Visualizing Orientalness: Chinese Immigration and Race in U.S. Motion Pictures, 1910s–1930s 9783412506865, 9783412505325

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KÖLNER HISTORISCHE ABHANDLUNGEN Für das Historische Institut herausgegeben von Norbert Finzsch, Sabine von Heusinger, Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp und Ralph Jessen Band 53

VISUALIZING ORIENTALNESS Chinese Immigration and Race in U.S. Motion Pictures, 1910s –1930s

von

BJÖRN A. SCHMIDT

2017 BÖH LAU VE RLAG KÖLN WE I MAR WI E N

Gedruckt mit freundllicher Unterstützung der Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften in Ingelheim am Rhein.

Dieses Buch ist zugleich die 2015 eingereichte Dissertation des Autors an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://portal.dnb.de abrufbar. Umschlagabbildung: USA: Anna May Wong, Chinese-American movie star (1905–1961). © akg-images/Pictures From History.

© 2017 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln Weimar Wien Ursulaplatz 1, D-50668 Köln, www.boehlau-verlag.com Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig. Korrektorat: Rebecca Wache, Castrop-Rauxel Gesamtherstellung: WBD Wissenschaftlicher Bücherdienst, Köln Gedruckt auf chlor- und säurefreiem Papier Printed in the EU ISBN 978-3-412-50532-5

Contents

Acknowledgements  ..............................................................................................  Introduction  .............................................................................................................. 

7 9

1 Yellowface and the Oriental Body  .. ..........................................................  1.1 The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  .. ....................................  1.2 Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  .. ....................  1.3 Racial Types: Yellowface Performances and the Hollywood System  . . ....................................................................  1.3.1 “The Man of a Thousand Faces”: Lon Chaney  ........................  1.3.2 “No more Chinese, Myrna”: Myrna Loy  . . .................................  1.3.3 “Chinese atmosphere”: Supporting Roles, Bit Parts, and Extras  .......................................................................  1.4 Conclusion  .. ................................................................................................. 

39 44 57

2 Chinatown and the Visuality of Space and Race  .. .............................  2.1 Chinatown as Urban Space  .....................................................................  2.2 Chinatown as Tourist Space  ....................................................................  2.2.1 Seeing Chinatown  ..........................................................................  2.2.2 The Tourist Gaze, Staged Authenticity, and the Cinematic Dispositif  ........................................................  2.2.3 Filming Chinatown: H. J. Lewis and the Figuration of the Chinatown Guide  . . .............................................................  2.2.4 Chinatown Films  ............................................................................  2.3 Conclusion  .. .................................................................................................  3 Becoming White/Becoming Yellow: Americanization, Assimilation, and the ‘Oriental Problem’  ....................................................  3.1.1 Chinese American Activism and Americanization  . . ..............  3.1.2 The Americanized Generation and the ‘Chinese Flapper’  ...  3.2 The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Question of Race  ........  3.3 Conclusion  .. ................................................................................................. 

74 81 89 99 104 107 111 139 140 150 156 165 191

195 201 213 236 271

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4 Illegal Immigrants and Alien Subjects  . . .................................................  4.1 Patrolling Boundaries: Creating the Illegal Chinese Immigrant  . . ..  4.1.1 Visibility at the Border: Territory, Surveillance, and the Illegal Chinese Immigrant  . . ...........................................  4.1.2 “Constant Warfare”: Fighting Illegal Chinese Immigration  . . ...................................................................  4.2 Foreigners-Within: Chinese American Aliens  ...................................  4.3 Conclusion  .. ................................................................................................. 

273 277 283 294 320 345

5 Conclusion  ...........................................................................................................  348 Filmography  ..............................................................................................................  Archives  .......................................................................................................................  Bibliography  .. ............................................................................................................  Periodicals  .. .............................................................................................................  Primary Sources  ....................................................................................................  Secondary Sources  . . ..............................................................................................  Index  .............................................................................................................................  Subjects  ...................................................................................................................  Names  ...................................................................................................................... 

353 358 359 359 364 367 387 387 396

Acknowledgements

Like all texts, this book is a “node within a network” – not only a discursive one. It was made possible only through a network of friends and colleagues. I would like to thank Norbert Finzsch for always supporting his students and endorsing scholarship off the beaten path. His help and critical academic stance made my disserta­tion and this book possible. I am also grateful to him for ­creating a truly unique space at the Anglo-­American Department of the Historical Institute at the University of Cologne, which provided the basis for great research projects and close friendships. I thank Olaf Stieglitz for showing me that history can be critical, i­nteresting, and fun. His endless support, unlimited advice and patience helped me get through this life phase and made the book what it is today. I also thank him for making me a Foucauldian and changing my life as a student. Thanks to Hanjo Berressem for his support as my third advisor and for giving me a new outlook on cultural theory. Furthermore I am most grateful for the help of Andreas Speer and the a. r. t. e. s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, which funded my research project with a scholarship. The graduate school gave me a desk to work at, helped to fund my research trips, and, above all, provided an inspira­tional environment for working on a disserta­tion. I learned almost everything I know about historical film analysis at the Arbeits­ stelle Geschichte und Film (AGuF), affiliated at the Anglo-­American Department at the University of Cologne. The courses and screenings of the AGuF brought me into contact with this field of study and gave me a new perspective on film and history. Thanks to Massimo Perinelli, Margit Szöllösi-­Janze, Maren Möhring, and Christiane König for enlightening discussions and for encouraging students to use film as a historical source. Many thanks and hugs go to the discussion and “therapy” group of the Anglo-­ American Department with whom I had the luck to debate drafts and, even more importantly, spend many evenings of non-­academic nature: Kristoff Kerl, Myron Tsakas, Helena Körner, Nina Mirza, Teresa Huhle, Vanessa Höse, Muriel Gonzáles, Dominik Ohrem, Björn Klein, and Gudrun Löhrer. Special thanks go to Pablo Dominguez for being such a great friend, a source of inspira­tion, and for always being positively critical with my drafts. I would also like to thank the always extremely helpful, supportive, and friendly staff at the following archives: Bancroft Library, Ethnic Studies Library at the

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|  Acknowledgements

University of California, Berkeley, Chinese Historical Society of America Museum, Pacific Film Archive, California Historical Society, Margaret Herrick Library, UCLA Film & Television Archive, Mo­tion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) at the Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House and the Department of Cinema Studies at the New York University. Sincere thanks to Christopher Kopacz who did the proofreading before I handed in my thesis. He helped me erase many “Germanisms” and countless other errors. The text benefitted tremendously from his meticulous work. I am grateful to the Geschwister Boehringer Ingelheim Stiftung für Geisteswissenschaften for financially assisting this publica­tion and making it possible that books like this one see the light of day. Thanks to Dorothee Rheker-­Wunsch and Julia Beenken at Böhlau Verlag for supervising its publica­tion. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank the dear people that accompanied me on this journey. Love and thanks to Zdenka Deskovic for always being there for me and helping me cope with this project. I know I was not easy to be around at times. And, of course, I am deeply grateful to my family for accepting me as the weird historian of the family. I dedicate this book to my mother, Christa Schmidt-­ Buchholz, who always supported me in the pursuit of my goals and going into research instead of getting a “proper” job. Björn A. Schmidt

Cologne, in the summer of 2016

Introduc­tion  |

Introduc­tion

In 1938, the New York Times published an article headed “West Builds ‘China City,’” which reported that Los Angeles was “erecting an Oriental town patterned upon movie concepts.”1 The text referred to the imminent comple­tion of a new quarter in central Los Angeles. Its construc­tion followed the complete demoli­tion of the city’s historic Chinatown, which had to give way to the prestigious Union Sta­tion. The article emphasized that ‘China City’ offered a stunning experience, as it was “built with an eye solely to the pictorial and was planned by a mo­tion-­picture designer.”2 Focusing indeed on appearance and Chinese atmosphere, the project was planned from scratch with the help of William Puntke, who worked as a set designer for Paramount Pictures. 3 The construc­tion also incorporated film sets donated by Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, which had served in the 1937 blockbuster The Good Earth. With its picturesque Chinese architecture, a lotus pond and rickshaw rides, ‘China City’ reflected entrepreneur Christine Sterling’s vision of it as a place intended mainly to attract tourists.4 The article’s men­tion of ‘movie concepts’ as playing a central role in ‘China City’s’ forma­tion indicates that the quarter’s rela­tion to Hollywood comprised more than mere geographical proximity. As a manifesta­tion of Hollywood ideas, ‘China City’ instead demonstrated the impact of mo­tion pictures on percep­tions of Chinese people and culture in the United States. Furthermore, the article’s emphasis on the quarter’s picturesque appearance points to the importance of the visual for creating a decidedly Chinese impression. A specific visual sensa­tion, it seems, was integral to representing and experiencing Chineseness – both for spaces like ‘China City’ and on the cinema screen. The significance of film and its interrela­tions with Chinese immigra­tion form the core of this study. On a general level, this study investigates the basic ques­tion:



1 Robert O. Foote, “West Builds ‘China City,’” New York Times, May 1, 1938. 2 Ibid. 3 See “Plans for Los Angeles’ New China City Completed,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1938. 4 On the history of China City, see William Gow, “Building a Chinese Village in Los Angeles: Christine Sterling and the Residents of China City, 1938 – 1948,” Gum Saan Journal 32, no. 1 (2010), accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.chssc.org/History/ChinatownRemembered/ Neighborhoods/Residents_of_China_City.aspx.

