Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
Representations of Asians have been at the center of US
film history from its inception. At the turn of the twentieth century, interest in the Spanish-American War
was met with both ‘‘actualite´s’’ (documentary or news
footage) and ‘‘reenactments’’ (staged depictions of key
events). These early representations drew from US
attitudes toward other races: early cartoons depicted
Filipinos as vaguely African in appearance, for example,
and a 1899 film, Filipinos Retreat from Trenches,
employed African American actors to portray Filipino
insurgents. Throughout film history, cinematic portrayals
of Asians and Asian Americans have shifted in response
to world events and US foreign policy on the one hand,
and have drawn from a legacy of Western attitudes
toward the ‘‘Orient’’ on the other.
Edward Said’s influential 1979 book Orientalism
had a major impact on postcolonial studies, cultural
studies generally, and literary studies specifically. Said
argued that orientalism was not a politically neutral field
of knowledge, but rather a system of governing the socalled Orient. (Note that in Europe the term ‘‘Orient’’
has traditionally referred to North Africa [the ‘‘Middle
East’’] and the Indian subcontinent [the ‘‘Near East’’],
whereas in the United States ‘‘Orient’’ typically refers to
the ‘‘Far East.’’) While Said was specifically concerned
with representations of the Middle East, scholars interested in East Asia and in Asian Americans have appropriated the term. Said argued that European writings did
not illuminate the Orient so much as they revealed
European attitudes about neighboring lands. After Said,
then, to label a text as ‘‘orientalist’’ is to imply that it is
culturally biased, trafficking in stereotypes of sensuality,
decadence, and weakness.
Said touched briefly on the sexual aspects of orientalism, but did not fully develop these arguments. Said’s
conception of orientalism as the will to dominate and
possess is entirely congruent with patriarchal sexuality.
The ‘‘white man’s burden’’ (the title of an 1899 poem by
Rudyard Kipling, subtitled ‘‘The United States’’) justifies
imperial domination under the guise of uplift, but is then
faced with a dilemma of integration and assimilation. In
Gayatri C. Spivak’s formulation, the white man’s burden
is specifically inflected as ‘‘white men saving brown
women from brown men’’ (287), thus allowing for
simultaneously repressing Asian masculinity and celebrating Asian femininity.
Rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances, such as
shifting attitudes toward US colonialism in Asia, produced complex and contradictory representations.
Shifting US relations with China offer another example:
in the 1920s and 1930s Hollywood depicted Chinese
as despots or warlords, most famously in the figure
of Fu Manchu. As China developed into an ally, the
Charlie Chan figure gained ascendance, but when the
Communists came to power in 1949, Hollywood shifted
its attention back to Japan and Korea, where US military
presence was bringing Americans into closer contact with
Asia.
Fu Manchu, created by Sax Rohmer (1883–1959)
(Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) in the 1910s, is the prototypical despot bent on world domination. Fu
Manchu’s criminal successes are dependent not just on
his position as king of a criminal underworld, but also on
his tremendous intellect and scientific genius. Fu
Manchu is simultaneously ascetic and sexually threatening, which is to say that his Scotland Yard foes suppose
his deviance to extend to misogyny even as he seems
repulsed by virile masculinity. In seeming polar opposition to Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan represents law and
order. Created by Earl Derr Biggers (1884–1933), the
Chinese detective from Honolulu was portrayed by
Warner Oland (1879–1938) in a popular series of films
produced by Fox from 1931 to 1942. Upon Oland’s
death in 1938 the role was taken over by Sidney Toler
(1874–1947), and when Fox ended production Toler
continued to play Chan in a series produced at
Monogram starting in 1944. Upon Toler’s death,
Roland Winters (1904–1989) took on the role until the
Monogram series ended in 1949. (In total, Fox made
twenty-seven films, Monogram made seventeen.)
Accompanied by his ‘‘Number One Son’’ (played with
all-American vim by Keye Luke [1904-1991]), who did
much of his legwork, Chan traveled the globe, and his
reputation as a brilliant detective preceded him and
typically won over racist skeptics. Chan is perhaps best
known for his aphorisms, witty sayings that have been
derided by his detractors as ‘‘fortune-cookie philosophy.’’
Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan are seeming opposites, but both were known for their keen intellects and
weak bodies (both men delegated strenuous activity to
their children—Fu Manchu to his vamp daughter, Chan
to his eldest son). Another curious point of similarity is
their paradoxical sexuality: Fu simultaneously asexual and
predatory, Chan seemingly shy but blessed with dozens
of children. In Hollywood films, such paradoxes were
typical for Asian masculinity. The ‘‘chink’’ in Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms (1919), played by Richard Barthelmess
(1895–1963), is a noble figure in large part due to his
refusal to act on the sexual desires that inspire his devotion; General Yen (Nils Asther) in The Bitter Tea of
General Yen (1933) commits suicide and thus spares the
missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) the need to resolve her
own anxieties about miscegenation.
The situation for Asian femininity was somewhat
different. The roles accorded to Asian and Asian
American women in the studio era were of course constrained by Hollywood conceptions of gender. Career
women, regardless of race, were portrayed as homewreckers or dragon ladies of a sort. Nevertheless, US attitudes
toward miscegenation cannot be discounted when considering cinematic depictions of gender. Romantic relationships between Asian women and white men were far
more prevalent than those between Asian men and white
women, in accordance with US perceptions about cultural difference and assimilation (men posed a threat of
ineradicable foreignness while women had the potential
for absorption into US culture). In the years following
World War II, when US gender roles were being redefined in large part due to the legacy of Rosie the Riveter,
the popular representation of working women during the
period, the perceived traditionalism of Asian cultures (an
orientalist perception) marked Asian women as domestically oriented and subservient. Concurrently, the US
occupation of Japan and Okinawa following World
War II, and US involvement in the war in Korea
(1950–1953), were responsible for significant numbers
of interracial marriages (between US servicemen and
foreign nationals) as well as, perhaps, an association of
Asian women with prostitution. In the 1957 film
Sayonara, Marlon Brando (1924–2004) portrayed an
Air Force officer stationed in occupied Japan who falls
in love with a Japanese woman (Miiko Taka) after much
soul-searching. The film’s message of racial tolerance is
put in service of a conservative affirmation of the sexist
ideology of romantic love. The apotheosis of romantic
melodrama in this mode was The World of Suzie
Wong (1960), adapted from a Broadway play that was
in turn adapted from a best-selling novel by Richard
Mason (1919–1997). An American expatriate (William
Holden) falls in love with a Hong Kong prostitute
(Nancy Kwan) and (again, after much soul-searching)
asks her to follow him (presumably, back home to the
United States). While Sayonara’s heroine was a woman of
some social standing, Suzie Wong transmitted the notion that Asian women are inherently submissive, even to the
point of depicting Suzie’s friends complimenting her for
inspiring violent jealousy in her lover.
These romantic melodramas differed from pre-1940
tragic romance narratives by allowing the interracial
attraction to be consummated. Movies made under the
Production Code generally ended with the death of one
of the lovers (with the white partner surviving more often
than not). Furthermore, the Asian characters were typically portrayed by a white actor made up in ‘‘yellow face’’
makeup (minimally, minor prosthetics to alter the shape
of the eyes). Cultural conventions dictated that if the
characters were of different races, it would be preferable
if the actors were both white. Thus the practice of
‘‘yellow face’’ casting was driven not solely by economic
concerns (casting a film with established white stars in
favor of unknown Asian American actors), but also by
responsiveness to societal taboos.