Pity the American office worker: overworked, undervalued and kept in the dark about the true intentions of his employer, which are somehow weirder and more odious than he could possibly know. The beauty of the corporate-culture satire “Severance” lies in just how universal, how quotidian, its protagonist’s gripes are. On some cosmic level, Mark Scout wants to investigate the aims of his mysteriously tight-lipped company. Day to day, though, he must slog away at unsatisfying and impenetrable tasks, browbeaten by a series of cold, uncaring bosses. Who hasn’t been there?
This season made a curious new addition to that line of Big Bad Bosses — a puzzle-box of a character, more loaded with menace than any of the middle managers who came before. Introduced, without fanfare, in the season’s premiere, “Miss Huang” is a steely Asian girl who, despite not looking old enough to enter PG-13 movies on her own, is apparently responsible for managing Mark and his adult colleagues. “Why are you a child?” someone asks, to which she only replies: “Because of when I was born.” Miss Huang is given no further explanation. She orders employees around, unsmiling, in her prim adolescent voice and middle-schooler knee socks, then plays with a hand-held water-ring-toss toy at her desk, all the more chilling for her lack of justification.
But we are meant to make some assumptions. Miss Huang is orderly, diligent, quick-witted. She shows not a pinch of personality, so her talents must lie in sheer intelligence or efficacy. We can infer by her position that she has excelled beyond her years in some way — that she is precocious, perhaps even a prodigy. Standing quietly in the corner, eyeing the staff, she occasionally looks forlorn, a kind of executive waif, yet the overall effect is of sinister vigilance. You suspect coiled ambition, backstabbery in waiting. “When I played her, I didn’t feel very scary,” the actress Sarah Bock said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, crew members would come up to me like: ‘You freaked me out. You’re terrifying.’”
The threat Miss Huang poses is more spectral.
Watching this strange corporate poppet float around all season long, injecting scenes with an aura of ominous efficiency and little else, I kept having the thought that I knew her, somehow.
And we have seen Miss Huang before — shades of her, at least. We have seen her in model students like Sanjay Patel on “Modern Family,” Cho Chang in “Harry Potter” (a Ravenclaw, naturally) and all the nameless TV Asian kids who effortlessly win spelling bees or chess tournaments. We have seen the top-of-their-class Asian doctors of “Grey’s Anatomy,” “House” and “E.R.” We have seen punchlines of ultracapability like “Asian Annie” on “Community” — the only person able to usurp the already-overachieving white Annie — or the high-ponytailed Joy Lin on “Girls,” who gets picked for a job over Lena Dunham’s Hannah because, while less personable, she knows how to use Adobe Photoshop. There is the corrupt accountant Lau in “The Dark Knight,” to whom Gotham’s mob bosses outsource their money laundering because he is “good with calculation,” and the geneticist Dr. Henry Wu, whose brilliance unleashes the hell of “Jurassic Park.” These are all wildly different characters in wildly different entertainments, but their Asianness is deployed to the same effect: as a shorthand for intellectual ability and über-proficiency.
This trope is so familiar, in fact, that we often see it playfully inverted. Across the six seasons of “Silicon Valley,” the Chinese software engineer Jian-Yang is repeatedly mistaken for a brilliant, devious plotter, but his enigmatic behavior and deadpan speech turn out to be mostly bog-standard naïveté. To Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, the schlubby Asian nerd Ned proves more vital as a friend than as a genius hacker. On “Gilmore Girls,” the Korean character Lane grows up tiger-mothered only to end up becoming a rock musician, while her white best friend overfixates on academics. In the recent movie “Mickey 17,” Steven Yuen’s character is openly scheming yet also comically hapless at that scheming.
With Miss Huang, “Severance” gives us an especially eerie spin on the original archetype. At first, it seems her Asianness might be unimportant. But other parts of the season pointedly plumb the racial politics of the workplace. A Black manager, given an artwork of the company’s white chief executive in blackface, has to swallow his disgust, while another Black character in the room beams a strained smile; afterward, he rapidly grows disenchanted with his job. So what is the hypercompetent Asian child in the corner meant to signify?
Her youth feels like the key. An overproficient Asian adult is one thing, but de-aged into a child and given power over a professional setting, the overexcelling model minority goes from annoying to contemptible. Mark and his colleagues are visibly irritated by Miss Huang, questioning her credentials, scowling at her policing of others, rejecting her (quite useful) suggestion to stop a nosebleed with petroleum jelly. Miss Huang’s presence feels wrong, unnatural, threatening in a heightened way. The interloping Asians of Hollywood’s past tended to be caricatures of pure evil or buffoonery — Fu Manchu in the former category, Long Duk Dong of “Sixteen Candles” and Mr. Yunioshi of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in the latter — but the threat Miss Huang poses is more spectral. What she seems to portend, to the entire office, is a beady, competitive superintelligence. Her menace is her own capability.
This anxiety has its own baggy history. In 1882, it was resentment against cheap and efficient Chinese laborers that led to the nation’s first law barring immigration from a specific racial group. In the decades since, as Asians in the United States have ascended across various white-collar professions, becoming all but synonymous with “achievement,” those same xenophobic fears and worries have ballooned outward from menial labor and into all jobs having to do with desks and computers and the intellect — leaving a share of suspicious Americans feeling like John Henry, their livelihoods jeopardized by some cold, inhuman steam engine of Asian aptitude. For the better part of the last decade, Harvard University battled a lawsuit accusing it of discrimination against Asian students in its admissions process, with plaintiffs claiming the school gave Asians’ test scores less value than traits like courage, kindness and “personality” — and in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that this bias was real, bringing about the eradication of affirmative action.
“Severance” toys, rather heartbreakingly, with exactly this prejudice. Midseason, in a fit of juvenile pique after not being allowed to play the theremin at a retirement party, Miss Huang, it is implied, rats out a fellow manager for improperly stapling papers. She doesn’t bring this matter up to their C-suite superiors for her own gain, though. She is simply doing her job and maybe seeking a bit of petty revenge. Then her plot arc completely deflates; this minor insouciance is her sole moment of true menace. By the season’s close, it is clear that she is not some conniving mastermind after all — merely a middle-management pawn, tasked with overseeing people she has no particular interest in outcompeting.
But the show generally asks us to see the world through Mark’s everyman-American-worker eyes. It’s to him, and his peers, that Miss Huang seems like a scheming figure whose very presence invites concern — provoking a common set of American insecurities about the type of person she might be, even if she is not. “Severance” never seems to fully recognize what it is doing here. Yet in using the precocious Asian character to invoke something forbidding, it triggers the classic model-minority curse: You are prized for proficiency and just as often rejected for it. Even if you’re just a child.
Source photographs for illustration above: Apple TV+.
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