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|  Introduc­tion

what exactly were the underlying ‘movie concepts’ and how did they inform percep­tions of Chinese Americans?5 When ‘China City’ opened in 1938, mo­tion pictures already had a rich history of representing Chinese immigrants as well as urban Chinese quarters. Since the medium’s very beginnings, American film audiences were fascinated with exotic imagery and depic­tions of what they regarded as Oriental culture.6 Mo­tion pictures projected American ideas of exoticism onto the ‘Far East,’ but they also depicted the life and culture of alleged Orientals in the United States. In a filmic context, these representa­tions referred mainly to Chinese Americans and, to a lesser extent, Japanese Americans. Mo­tion pictures most commonly depicted Chinese immigrant males as figura­tions of the mysterious, inscrutable, and villainous Oriental or as the emasculated Confucian philosopher, laundryman, or opium addict.7 Chinatowns offered popular settings for film narratives, since their curio stores and architecture served as exotic backdrops for the story. However, films also used them for depic­tions of urban vices, particularly prostitu­tion, gambling, opium smoking, gang warfare, and other crimes.8 These film conven­tions composed part of the cultural history of Chinese immigra­tion and exclusion. Since immigra­tion from China started in the









5 For both political and practical reasons, my usage of the term ‘Chinese Americans’ will include both Chinese immigrants, who were by law ‘ineligible for citizenship,’ and U. S.-born Chinese Americans. I use the term ‘Chinese immigrants’ whenever I specifically refer to Chinese-­ born immigrants. 6 I use the term ‘Oriental’ as a historical concept, which referred to Asian and Middle Eastern cultures and peoples. As a cultural construc­tion rooted in colonialism and the articula­tion of a Eurocentric perspective, the term is highly ques­tionable. The same is true for ‘Occidental.’ My study seeks to deconstruct these concepts and trace the historical meanings they conveyed. For the sake of readability, I will omit the quota­tion marks when using these terms. 7 See Peter X Feng, introduc­tion to Screening Asian Americans (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham, Asian Americans and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); John Haddad, “The Laundry Man’s Got a Knife! China and Chinese America in Early United States Cinema,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives, (2001): 31 – 47; Gary Hoppenstand, “Yellow Devil Doctors and Opium Dens: The Yellow Peril Stereotype in Mass Media Entertainment,” in Popular Culture: An Introductory Text, ed. John G. Nachbar and Kevin Lause (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992), 277 – 291. 8 Peter Stanfield, “‘American as Chop Suey’: Invoca­tions of Gangsters in Chinatown, 1920 – 1936,” in Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, ed. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 238 – 262; Ruth Mayer, “The Glittering Machine of Modernity: The Chinatown in American Silent Film,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 4 (2009): 661 – 684.

Introduc­tion  |

mid-­nineteenth century, Chinese faced hostility and racial hatred.9 Discrimina­ tion against Chinese due to percep­tions of them as a threat to white labor on the West Coast culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first U. S. law prohibiting immigra­tion on the basis of race.10 Subsequent laws renewed exclusion and expanded it to the Japanese and other Asian groups in the ­following decades. Asiatic exclusion became permanent in the 1924 Immigra­tion Act, which was the cornerstone of the nativist and restrictive immigra­tion poli­cy of the 1920s.11 These immigra­tion restric­tions resulted from the intensifying debates about the desired composi­tion of the United States’ popula­tion, which were increasingly tied to racial categoriza­tions. Around the turn of the century, the no­tion of the so-­called Yellow Peril informed a broad anti-­Chinese sentiment.12 Many political and cultural critics viewed China as a threat to the Western hemisphere that would soon overrun Europe and the U. S., as had its supposed

9 See Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Najia Aarim-­Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Ameri­ cans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848 – 1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785 – 1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 10 The debate about the causes of the Chinese Exclusion Act has a long history of its own. Post-1960s scholarship generally ques­tions the sole focus on California and the class-­bias of earlier studies. The focus has shifted to aspects of race and general American sinophobia. See ­Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-­Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Recent scholarship stresses the significance of gender for the Chinese Exclusion Act. See, for example, George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigra­tion Before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). A transna­tional approach is outlined in Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (2007): 537 – 562. 11 See Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigra­tion, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Demo­ cracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigra­tion Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). For an enduringly relevant study on U. S. nativism, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860 – 1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955). 12 See Richard Austin Thompson, The Yellow Peril, 1890 – 1924 (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Stanford M. Lyman, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ Mystique: Origins and Vicissitudes of a Racist Discourse,” Interna­tional Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 13, no. 4 (2000): 683 – 747; Ute Mehnert, Deutschland, Amerika und die ‘Gelbe Gefahr’: Zur Karriere eines Schlagworts in der Großen Politik, 1905 – 1917 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995). For a psychoanalytical reading of Yellow Peril fear in U. S. history, see John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Notes for a History of Paranoia: ‘Yellow Peril’ and the Long Twentieth Century,” Psychoanalytic Review 97, no. 2 (2010): 263 – 283.

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predecessors, the ‘hordes’ of Genghis Khan. Rendering Chinese immigra­tion an indirect form of coloniza­tion, Yellow Peril discourse further reinforced racism against the Chinese living in the United States. The racial anxieties at the core of such proclama­tions became immensely powerful in U. S. political and popular culture, where Chinese were portrayed as racially inferior, immoral, and gene­ rally incompatible with Western cultural standards.13 On a large cultural scale, these discourses rendered Chinese immigrants incapable of ‘assimilating’ into U. S. society, representing even native-­born Chinese Americans as what scholars have termed ‘foreigners-­within’ or ‘perpetual foreigners.’14 The point of departure for this study is mo­tion pictures’ rise as the most important form of mass entertainment during a time when ques­tions of race and immigra­ tion fueled debates on a significant scale. Taking the Chinese Exclusion Act and the nativist legisla­tion of the 1920s as key points in U. S. political history, this study explores how mo­tion pictures as a cultural and visual practice negotiated the pre­ sence – and exclusion – of people with Chinese heritage. How did films produce popular knowledge about Chinese immigrants as the fundamental Other of Occidental culture? Here I generally follow Edward Said’s thoughts on Orientalism and ask how filmic depic­tions of Chinese immigrants disseminated ideas about a Western and decidedly American identity by relying on so-­called Orien­tals as a “contrasting image”15 – that is, as the constitutive Other of Western civiliza­tion. In this regard, I understand the concept of Orientalness as a flexible, historical term, constituting a unified Western identity by demarcating it from a racialized, non-­white Other. Scholars have identified ‘American Orientalism’ as comprising both the fascina­tion with an exotic, romanticized ‘East’ and the racial anxieties of Yellow Peril discourse.16 Unlike its European counterpart outlined by Said, 13 See Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fic­tion, 1850 – 1940 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1982). For comprehensive collec­tions of visual sources, see John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, eds., Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-­Asian Fear (London: Verso, 2014); Philip P. Choy, Lorraine Dong, and Marlon K. Hom, eds., Coming Man: 19th Century American Percep­tions of the Chinese (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 14 See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 5. On the persistence of these no­tions until present day, see Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 15 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2003), 2. 16 On American Orientalism, see, for example, John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before China­town: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776 – 1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique:

Introduc­tion  |

American Orientalism involved a strong ‘domestic’ dimension as it was shaped by Asian, especially Chinese, immigra­tion into the United States in the nineteenth century. Since Chinese were the largest immigrant group and the first one to be excluded, they dominated the realm of visual representa­tion.17 Consequently, I understand Orientalness as a concept through which U. S. society of the early twentieth century understood and constructed Chinese as racial Other in order to legitimize their exclusion, ineligibility for citizenship, marginaliza­tion, and massive discrimina­tion. Rather than focusing on the way the Orient served as an outward projec­tion in U. S. culture, I will point to the processes through which Chinese Americans in the United States were understood as a foreign presence within the United States.18 My investiga­tion contributes to the growing scholarship devoted to the cultural history of Asian Americans and the concepts of race, gender, and class that shaped it. The distinctive posi­tion of Asian Americans within the history of the United States has generated much research over the last decades. In order to shed light on this long neglected field, scholars have investigated the political, social, and cultural histories of Chinese Americans during the exclusion era.19 The representa­ tion, or rather ‘misrepresenta­tion,’ and stereotyping in visual media have become central aspects for investiga­tions of racial discrimina­tion. Key starting points for Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transforma­tion of American Orien­ talism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). On Orientalism interrela­tion to Chinese exclusion, see Neil Gotanda, “Exclusion and Inclusion: Immigra­tion and American Orientalism,” in Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globaliza­tion, ed. Evelyn Hu-­DeHart (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 129 – 151. 17 The case was different with mo­tion pictures that used ‘the Orient’ as their setting, where the Middle East also played a significant role. See, for example, Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (London: Tauris, 1997). 18 While this project started with the inten­tion to include Japanese and other Asian immigrant groups, such as Koreans and Filipinos, I quickly realized that it would require far more research, flattening the depth of my analysis. The four central fields of this study each underscore the prominence of Chinese as stereotypical Orientals. 19 See, for example, Shehong Chen, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850 – 1943: A Trans-­ Pacific Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigra­tion Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991); Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882 – 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989).

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discussions have often revolved around bewilderment over the blatant racism of the popular Fu Manchu stories and other Yellow Peril narratives in mo­tion pictures and literature – a bewilderment that formed the initial starting point of this study as well.20 The evil Chinese mastermind Fu Manchu, threatening to destroy Western civiliza­tion and seeking to enslave white women, was indeed an immensely popular figura­tion of colonial racial anxieties. Fu Manchu formed the archetype for countless characters in dime novels, magazine stories, and mo­tion pictures of the early twentieth century. Early scholarship focused on working out particular stereotypes and based their analyses on contrasting negative and positive ­images.21 The figure of the Oriental detective that became famous through the Charlie Chan films of the 1930s and 1940s seemed to form a ‘positive’ counterpart to the villainous Fu Manchu.22 Here the Chinese American character was a benevolent, proverb-­quoting, and mystery-­ solving private detective who helped to apprehend criminals. These depic­tions of Asian characters were highly gendered, as Renee Tajima influentially remarked.23 She identifies two fundamental representa­tional modes of Asian femininity, both linked to passivity and subordina­tion to men: the Lotus Blossom and the Dragon Lady. The stereotype of the Lotus Blossom refers to characters that serve as the passive love interest of white men, representing a romantic-­sexualized object of the white gaze. The Dragon Lady, on the contrary, describes the female counterpart to Fu Manchu, who Tajima characterizes as the treacherous and evil servant of male Oriental villains, assisting to dominate white men. These stereotypes are indeed striking and they circulated immensely in early twentieth-­century popular culture.

20 A groundwork study is Eugene Franklin Wong, On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the Ameri­ can Mo­tion Pictures (New York: Arno Press, 1978). On Fu Manchu, see Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014); Tina Chen, “Dissecting the ‘Devil Doctor’: Stereotype and Sensa­tionalism in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu,” in Re/Collecting Early Asian America, ed. ­Josephine D. Lee et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 218 – 237. 21 A typical example of these earlier approaches is Dorothy B. Jones, The Portrayal of China and India on the American Screen, 1896 – 1955 (Cambridge: Center for Interna­tional Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1955). 22 On Charlie Chan, see Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Jachinson Chan, Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee (New York: Routledge, 2001). 23 Renee Tajima, “Lotus Blossoms Don’t Bleed: Images of Asian Women,” in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian American Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 308 – 317; see also Laura Hyun-­Yi Kang, “The Desiring of Asian Female Bodies: Interracial Romance and Cinematic Subjec­tion,” Visual Anthropology Review 9, no. 1 (1993): 5 – 21.

