Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan Laican analyze how media frame the intimate relationships of these celebrities, who live out the
Korean reality show, We Got Married, and echo the larger China–Korea interactions in diplo-
macy and economy.
Another objective might be cultural politics surrounding the performers who have multi-
cultural backgrounds. East Asian media have never been in lack of Western educated media stars,
but “mixed blood” performers, whose foreignness can mean either privilege or inferiority, have
become more prevalent in East Asian show business in the age of globalization. Each medium
environment as a system has its affordance, which is, in fact, mutable in the long run, for the
performing space of these “foreigners.” For instance, TV drama and variety shows typically attract
audiences by producing closeness and domesticity, whereas film would do so by deliberately
controlling audiences’ cognitive distance with text (Marshall 1997, 198). The “mixed blood”
performers may become the face of fashion and advertisements, but they hardly break into the
highly domestic domain of television drama. In Taiwan, some performers of Eurasian descent have
taken leading roles, previously long occupied by ethno-national performers. In Taiwanese urban
romantic dramas, their physical differences are abstracted into socioeconomic gaps as they usu-
ally play urban youngsters with upper class backgrounds. In another case, Vietnamese-Taiwanese
actress Helen Thanh Dao has complained about being typecast as the Vietnamese wife to a
Taiwanese man, such as in the social realist dramas on Public TV System (The Little Cosmos
No 33 2013). The on-screen difference between the two types of “mixed blood” performers
signi fies the racial hierarchy pattern in Taiwanese society and the lingering Western domination.
In variety shows, the performing artists are framed as individuals suffering from various stereo-
typical imaginations. The eagerness of both types of “mixed blood” performers to break these
stereotypes that the society attributes to them seems to illuminate the myth of multiculturalism
in Taiwanese society which is oscillating between Sino-centrism and post-Sino-centrism. Their
career as public figures in a media business and market-driven capitalist economy depends on
the contesting public attitude towards the formation of culture and individuality in the course of
time. How they are presented in these media deserves more critical attention.
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