compelled me. I have only known proximity," Henry confesses (130). Proximity is an

ontological marker of his status in America as an ethnic minority subject.

 Henry's profession of espionage symbolically illustrates the dilemma of the model

minority or a docile inside-outsider whose admittance to a mainstream society is often

predicated upon the performative manipulation/exploitation of his interstitial minority

subject position, which underpins the privilege and rights of the majority. Lee's

characterization of Henry is particularly interesting, because of its simultaneous

invocation of the seemingly incompatible characteristics often attributed to Asians. In

critiquing Anglo-American literature for its biased portrayal of Asians, Elaine Kim has

pointed out that it typically splits the stereotypical image of Asian Americas into the

"good" ones, loyal sidekicks and amiable servants, for example, and the "bad" ones or

"brutal hordes and sinister villains."319 Lee integrates these two split images of Asian-

Americans into one in Henry, who is a very complex mixture of both these "good" and

"bad" stereotypical images of Asians, despite his good surface appearance of the model

minority. Interpellated as a social abject in the Althusserian sense, Henry lives in a dismal

inner vacuum caused by the lack of the idealizing and mirroring selfobjects, the existence

and support of which, according to Kohut, are critically important for psychological

survival and health. As a result, Henry internalizes the hegemonic racial and cultural

ideology and serves mainstream American society by performing the art of duplicity and

proximity as a cultural mole. However, Henry's docility and servitude cannot override

the undertone evoked by the theme of a sinister and treacherous Asian villain in popular

formula fiction, which has produced many well-known characters like Sax Rohmer's Dr.