Introduc­tion  |

Recent scholarship has moved away from identifying negative or positive representa­tions and towards analyzing the historical discourses that produced and disseminated these stereotypes. As Peter X Feng asserts, “there is no such thing as a positive or negative representa­tion, rather, there are representa­tions that are mobilized positively or negatively depending on discursive context.”24 By ­expanding the analytical perspective, we can reveal the specific func­tion of stereo­types within changing historical discourses and power rela­tions. Scholars like ­Robert G. Lee have accordingly worked out how U. S. popular culture has reima­gined Asian Americans as Orientals by constructing them as ‘heathen Chinee,’ ‘coolies,’ or a ‘model minority’ over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in changing historical settings. Lee reminds us that concepts of ‘the Oriental’ as alien always encompassed aspects of race, gender, sexuality, and na­tio­nal identity. As such, it always answered perceived historical ‘crises’ – periods when the concept of ‘Ameri­canness’ was redefined.25 Scholars have also revealed the underlying racial dyna­mics of allegedly positive figures like Charlie Chan or the romanticized and passive Confucian merchant, perpetuated through D. W. Griffith’s film classic Broken Blossoms (1919).26 They point instead to the interrelatedness of p­ resumably negative and positive stereotypes, seeing them as two sides of the same coin, each ­expressing a historically specific mode of constructing and containing Chinese American Otherness.27 Other scholars like Gina Marchetti demonstrated how Yellow Peril narratives massively circled around fears of interracial sexuality. Yellow Peril discourse, she argues, “combine[d] racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxie­ ties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark occult forces of the East.”28 Underscoring once more that Orien­talism and colonialist discourse is always connected to race, gender, and sex, Marchetti 24 Peter X Feng, introduc­tion to Screening Asian Americans (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 5. See also Lee, Orientals, 12 – 13. 25 Lee, Orientals, 9. 26 Broken Blossoms, dir. D. W. Griffith, perf. Lilian Gish and Richard Barthelmess (United States: D. W. Griffith Produc­tions, 1919). I document films in footnotes only when I first men­tion them. Please consult the filmography for further references. On Broken Blossoms, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fic­tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10 – 45; Susan Koshy, “American Na­tion­hood as Eugenic Romance,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2001): 50 – 78; Lan Dong, “Cinematic Representa­tion of the Yellow Peril: D. W. Griffith’s ‘Broken Blossoms,’” in Color, Hair, and Bone: Race in the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Linden Lewis et al. (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008), 122 – 146. 27 See Feng, Screening Chinese Americans; Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asian American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 142 – 145. 28 Marchetti, Romance, 2.

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shows how mo­tion pictures depicting interracial contact articulated both sexual anxieties and fantasies. In the early decades of the twentieth century, these filmic depic­tions sensa­tionalized a cultural taboo, and as a consequence their narratives were usually destined to end tragically for the Oriental character. This study follows these thoughts and aims at further expanding our perspective by investigating filmic depic­tions in their rela­tion to the political, social, and cultural history from which they emerged. I argue that film offered a unique and highly influential medium for the various discourses circling around Chinese immigra­tion. By focusing on mo­tion pictures’ embeddedness in diverse discursive fields of visual knowledge, I will pursue ques­tions of what mo­tion pictures depicted and how they created meaning and thereby solidified and negotiated power hierarchies. As I show, films did indeed more than ‘misrepresent’ Chinese immigrants and circulate racial stereotypes: their very visuality was based on racialized knowledge of Chinese American Orientalness. A closer look at mo­tion pictures in the early twentieth century shows that Chinese Americans appeared in a large number of films in varying narrative contexts and settings. These representa­tions span a broad spectrum, often not fitting into the pattern of simple stereotypes. Films set in Chinatown, for example, offered their audien­ces a glimpse into a hybrid space, inhabited by Chinatown gangsters and so-­called hatchet men but also home to Americanized youths and ‘Chinese flappers.’ Border westerns, on the contrary, depicted Chinese as illegal immigrants, as intruding aliens, often ‘smuggled’ into the country. A significant number of representa­tional modes and mo­tion pictures have largely remained ‘under the radar’ of scholarly atten­tion. Moreover, in the time period concerned in this study, all leading roles that portrayed Oriental characters were played by white actors and actresses in yellowface, further underscoring mo­tion pictures’ rela­ tion to racial imagery. Looking through the many films produced in this time period reveals that contemporary racism (and this is indeed a characteristic all these films have in common) operated on many levels. How can we grasp these representa­tions? And more importantly, how did they contribute to the no­tion of Oriental Otherness? On a general level, these films underscore the degree to which U. S. society was preoccupied with ques­tions of race and the significance of Chinese immigra­tion. The following chapters seek to investigate this broad field from a new perspective by situating mo­tion pictures within the visual culture of the interwar period. My central argument is that film visuality formed an important element within a broader visual culture of Oriental Otherness, which placed Chinese Americans at the margins (or outside) of U. S. society. I argue that these various portrayals were informed by and contributed to contemporary ques­tions of immigra­tion, ‘Americaniza­tion,’ race, and the general

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(in)visibility of Chinese in political and social debates. I will investigate and analyze these connec­tions and aim to show mo­tion pictures’ productiveness within the social, cultural, and scientific discourses of their time. Besides contributing to Asian American history, my investiga­tion therefore also invests itself in the history of immigra­tion and the significance of race at the height of America’s exclusionist policy. As recent scholarship emphasizes, the nativist political climate and the immigra­tion restric­tions during the first decades of the twentieth century circled heavily around ques­tions of race.29 In the light of a rising na­tionalism and the ongoing influx of so-­called ‘new immigrants,’ ques­tions about the desired racial composi­tion of the U. S. popula­tion gained much atten­tion. Fears over the imagined demise of the white, Protestant American ‘racial stock’ through the immigra­tion of supposedly lower races abounded.30 Immigra­tion discourses of the 1920s consequently defined the ‘outsiders’ of U. S. society and contributed to the no­tion of a decidedly white U. S. na­tion state. Chinese immigrants, however, had already been excluded since 1882, and although they found manifold ways of circumventing exclusion, they posed a slightly different problem to many contemporaries. The presence of those immigrants already living in the U. S. as well as their native-­born offspring on the one hand and the fears of illegal immigra­tion on the other occupied public debates. The time period from the 1910s to the 1930s saw the American public addressing these ­topics on a broad cultural platform. Several discursive fields ranging from sociology and scientific race theory to border enforcement and tourism identified Chinese Ameri­cans as foreigners-­within, as illegal aliens or as Oriental curiosities living in closed-­off spaces like Chinatown. These discourses contributed to an understanding of Chinese Americans as racially inferior, unassimilable, and ineligible for citizenship. The 1920s and 1930s, however, also witnessed an increasing agency and visibility of native-­born Chinese Americans in the political and cultural sphere.31 These decades,

29 See, for example, Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Na­tion in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 30 See Higham, Strangers in the Land. Out of the many recent studies, see, for example, King, Making Americans; Barbara Lüthi, Invading Bodies: Medizin und Immigra­tion in den USA 1880 – 1920 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2009); Robert Júlio Decker, “White Subjects, Governmentality, and Immigra­tion Restric­tion in the United States, 1894 – 1924,” in Colo­ nialism and Beyond: Race and Migra­tion from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. Eva Bischoff and Elisabeth Engel (Münster: LIT, 2013), 33 – 52. 31 See, for example, Chen, Being Chinese; Chan, Entry Denied; K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion

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as I argue, are characterized by conflicting concepts regarding Chinese Americans’ ‘place’ in U. S. society, oscillating between racialized Orientalness and increasing ‘Americaniza­tion.’ These underlying shifts make these decades so important for understanding the United States’ negotia­tion of Chinese American immigra­tion and topics of immigra­tion in general. As scholars like David Palumbo-­Liu emphasize: “As conceptual entities with which (and against which) America measured itself, and also as active agents, Asians in America have historically participated in the constitu­tion of what ‘America’ was and is at any given moment.”32 The history of American concep­ tions of Oriental Other­ness is always also the history of the supposed, idealized ‘self ’ of U. S. na­tionalism. A central ques­tion remains: what can we gain by looking at mo­tion pictures? And why are mo­tion pictures important for our understanding of the processes of racializa­tion? To begin with, I understand race as a social construc­tion, following Omi and Winant’s influential theory of racial forma­tion.33 Race is not a biological essence but a fluid concept, discursively constructed and politically contested. Most importantly, race is historically variable and constantly transforming.34 As Omi and Winant rightly observe, even though race does not exist, it does have a very real effect as a social category. Race pervades every level of social, cultural, and political interac­tion. Images play an important role in these processes, as they are easily consumable and offer simple recogni­tion and identifica­tion. Since the beginnings of scientific race theory, racial imagery served to demarcate ­racialized bodies, distinguish white races from others and categorize humans along the lines of visual difference. As Richard Dyer ­poignantly asserts, “racial imagery is central to the organiza­tion of the modern world.”35 Mo­tion pictures, like no other modern medium in the early twentieth century, disseminated images of race to large audiences and incorporated racialized ­no­tions into their narratives, thereby contributing massively to the circula­tion and consolida­tion of racial knowledge. Film studies have repeatedly worked out how mo­tion pictures have shaped, transformed, and reproduced ideas of race, emphasizing that film itself came into being during a time period when racial concepts were in flux and increasingly Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Pei-­te Lien, The Making of Asian America through Political Participa­tion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). 32 David Palumbo-­Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2 (italics in the original). 33 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Forma­tion in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55 – 56. 34 See Les Back and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (London: Rout­ ledge, 2000). 35 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 1.

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ques­tioned.36 As film scholar Daniel Bernardi stresses, film was of critical importance for the forma­tion of racial categories: “Indeed, U. S. cine­ma has consistently constructed whiteness, the representa­tional and narrative form of Eurocentrism, as the norm by which all ‘Others’ fail by comparison.”37 Consequently, mo­tion pictures did not merely ‘mirror’ the racial discourses around immigra­tion that I outlined above; they were (and still are) a productive force within them. They actively produced and disseminated them and made racial concepts accessible and meaningful to their audiences. In this regard, it is important to point to the intersec­tions of race and other categories like gender and class. While the focus of my analysis is on race, I follow an intersec­tional approach that regards categories of social stratifica­tion as inextricably linked.38 Like race, gender does not refer to any biological essence but is the product of biological and cultural discourses inscribed onto the body.39 It is important, therefore, to keep in mind that the racialized body is always a gendered body as well. Construc­tions like race, gender, and class are the result of constant repeti­tion, reitera­tion, and performativity, as

36 See Daniel Bernardi, ed. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U. S. Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representa­tion: Cultural Representa­tions and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: SAGE , 1997), 223 – 290; Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Euro­ centrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994); Lester D. Friedman, ed., Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Gerald R. Butters Jr., Black Manhood on the Silent Screen (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, eds., America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, 2nd ed. (Malden: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009). 37 Daniel Bernardi, introduc­tion to Birth of Whiteness, 4 – 5. 38 See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersec­tion of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimina­tion Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” Uni­ versity of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139 – 67. See also Katharina Walgenbach, “Gender als interdependente Kategorie,” in Gender als interdependente Kategorie: Neue Perspektiven auf Intersek­tionalität, Diversität und Heterogenität, ed. Katharina Walgenbach et al. (Opladen: Barbara Budrich, 2007), 23 – 6 4. My focus on race, therefore, is inevitably an analytical simplifica­tion and solely due to reasons of practicability. I will, however, emphasize other categories whenever they are crucial to my analysis. 39 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). As Olaf Stieglitz has remarked, intersec­tional theory has a tendency to be ahistorical, whereas gender history has long followed intersec­tional approaches without labeling them as such. See Olaf Stieglitz, review of Intersek­tionalität: Zur Analyse sozia­ler Ungleichheiten, ed. Gabriele Winker and Nina Degel, H-Soz-­Kult, 30. 10. 2009, accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.hsozkult.de/publica­tionreview/ id/rezbuecher-13211.

