Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film

Criminalization/Assimilation

Criminalization/Assimilation

Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film

PHILIPPA GATES

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gates, Philippa, 1973- author.

Title: Criminalization/assimilation : Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in classical Hollywood film / Philippa Gates.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Includes filmography.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025645 | ISBN 9780813589428 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813589411 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Chinatowns in motion pictures. | Chinese Americans in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C475 G38 2019 | DDC 791.43/62951073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025645

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Philippa Gates

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Part I: Hollywood’s Chinese America

1 Introduction

2 Yellow Peril, Protest, and an Orientalist Gaze: Hollywood’s Constructions of Chinese/Americans

Part II: Chinatown Crime

3 Imperiled Imperialism: Tong Wars, Slave Girls, and Opium

4 The Whitening of Chinatown: Action Cops and Upstanding Criminals

Part III: Chinatown Melodrama

5 The Perils of Proximity: White Downfall in the Chinatown Melodrama

6 Tainted Blood: White Fears of Yellow Miscegenation

Part IV: Chinese American Assimilation

7 Assimilation and Tourism: Chinese American Citizens and Chinatown Rebranded

8 Assimilating Heroism: The Chinese American as American Action Hero

9 Epilogue

Filmography

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Criminalization/Assimilation

Part I

Hollywood’s Chinese America

1

Introduction

The misconceptions of Chinatown are those that Hollywood helped to construct—perhaps most famously in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown, in which the hero is advised, Forget it, Jake! It’s Chinatown! David Henry Hwang, the Tony award‒winning playwright and screenwriter, explains: Chinatown has always represented something within the country … which is other," which is defined by a different set of mores, different people, different foods—and I think that’s fascinating, it’s seductive, it’s threatening. So the phrase from the movie Chinatown really sums up this notion that that’s a different kind of place."¹ Hollywood’s Chinatown is a dark, unknowable space where crime and corruption are rife, and since the 1970s, Chinese American filmmakers have sought to redefine this space. As the Chinatown Film Project, a 2009 exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Chinese in America, declared, Chinatown is the ultimate Hollywood metaphor and a space where families still live.² Chinatowns are places that represent both the coming together of Chinese immigrants in a community and their historical segregation as mainstream society deemed them undesirable aliens. Chinatowns are mainly a North America phenomenon: some have been destroyed to make way for new developments (for example, in Edmonton, Alberta); some were manufactured for tourists and the film industry (New Chinatown in Los Angeles, California); some are well-preserved historical neighborhoods that attract tourists (in Honolulu, Hawaii, and Vancouver, British Columbia); some are driven more by local business than tourists (in Toronto, Ontario, and New York City); and some are world famous, both tourist attractions and thriving communities (in San Francisco, California). In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, Chinatowns were regarded as undesirable places crowded with foreigners and rife with crime; in the second half of the twentieth century, Chinatowns came to be appreciated as exotic places to visit. As Rose Hum Lee explains, Chinatowns go through various stages of development and decline: from an immigrant ghetto to a tourist-attracting centre, then to a shopping centre for the Chinese.³ While Chinatowns in North America are now considered lived-in communities, tourist attractions, and historical gems, for the majority of Hollywood filmmakers and audiences, Chinatown has always been, and remains today, a site of mystery.

