Netflix’s “The Chair” is a single narrative

No one story can say it all.

Yi Shun Lai

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(L to R: Sandra Oh, Nana Menash, and Holland Taylor; photo: Netflix)

When The Chair, Netflix’s hot new mini-series about a university’s first-ever BIPOC chair of a department, came out, a friend posted a lamentation on the wall of a Facebook group we’re both a part of.

“This is hitting me and my writing partner hard,” she wrote. The premise and setting were similar to a pilot they’d been working on.

I’ve been where she is. The idea of narrative scarcity surrounds all of us, especially those of us who have been struggling for years to write a story starring faces that are familiar to us; stories we’ve lived or want to see: Asian academics; Black creatives; Muslim superheroes, say.

But I’ve come to recognize this scarcity as a failure of the system, rather than an internal failure to come up with more ideas or to act on them quickly enough. And, I’ve come to realize that the stories I want to see still aren’t being produced.

When I was trying to find an agent and publishing house for my first novel, I fielded a number of variations on “I love this, but I can’t think of anyone who would want to buy it,” and “We did an Asian book last year.” I didn’t have the words for it then — and I wouldn’t have never said this to an agent or a publisher — but the question I want to ask now is, “Oh? And did you also do ‘a white book’ last year?” And “Can you think of anyone who’d want to buy books by and about white people?” (I know, by the way, that there are a lot of reasons for not connecting with a book. But it’s good to consider more deeply why a work of art isn’t resonating with you, and the reasons I was given seem to point to a need for such critical thinking.)

There is room, I tell my friend, for more than one narrative about an Asian woman in academia. For one, Sandra Oh is Korean and plays a Korean academic. My friend’s character is Taiwanese. I tell her not to fall into the trap the canon has built for us, where all Asian narratives are deemed the same, or too similar to each other.

For two, every academic is different, and will treat their career arcs differently. Just because the characters are in the same professional field, it doesn’t mean the stories are going to be the same. Come on — how many stories about waiters…

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Yi Shun Lai

Author: A SUFFRAGISTS’S GUIDE TO THE ANTARCTIC (2024), Pin Ups (2020). Columnist, The Writer. theGooddirt.org; @gooddirt. Psst: Say “yeeshun.” You can do it!