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scholars like Judith Butler emphasize.40 This will become apparent, for instance, in regard to yellowface when I turn to ques­tions of how the practice of racial masquerade reiterated racialized knowledge of the Oriental body. Addi­tionally, ques­tions regarding the performativity of race were actively negotiated in films that depicted ‘Americanized’ Chinese characters who find out about their ‘true’ white identity at the end of the film, a narrative twist featured in a number of films of the 1920s and 1930s. The importance of visuality leads to the third field my study seeks to contribute to: the growing scholarship on ‘visual history,’ especially in German academia. My approach testifies to the use of mo­tion pictures as a historical source and advocates the recogni­tion of film as a pivotal agent in social processes. While the use of film is a common practice in U. S. scholarship, it still occupies a niche of modern history and Zeitgeschichte in German historiography, where the medium is only tentatively accepted as a source equal in value to that of any other cultural ‘text.’ Historian Gerhard Paul has influentially called for an increased use of images and the incorpora­tion of visual history into the historiographic discipline.41 Until the 2000s, as Paul observes, images have played only a minor role in German historiography and were largely considered as mere auxiliary for texts or faithful representa­tions of their time.42 Only in recent years have historians begun to investigate the cultural, social, and political effects of images and moved away from merely looking at their content. The discipline has surely made progress, especially in the field of photographic history.43 In regard to mo­tion pictures, the last years have seen a number of publica­tions that move away from film history to the perspective of film as history, demonstrating creatively how film can serve for historical analysis.44 However, while German historians have begun to develop theoretical 40 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 18. 41 See Gerhard Paul, ed., Visual History: Ein Studienbuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und ­Ruprecht, 2006); Gerhard Paul, BilderMACHT: Studien zur Visual History des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013); see also, Saskia Handro and Bernd ­Schönemann, eds., Visualität und Geschichte (Münster: LIT, 2011). 42 Paul differentiates between visual history and the “Historische Bildkunde” of the 1970s and the tradi­tional use of paintings in medieval history, see Gerhard Paul, “Von der Historischen Bildkunde zur Visual History: Eine Einführung,” in Paul, Visual History, 7 – 36. 43 On photographic history, see, for example, Jens Jäger, Fotografie und Geschichte, Frankfurt: Campus, 2009; see also Jens Jäger and Martin Knauer, eds., Bilder als Historische Quellen? Dimension der Debatten um Historische Bildforschung (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2009). 44 See, for example, Antje Dechert, Stars all’italia: Kino und Körperdiskurse in Italien, 1930 – 1965 (Köln: Böhlau, 2014); Tobias Nagl, Die Unheim­liche Maschine: Rasse und Repräsenta­tion

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and methodological frameworks for the historical analysis of images, mo­tion pictures still remain largely excluded from these considera­tions. Within the increasingly d ­ eveloping field of discursive understanding of visual sources, a transferal of discourse theor­y to mo­tion pictures has yet to occur.45 Lacking a fundamental theoretical approach to the field of film and history, Günter Riederer’s remarks about the “complicated rela­tionship” between German historiography and film remain valid up to this day.46 This book aims at providing a fresh perspective for the debate of film’s rela­ tionship with history and undertakes a visual discourse analysis of mo­tion pictures. It employs and expands the theoretical framework historians have recently developed in regard to the discursive understanding of images and uses it for the close reading of U. S. mo­tion pictures. By focusing on visual discourses and visua­ lity, I take the filmic images themselves into account and investigate the practices involved in producing and consuming them. Mo­tion pictures reproduced and transformed historical discourses on all opera­tional levels: through their imagery, narrative, costumes, makeup, and through their quality as a social practice. The four chapters of this study ask how the discursive, practical, and spatial ‘context’ of the films featuring Chinese Americans created specific meaning in regard to Oriental Otherness. For instance, how did the on-­screen depic­tions of Chinatown relate to the ‘real’ U. S. Chinatowns as popular tourist attrac­tions? How did the depic­tion of illegal Chinese immigrants in films correspond to the imagery of the U. S.-Mexico border and cultural dichotomies of inside and outside? How did makeup artists transform white actors and actresses into screen-­Orientals, and what effect did it have that audiences were completely aware of who was ‘under’ this makeup? Why were depic­tions of allegedly Americanized Chinese youths and narratives that involved a character’s ‘becoming white’ so popular?

im Weimarer Kino (München: Edi­tion Text + Kritik, 2009); Maren Möhring, Massimo Perinelli, and Olaf Stieglitz, eds., Tiere im Film: Eine Menschheitsgeschichte (Köln: Böhlau, 2009); Pablo Dominguez Andersen, “‘So Tired of the Parts I Had to Play’: Anna May Wong and German Orientalism in the Weimar Republic,” in Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and Na­tional Belonging in a Transna­tional World, ed. Brian B. Behnken and Simon Wendt (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013), 261 – 284. 45 A recently published volume exemplifies this, as it substantially contributes to the debate but completely lacks a text on mo­tion pictures. See Franz X. Eder, Oliver Kühschelm, and Christina Linsboth, eds., Bilder in Historischen Diskursen (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014); see also Sabine Maasen, Torsten Mayerhauser, and Cornelia Renggli, eds., Bilder als Diskurse – Bilddiskurse (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2006). 46 Günter Riederer, “Film und Geschichtswissenschaft: Zum aktuellen Verhältnis einer schwie­ rigen Beziehung,” in Paul, Visual History, 96 – 113.

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By scrutinizing how mo­tion pictures produced meaning on all these levels and in rela­tion to other discursive fields, we can comprehend them in their historical significance. I will therefore identify four discursive fields connected to Chinese immigra­tion and show how mo­tion pictures visualized these discourses for mainstream audiences. I will take into account the rela­tion between filmic visuality and other images like postcards or photographs. On a general level, I will focus on the way the medium film opened new possibilities of visualizing racialized knowledge and a specific visibility of Chinese Americans in the time period from the 1910s to the 1930s. This theoretical framework will unfold in more elaborate detail in the next subchapter. The temporal focus on the 1910s to World War II results from my argument that these were formative years for a specific re-­actualiza­tion of images of Chinese Americans through the increasingly significant film medium. Scholarship has investigated the visual representa­tion of Chinese immigrants during the times of anti-­Chinese agita­tion and beyond.47 Most often, these studies concentrate on the period of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act itself or, when adopting a more film-­oriented approach, cover a longer time period from early film in the 1900s to the 1960s and beyond.48 While these studies form important contribu­tions, the topics of Yellow Peril, stereotypes, and immigra­tion are largely discussed at chapter-­length and often lack a comprehensive historical background. The time period spanning mo­tion picture’s consolida­tion as a mass medium and its precise effects on discourses of immigra­tion and race have never been analyzed in detail. My study seeks to close this gap. The chosen time frame starts in the 1910s, when the feature film as we know it today became the predominant style. This decade saw the intensifica­tion of exclusionist and racial discourses in the aftermath of World War I. I chose the late 1930s as the end point because of a recognizable cultural and political shift which impacted the narratives and aesthetics of the films and caused a decline in many elements discussed in this study. The Sino-­Japanese War in 1937 and the ultimate outbreak of World War II , which turned Chinese into U. S. allies and led to the vilifica­tion of Japanese, changed mo­tion picture’s focus and impacted the industry as a whole. The increasing political agency of Chinese Americans who addressed discriminating depic­tions and racial stereotypes 47 Lee, Orientals; Choy et al., Coming Man; Tchen and Yeats, Yellow Peril. 48 See Marchetti, Romance; Lee, Orientals; Feng, Screening Asian Americans; Karla Rae Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu, eds., Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

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contributed further momentum to this trend; this agency will pose a recurring theme throughout the study. The choice in favor of a synchronic analysis of a large number of films produced in a relatively short time period owes to the fact that my study is a deci­ dedly historical work. It allows providing an in-­depth analysis of the historical processes and culture that mo­tion pictures were an element of. As I argue, filmic sources offer a means for analyzing the cultural dynamics of debates about immigra­tion. I use them to point out how films produced culture – through their visuality, the practice of their consump­tion and as elements of broader discourses. By following a large number of mainly un-­canonized films from the 1910s to the 1930s into several discursive fields, my study demonstrates how these films resonated with contemporary power hierarchies and the produc­tion of racial knowledge about Orientals. For the first time, a detailed analysis explores the manifold ways film shaped the United States’ understanding of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, focusing exclusively on the crucial time period when ques­tions of immigra­tion, Americaniza­tion, and race were most hotly debated. My study is explicitly devoted to U. S.-American representa­tions of Chinese in the United States. It therefore omits films that deal with China itself. This decision owes largely to practicability, as the latter would require a dispropor­tionally greater body of research, but it is also a decision I made consciously because this study is interested in the effects immigra­tion had on the United States and less in American projec­tions of China.49 This distinc­ tion is of course an analytical one, and de facto the boundary is fluid, but I am confident that my focus is justified by the depth of investiga­tion it allows and the comparably large output of films that explicitly deal with Chinese Ameri­ cans and Chinese immigra­tion. What follows is an outline of my basic theoretical and methodological approach. This sec­tion will lay out my understanding of visual discourse analysis and how mo­tion pictures can be analyzed as historical elements therein. This theoretical background provides the basic framework of my overall study. In order to avoid a fundamental separa­tion between theory and analysis, I will elaborate on more specific theoretical concepts in the respective chapters when they contribute directly to my investiga­tion.