In classical Hollywood films, Chinatown was a favorite space used by screenwriters and producers to offer a homegrown exotic world—one that was physically close but simultaneously culturally foreign. As Ruth Mayer argues, Chinatowns are complex urban phenomena shaped by immigration politics, racialized discourses revolving around public health and citizenship, tourism, trade relations, commercial exchanges, missionary ambitions, labor exploitation, and cultural self-fashioning.⁴ Chinatowns represent both Chinese culture but also Orientalism, a sphere of protection for Chinese immigrants but also of withdrawal or alienation from mainstream society.⁵ America’s Chinatowns became associated with crime for several reasons: first, because newspapers tended to publish only stories about crime when writing about Chinatowns; second, because newspapers connected every Chinatown murder to a tong war or crime racket; third, because novels and films set in Chinatown capitalized on such stories to attract readers and viewers; and last—and most important—because being Chinese in America was, in many ways, regarded as being criminal in and of itself.⁶ To be Chinese in America was to be alien: Chinese were regarded as heathen despite being religious, because they were not Christian; feminized despite their hard labor on the railroads, because the men wore tunics and had long hair, as well as performing women’s work such as cooking and laundry; backward despite their own rich and old culture, because many could not speak English; and immoral despite their own social values, because they took part in gambling and prostitution. Everything about Chinatown evoked the alien (queues, joss houses, lotteries, and herbalism) and the morally corrupt (opium smoking, prostitution, purported rat eating, and gambling). The populations of Chinatowns were predominantly male (notably a result of the 1875 Page Act, which discouraged the immigration of Chinese women)—forming a bachelor society that, importantly for Americans, lacked nuclear families.

Especially in California, where Chinese people were more visible than in other parts of the country, white Americans feared that the members of this alien race would outnumber the established immigrants and that the seemingly criminal culture of the Chinese would come to dominate—in other words, whites feared the so-called yellow peril (Figure 1.1). Chinatown life was associated on the one hand with imperial China (a seemingly traditionalist, outdated, and anti-American culture) and on the other hand with modern crime (opium dens, alien smuggling, prostitution, and gambling). In 1924, the fear of the country’s being flooded with Chinese immigrants began to abate with the passing of the Immigration Act (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act), which halted all Chinese immigration. Almost immediately came the creation of benign and heroic Chinese characters—most famously Charlie Chan, the Chinese detective from Honolulu; however, yellow peril fears did not dissipate completely and many filmmakers continued to depict Chinatown crime rackets or Oriental villains. By the 1930s, the associations of the Chinese with crime remained and Chinatown became a signifier detached from its original signification. The idea of Chinatown evoked not an image of a Chinese community but a mysterious, dangerous, and unknowable space. Producers used Chinatown in film titles to capitalize on the appeal of the district to audiences—even when the film’s action did not center there, for example A Trip to Chinatown (Kerr 1926), Torchy Blane in Chinatown (Beaudine 1939), and Chinatown (Polanski 1974). In other words, the image of Chinatown constructed in American film between the two World Wars became the image of Chinatown—cemented in the past and recycled in films for decades after.

While Chinatown as a city quarter retained its nineteenth-century associations for twentieth-century film audiences, the representation of its residents (Chinese Americans) did evolve. Beginning in the 1930s, in its pursuit of imperialist goals, Japan became increasingly antagonistic toward China, and the former’s aggressions culminated in the Second Sino-Japanese War. As a result, the Chinese were recast in Hollywood film as sympathetic allies of the United States. In the 1910s and 1920s, Chinatown had been the subject of serious and star-driven dramas; in contrast, in the 1930s, it was relegated to the site of low-budget crime films. And while in the 1910s and 1920s, Chinatown crime was connected to Chinese tongs and opium, in the 1930s crimes associated with the Chinese were those related to immigrant smuggling rings that could be run by supposedly upstanding white Americans. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought the United States into World War II and provided the country with a new Asian enemy. Two years later, the Magnuson Act repealed Chinese exclusion, allowing the entry of 105 Chinese immigrants a year into the United States. With Chinese immigration once more legal (even if limited) and the visibility of a growing population of American-born Chinese, Hollywood film all but abandoned Chinatown crime as a topic and instead offered assimilated Chinese American characters. The role of the Oriental villain was passed to the Japanese, and yellow peril fears now focused on war crimes.

Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film traces the various ways that Hollywood explored and exploited Chinatown communities and Chinese immigrants in genre films up to 1950. The scope of the book is limited to the period of classical Hollywood because of the standardization in terms of film style and content in that era. The choice to single out the representation of Chinese Americans from the broader group of Asian Americans was based on that fact that American society’s conception of other Asian peoples was dependent on its understanding of Chinese people, who were the most numerous Asian immigrants in the nineteenth century.⁷ The study is also restricted to films set in the United States because Hollywood drew a distinction between those and films set elsewhere (such as China or London’s Limehouse District) in terms of their themes and characterization of Chinese people. Films set in London do not engage with questions of Chinese American identity even when Asian American actors are present, and films set in China valorized Chinese peasants that would be identified as unwanted coolies in films set in the United States. Class seemed to be a more important issue than race for American screenwriters and filmmakers, as only Chinese merchants or university students could be significant and positive characters, seen as middle-class immigrants who shared the values of Hollywood. This book concludes with films of the 1940s when the Japanese replaced the Chinese as America’s yellow peril, classical Hollywood began its decline, and American race relations began to focus on African American civil rights. Tom Gunning confirms that in terms of race, the films of the 1950s and 1960s have a different tone, with the impact of the contemporary American dilemma of racial equality often seeping in as a subtext.⁸

FIG. 1.1 A Romantic Drama of Oriental Vengeance—Many Chinatown films, including The Sign of Poppy (1916), used yellow peril villains to attract audiences. Advertisement from Moving Picture World (December 1916), courtesy of the Media History Digital Library (http://mediahistoryproject.org).

The slash in the book’s title (in Chinese/Americans) indicates the difference between (but also a connection) in American film between Chinese-born immigrants and American-born citizens. As David Palumbo-Liu argues, " ‘Asian/American’ marks both the distinction installed between ‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement."⁹ In this book, I use the terms Chinese American and Asian American without hyphenation. As Peter Feng explains, The hyphen implies that Asia and America are discrete spaces that require bridging, obscuring the discursive construction of boundaries that defines Asian and American as different and mutually exclusive.¹⁰ The other slash in the book’s title (in Criminalization/Assimilation) parallels that in Chinese/Americans: in other words, Hollywood identified Chinese-born immigrants with criminal activities while regarding American-born Chinese as assimilable citizens. By the 1930s, Hollywood films made an increasingly clear distinction between the two groups, with the latter possessing American values: Chinese Americans were presented as exotic but—finally—not foreign.

Scholars have explored how racial identity in the United States is discussed mainly in terms of white versus black. In the 2010 census, African Americans were the largest racial minority in the country—accounting for about 13 percent of the population, while Asian Americans accounted for 5.6 percent.¹¹ However, as Sucheng Chan argues, the presence of Asians on American soil highlighted some fundamental cleavages in America society. This fact makes Asian immigration history more important than the small number of Asians in the United States might otherwise warrant.¹² And K. Scott Wong explains that historical attitudes of white Americans toward African Americans and Chinese Americans were different: On the one hand, Chinese were considered as inferior to black Americans, ‘incapable of attaining the state of civilization [as] the Caucasian.’ On the other hand, Chinese were regarded as less assimilable than black Americans because, it was believed, the Chinese had once had an advanced civilization to which they clung.¹³ Dana Y. Takagi argues that even though race relations in the United States are determined through the comparison of white and African American experiences, Asian Americans are central, not peripheral, to debates about race.¹⁴ Importantly, while race relations in the United States since the mid-twentieth century have been articulated in reference to African Americans, before World War II, films typically explored questions of race through a comparison of white Americans and Chinese immigrants. Relatedly, although African American racialization was created mainly through segregation, the racialization of Asians in America was created mainly through restricting immigration and naturalization.¹⁵ It is for this reason among others that this book focuses on the history of Chinese Americans in mainstream film—to understand how, through film, America constructed and defined its national identity for itself and the rest of the world. As John Kuo Wei Tchen argues, The use of Chinese things, ideas, and people in the United States, in various imagined and real forms, has been instrumental in forming this nation’s cultural identity—conceiving of China as an advanced civilization to emulate and then, later, as a place to conquer as part of America’s Manifest Destiny to expand ever westward.¹⁶

