The rise and fall of Suzy Singh, Master Chef’s last Asian contestant

As the last Asian contestant standing in the recently concluded US version of Master Chef, Gordon Ramsay’s cooking competition TV show for amateur cooks, I was ready to pull out my pom-poms to root for Suzy Singh.

A 27-year-old neural engineer from a suburb of Chicago, Singh appeared cheery and smart, and she cooked ambitious Indian-inspired food, like her signature dish, Tandoori Cod en Papillote.

She also had a story that any kid of American immigrants can identify with. “I’m a first-generation South Asian,” she said when she was first selected for the show. “Being a chef in Indian culture is against the norm. There’s this demand to be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, a businessperson. When I told mom wanted to be a chef and go to culinary school, she was like, [in an accent] ‘You want to be a servant? I’m highly, highly disappointed in you.’”

An Indian-American kitchen Rambo

An Indian-American rebel who was going to chuck her proper neural engineering career to pursue her dream of opening a food truck in Chicago? Go, Suzy Singh!

But it didn’t take long for Singh’s true and unflattering colours to fly. She could be arrogant. “My dishes are restaurant-quality dishes, and I am the best cook here by far,” she unabashedly chirped while preparing salmon three ways.

I had misjudged Suzy Singh. I thought she’d be an Indian-American kitchen Rambo, a bold and unorthodox female role model who was going out on a limb to pursue her passion for cooking. But it quickly became apparent that she was really just the quintessential Asian American stereotype dressed in chef’s whites: an overachieving, ass-kissing perfectionist who’d win at any cost.

In one memorable scene, after she went above and beyond what other competitors had done by making a duo of tarts, a judge told her sarcastically: “You remind me of the girl in high school I used to sit by who was like, teacher you forgot to give us homework.”

She embraced the insult straight-faced. “I was that girl in high school,” she said, as the other contestants chuckled.

Accordingly, Singh didn’t win any popularity contests with the other show participants. Max, an 18-year-old contestant who became Singh’s nemesis, commented that “Suzy is so (bleeping) arrogant. She thinks she’s a professor of culinary arts.”

Another competitor, Christine, added, “I don’t think she’s the one to beat; she’s the one I want to beat up.”

Sweet schadenfreude and vegetable korma

Given her big head, it became fun to watch Singh flounder over the course of the season. In an episode where the contestants were asked to concoct a vegetarian dish using ingredients such as curry powder, she giggled with delight. “It’s just dangling the bait,” she said, confident she’d win the challenge. “Cut me open, you’ve got curry powder coming out.”

Singh used the ingredients to prepare samosas with a pear chutney. “This is so pretty, omigosh,” she said to herself as she stirred and fried. “I’m in love with this food that I’m making.”

But when she wasn’t selected as one of the top three cooks in this challenge — and horror of horrors, a non-Indian competitor won with a vegetable korma—it wasn’t pity I felt for Singh; it was a sweet jolt of schadenfreude.

It caught me off guard—I had expected to cheer for her, big head and all, in a kind of Asian America solidarity. But here was a case where even though an Asian American was allowed to buck the Harvard Medical School trope, she was still tethered to the stereotype of the Asian as exasperating Type A overachiever. The sweet dreamer, the loveable goof, or the confident visionary— these are complex and humanising roles reserved for everyone else, even when it came to reality TV.

Of course, its not Singh’s fault that she’s an overachieving perfectionist (or that the producers of the show sought to portray her that way). It’s just that I didn’t want to root for another one — there are enough Suzy Singhs on TV as it is. She’s just one in a long line of recent media images, particularly in advertising, that unerringly portrays Asian Americans as uniformly “mathematically adept or intellectually gifted,” as a recent Washington Post article put it.

What’s wrong with that? In America at least, where complex images are too few and far between, they become the basis of race-based stereotyping. “These sorts of roles haven’t escaped the notice of some Asian Americans, who are of mixed minds about it,” the Washington Post noted. “On the one hand, it’s hard to object to being associated with positive traits — intellectual, well-educated, knowledgeable, etc. On the other, they say, it’s a limited and singular cliché for a highly diverse group that comprises nearly 6 percent of the U.S. population and is made up of people of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian and South Asian descent as well as other backgrounds.”

Certainly, compared to the slanty-eyed, bumbling Asian American media images of yore, I’d take a Suzy Singh any day. But don’t expect me to cheer for another two-dimensional caricature with any enthusiasm.

Watch video: Suzy Singh tours the Golden Temple in Amritsar

Ousted and redeemed

I had written Singh off a few episodes into the show. But then she surprised me—right as she got the boot.

She and her fellow contestants were asked to prepare a dish for three international judges, including acclaimed chef and Master Chef India judge Kunal Kapoor.

In the challenge, she squabbled mercilessly with her teammate, Christian, and they produced a so-so gourmet version of a Thanksgiving-style dinner. Kapoor and the other judges gave Singh’s team the losing score, forcing them into a lemon meringue bake-off.

Singh’s pie was deemed delicious by the judges, but they nitpicked that the crust came out unevenly and the meringue needed work. She was ousted.

But in losing she gained a new level of depth, and she transformed from a walking Asian cliché into a believable, relatable, three-dimensional person.

“I’m so proud of the journey that I’ve had,” she said as she was shown the door. “I’ve suffered through things and I’ve had so many highs and I had so many lows, but I don’t think I’ve been as happy as I have been in the Master Chef kitchen in my entire life. I’m done being an engineer. … Thank you for validating what I’m supposed to do with my life. I’m so grateful.”

And I got to see a little glimpse again of that bold, sincere culinary crackerjack that had initially made Suzy Singh the show’s hero in my eyes.

http://www.firstpost.com/living/the-rise-and-fall-of-suzy-singh-master-chefs-last-asian-contestant-69031.html