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.