Criminalization/Assimilation explores the representation of Chinese immigrants through popular film because, as Robert G. Lee observes, The ‘common’ understanding of the Oriental as a racialized alien … originates in the realm of popular culture, where struggles over who is or who can become a ‘real American’ take place and where the categories, representations, distinctions, and markers of race are defined.¹⁷ Film is a key medium through which to analyze the representations of American Chinese and to understand the sociopolitical forces determining those representations and their shifting meaning in American culture. In Hollywood a few films were made by, and often for, American Chinese, including Blossom Time (Sunn 1934) and A Chinese Gains a Fortune in America (1939),¹⁸ both produced by the Grandview Film Company; Sum Hun (Tang 1936), produced by Cathay Pictures; and Golden Gate Girl (Eng 1941), produced by the Golden Gate Film Company. All four films were set in San Francisco with dialogue in Cantonese, and all but one were love stories. These films, while important examples of self-representation, did not have an impact on mainstream audiences. Criminalization/Assimilation focuses instead on the representations of Chinatown and American Chinese in Hollywood films that reached both national and international audiences and shaped America’s national identity. Criminalization/Assimilation explores the variety of Hollywood’s responses to social issues (specifically immigration and racism) and social problems (primarily drug trafficking and prostitution), as well as the impact of the Motion Picture Production Code (Hollywood’s system of self-censorship) and other industry factors (including stardom and independent production) on the treatment of those subjects. Hollywood did not invent the stereotypes of Chinese people it presented on the silver screen, but it did perpetuate and reinforce them. As Wong writes, By placing these images in their historical context, it becomes clear that impressions and depictions of ‘Chinatown’ have been used for sociopolitical purposes that have much more to do with the agendas of the framers of these representations than they do with the residents of Chinatown.¹⁹ From silent-era melodramas to classical-era B films, Criminalization/Assimilation examines how American filmmakers exploited both yellow peril fears and the American fascination with Chinatowns to attract audiences. Chinese/Americans simultaneously provided American filmmakers with box-office fodder while their identity was subjected to scrutiny and stereotyping by American racial attitudes.

The discussion of Chinese/Americans in American film began in Asian American scholarship in the 1970s, which exposed America’s systemic racism toward Asian immigrants and highlighted the contributions of Asian American artists who challenged mainstream conceptions. Questions of identity politics played a key role not only in assisting the empowerment of ethnic minorities in America but also in challenging the cultural hegemony of American culture and leading to the racial and political construct of the Asian American. Asian American identity can be defined by ethnicity, ancestral descent, and cultural tradition; however, Jun Xing argues that this definition can be problematic, lumping different Asian peoples together and not taking into consideration an individual’s country of birth or cultural experiences.²⁰ Today, Asian American scholars examine and challenge how Asian Americans are regarded and excluded from dominant cultural discourses—what Taro Iwata calls the oppositional agency of a supposedly united Asian America.²¹ Scholars also recognize, however, that an essentialist idea of Asian American identity can be used by mainstream culture to construct ethnic stereotypes or the idea of a cohesive ethnic community as a threat.²² Beginning with scholars like Lisa Lowe in the 1990s, the examination of Asian American experiences has explored their diversity—specifically, their heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity.²³ Kent A. Ono argues that since the early 2000s, Asian American studies has moved into its second phase—which questions, rather than breaks with, the precepts of the first.²⁴ Asian American scholars now avoid narrow definitions of cultural identity and instead, question mainstream assumptions about racial and ethnic identity. After all, as Xing explains, identity is not fixed or identical, and "ancestry does not guarantee a common identification."²⁵ Criminalization/Assimilation focuses primarily on Chinese immigrants to isolate the representation of national identity and citizenship, despite Hollywood’s tendency to conflate different nationalities. As Karla Rae Fuller argues, for Hollywood the Oriental exists as an ethnic classification (though loosely based on Asian culture) that supersedes national or racial identity.²⁶ For this reason, at various points in the book, I use the term Asian American rather than Chinese American when appropriate and the term white rather than Caucasian to avoid the negative associations that come with that term.²⁷

