: independent and vocal, friends with mostly non-Asians."

Ling's a banana -- really," says Yihong Hsu, a graphic-design major at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. "Banana" or "Twinkie," colloquial expressions used mainly among Asian-Americans, mean one is "yellow on the outside, white on the inside."

But while Ling perpetuates these images, she also breaks them, and realistically reflects a fuller, more complex human being. The International Student Stereotype is quiet, shy and unassuming, submissive to authority and conservatively modest. Ling is not any of this."

She's a strong Asian woman who's clearly potent, clearly has control. She's not a victim, not somebody who lets anyone come even close to victimizing her," Jeff Yang, founding publisher of A. magazine, told the San Francisco Examiner. A. magazine is a New York-based publication on Asian-American culture.

Diana Kim, a senior at Hopkins, says, "She's not only mean, loud and almost heartless in her ways, but she has this way of glaring." Then there are the 1.5 Generationers, as they are unofficially labeled. People who immigrated to the United States as young adults, and are now parent-age, comprise the first generation; their English is usually not perfect but good. The second generation is the American-born children of these parents, typically assumed to be more American than their native nationality. The 1.5 generation is everyone in between.

Not completely Americanized, not completely Asianized, 1.5ers usually speak perfect English and are fluent in their native tongue.

In a recent episode, Ling appeared in court as litigator and delivered part of her closing statement in the Mandarin dialect."

Her accent was really bad," says Hsu, "but at least she spoke Mandarin."

Like many 1.5ers, Ling is bilingual and wears fashions reflecting Asian trends. Unlike many 1.5ers, she is strikingly open about sex, even to co-workers, and audibly opinionated about issues. In other words, the already-tangled generational lines are blurred.

Viewers today are talking about Ling -- that she's stereotypical, that she's not. It is doubtful that viewers watch Ally and measure how stereotypically "American" she is, or how stereotypically African-American Rennee Radick, her roommate, is. Still, the buzz about Ling is a good thing: The disagreement indicates that the Asian population in the United States is growing, perhaps even slowly mainstreaming, and all the while steamrolling over once-prevalent immigrant stereotypes.