49 For studies using a more outward-­oriented perspective, see Bernstein and Studlar, Visions of the East; Naomi Greene, From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014); Homay King, Lost in Transla­tion: Orien­ talism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

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Theory and Methodology

This study will point out the visual discourses that determined how mo­tion pictures represented topics of Chinese immigra­tion from the 1910s to the 1930s. It aims, on a first level, at a (visual) discourse analysis that demonstrates the films’ cultural importance by showing how they inscribed themselves into these discourses. On a second level, the study conceives of mo­tion pictures as a visual practice and as a technology of power, knowledge, and identity construc­tion. It will look at the ways the films were seen and also how both their aesthetic and narrative produced a specific visuality. While it may seem like the concept of discourse needs no further explana­tion anymore, I want to stress first those aspects of Foucauldian discourse and dispositif (‘apparatus’) theory which are relevant for my analysis.50 Following the theoretical insights of visual culture studies, I will outline my understanding of mo­tion pictures as visual discourses. While the field of visual culture studies is still emerging and very heterogeneous, its basic premises are highly compatible with the analytical perspective of this study. While a conclusive defini­tion of ‘discourse’ would contradict Michel Foucault’s philosophical approach, he comes close to it in The Archeology of Knowledge. Here he points out that his understanding of discourse is based on the simple observa­tion that “on the basis of the grammar and of the wealth of vocabulary available at a given period, there are, in total, relatively few things that are said.”51 He introduces discourse as the instance which organizes and limits what can be said and therefore defines which expressions are meaningful at a specific point in time. The sum of connected statements constitutes – by means of repeti­tion, reproduc­tion, and transforma­tion – what Foucault calls “discursive forma­tions.”52 Anything which is not said is not merely unworthy of being said, but has no rela­ tion to meaningfulness and knowledge and therefore, in a certain sense, does not exist at all. Discourses form the very basis of what is known and how it is known, and therefore they construct reality. 50 See Achim Landwehr, Historische Diskursanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008), 63 – 65. I will use the original French expression of dispositif instead of the often-­used transla­ tion ‘apparatus.’ In my opinion, the latter falls short of the original meaning. 51 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972; repr., London: Routledge, 2002), 134. 52 Foucault, Archaeology, 131. Foucault’s understanding of statements differs significantly from their common meaning. Statements are the basic elements which constitute a discourse. A statement is therefore neither a proposi­tion nor an expression but a ‘func­tion’ of discourses. Its func­tion exceeds a mere level of meaning, insofar as a multiplicity of statements form the rules an expression follows in the field of discursive meaningfulness, see Foucault, A ­ rchaeolo­g y, 89 – 132.

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Throughout his work, Foucault is not specifically interested in the repressive func­tion of phenomena but in their productivity. This implies a perspective in which the margins of intelligibility are as important as the way discourses produce knowledge of objects and, ultimately, reality. According to Foucault, it is only on the level of discourses that we can make any statement about historical processes. “A task that consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs […] but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. It is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe.”53

This ‘more’ is exactly what distinguishes discourse analysis from more tradi­tional, positivist historiography.54 It is based on the no­tion that there is n ­ othing which is not discursively formed, and therefore everything can be historicized. Furthermore, it directly connects knowledge to aspects of power and subjectivity. Foucault himself famously contributed to the historiciza­tion of concepts that had been regarded as possessing a ‘natural’ essence, such as the body or sexua­ lity.55 In order to point out the historical dimension of knowledge, Foucault implements the Nietzschean understanding of genealogy. The genealogical method departs from a linear perspective and instead apprehends the processes of becoming and transforma­tions of knowledge. It takes into account

53 Foucault, Archaeology, 54 (italics in the original). 54 In the following passages, I will focus on the implica­tions of discourse theory for historio­ graphy. Of course, discourse analysis does not have to be historical. In his introduc­tion to The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, Foucault states he does not consider himself a historian at all. While I refrain from joining the debate of whether Foucault was a historian or not, I argue it is this “more” that discourse analysis brings to light that makes it a theory of radical historicity. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1985; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 9. 55 This is what makes Achim Landwehr’s sugges­tion for a discourse analysis of the concept of ‘discourse’ itself so interesting. The Foucauldian understanding of discourse became a power­ ful tool for ques­tioning no­tions of normality in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and the events around 1968. Discourse theory, so to speak, made it possible to say things that could not be said before. It produced a different form of knowledge and became a political tool. This was the reason why Foucault’s thoughts proved so useful for gender- and postcolonial studies. See Achim Landwehr, “Diskurs und Diskursgeschichte, Version 1.0,” Docupedia-­Zeitgeschichte February 11 (2010), accessed April 18, 2016, http://docupedia.de/ zg/Diskurs_und_Diskursgeschichte.

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the ruptures, contingencies, simultaneities, and multiplicities that are at work in the forma­tion of discourses.56 By understanding discourses as productive forces in the forma­tion of knowledge, Foucault fundamentally rejects classical ideas about the sovereign subject. Subjects are not outside of discourses; on the contrary, they are constituted through discourses, being an effect of discursive forma­tions and at the same time (re-) producing them. Situated within the field of knowledge, they have to ‘subject’ themselves to discourse to obtain an intelligible subject posi­tion. If we consider the subject discursively formed, it can no longer serve as the point of departure for historical examina­tion.57 While this concep­tion of subjectivity led to much criticism and many lamenta­tions over the ‘death’ or denial of the subject, it is in fact its radical historiciza­tion.58 The connec­tion between discourse and power occupies a central posi­tion in Foucault’s thinking. Foucault conceives power not as a repressive force that p­ eople or groups exercise in a top-­bottom direc­tion. Instead, power permeates society as a whole. It “traverses and produces discourse” on every level of society and therefore needs to be “considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose func­tion is repression.”59 Knowledge is always connected to power in a productive way, and at the same time “it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together.”60 56 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139 – 164. 57 “One has to dispense with the constitu­tion of the subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitu­tion of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitu­tion of knowledge, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in rela­tion to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history.” Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 109 – 133, 117. 58 See Siegfried Jäger, “Diskurs und Wissen: Theoretische und methodische Aspekte einer Kritischen Diskurs- und Dispositivanalyse,” in Handbuch Sozia­lwissenschaft­liche Diskursanalyse, Bd. 1: Theorien und Methoden, 2nd ed., ed. Reiner Keller et al. (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2006), 83 – 114, 89; Reiner Keller, Werner Schneider, and Willy Viehöfer: “Theorie und Empirie der Subjektivierung in der Diskursforschung,” in Diskurs – Subjekt – Macht: ­Theorie und Empirie von Subjektivierung in der Diskursforschung, ed. Reiner Keller, Werner Schneider, and Willy Viehöfer (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag 2012), 7 – 20. 59 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 119. 60 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduc­tion (1978; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 100.

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In order to grasp Foucault’s concept of discourse, one always has to contemplate the interrelatedness of discourse, subjectivity, knowledge, and power. Discourses do not remain on the level of language; they shape and delimit a specific know­ ledge of a time and therefore generate truth effects, constructing reality. This knowledge is linked to power and thus situates historical subjects within a field of power rela­tions. Why is the Foucauldian concept of discourse relevant to the following analysis of mo­tion pictures? I introduce the concept primarily to argue for a discursive understanding of mo­tion pictures. Given that writing about film as a historian usually puts one in the posi­tion of being caught in the middle between tradi­tional historiography and film studies, discourse analysis appears to me as the best way to grasp mo­tion pictures from a clearly historical perspective. Like any other historical source, mo­tion pictures never exist outside of history but are always elements of historical discourses. If we follow Foucault, a book is never confined to its cover, just as a text never has a clear beginning or end but consists of a network of discourses that lead both into and out of it. A book is neces­sarily situated within a discursive field in order to be meaningful, and therefore it “is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”61 The same is true for mo­tion pictures: they are productive elements of discourses; they connect different discursive forma­ tions; they carry and disseminate a specific historical knowledge. If we understand cultural texts as nodes within a network, there must be threads that films pick up and place in a specific rela­tion, thereby (re)producing and transforming discursive forma­tions.62 This is even more the case with mo­tion pictures, as they are never the crea­tion of a single author or director but the result of various influences and factors. Like all texts of popular culture, films need to move within a certain field of discursive meaningfulness – even more so, since films must be understood by large audiences and, as a commercial product, appeal to many people to perform profitably. It is important to remember that films do not func­tion as a mirror of reality and therefore cannot be used as a ‘window’ into the past. Film is by its very nature always staged, edited, and framed and can therefore always be defined both by what we see and by what it does not show.63 61 Foucault, Archaeology, 25 – 26. 62 See Philipp Sarasin, “Subjekte, Diskurse, Körper: Überlegungen zu einer diskursanalytischen Kulturgeschichte,” in Kulturgeschichte Heute, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig and Hans-­Ulrich Wehler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 131 – 164. 63 For a classic work on film and film theory, see James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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A discursive approach allows a historiciza­tion of films because it is equally inte­ rested in what is shown and how it is, connecting them to specific knowledge and power rela­tions. The task of the historian is consequently to subject mo­tion pictures to a close reading, deconstruct them, and work out how they relate within histo­ rical discursive networks. In order to do so, this study will follow these discursive ‘threads’ into four larger discursive fields that produced a specific knowledge about the Chinese Oriental as racial Other. These fields are directly related to ques­tions of Chinese immigra­tion, and mo­tion pictures were significant and productive elements of these discourses, as we will see. Far from being specialized fields, they pervaded all areas of ‘common knowledge,’ as becomes apparent in the analyzed films. Working with mo­tion pictures inevitably requires a heightened awareness for aspects of visuality. This study will take into account insights and theories from the discipline of film studies, but it is more closely situated within the growing academic field of visual culture studies. Since the late 1990s, the humanities have witnessed a shift in the theoretical and practical approach to images and other forms of visual media. This ‘turn’ stressed the importance of images for all aspects of culture and fundamentally changed the way scholars worked with them. An influential proponent is art historian W. J. T. Mitchell, who called for a “pictorial turn” in 1992 in an attempt to combine art history and cultural studies.64 On a general level, the visual turn in the humanities is a reac­tion to the linguistic turn and can be understood as an applica­tion of the latter’s basic assump­tions to the field of images.65 The call for an increased atten­tion to images can, however, also be understood as a critique of the linguistic turn. In the Western philosophical tradi­tion, images have always succumbed to logocentrism; they obtained recogni­ tion merely as auxiliaries of the written word rather than as culturally important on their own.66 The visual turn ques­tions and criticizes this ­limita­tion to text and

64 W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Represen­ ta­tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11 – 34. Almost simultaneously, art historian Gottfried Boehm proclaimed an “iconic turn” and became one of the leading ­scholars in the field, especially in German academia. See Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild? (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1994), 11 – 38. For an overview of the diffe­ rences and similarities between Mitchell’s and Boehm’s concepts, see Gottfried Boehm and W. J. T. Mitchell, “Pictorial versus Iconic Turn: Two Letters,” Culture, Theory and Critique 50, no. 2 – 3 (2009): 103 – 121. 65 I prefer the term ‘visual turn’ over ‘pictorial’ and ‘iconic turn’ because it disregards the minor conceptual discrepancies and describes the ‘turn’ holistically. It also stresses both the importance of images themselves as well as the aspects of visuality. See Doris Bachmann-­Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006), 330. 66 See Bachmann-­Medick, Cultural Turns, 329.

