Comic Book / The Good Asian

In 1882, the U.S. passed a ban on Chinese immigrants, blaming them for the 1874 depression. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act expanded the ban to include Asians and Arabs. By 1936, over half a century after the original ban...the Chinese was America's first generation to come of age under an immigration ban.

The Good Asian is a 2021 historical Asian-American mystery noir comic book written by Pornsak Pichetshote, with art by Alexandre Tefenkgi, colors by Lee Loughridge, and designs and letters by Jeff Powell. It is published by Image Comics.

San Francisco, 1936. Edison Hark has just arrived from Hawaii, where he was one of the first Chinese-Americans to become a police officer in the United States. Edison Hark is here on a mission for the man who took him in after his mother died: the extremely wealthy and exceedingly well-connected Mason Carroway. Mason, whose health has always been delicate, abruptly suffered some health issues and went into a coma right around the time that his young Chinese maid and possible lover, Ivy Chen, mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Frankie Carroway (Mason's son and essentially Edison's foster brother), has asked Edison to find Ivy and reunite her and Mason in the vague hope that it may help his father recover, but something about the whole affair, especially Ivy's disappearance, is just not right. Another issue is the presence of Victoria Carroway (Mason's daughter and Frankie's sister), with whom Edison has a... complicated relationship.

Edison begins working together with the virulently racist Detective O'Malley in San Francisco's Chinatown as he tries to chase down leads on Ivy Chen, and soon learns that the local Asian-American community faces much greater repression and open bigotry than was the case in Hawaii, complete with complicated politics and tensions both within the Asian-American community and with the the white majority around them. Edison encounters numerous obstacles, not the least of which is when he learns that there is a vicious killer loose in Chinatown, with rumor saying that the killer is Hui Long, a notorious assassin who worked for the Tongs years ago, and who has apparently returned in a quest for revenge against the bosses who turned on him.

If Edison can't find and stop the killer quickly, the police and public will terrorize Chinatown in a brutal crackdown...

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Tropes included in The Good Asian:

• Anti-Hero: Edison is a cynical, manipulative, deeply disillusioned man. He recognizes that an uncomfortably large part of his job is going after his own people and sometimes terrorizing and abusing them in the hopes that it prevents the rest of the police and larger white communities from doing much worse and/or on a larger scale. At his absolute best, he's a Pragmatic Hero with a case of Good Is Not Nice, in his darker moments he can slip pretty far into being an Unscrupulous Hero.
• Arranged Friendship: When Edison was a boy and his mother was the Carroway family maid, she pushed him hard to be friends with Mason's son Frankie, knowing that being friends with a rich white family would open a lot of doors for a poor Chinese-American boy that would otherwise be closed in that era. Young Edison liked Frankie decently well, but was also shown to resent being encouraged/forced to spend all his time with Frankie. Years later as an adult, Edison recognizes that he has basically been manipulating and lying to Frankie so long that, when combined with the resentment he felt over the years, even he isn't really sure what his real feelings are for his friend/foster brother.
• Assassins Are Always Betrayed: Rumor says that years ago, Hui Long was a terrifying hitman for the Tongs, but they betrayed him. Hui Long then vowed to get his revenge on his former employers and their descendants, and now after years of him apparently lying low, recent killings have people believing that he's back...
• Attack the Injury: Edison suffers a wound from a hatchet when he fights Hui Long in the first trade paperback. At the start of the second trade, as he's about to get into a brawl with O'Malley, Edison reopens the wound and immediately thinks that he has to end the fight quickly, before O'Malley can notice the injury and take advantage. As soon as he thinks this, O'Malley notices the heavy bleeding, smiles, and jams a finger right into the wound.
• Ax-Crazy: Silas is an unhinged madman with a legitimate grudge against the world who is very dangerous in a fight and has little to no compunction about killing people in cold blood.