In terms of film, there has been a proliferation of scholarship that, since the early 1990s, has explored Asian American racial identity in film²⁸ and, more recently, transnational Asian American identity in a global world.²⁹ These studies have foregrounded Chinese American independent film,³⁰ postclassical Hollywood film from the 1970s onward,³¹ higher-profile classical A films,³² and/or white performances in yellowface.³³ Criminalization/Assimilation aims to fill gaps in the discussion of Chinese/Americans in mainstream American by examining four decades of filmmaking and two different genres (melodramas and crime films) that were the most prolific in terms of depicting Chinatowns and Chinese immigrants. While some scholars focus on the representations of China in Hollywood film,³⁴ this book interrogates not America’s China but America’s Chinese America.³⁵ American silent films and sound-era B films were intrigued by Chinese immigrants and their potential effect on mainstream culture. In general, American films moved from denying the subjectivity of Chinese/Americans to providing an identification with the other even if that is not the sole focus of the film. As the classical era progressed, Chinese immigrants become Chinese Americans—that is, American citizens. However, this progression was not consistent, and while some filmmakers of the early 1930s demonstrated thoughtfulness in the representation of Chinese Americans and cast Asian American actors in leading roles, others continued to link Chinatown with crime and cast white actors in yellowface. It would not be until the early 1960s, in a reflection of the impact of the civil rights movement, that Asian Americans would appear in an increasing number of leading roles in films such as Walk Like a Dragon (Clavell 1960) and Flower Drum Song (Koster 1961), and not until the 1970s that an independent Chinese American cinema would emerge that allowed Chinese Americans to depict their experience of American life in films, the best known example of which is Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing (1982).

Fuller argues that the distinctions between the portrayals of Asian characters by white actors versus those by Asian/American actors are frequently collapsed by scholars, critics, and viewers in order to create a generalized Asian typology.³⁶ Criminalization/Assimilation aims to overturn the myth that classical-era films presented a united front in terms of their representation of Chinese/Americans—in other words, to pull at that supposed homogeneity and show how various strands (yellowface versus Asian/American performance and Chinese immigrants versus Chinese American citizens) are distinct. For example, many scholars focus on the Oriental villain like Dr. Fu Manchu and the model minority like Charlie Chan as character types. However, these two stereotypes are, for the most part, aligned with yellowface casting and ignore instances when Asian Americans were cast. Instead, Criminalization/Assimilation examines the various ways that Chinese immigrants, Chinese American citizens, and Chinatown communities are represented in American film and maps the shift from the criminalization of foreign immigrants to the valorization of assimilated citizens.

Importantly, Criminalization/Assimilation explores how the performance of Asian/American actors offers moments of resistance in Orientalist narratives and demonstrates contributions to the film industry. Eurocentrism emerged as a rationale for colonialism and was naturalized as ‘common sense’ within Western cultures.³⁷ In other words, a Eurocentric (or, more specifically, an Orientalist) approach to viewing the world is so ingrained in Western culture that it appears to be natural rather than constructed. As Gunning observes, perhaps the most important lesson that studying ethnic identity in the movies can teach us is the constructed nature of all representation.³⁸ Criminalization/Assimilation aims to expose the constructedness of Chinese/American representation and to clarify to what end it served the filmmakers who produced, and the audiences who consumed, films at the time. While some scholars have detailed the stereotypes of Chinese American representation, less discussed has been the key part that Asian American actors played in Hollywood films, even if mainly in secondary roles. And while other scholars have recently produced critical biographies of some Asian Americans, these have focused on Hollywood’s best known actors such as Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong, and Philip Ahn.³⁹ This has left the contributions of lesser-known but prolific actors—including Yutaka Abe, Benson Fong, Toyo Fujita, Willie Fung, Chester Gan, Sôjin Kamiyama, Goro Kino, Eddie Lee, Lotus Long, Richard Loo, Toshia Mori, Frank Tokunaga, Tôgô Yamamoto, and Victor Sen Yung—underexplored. This book examines a larger group of Asian American actors who may have not been high-profile stars or cast in leading roles, but whose presence on the screen marked a resistance against systemic racism, omission, and the practice of yellowface and offered moments of self-determination in the representation of Asian American labor in the industry and their identity on the screen. To that end, a key aim of this book is to participate in what Iwata calls the recent trend to reject essentialist interpretations of history (i.e., seeing whites only as victimizers and groups of color only as victims).⁴⁰