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therefore also argues for a re-­evalua­tion of the linguistic turn’s basic founda­tion. In the same way language received recogni­tion as important for cultural processes, images have moved to the center of atten­tion. They are no longer regarded as representa­tions, symbols, or illustra­tions of external objects; rather, they must be analyzed in their productive func­tion within a network of culturally formed codes of meaning. Images like paintings, photos, or films produce meaning rather than just referring to the world in a neutral way. According to Mitchell, the pictorial turn “is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institu­tions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realiza­tion that spec­ tatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance the practices of observa­tion, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpreta­tion, etc.) and that visual experience or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.”67

Images, like language, hold an important posi­tion between the things they refer to and the seeing subject. They ultimately shape the way the world is ‘seen.’ While the visual turn has its origin in art history and philosophy, the last decades have seen a new (or renewed) interest in the connec­tion between images, know­ledge, and culture in many disciplines, which led to the emergence of visual culture studies as an interdisciplinary academic field. It comprises a wealth of theoretical approaches and has become a rapidly growing field of study.68 It has accordingly brought forth an almost incomprehensible number of publica­tions, journals and university courses in recent years.69 This diversity has increased the difficulty of defining the field of visual culture studies as a whole. As a consequence, a common critique is that the vast number of publica­tions in fact “tell us everything and ­nothing”70 about what visual culture studies comprise and what they aim to demonstrate.

67 Mitchell, “Pictorial Turn,” 16 (italics in the original). 68 For a useful overview of the different approaches, see Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 69 For an introductory read, see Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith, introduc­tion to Visual Cul­ ture: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 1: What is Visual Culture Studies? (London: Routledge, 2006), 1 – 18; Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood “Critical Approaches to the Study of Visual Culture: An Introduc­tion to the Handbook,” in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood (London: Berg, 2012), 1 – 56; Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduc­tion to Visual Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 1, no. 2 (2002): 165 – 181. 70 Morra and Smith, introduc­tion, 10.

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Visual culture studies’ theoretical approach to visuality as a cultural practice shows their closeness to cultural studies. It is again W. J. T. Mitchell who emphasizes that, rather than visual artifacts, it is ‘visual culture’ that acts as the object of study and who argues for a critical analysis of the constructed essence of vision in the tradi­tion of cultural studies.71 Vision and visuality are primarily cultural constructs, and so visual culture needs to be understood as processes and practices of meaning produc­tion. In their book Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright turn to prominent scholars of cultural studies like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams to define culture as a process and conclude that “artifacts such as images and imaging technologies have politics and agency.”72 Visual culture studies therefore aim to analyze images not only as images but as elements of processes and practices of a larger visual culture. It is the “ways of seeing, practices of looking, scopic regimes and visual metaphors” that surround an image, pain­ ting, sculpture, or film that in sum define visual culture.73 The latter encompasses not only the image itself but also its rela­tion to other images, spectatorship, technology, and its effect on visibility, subjectivity, and knowledge. Recent studies especially have posed ques­tions “about the rela­tionships between seeing, social practices and knowledge produc­tion, vision and power, visual ways of thinking and wider aesthetic, ideological and cultural forma­tions.”74 It is this interrela­tion of images, visuality, and culture that lies in the center of visual culture studies. In this regard, I follow Gillian Rose who poignantly summarizes the basic principles of recent literature on the social effects of images. According to her, visual culture comprises the following aspects: how images visualize (or render invisible) social difference; how they are looked at; how they are embedded in a wider culture; the role of the audience(s); and the agency of images.75 In order to understand the full impact of images within a culture and as a cultural process, we need to keep these effects in mind. They mark the place that images hold within culture and ultimately define their visuality. 71 Mitchell, “Showing Seeing.” 72 Sturken and Cartwright, Practices of Looking, 3. 73 Morra and Smith, introduc­tion, 10. John Berger’s 1972 television series Ways of Seeing and the accompanying book, in which he criticized ideological aspects of visuality in the Western cultural tradi­tion, are considered seminal works on visual culture avant la lettre. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 74 Sandywell and Heywood, “Critical Approaches,” 5. The authors refer to this newer trend of increased self-­reflexivity as “New Visual Culture Studies,” in accordance with the emerging field scholars refer to as “New Cultural Studies.” 75 See Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduc­tion to Researching with Visual Materials, 3rd ed. (London: SAGE, 2012), 11 – 16.

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Visual culture studies draw from a wide range of theories, which largely belong to the same canon of works that influenced cultural studies; however, the novel context puts them into new perspective. Many scholars refer to Guy Debord, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, and others in their analysis of visual culture, popular culture, and power.76 In this regard, concepts like Foucault’s panopticon offer decisive impulses to understand the connec­tions between visuality, subjectivity, power, and discourse.77 In a similar way, Martin Jay points to modernity’s “scopic regimes” in order to emphasize the significance of perspective and the gaze for processes of subjectifica­tion in the field of painting.78 From the perspective of film studies, Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the male gaze and scopophilia in mo­tion pictures is considered one of the first attempts to analyze images beyond their immanent level as technology of visibility, making the image a productive site for subjectivity and gender identity.79 In the same way that texts must undergo a close reading to reveal their cultural significance in the produc­ tion of meaning and power rela­tions, images must be examined through ‘close seeing.’80 Following Nicholas Mirzoeff, a historiographical perspective should “highlight those moments where the visual is contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of social interac­tion and defini­tion in terms of class, gender, sexual and racialized identities.”81 The time period discussed in this study, as I argue, offers a vibrant example for such a contesta­tion of the visual. From the above-­men­tioned understanding of visual culture studies as an extension of cultural studies to the field of images, it is only a small step to connecting ­Foucault’s concept of discourse to the realm of visuality. If there is a limita­tion of what can and cannot be said, then the same is true for what can be depicted (or seen) in images and films.82 If texts are nodes within a network of discourses, then mo­tion pictures – as a different form of cultural text – must be understood as a network 76 The connec­tion to cultural studies is also apparent in the fact that Stuart Hall co-­edited a reader on visual culture, which features the authors men­tioned above. See Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: A Reader, (1999; repr., London: SAGE, 2009). 77 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 201 – 205. 78 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3 – 23. He borrowed the term from Christian Metz’s seminal work on cinema. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 61. 79 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 – 18. 80 Sandywell and Heywood, “Critical Approaches,” 7. 81 Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduc­tion to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 4. 82 See Sabine Maasen, Torsten Mayerhauser, and Cornelia Renggli, “Bild-­Diskurs-­Analyse,” in Maasen et al., Bilder als Diskurse, 7 – 26, 8.

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of visual discourses that lead into and out of them. They are situated in rela­tion to their audiences’ practices of seeing and exist within a realm of visual meaningfulness demarcated by discourse. Visual discourses, then, describe the interrela­tions between different images: they form a specific visuality that shapes the imagery of a specific cultural field at a specific historical moment.83 Mo­tion pictures therefore refer to a historical repertoire of images and modes of representa­tion that form the visual culture of their times. Visibility in mo­tion pictures and other visual media is not merely a given phenomenon but always an effect of discourses, historical power/knowledge, and the practices through which images become meaningful.84 If we take Foucault’s concept of discourse seriously, it already points to many dimensions that visual culture studies aim to illuminate – such as the constructedness of visuality, meaning produc­tion, identity, power, and processes of subjectifica­ tion.85 Foucault himself was interested in practices of seeing and their connec­tion to the body and subjectivity, as his observa­tions on the panopticon and his occasional discussions of paintings demonstrate.86 He did not limit his reflec­tions to the textual level but took into account practices and institu­tions as well. For this purpose he introduced the concept of the dispositif, famously (non)defined as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institu­tions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic proposi­tions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid.”87

The dispositif importantly embodies the rela­tions between the discursive and non-­ discursive, taking into account features such as objects, practices, spaces, and ‘mea­ sures.’ As Foucault remarks, the dispositif is the instance that incorporates these 83 See Franz X. Eder and Oliver Kühschelm, “Bilder – Geschichtswissenschaft – Diskurse,” in Eder et al., Bilder in Historischen Diskursen, 1 – 4 4. 84 For a Foucauldian approach to visual culture, see also Tom Holert, “Kulturwissenschaften/ Visual Culture,” in Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, ­Themen, Methoden, ed. Klaus Sachs-­Hombach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 226 – 235; Tom Holert, “Bildfähigkeiten: Visuelle Kultur, Repräsenta­tionskritik und Politik der Sichtbarkeit,” in Imagineering: Visuelle Kultur und Politik der Sichtbarkeit, ed. Tom Holert (Köln: Oktagon, 2000), 14 – 33. 85 For an overview of discursive approaches to visuality, see Rose, Visual Methodologies, 189 – 226; Eder, Kühschelm, and Linsboth, Bilder in historischen Diskursen; Maasen, Mayerhauser, and Renggli, Bilder als Diskurse. 86 Cornelia Renggli points to Foucault’s interest in visuality. See Cornelia Renggli, “Komplexe Beziehungen beschreiben: Diskursanalytisches Arbeiten mit Bildern,” in Eder et al., Bilder in historischen Diskursen, 45 – 61, 48. 87 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194 – 228, 194.