• The Beard: Played with slightly. Victoria was inadvertantly one to Terrence Chang. The two became friends, but despite Victoria's attempts (and at least one panel showing them laying in bed after an unsuccessful attempt at sex), a Relationship Upgrade didn't happen due to Terrence being gay. They remained friends and business associates, and were seen together often enough that Silas believed they were a secret couple and tried to obtain proof. It instead lead to him getting proof of Terrence being gay, and Victoria paid Silas off to keep it secret rather than see Terrence and all his work in Chinatown ruined due to the homophobic laws and attitudes of the time.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: As children, Victoria Carroway despised Edison, believing that he was sucking up to her father Mason and brother Frankie as a meal ticket. (Largely thanks to pushing by his mother, who saw the obvious benefits to having rich white friends and how it could open doors and create opportunities for Edison.) Eventually he won her over and during their teens they became lovers.
• Beneath the Mask: Edison often indicates that he has to lie a lot when he's taking to other Asian people, because as a police officer, he knows just how deep the racism goes and has to indulge in it himself in order to get the other officers behind him. Even Detective O'Malley, who is virulently racist against Asians, is pretty fine with Edison. Edison, however, loathes the fact that he needs to constantly betray his own people just to try to minimize the harm that they will inevitably be dealt.
• Bigot with a Badge: It can be safely assumed that any white police officer is one, but O'Malley takes the cake and is by far the most prominent example. It's shown that officers who are racial minorities aren't always much better as far as oppressed minority communities are concerned; Edison has to put on a show of racism and being hard on Chinese-Americans in order to be sure that he will be accepted by and get backup from white officers, and has certainly internalized some negative beliefs about Chinese-Americans.
• Bittersweet Ending: Heavy on the bitter, light on the sweet. Edison manages to live through some very dangerous circumstances, but he is officially blamed for the Chinatown killings and must hide out under a new face and identity for the rest of his life. Victoria, revealed near the end as not being nearly as much of a villain as Edison thought, survives an offscreen suicide attempt, but due to being a woman her position as the heir-apparent to the various Carroway companies was always precarious and will probably be lost forever. Edison manages to ensure the Carroways will continue to fund and invest in Chinatown, but the residents will continue suffering under oppressive conditions, while any progress will be incremental and require generations to achieve. Otherwise, nearly all the news is bad: Frankie is killed, both of the Yan brothers, big players in Chinatown, are killed, Ivy was killed before the story ever started, and several other people have also either died or had to go on the run as a result of events in the story.
• Blackmail: When Eddy and Victoria talk, Victoria shows him how the Carroways accounts were regularly seeing large withdrawals on the same day every month. Eddy figures it was Mason paying blackmail to Ivy Chen. It was actually Victoria paying a blackmail to Silas, Ivy's half-brother, in order to make sure Terrence Chang's secret homosexuality remained secret.
• Blackmail Backfire: Silas blackmailed both Victoria and the Yan brothers regarding Terrence Chang's homosexuality. Spiteful and thrilled by his newfound power, Silas kept increasing his demands until the Yan brothers tried to kill him rather than continue to pay.
• Blunt "No": Terence Chang asks Edison Hark to help them capture the killer loose in Chinatown. Edison, who has only come to San Francisco to find Ivy Chen, shuts him down with a quick "No." Edison's narration says that it was worth it just for the look on Chang's face.
• Body Horror:
  • In the first volume, an Asian kid leads Edison to an unlocked basement where he found a dead body. However, the body has been there for weeks and become bloated and infested with maggots. The skin is so discolored that the only way Edison knows the corpse used to be a white man was due to a small region around the fingertips not yet being discolored.
  • The second volume includes Edison getting his face burned off with lye. It's a pretty harrowing scene.
• Boomerang Bigot: Downplayed, but Edison has definitely internalized some nasty attitudes about Chinese Americans.
• Child of Two Worlds: Both Edison and his murderous Evil Counterpart Silas are caught between two worlds, the world of upper class white America, and the oppressive reality for Asian-Americans where they are second class citizens and seldom more than one angry white person or bigoted cop away from danger.
• Crusading Lawyer: Terence Chang. Frankie hired him to get Edison out of prison, but they already knew each other because Chang is from one of the Six Families, the leaders of San Francisco's Chinatown, and has been working with the Carroways on their investments into Chinatown. Chang's cause is to make a better world and life for Chinese-Americans, both locally through such investments and through political pressure.
