Take-Back-the-Trope

Take-Back-the-Trope is a photo collection and performance project through which Ever and the Gang of Five reclaim control over stereotyped images of Asian men. Its significance lies in the shift from being defined by other people’s expectations to creating and circulating a comic, collective image on their own terms. The project begins as a joke among friends on the road through southern Taiwan, then becomes a public performance whose reception reaches beyond the group itself.

Origins and Purpose

The project takes shape during the trip south, as the friends pose for photographs that parody familiar racial caricatures. At the southern tip of Taiwan, Ever asks what stereotype the group is reclaiming this time. Marc calls the pose “Five Wise Asian Sages,” and Sam solemnly adds, “We Asians. Are so wise.” The tableau is intentionally exaggerated: the five young men pose together with their eyes closed, turning the stereotype of Asian wisdom into a performance they control.

Ever’s response is more than amusement. Watching the group choose how to represent themselves, she feels affection and recognizes that she is not the only one taking charge of identity that summer. Her insight links the project to her own unsettled experience of belonging. Earlier, she had felt an unexpected relief when her Asian Americanness seemed invisible among people in Taiwan; Sophie had also called her a “Twinkie,” exposing the gap between Ever’s American self-understanding and the cultural fluency expected of her. Against that history of being categorized from outside and found inadequate, Take-Back-the-Trope offers a different possibility: identity can be made visible without surrendering the right to shape its meaning.

Photographs and Shared Authorship

Ever gives the informal series its name when she raises her phone and announces the Take-Back-the-Trope photo collection. The gesture makes her more than a witness to the boys’ joke. She becomes the photographer and organizer, helping turn a passing pose into a recurring project. In response, the five friends bow deeply to her and call her “our daughter,” placing her inside the group’s affectionate performance rather than outside it as an observer.

The photographs recur as the trip continues. At Sun Moon Lake, Marc refuses to explain in advance what he and the others have planned for their seven-minute performance block. Instead, the Gang of Five poses again for a new image: arms and legs raised in crane kicks, fists cocked like dragon strikes, and teeth bared in an overblown martial-arts tableau. Marc identifies the pose as “Magical Martial Arts Gurus,” and the group’s theatrical aggression makes the caricature legible as a joke they are directing themselves. The students around them roar with laughter; Ever laughs too and adds their names to the performance list. Her role has expanded from naming the collection to helping make the group’s self-representation part of a larger public program.

From Joke to Public Performance

The project’s clearest public counterpart arrives at the Ms. Chien Tan Beauty Contest. Marc, Sam, David, Benji, and Peter appear as contestants, with the group taking on the effeminate Asian-male stereotype on their own terms. The contest’s theatrical setting turns the photo series’ playful premise into an event staged before the wider camp audience: the friends do not merely pose as a counter-image, but step into a spectacle that makes the stereotype itself part of the joke.

Ever responds with such force that her throat aches from cheering. She looks for Rick in the audience and wonders how the adults present will receive the performance. The Dragon, who manages the camp, is clapping with her arms over her head, while two dignitaries beside her cheer just as enthusiastically. Their response complicates any simple opposition between rebellious students and disapproving authority. The performance remains irreverent, but its reception shows that the group’s chosen image can be celebrated in public rather than merely tolerated in private.

Meaning and Limits

Take-Back-the-Trope gathers several distinct acts of self-authorship: the boys invent poses, Ever names and photographs the collection, and the larger group carries its spirit onto the stage. The recurring photographs preserve a version of the friends that differs from the narrow measures of achievement Ever associates with the World Journal, where a Chinese American prodigy’s spelling bee, piano debut, science-fair victory, and Yale football recruitment had made him a recurring benchmark against which she judged herself. Here, the boys’ value is not established by winning conventional honors. They make their own joke, invite others into it, and become memorable through performance and solidarity.

The project does not erase the stereotypes it invokes; its humor depends on the audience recognizing them. Its change of emphasis is instead in who controls the staging. The poses exaggerate familiar images, but the friends choose the exaggeration, and the audience’s laughter and applause answer an act of their own making. For Ever, the collection becomes part of a wider movement toward self-definition: the camera records not an imposed verdict about who the group is, but a shared claim to decide how they will appear.