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diverse fields and follows a “strategic func­tion.”88 As in all his writing, he focuses again on the shifts and transforma­tions, stating that the dispositif is a forma­tion “that at a given historical moment has as its major func­tion the response to an urgent need.”89 Following these thoughts, a dispositif can be understood as a ‘materializa­ tion,’ or realiza­tion, of the inherent rela­tions of power/knowledge, an extension of Foucault’s conceptualiza­tion of discourse onto the field of the non-­textual but ultimately closely tied to it. In Foucault’s own work the prison or the clinic are examples of manifesta­tions of dispositifs. The concept, however, became important to Foucault’s thoughts on biopolitics, which describe the mechanisms, ‘measures,’ and institu­tions that constitute knowledge of a society’s ‘popula­tion.’90 Regarding his understanding of the historical urgency to which a dispositif answers, he states: “[t]his may have been, for example, the assimila­tion of a floating popula­tion found to be burdensome.”91 The dispositif I outline in this study, on the contrary, was directed at non-‘assimilating’ Chinese Americans and marked them as the Other instead. In other words, its strategic func­tion was a containment of immigrants by explicitly marking their alleged foreignness as a racial attribute. I find Foucault’s concept of the dispositif highly applicable to visual culture studies as it allows describing the visual, practical, and spatial mechanisms that surround images, and especially mo­tion pictures, as a practice of seeing. Film studies demonstrated its applicability to the cinema theater itself, employing the concept to describe the rela­tions between projector, theater seats, gazes, and the screen.92 While my study deconstructs a larger overall dispositif of Chinese Ame­ rican Othering, two specific dispositifs will play an important role, both of which are connected to space and visibility. The first one regards the visual dispositif of Chinatown tourism, which corresponded to the cinematic dispositif. Here the spatiality of the mo­tion picture theater and the audience’s gaze constituted specific dichotomies of urban space as well as between the looking subjects and looked-­ upon ‘objects.’ The second one is the dispositif of border surveillance and illegal immigra­tion, comprising the technologies and visual language that correspon­ ded to the desire to make both territorial and racial boundaries – as well as their

88 Ibid., 195. 89 Ibid. (italics in the original). 90 See Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975 – 76 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), esp. 239 – 264. 91 Foucault, “Confession of the Flesh,” 195. 92 See Jean-­Louis Braudy, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39 – 47; Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

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trespassers – visible. In both these fields, mo­tion pictures acted as a significant force, as they extended these dispositifs to the domain of popular culture. This study will mainly focus on four major discursive fields of U. S. culture that can be directly linked to several mo­tion pictures. A central ques­tion will be how the films produced knowledge of racial difference and Otherness. How did they reproduce and transform discourses that, at the time of their produc­tion, massively facilitated hegemonic concepts of white, heteronormative identities by contrasting them to a perilous ‘yellow’ race? Each of the discursive fields – yellowface, Chinatown, Americaniza­tion, the border – is ultimately based on investiga­tions of racial difference. They formed a discursive network that produced concepts of racial and na­tional identity. In the time period of this study, when Chinese immigra­ tion seemed to threaten and erode racial categories, mo­tion pictures negotiated these boundaries. While the films follow a different logic in each of the analyzed discursive fields, as a whole they (re)produced power hierarchies and subjectivities based on the no­tion of Oriental Otherness. At the same time, discourses are always contested and identities never stable; the presence of Asian Americans in mo­tion pictures also allowed for different readings that crossed hegemonic identity forma­tions. It is therefore important to keep in mind that films do not merely represent repressive power structures which they articulate in simple stereotypes. They move within contested fields of power and knowledge and allow crossings and transforma­tions which are ultimately related to social change.

Sources, Structure, and Chapter Outline

The main sources for my analysis will consist of mo­tion pictures from various genres produced throughout the 1910s to 1930s. The chosen time frame allows for the considera­tion of films outside the small canon regarded as film-­historically valuable. While other produc­tions like the popular Fu Manchu installments or the detective films of the Charlie Chan series were influential and are indeed important to consider, they are relatively well-­studied and will only be discussed when they contribute to my analysis. Instead, I aim at expanding the perspective and mostly consider films off the beaten path and cover diverse genres and types – ranging from Chinatown gangster movies to border westerns to documentaries. I chose to focus solely on films that are preserved and accessible for viewing, which unfortunately affects those produc­tions from the silent era, as many are considered lost. Accessibility, however, is essential for my aim of ‘close seeing’ them and taking visual features into account. For this reason, I decided against films whose narrative and style can only be reconstructed through secondary

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sources. As my time period spans both silent and sound film, I acknowledge the aesthetic, narrative, and structural changes that came with this shift, but I refrain from differentiating strictly between these two film types. This decision is directly linked to my emphasis on their historicity and the culture from which the films emerge rather than the medium’s immanent specifics. I will nonetheless consider the distinctive qualities – for instance, the use of characters’ voices – whenever they appear relevant to my analysis. In a similar way, I make little distinc­tion between major produc­tions and so-­called B-movies. I believe that B-movies and exploita­tion films are equally important in regard to mass audiences and cultural relevance. Their marginal status allowed certain liberties on the narrative level and in their imagery and, as a consequence, these films could often address social and controversial topics more openly than produc­tions from the major film studios.93 Film-­related sources like promo­tional material and film magazines comprise another important body of material. By considering film posters, stills, and promo­ tional campaigns, I trace the images which surrounded a film’s release and which often relied on bold iconographies that transported addi­tional meaning to public audiences. Film magazines as well as film reviews in newspapers offer insights into the contemporary recep­tion of films and help outline the difficult task of ­audience recep­tion. Magazine and newspaper articles of course document the critics’ estima­tion of a film (which often enough does not correspond to its popu­ larity or film-­historical value). They also contribute to an understanding of the film’s cultural and cinematic context and point, for instance, to the significance of the actors’ and actresses’ star personae for the film’s meaning. Besides film-­related materials, I will scrutinize texts and images from a diverse field of sources in order to shed light on the manifold discursive connec­tions in mo­tion pictures. The choice of sources strongly depended on the discursive field discussed in each of the four chapters. Newspapers and magazines generally play an important role throughout this study, as they illuminate the political and social debates that dominated the decades in ques­tion. I will point in particular to the significance of newspaper coverage in regard to discourses of illegal immigra­tion and the U. S.-Mexico border. Other textual and visual sources belong to the fields of sociological publica­tions, books, and tourism-­related material on U. S. Chinatowns, special literature on film and theater makeup, and juvenile literature. The breadth of sources correlates directly with my argument that mo­tion pictures related to contemporary culture on many levels.

93 See, for example, Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploita­tion Films, 1919 – 1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

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The basic approach to the structure of this study is to offer a prism which divides the broader discourse of Chinese immigra­tion into four different discursive ‘beams.’ Each chapter will place a focus on a different aspect of visuality. While the chapters are connected to each other, each stands on its own and can be read separately. My approach does not follow an overall narrative arch but traces the specific processes within each field in a roughly chronological manner. By reading the whole study, however, the developments discussed in the four sec­tions – each ending in the mid- or late 1930s – will form a coherent overall picture of the larger cultural and political shifts in the United States. Chapter 1 outlines how mo­tion pictures produced racialized visual knowledge of the Oriental body through the practice of yellowface. This chapter comes closest to an introduc­tion, as it deals with a topic that is essential to all films discussed in this study and whose origins date back the farthest in history. Yellowface describes the practice of white actors and actresses playing Asian roles – most prominently in mo­tion pictures. I will focus on the imagery of this racist and racializing procedure on three different levels. First, I will trace the genealogy of yellowface and demonstrate how it related to Chinese immigra­tion and the crea­tion of visual stereo­types of Chinese immigrants. Second, I will go into more detail concerning the crea­tion of the Oriental body on-­screen by scrutinizing the field of makeup artistry. Here I argue that this discourse was closely linked to scientific race theory and its visual language in order to transform whites into Chinese and ‘produce’ Orientals for the screen, with particular focus on racialized traits like the ‘Oriental eye.’ Third, taking up the double meaning of ‘image,’ this sec­tion will deal with the interrela­tions between the star image of actors and actresses and their yellowface performances. While yellowface in general produced racist stereotypes, I argue that each star added different layers of meaning to it that shed light on historical racial dynamics. A short outlook will focus on the often-­neglected Chinese American actors and how they were affected by yellowface. In sum, this chapter relies less on specific film analysis than the other chapters but rather considers the structural background and practices of film produc­tion and stardom. It shows the different prerequisites for the way mo­tion pictures created a specifically filmic visuality and ‘produced’ Orientals on the screen. In chapter 2 I focus on Chinatown in order to show how mo­tion pictures followed the contemporary no­tion of its spatial Otherness and how the practice of going to the movie theater was connected to tourism. This chapter investigates Chinatown as a socially constructed space that correlated with racist ideas of Orien­tal Otherness. I will situate mo­tion pictures within the larger visual discourse of Chinatown as a vice-­ridden space filled with secret backrooms hidden behind fake facades. As these characteristics acted as a driving force for the emergence of

Introduc­tion  |

Chinatown as a destina­tion for slumming and tourism, I will argue that mo­tion pictures employed a visual logic of tourism themselves. When Chinese Americans successfully worked towards cleaner, more picturesque quarters and safety, mo­tion pictures employed a touristic appeal themselves to uphold the historical stereotypes of the vice-­ridden ‘old Chinatown.’ Playing with audiences’ expecta­ tions and ideas of authenticity, films attracted viewers by promising a glance at the ‘real’ Chinatown. I identify this visual logic through the concept of the ‘tourist gaze,’ which I trace within a larger cinematic dispositif of tourism. The departure point for chapter 3 involves the significant number of films that dealt prominently with ques­tions of racial hybridity and cultural identity. These films either based their narratives on depic­tions of seemingly Americanized second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans or featured characters who pass as Chinese or white until their ‘true’ identity is revealed. I argue that these films negotiated contemporary debates about the so-­called assimila­tion of Chinese immigrants on different levels and offered a unique visual form with which to address these ques­ tions for mainstream America. The 1920s and 1930s indeed mark a time period when different social groups contested ideas about the alienness or Americanness of Chinese Americans more and more. I outline this ambivalent and often conflicting discursive field by first pointing to the long history of Chinese American activism and the hybrid status of the native-­born genera­tions, which became culturally and politically visible in the cultural landscape of the 1920s. Films often hinted abstractly at these shifts and popular culture often understood them as genera­tional and racial conflicts. I then turn to the academic and popular debates about Chinese Americans’ ability to assimilate into U. S. culture and become part of the so-­called melting pot. The investiga­tions of the Chicago School of Socio­ logy, headed by Robert E. Park, played an important role, as they devoted their studies to what they referred to as the ‘Oriental problem.’ Mo­tion pictures found their own way to address these ques­tions and did so in ways that created room for ambivalent readings. On an overall level, however, mo­tion pictures solidified racial boundaries more than they circumvented them. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to both the territorial and racial boundaries of the United States within the context of illegal immigra­tion. Mo­tion pictures, border westerns especially, often revolved around depic­tions of Chinese aliens and the so-­called smuggling of Chinese over the U. S.-Mexico border. I argue that these films constructed Chinese as aliens and intruders; a larger visual dispositif of border surveillance and visibility in the face of increasing na­tionalism and immigra­tion control informed this visuality. Films offered visualiza­tions of the na­tion’s (that is, the ‘imagined community’s’) territorial border, which, in the early twentieth century, gained massive atten­tion and manifested as the boundary line between

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inside and outside. Furthermore, mo­tion pictures created a specific (in)visibility of Chinese immigrants: as a visual medium they created images of the Chinese as decidedly alien and detained them at the narrative margins, as outsiders, ‘smuggled goods,’ and ‘foreigners-­within.’ Taken together, the chapters show how Chinese immigra­tion and exclusion spawned cultural images about concepts like ‘American’ and ‘Oriental’ and ‘inside and outside,’ for which mo­tion pictures became the most influential arena. Mo­tion pictures adopted, reproduced, and transformed different fields of visual knowledge and made them available to large audiences. The films analyzed in this study acquired their different meanings to audiences largely by unfolding within the realm of what could be said and thus of what could be seen. Emulating and reproducing contemporary hierarchies of power and knowledge, these films presented the American public with means to negotiate racial, gender, and class concepts during a time period when immigra­tion and the so-­called ‘Oriental problem’ appeared to threaten the hegemony of white European Americans.