• Deconstructor Fleet: The second volume subverts or deconstructs many noir tropes and archetypes, arguably to the point where it's to the detriment of the overall story. Some of these include:
  • The Chessmaster: Mason Carroway is seemingly set up as a Chessmaster, a rich and connected man with his fingers in dozens of pies and with interests and influence everywhere. Edison is teased with the possibility that Mason, prior to his health problems, was pulling strings everywhere and involved in dark dealings. In the end he just turns out to be a lonely and well-intentioned old man who is not all-powerful, and whose knowledge, wealth, and influence can only have limited effects at best in the world around him.
  • Close-Knit Community: Minority communities in cities are close because they have no choice but to be in order to survive and because they share some generational trauma in common. The people within them are not a Planet of Hats and have lots of their own (sometimes vicious) infighting, resentment, Tall Poppy Syndrome and trauma bubbling under the surface. These stresses and tensions are at a constant simmer at best, and sometimes build to an explosion, and while there are some benefits to these sorts of communities the pressures within them can make the life of everyone who lives there a little bit miserable.
  • Defective Detective: While the hard drinking, slovenly, suffering from personal losses O'Malley is not a Clueless Detective, he certainly isn't the sort of "cynical, knows everything going on in the streets, and everything that's really going on in society" type of detective the way this archetype is often portrayed. Other cops think, with pretty good reason, that O'Malley is a washed up has-been, and virtually his only tactics are Police Brutality and threatening to deport innocent people to China. He eventually pins all the Chinatown killings on Edison, blatantly ignoring the indisputable truth that Edison could not have committed many of the crimes/killings that happened because they began before he arrived in San Francisco.
  • Fall Guy: Both Michael Martinez (the man convicted of and executed for killing Edison's mother), and Edison himself become convenient fall guys for the police, not as part of a conspiracy or to protect a Man Behind the Man, but because it was much more convenient and easier to blame things on them than to find the parties truly responsible for the crimes they were accused of committing.
  • Femme Fatale: At various points both Victoria Carroway and Ivy Chen are set up as possible examples. Victoria is Edison's beautiful Old Flame who has a complicated relationship with Edison, and tries to set him up to be killed after pretending to seek his help, while Ivy is rumored to be a seductress and manipulator of white men. The end of the second volume sees Victoria revealed as a woman driven to desperate measures in an attempt to help someone that she cared about and her "pet project" of improving Chinatown, and while Edison will never know the truth about Ivy for sure, he comes to think that the stories about Ivy were likely exaggerated gossip and rumor and she was just someone doing her best to survive in tough circumstances.
  • The Fixer: The Carroways employ Nash as one. According to Victoria, he made the situation much worse by trying to torture Silas's location out of Ivy, making Ivy Defiant to the End. When a tied up Ivy tried to attack Victoria, Nash accidentally killed her, making it certain that Silas would be out for revenge.
  • Girl Friday: In the second volume Lucy Fan, who briefly helped Edison in the first volume and went on a date with him until being exposed to the darker side of what being an Asian-American cop in the era meant, starts investigating the mystery after Edison is blamed for the killings and disappears. While intelligent and level-headed, she is just an ordinary person and not a trained and experienced detective, and promptly falls into a trap that could have easily gotten her killed if not for the fact that Holly Chao isn't a hardened killer and took pity on her.
  • Police Are Useless: When you're a heavily discriminated against minority, bigoted white police officers are the last thing you want to see. Especially when many will resort to brutality or threatening to deport your family in a heartbeat. Not to mention they can choose to just look the other way or even give the okay to angry mobs that want to attack you.
  • Professional Killer: The mysterious, ultra efficient, underworld assassin Hui Long, who people swear isn't real even as they can't help speculating about his return and quest for vengeance actually isn't real. He is a convenient cover for Silas, however. Whether there ever was a real Hui Long or if he just the result of rumors, tall tales, and Gossip Evolution is unknown.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The story is set in 1936 and it includes all of the casual racism, misogyny, and ugliness of that time period. Detective O'Malley, who is a contact the Carroways have in the local police, routinely uses quite a number of Asian slurs.
