The Asian Robot Maid: Franny Choi’s Roomba, Domestic Ideal, and a Persistent Tech Fantasy

The useful part

I slid merrily around the hardwood in my socks, clearing shoes and backpacks out of her path. It was the middle of the semester when Rosie suddenly stopped working, and Cameron and I were both too overwhelmed with teaching to figure out the repair process. The ideal house was an extension of the ideal me, a properly Korean and feminine me, an attentive me who could make things gleam and grow instead of slowly ruining them.

How it works

• In 2001, its PackBot made headlines when it was used to search the ruins of the World Trade Center for survivors after the 9/11 attacks.
• The following year, a fleet of Pack-Bots was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, while in the US, iRobot released the Roomba, armed with capabilities initially honed for the battlefield.
• In our wider imagination, the clamor for an automatic maid-of-all-work persists.
• I can't stop thinking about that look that passes between Joe and the sales clerk, which happens so quickly I miss it on my first watch.
• The clerk hands Joe some paperwork, looks at Anita just offscreen, then back at Joe with a knowing smile, a wink.

What to take from it

I took up a habit of making fun of my domestic failings, which was either a way to flaunt my tiny rebellion against the ideal me or a path I could cut through the shame of failing to live up to her. Like my jokes, Rosie cast a protective sheen of camp over the whole conversation. The Roomba floor-vacuuming robot first came on the market in 2002, made by the company iRobot.

Example or evidence

• At the time of this writing, buzzy articles about the 1X Neo, the Figure 03, and the Apptronik Apollo are making the rounds.
• In 2021, Elon Musk accelerated the race to build an all-purpose humanoid robot with the announcement of Optimus, prompting a surge of competitors despite having little more than a mock-up to show investors...
• Captured, refurbished, and sold to the Hawkinses under the name Anita, Mia's personality is trapped somewhere inside Anita, watching as her own body obediently cooks, cleans, minds the children, and strips...
• "Remember Rosie, the clunky metal automaton maid who kept the TV cartoon Jetsons ' carpets spotless?

Details worth keeping

What is this job we're so desperate to give her? So I went back to vacuuming, by which I mean I mostly stopped. Rosie had always been less a time-saver, anyway, than a promise—a slow, cylindrical portal to the house of my imagination, where fiddle-leaf figs thrived in natural light and the floors were so clean you felt compelled to crawl rather than walk back in your shoes if you forgot your keys.

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