Yet elsewhere in the arts, Asian-Americans have flourished: as poets, writers, directors, photographers, fashion designers, architects, interior decorators and visual artists. The creative offerings of Asian-Americans — from Vera Wang’s fantasy wedding dresses to the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri to the haunting cinematography of Hiro Murai, the director of Donald Glover’s television show “Atlanta” — aren’t just accepted but celebrated. Only in the representational arts do Asians remain unseen — mostly in film and television, but in music, too, and, to a lesser degree, on the runway.

In other words: It is only when we are hidden that we are allowed to succeed. Which leads to a more troubling but inevitable conclusion: that there is something about the very physiognomy of the Asian face that American audiences still cannot or will not accept.

EXOTIC, OPPORTUNISTIC prostitutes. Sexless, emasculated eunuchs. Submissive young girls. Savage, untamed creatures. Coolies. Filth. The earliest stereotypes about Asian-Americans were formed after the first wave of immigration in the mid-1800s, when Chinese immigrants were brought in by the thousands to help build the railroads that would eventually crisscross the western half of the nation. They were cheaper than American and European laborers, and they were made to work longer hours. But they were also hired because they were willing (though did they really have a choice?) to do the more dangerous work — clearing the path along perilous mountain ridges with dynamite, blowing up granite rock to create tunnels, often getting trapped inside mountains or swept away in avalanches — that others refused to do.

Their arrival was called the Yellow Peril. Asian immigrants were seen as invasive and threatening to an entire American way of life, and over the next century, a series of laws were passed that excluded first the Chinese, but then also those from other Asian countries. By 1924, all Asian immigrants (with the exception of those from the Philippines, a country that had been annexed by the United States) were refused citizenship, naturalization, land ownership and, in some states, prevented from marrying those of another race.

Hollywood capitalized on these fears accordingly in their creations of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. The former, a calculating villain who appeared in a series of films beginning in the 1920s (the name, invented by its British creator, is a crude jingoist rhyme, neither Mandarin nor Cantonese), is a mask of a Chinese man, always portrayed with crudely slanted eyes, eyebrows like caterpillars and a thin dangling beard. The latter was a benevolent but subservient detective in a bowler hat who was popularized by a series of white actors in dozens of films beginning in the 1920s and into the 1980s. And even if Asian men weren’t portrayed as the yellow-faced villain or the neutered helpmate, they were still always the other. As with almost any reviled minority group in America, the fear traces back to sex — the men were either sexless or sex-crazed. The women were conniving dragon ladies or docile concubines.

It was only in 1965, when immigration laws changed again, and the United States eliminated national-origin quotas and introduced a preference system based on family relationships as well as skills, that a new wave of Asian immigrants arrived. With them came a new stereotype, one that persists today: the model minority — competitive, goal-oriented and hard-working (but, notably, lacking in creativity, charm, sex appeal and humor). A recent lawsuit against Harvard University revealed how it systematically discriminates against Asian-American applicants, alleging that though Asian-American students consistently performed higher than other applicants when it came to test scores, grades and extracurriculars, they were consistently given lower scores for “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to the 160,000 student records included in the lawsuit’s filing. (Harvard has denied the charges.)

Inscrutable. High-achieving. Soulless.

Why is it that the challenges of becoming part of a new country, of overcoming an immense language barrier or working twice as hard and twice as long are so rarely prized? I think often of the leap, for example, my mother made immigrating to this country from Taiwan, and how much she lost in translation. It’s the little things you forget to explain or can’t, at least right away, put into words. For years, my mother would tell me she was afraid of snakes, and I never understood why until we visited the house where she grew up in Keelung, a port city in northern Taiwan where the weather can shift in an instant, blue sky darkening to black. There, alongside a small garden, was a creek, and as we passed it, my mother remarked that that was where the bodies of dead snakes accumulated after each typhoon. The Chinese-American writer Weike Wang’s short story “Omakase,” published this year in The New Yorker, captures this cultural muteness as well. In it, a young Chinese-American woman goes on a date with her white boyfriend to a sushi restaurant in Harlem. His relative ease in the restaurant and in his interactions with the Japanese chef show, on the one hand, a charismatic personality. But on the other, it reveals a white man’s assumption of being understood, in being welcome. It causes, at one point, the protagonist to reflect on an earlier moment when she introduced her boyfriend to her parents:

Her mother was a housewife. Back in China, they’d had different jobs. Her father had been a computer-science professor and her mother had been a salesclerk, but their success in those former roles had hinged on being loquacious and witty in their native language, none of which translated into English.

It’s an obvious but understated point — the lack of charisma and expression that the protagonist’s father possesses in English is not because he is a humorless and charmless man, but that the nuances of such expression are not, at that moment, available to him. It calls to mind the coded language used to describe Asians and Asian-Americans: “hard-working” instead of brilliant, “diligent” but not dazzling, “focused” but not naturally gifted.