• Disposing of a Body: Well, less disposing of, and more trying to move to a less disastrous location. When Frankie is killed by Silas in the Jade Palace, the club that is supposed to be the centerpiece of a new Chinatown, Edison knows it's going to be an absolute disaster for Chinatown, because once a young, white, American millionaire is found murdered in Chinatown, it will give both police and local racists an excuse to go wild attacking Chinese-Americans. So he tries to move the body elsewhere... and is promptly caught in the act by none other than O'Malley.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Edison sees a raid going down and the white cops casually being racist and begins thinking about how bad white people are. And then two white women walk by in skimpy (for the time) dresses:
  And as if on cue...my type saunters right on by. Hollering my hypocrisy, all while reminding me...of the trouble—my type's gotten into me.
• Dramatis Personae: The second trade paperback starts with one, to catch everyone up on the the Carroway family and major players in Chinatown, as well as certain events from the first trade paperback.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Silas is an unhinged blackmailer and killer, but he truly and deeply loved his mother and was similarly devoted to his half-sister Ivy Chen. Many of the consequences of the story (including many of the people who die as a result), come about due to that devotion to his sister.
• Evil Counterpart: Silas is a dark reflection of Edison, with similar but opposite experiences and upbringing. Edison is the son of a rich family's maid that was taken in by them after she died. Silas is the half Asian son of a white heiress whose family turned their backs on her and him due to her relationship with an Asian man. Edison has lived with the truth of being an Asian-American man who will never be accepted by the upper class white America that he grew up on the periphery of and being despised by Asian-Americans for being part of the police that oppresses them. Meanwhile Silas was rejected by his wealthy white family aside from his mother due to being part Chinese-American, and can't fit in or be accepted as he longs for in the Chinese-American community because he looks white. Mason tried to hand Edison at least some of the keys to the kingdom, but for personal reasons and resentments Edison became a police detective instead. Silas was denied his birthright and came up with a scheme to strike back as a criminal.
• Fall Guy: After becoming a cop, Edison learned that Michael Martinez, the man convicted and executed for killing his mother, was innocent. Mason genuinely put pressure on the police to find out who killed Edison's mother, and because they had no clue who could have done it, they simply picked a local criminal and blamed it on him.
• Fingore: During their fight early in the second volume, Edison bites off one of O'Malley's fingers. It's safe to say that this doesn't endear Edison to O'Malley. From that point on It's Personal for O'Malley, and he ignores any contradictions in evidence to blame Edison for the Chinatown killings.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Frankie Carroway is the foolish sibling; a naive, well-intentioned case of Idle Rich with a history of being a Handsome Lech. Victoria is the responsible one, an intelligent, skeptical woman with a keen sense for business and the realities of the world. A flashback shows that Mason considered Edison, who was like a son to Mason, to be the truly responsible one, but Edison's cynicism, a number of bad choices during his youth, and the psychological weight of his job and disillusionment mean that he's less steady and reliable than Mason believed.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Edison is an old-fashioned brawler, and is quite good at it, as he can and on several occasion does take on multiple attackers with his bare hands. But when he faces off with Hui Long actually Silas for the first time, Hui Long proves to be a skilled martial artist and way out of Edison's league. During the fight Edison thinks about how he despises martial arts.
  Edison: [Internal Monologue as Hui Long is beating him around the room] A kicker. Of course he's a kicker. Just once I want to meet a Chinaman who puts his dukes up.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Edison Hark has a classic Anti-Hero/grizzled scar that runs down one side of his face, from above his left eyebrow to his cheek. Ironically, it didn't come about as a result of, say, working undercover or brawling with a criminal, but a slap from Victoria Carroway, who was wearing a ring at the time.
• Hate at First Sight: Edison despises Terrence Chang, the seemingly perfect golden boy of San Francisco's Chinatown and the most respected lawyer of the area, pretty much the moment he lays eyes on Terrence.
• Hardboiled Detective: Edison very much evokes the feeling of one, being a cynical, trench coat clad detective operating in an underworld full of backstabbing, shifting loyalties, and who relies on his skill as an investigator and as well as his fists and gun in a fight to see him through.