Today, there is a debate of whether being present on the screen is positive in and of itself, even if cast as a stereotype.⁴¹ Representations of Chinese/Americans in classical Hollywood film have been underexamined by scholars because of the systemic racism they reflect, but such a dismissal can be reductive. As Gunning comments, simply attacking images as false can create what I feel is a dangerous oversimplification.⁴² Robert Stam and Louise Spence argue that scholars need to move beyond talking about positive and negative representations of race and instead think about cinematic possibilities of otherness.⁴³ Similarly, Richard Rushton and Gary Bettinson confirm that distinguishing between positive and negative images remains an important, if still overemphasized area of debate, even while theoretical approaches have become more subtle.⁴⁴ Feng argues that first, there is no such thing as a positive or negative representation, rather, there are representations that are mobilized positively or negatively depending on the discursive context; second, representations created by non-Asian American filmmakers are not necessarily racist, nor are the representations created by Asian American filmmakers necessarily progressive.… Both mainstream and marginal representations of Asian Americans articulate the terms whereby the borders of the American body politic are policed.⁴⁵ To reject all films that offer stereotyped or contested representations as racist is not as useful as understanding how and why they are racist. In addition, to explore classical films allows for the celebration of other representations that offer moments of resistance. Importantly, while yellowface can be seen as a by-product of industry pressures to cast stars in leading roles, not to interrogate its practice is an oversight.

While the representation of Chinese/Americans is determined, in part, by American race relations, it is also dependent on the conventions of film genres, which dictate certain themes, character relations, plot elements, and tones. Certain genres—mainly, newspaper crime films, mystery films, and social melodramas—linked Chinese immigrants and Chinatown communities with crime.⁴⁶ Genre criticism has often attempted only to regulate, classify, and explain film through genre; instead, Nick Browne argues that scholars should consider genres as gravitating toward discreet, heterotopic instances of a complex cultural politics.⁴⁷ Rather than regarding a genre as a cohesive body of films with common conventions produced over a long period of time, I argue that genres can be broken down into specific trends or cycles that are the product of specific sociohistorical, economic, and industrial moments.

In the retrospective analysis of classical American film today, it is important not to apply our values and expectations anachronistically to that historical moment. These films were produced before the civil rights movement, and there was no push at the time from the Chinese immigrant community for equal rights, self-empowerment, and respect. Rather than being critical of the roles that they played, Asian American actors tended to express gratitude for being able to work in the industry and represent their people in an era when they generally lacked visibility. For example, the Chinese American actor Keye Luke, who played Charlie Chan’s Number One Son in ten films, described Chan as a Chinese hero for Chinese Americans like himself.⁴⁸ Furthermore, the presence of Asian Americans in film offered moments of resistance against dominant racist representations. For example, in the short film Hollywood Party (Rowland 1937), the white actors Elissa Landi and Charley Chase host an Asian-themed garden party, complete with white girls in Chinese dress and Chase in yellowface as Charley Chan Chase. Despite the obvious conflation of Japanese and Chinese culture, Chase’s distasteful yellowface performance, and the comedic approach of the film to Asian cultures, Anna May Wong offers a fashion show in one scene in the film as the China lady of fashion. Wong attempts to dispel the notion that China and its women are trapped in the past by modeling examples of Chinese modern dress, as she calls it—including an afternoon dress in the famous Peking blue; a cheongsam in imperial yellow; and a blue cape with imperial brocade but, importantly, in the latest Western fashion. Wong challenges other assumptions about Chinese culture when she turns to a Chinese assistant and speaks in Mandarin. The girl replies in perfect English, Sorry, but I only understand Cantonese. Wong replies, Oh, I thought I could brush up on my Mandarin. Hollywood Party demonstrates white ignorance and exoticization of Asian cultures while, at the same time, Wong’s resistance to it. While Asian American actors may have found the majority of Hollywood’s representations of their people and culture at best inaccurate and at worst offensive, there was no tradition or outlet for voicing those concerns. Being visible in America’s representation of itself on screen was, in many ways, the first opportunity these actors had to challenge and change racial stereotyping.

Criminalization/Assimilation provides a comprehensive understanding of classical Hollywood’s representation of Chinese/Americans by bringing two disparate critical traditions—Asian American studies and film studies—into conversation and analyzing the films as situated in their sociopolitical, historical, and industrial contexts.⁴⁹ In other words, this book is not intended to be a contribution to Asian American studies specifically or to film studies only. Rather, it is intended to enhance and expand our understanding of the representation of Chinese Americans in film and our appreciation of the contribution of Asian American actors to the industry. The discussion of the representation of Chinese immigrants in this book is historical in approach. As Colleen Lye notes, A historical approach to racial representation has the advantage of being able to account for the specificities of different marginalized groups, whose stereotypical attributes are located in shifting dynamics of social relations and social conflicts. A historical approach also helps us to maintain a healthy skepticism … toward the temptation to think that the articulation of minority subjectivity can be separated from the history of racialization.⁵⁰ Criminalization/Assimilation not only analyzes the long and complex history of the representation of Chinese/Americans in American film in the first half of the twentieth century, but it also brings to light lost or forgotten films and performances.

According to a Library of Congress study, at least 75 percent of the almost 11,000 silent films released by major studios have been lost.⁵¹ Even copies of classical-era sound films can be hard to locate, especially those produced by smaller and less-established studios. In these cases, our understanding of lost films must be guided by the production materials peripheral to the film—such as advertisements, reviews, stills, and plot synopses. In Criminalization/Assimilation, the close analyses of specific films and their representation of Chinese/Americans are informed by the materials contemporaneous to the films that illuminate America’s attitude toward the representation of race at different times and substitute for the film itself when it does not exist. For example, it is only thanks to a detailed plot synopsis for exhibitors and collectors created by Selig Polyscope for The Lights and Shadows of Chinatown (1908) that we know anything about this early film. According to the synopsis, the film included a street scene with vegetable vendors, fish sellers, fortune-tellers, and merchants selling their wares to locals and tourists alike; a joss house scene with hatchet men taking an oath to kill; and an opium den scene.⁵² Thus, in addition to analyzing the representation of Chinese/Americans in films that can be viewed, Criminalization/Assimilation also describes the various types of stories, characters, and themes in films that no longer exist to illuminate the attitudes of producers and audiences alike toward Chinese immigrants.

The primary research for this book was conducted at various archives and libraries. As Charles Merewether states, one of the defining characteristics of the modern era has been the increasing significance given to the archive as the means by which historical knowledge and forms of remembrance are accumulated, stored and recovered.⁵³ The UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles and the Library of Congress in Washington are vital resources for screening hard-to-find films. The Margaret Herrick Library, USC Cinematic Arts Library, and Warner Bros. Archive (all in Los Angeles) have extensive script collections, including early outlines and treatments of films. Analyzing alterations made across scripts is an important way to trace how producers met the requirements of the Production Code and the demands of the Chinese consul in Los Angeles. The Margaret Herrick Library’s special collections include studio collections (for example, the Paramount Pictures Production Records Collection) and institution records (such as those of the Motion Picture Association of America’s Production Code Administration [PCA]). While scholars have documented the impact of the Production Code on the representation of sex and violence, its regulation of the representation of race has not been explored to the same degree. PCA files on individual films reveal a sensitivity on the part of the PCA to the fact that some depictions and dialogue would be offensive to Chinese audiences, as well as a concern with dialogue that suggested overtly that racism was a problem in American society. The film reviews consulted for this study range from those in major newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times and New York Times) and fan magazines (such as Photoplay) aimed at filmgoers to those in film industry trade publications (such as Motion Picture Daily, Moving Picture World, and Variety) aimed at exhibitors.⁵⁴ In the past, scholars would have had to locate physical copies of these papers and magazines; today, many historical newspapers are searchable online and, thanks to David Pierce and Eric Hoyt, many trade papers and fan magazines are now searchable through the Media History Digital Library.⁵⁵