• Hyper-Awareness: The reason Edison Hark is a good detective — he can see details that people are hiding, like a Chinese man trying to hide scars or his partner, Detective O'Malley, no longer caring if his suit is in good condition. The eye for detail actually come from the fact the Edison wanted to be an artist and was shown to have genuine talent, but that got pushed to the side as he grew up.
• Hypocrite: Silas may talk the talk about supporting Chinese-Americans against the racist white majority, but he doesn't hesitate to blackmail and threaten to destroy other Asian-Americans and everything they've built for his own profit.
• It's Not About the Request: When Edison refuses to help Terrence Chang find the killer loose in China Town during their first meeting, it's not because he's opposed to doing so, but because he immediately feels a bit of Irrational Hatred towards Chang. (Also, he feels his time will be taken up trying to help the Carroways, he only later learns that the two incidents are connected.)
• Magic Plastic Surgery: After Silas burns off most of his face with lye, Edison goes to a back alley doctor and within a few months he looks like an entirely different man with a normal face.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Interracial marriage was illegal in California at the time, as a younger Edison pointed out to Victoria when she suggested they live there together, and Silas's maternal grandparents turned their backs on both him and his mother when she, a white woman, first fell in love with and then conceived a child with an Asian man.
• Missing Mom: Edison Hark's mother died when he was young, so he was taken in and raised by Mason Carroway.
• Mugging the Monster: The second volume ends with several white thugs going to mug Edison, smugly noting how there aren't any police around. He notes that they're right, there aren't any police around, and begins beating up the nearest of them.
• Not Blood, Not Family: This was initially Victoria's attitude towards Edison when Mason first adopted him, as she viewed Edison with disdain, believed that he was using her family as a Meal Ticket, and went so far as to tell him "You're not family, you're trash my father gave a home." It's implied that it took years, and seeing Edison's genuine concern when Mason was struggling with his heart condition, before Victoria accepted him. It's also ironic that she was initially so dead set against Edison, considering the two wound up as secret lovers years later.
• Not Blood Siblings: Despite having been raised as essentially foster siblings after the death of Edison's mother, Edison and Victoria Carroway wound up as lovers in their teens, and Edison still carries a fierce torch for her, even though he bitterly believes that their relationship was doomed from the start due to racial attitudes of the time and refused to truly give it a chance when the Carroways moved to California.
• One Free Hit: When confronted by the son of a man that Edison had arrested earlier the story (and whom Edison had roughed up when the man tried to run), Edison offers the son a free shot, but says that if the shot doesn't put Edison down he's going to immediately fight back. Then subverted, as while the son is thinking this over and perhaps on the edge of not going through with it, Edison knocks him senseless while he's distracted.
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy: Frankie Carroway is a big investor in Chinatown and a fancier of Asian/Asian-American culture. He's deeply hurt to find out that despite the money, genuine good will, and time he spends in Chinatown that the residents do not see him as one of them.
• Race Fetish: Mason seems to have a thing for Asian women. Edison is happy to sleep with either Asian or white women, but he certainly carries a torch for Victoria, and is implied to routinely hire white prostitutes and call out Victoria's name during sex.
• Raised by Natives: After Edison's mother died, he was raised by the rich Mason Carroway, whom his mother worked for as a maid. After a while Edison started bitterly wondering if Mason was actually having an affair with his mother, due to the extent of Mason's generosity and devotion to Edison, especially after Mason later appears to be involved with Ivy Chen, another Chinese maid working for him.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Frankie Carroway asks Edison to find Ivy, his father's lover, believing that it might cheer his father up for them to be reunited. Frankie doesn't know that Ivy was killed as a result of his sister Victoria's actions, and she had already confessed as much to her father before his health worsened.
• Shown Their Work: The series is thoroughly researched to give feel for the times and the circumstances that Chinese-Americans found themselves laboring under at the time. The end of both trade paperbacks are filled with notes and timelines about laws and court cases that effected the setting, as well as historical inspirations for the series.
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Edison, who internalized his father's cynical (and not actually wrong) view of America's race relations, has been exposed to the dark side of humanity through his police experience, and been disappointed by the law, calls out certain other characters on misplaced hopefulness and idealism, and is sometimes proven right to take such a cynical view.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: Both Victoria Carroway and Lucy Fan call Edison out for his jaded worldview and inability to allow any room for hope or positivity, and they are sometimes proved right.
• Start of Darkness: The origins of Silas and how he came to harbor a bitter hatred for White America are told via a flashback. It shows how his mother, a white woman and heiress to a rich family, was disowned by her parents for falling in love with a Chinese man, how they refused to help when their daughter begged for help with medical treatment for Silas's father and refused to have anything to do with her or Silas, leading to the preventable death of Silas's father and, years later, her own. This led to Silas trying to find a home with San Francisco's Chinese community, only to be largely excluded because he was a stranger not raised in the culture/community who looks white. The exceptions to this would be his half-sister Ivy Chen and her friend Holly Chao, who accepted him and to whom he would become fanatically devoted.
• Stepford Smiler:
  • Edison was pushed into being close with the Carroways by his mother, regardless of his misgivings or the cynical views about race relations he started absorbing from his father. He became even more reliant on them when first his father left and then his mother was murdered, and played the role of the perfect son to Mason and perfect brother to Frankie and Victoria to the hilt, while shoving down his own true feelings, misgivings, and other emotional turmoil. This eventually resulted in him having blow ups with both Victoria and Mason, after which he distanced himself from the family.
  • Most of Chinatown is forced into this to some degree, having to constantly play roles for both their neighbors and the white majority that surround them. This means a lot of having to play at being the ideal Chinese son/daughter, having to play at being non-threatening and not drawing attention to themselves with white people, all while struggling with the emotional and mental weight of life.
    Edison: [Internal Monologue upon meeting Terrence Chang] You don't have to look hard to find a Chinaman acting perfect. 'Cuz their folks gave up too much to accept less. And America'll use any pretense to see you as the problem. For yellow folk, chasing perfect is normal—it's the one who get there that you have to be wary of. The perfect smile. Posture. Part in their hair... perfection takes sacrifice, so you have to be suspicious of anyone sad enough to go through with it.
  • When Edison first visits the Carroway mansion in San Francisco and talks to Frankie, they take a moment to observe a portrait of Mason, surrounded by Frankie, Victoria, and Edison after he'd been adopted into the family. Frankie reminisces about how Mason used to say that the day they had that portrait done was the day they truly became a family. Edison immediately has a flashback to a young Victoria telling him "You're not my brother, you're trash my father gave a home." Edison shows no sign of what he is thinking, or that he ever showed how hurtful similar incidents must have been until however long passed before he won Victoria over and got her to accept him.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: Edison, at least in his past, had adopted a Respectability Politics outlook, even saying at certain points to characters things like "Maybe they'll stop treating us like crap when we stop giving them an excuse to!" It's also shown that residents of Chinatown try to walk a tightrope and go out of their way to appease the sensibilities of white people and not appear strange or threatening.
• Tragic Bigot:
  • O'Malley was probably some level of bigot before, but apparently his drug addict son died in an opium den in Chinatown, and that's when he came to truly hate Chinese-Americans.
  • The half white, half Chinese-American Silas has despised white people ever since his rich white maternal grandparents disowned his mother for falling in love with a Chinese man and refused to aid his mother when she begged them for help with his father's medical treatment. This refusal to help led directly to the death of his father, and a few years later, that of his mother, leaving Silas embittered and hateful.
• Vicariously Ambitious: Edison's mother passionately wanted a better life for him, and knew exactly how difficult that would be for an Asian-American boy in America during that era, so she very forcefully pushed Edison to ingratiate himself with the Carroways to make that potential better life easier to achieve.
• Wham Episode: The first trade volume concludes with Hui Long/Silas Woodward killing both Donnie Yan and then Frankie Carroway in the Jade Palace, more or less guaranteeing disaster for Chinatown.
• Wham Line: From the second issue:
  Victoria: You never had any idea how many secrets [Mason] had, did you?
  Edison: What secrets?
  Victoria: Name it. He's the most powerful person in any room he enters. He always knows more than he lets on about everything—me, you—hell—even your mother's murder.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: A particularly racist example, as Detective O'Malley compliments Edison's detective skills by saying that perhaps all Asians aren't all so bad. Except he uses an Asian slur while doing so, making the whole thing seem disingenuous.

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