While these physical and virtual archives provide materials related to texts, which are especially useful in the absence of those texts, the materials themselves must be analyzed as cultural objects. There is always an inconsistency in the materials available for each film (for example, reviews, stills, and scripts are available for some films but not for others), there is often a lack of information to identify the materials (for example, the only script available may be an early draft rather than the final shooting script) and a hierarchy in terms of what materials are preserved (for example, major studios often preserve and donate their materials, whereas many smaller studios disappeared along with their materials), and there is the potential to misinterpret the meaning of a film by analyzing other resources in its absence (for example, some reviewers do not clarify if Chinese characters are played by Asian American or white actors). Furthermore, reviews must be read as critically as the film themselves, since they reflect the biases of the time. For example, in reference to An Oriental Romance (Lessey 1915), a reviewer for Moving Picture World commented that the role of a stolid faced Chinaman is an exceedingly difficult one for an animated American actor to impersonate satisfactorily.⁵⁶ Here the criticism is not that an American actor cannot play the role of a Chinese man satisfactorily, but that there is something about Chinese men—in terms of their physical and behavioral characteristics—that is unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, without these archival materials, these films might remain lost or forgotten.

The research for this book also involved exploring the broader history of America’s Chinese immigrants and included visits to the Chinatowns of Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco in the United States and Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria in Canada. The San Diego Chinese Historical Museum, the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, and Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco provide informative exhibitions and publications detailing the history of Chinese immigration. The Main Branch of the San Francisco Public Library includes the Chinese Center, the San Francisco History Center, and the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection and contains a full run of the Chinese Digest. The Los Angeles Public Library and San Francisco Public Library were the main sources for the West Coast newspapers I researched. As Jan Olsson argues, newspaper discourses in the early twentieth century were the nervous system of the modern world.⁵⁷ Since the majority of Chinatown films are set in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I relied mostly on the San Francisco newspapers, especially the San Francisco Chronicle (the city’s leading daily at the time) to establish a comparison between Hollywood film and print media in terms of their representation of Chinese immigrants.⁵⁸ In addition, as Clare V. McKanna, Jr. suggests, headlines in West Coast newspapers revealed the racial prejudice of the editors and general public.⁵⁹

What distinguishes Criminalization/Assimilation from other studies of Chinese/Americans in film is its interdisciplinarity (it is informed by Asian American studies, cultural studies, film studies, and film history), which allows it to provide an in-depth and wide-ranging examination of the representation of Chinese/Americans in film by connecting those filmic depictions to the sociohistorical moment that conceived of them, as well as the film industry and its practices.⁶⁰ Criminalization/Assimilation also differs from other studies since it focuses on Chinese immigrants, rather than the representation of Chinese people in China or of other Asian immigrants in the United States. It also illuminates the range and number of performances by Asian American actors rather than only those by white actors in yellowface and brings to light dozens of films that have been previously ignored or lost. While it would be impossible to discuss Asian American performances without addressing those of stars such as Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong, the book also analyzes the performances of many other Asian American actors, including the Japanese American actors of the silent era and the Chinese American actors of the sound era. And rather than dismissing the stereotypes of Chinese/Americans as racist, Criminalization/Assimilation asks why they came about and how the presence of Asian American actors onscreen offered moments of resistance to the mainstream attitudes. Through the critical analysis of Chinatown films situated in the social, political, and economic contexts of the first half of the twentieth century, and informed by extensive archival research, Criminalization/Assimilation reveals the variety of racial representations within classical-era film and brings to light not only lost and forgotten films but also the contributions of Asian American actors whose presence onscreen offered important alternatives to Hollywood’s yellowface fabrications of Chinese identity and a resistance to Hollywood’s Orientalist narratives.

Criminalization/Assimilation maps how Chinese immigration was processed