1 Yellowface and the Oriental Body

In the early 1930s, after the industry had faced the technological challenge of sound film and the economic turmoil of the financial crisis, Hollywood showed a heightened interest in a narrative theme that had been a part of its history since the very beginning: stories dealing with Chinese and Chinese Americans. The high output of films relating to the Orient made contemporary observers attest that the industry was “in the midst of an Oriental cycle.”1 The pictures produced during this period took place in both the United States and Asia and ranged from B-movies to elaborate, high-­budget films. The decade saw the continua­tion of popular Yellow Peril narratives in films like Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) as well as the emergence of the Charlie Chan detective series in 1931, which allegedly portrayed Chinese Americans in a more positive light.2 Other dramas took place in either Chinatown, like The Son-­Daughter (1932) or The Hatchet Man (1932), or in the Far East like Madame Butterfly (1932), Shanghai Express (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), or the Academy Award-­winning The Good Earth (1937).3 Hollywood’s longstanding fascina­tion with the Orient burgeoned unabated and reached a new peak, whose causes and effects will form the basis of the study at hand.

1 Leo Meehan, “Oriental Idea in Films,” Mo­tion Picture Herald, December 17, 1932, 23. 2 Daughter of the Dragon, dir. Lloyd Corrigan, perf. Anna May Wong and Warner Oland (United States: Paramount, 1931); The Mask of Fu Manchu, dir. Charles Brabin, perf. Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, and Karen Morley (United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1932); The Charlie Chan series comprises more than 40 films, most of them produced in the 1930s and 1940s. The series gained popularity in 1931 when Warner Oland first played the detective. Oland appeared in 16 films of the series from 1931 until his death in 1938 and still is the iconic actor for the series. 3 The Son-­Daughter, dir. Clarence Brown, perf. Helen Hayes and Ramon Novarro (United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1932); The Hatchet Man, dir. William A. Wellman, perf. Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, and Leslie Fenton (United States: First Na­tional, 1932); Madame Butterfly, dir. Marion Gering, perf. Sylvia Sidney, Cary Grant, and Charlie Ruggles (United States: Paramount, 1932); Shanghai Express, dir. Josef von Sternberg, perf. Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, and Anna May Wong (United States: Paramount, 1932); The Bitter Tea of General Yen, dir. Frank R. Capra, perf. Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, and Toshia Mori (United States: Columbia, 1933); The Good Earth, dir. Sidney Franklin, perf. Paul Muni, Luise Rainer, and Walter Connolly (United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­ Mayer, 1937).

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|  Yellowface and the Oriental Body

Figure 1  “So Hollywood Goes Oriental,” Photoplay, January 1933, 73.

In 1933, fan magazine Photoplay devoted a page to the cycle of Oriental films and asserted: “So Hollywood Goes Oriental.”4 Two photos showed actresses Helen Hayes and Sylvia Sidney, who starred in The Son-­Daughter and Madame Butter­ fly, respectively (see fig. 1). The actresses appeared in Oriental dresses and settings, wearing makeup that enhanced their supposedly Oriental appearance. In this sense, the terminology of ‘going Oriental’ referred to the Orientaliza­tion of the actresses themselves. Instead of Hollywood actually moving to East Asia, ‘to go Oriental’ describes the American appropria­tion of Asian themes and images. Despite many differences, all Hollywood produc­tions with Oriental themes emerging in the 1930s had one thing in common: they featured white actors and actresses who played Oriental characters. The appearances of almost all Asian main



4 “So Hollywood Goes Oriental,” Photoplay, January 1933, 73.

Yellowface and the Oriental Body  |

characters resulted from makeup and costumes intended to create an illusion of Orientalness. This racial masquerade was most visible in the actors’ and actresses’ faces, where adhesive tape, greasepaint, and makeup worked to give the characters the stereotypical features of ‘slanted’ eyes and high eyebrows that served as racial markers. This practice of yellowface in mo­tion pictures is, in fact, as old as the film medium itself and draws historically from tradi­tions in theater and vaudeville performances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The boom of Oriental mo­tion pictures in the early 1930s proved above all that the practice had survived the transi­tion from silent film aesthetics to modern sound film. At the core of visual representa­tions of Chinese Americans stood the basic fact that most Chinese characters audiences saw on the screen were portrayed by white actors in – often bizarre – makeup. These depic­tions followed their own filmic and theatrical conven­tions, informed by contemporary racial concep­tions. This way, mo­tion pictures created and disseminated a specific visual knowledge about Orientals for mainstream audiences, a knowledge based on racialized body concepts. In fact, it is here that the term ‘Oriental’ makes perfect sense, as yellowface performances point to decidedly white concep­tions and projec­tions of the Orient or, more specifically, the Oriental. It ultimately highlights the constructed character of race. As a visual concept, it applied to Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian na­tionalities and followed tradi­tional Western ideas of the Orient as a unified entity that formed the Occident’s counterpart. Yellowface led to the paradoxical situa­tion that, despite the heightened inte­ rest in Oriental films, Asian Americans very rarely appeared in leading roles. A 1932 incident, in which Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer turned down Chinese American actress Anna May Wong for the leading role in The Son-­Daughter because repre­sentatives reportedly considered her “too Chinese to play a Chinese,”5 epito­ mizes this practice. When Wong was considered for the role of O-Lan, one of the protagonists in the highly ambitious 1937 produc­tion The Good Earth, this form of discrimina­tion emerged again. The film is set in China and depicts the struggles of a Chinese farmer family. The producers, however, dismissed Wong and decided to cast Paul Muni and Luise Rainer in yellowface. Moreover, German-­born actress Rainer received an Academy Award for her role as O-Lan. Hollywood, it seemed, had its very own concep­tion of Orientalness, which had developed its own visual style. Paradoxically, Asian American actors had to adapt to popular concep­tions of Orientalness. While the 1920s and 1930s were



5 Graham Russell Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood ­Legend (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 114.

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arguably the most significant decades for cinematic yellowface performances, it remained a common practice in film and television until late in the second half of the twentieth century.6 The use of yellowface highlights film business’s persistent racism on several levels. The privileging of white performers betrays the symptomatic idea that whites could play people from any other race while marginalized groups gene­ rally lacked acting skills and could not even play ‘themselves’ – that is, meet the filmic expecta­tions tied to non-­white roles. This idea correlated with concep­tions of whiteness as the racial norm from which other races deviated. On a structural level, yellowface served to secure white artists’ privileged posi­tion and deny Asian Americans the chance to play leading roles, except for the few Asian Americans who managed to become movie stars like Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong, and Philip Ahn.7 However, even they struggled with the racist Hollywood system and the Orientalist roles they landed. Meanwhile, yellowface benefited a handful of white actors’ and actresses’ careers – such as those of Warner Oland, Lon Chaney, Richard Barthelmess, or Myrna Loy –, immensely launching them into popular fame for their Oriental roles. Yellowface is both a racist and racializing practice. While the phenomenon as such appears regularly in academic literature on Asian American representa­tions, scholarship rarely analyzes its racial impact in detail. A small number of scholars have focused on its roots in music and theater performances, its employment of racist stereotypes in film, its correla­tion to blackface, and its rela­tionship to performativity.8 In my own analysis, I will concentrate on aspects of visuality and on the racializa­tion of the Oriental body especially. I argue that yellowface as a practice and as a visual discourse must be understood in its historical rela­tion to the field of scientific race theory. The use of makeup served to mark the actor or actress visually



6 On yellowface’s continuity, see Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham, Asian Americans and the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 7 On these actors’ and actresses’ careers and their struggle with yellowface racism, see Daisuke Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transna­tional Stardom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Anthony Bernard Chan, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 1905 – 1961 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003); Hye Seung Chung, Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-­Ethnic Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 8 There are only two studies devoted to yellowface in book-­length. For the most substantial and recent one, see Karla Rae Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). For the practice’s theatrical roots and rela­tionship to blackface minstrelsy, see Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005). See also, Ono and Pham, Asian Americans, 25 – 62.

Yellowface and the Oriental Body  |

as racial Other and, in doing so, followed biological and physiognomic concep­tions of racial body features – a connec­tion scholarly atten­tion has not yet chosen as a subject. Until the mid-­twentieth century, yellowface served as the only mode of Asian representa­tion on-­screen and thus as an important visual source for Ameri­ can audiences and their concep­tions of what it meant to act and look Oriental. Contemporary audiences were fully aware they were watching white stars in racial masquerade, but they judged their performances according to common knowledge of racial characteristics. Accordingly, I will investigate the interplay between the images of film stars and their yellowface performances. What did it mean for actors and actresses to appear as Chinese on-­screen, and how did it affect their public percep­tion? Here I argue for the close interconnec­tions between yellowface and the respective star personae of actors and actresses – a fact seldom scrutinized in studies of early film stars. Appearing as Oriental always evoked counterstrategies both off- and on-­screen to contain racial ambiguities and solidify hegemonic whiteness. In the following chapter, I will first outline the genealogy and cultural significance of yellowface in U. S. popular culture and its emergence in the mid-­nineteenth century. While the thematic chapters of this book are all interrelated, yellowface forms the very basis for them all, as it presented an overwhelmingly common practice. In my discussion of its historic roots, I will point especially to yellowface’s connec­tion to Chinese immigra­tion and work out its similarities to blackface performances. Then I will analyze yellowface as a visual expression rooted in nineteenth-­century race theory. Yellowface performances, as I argue, composed an important element in the process Michael Keevak describes as the “becoming yellow” of East Asians.9 I will demonstrate this development by showing the discursive resonances between race theory and contemporary literature on makeup that gave practical instruc­tions for transforming whites into Orientals. Concepts of the ‘almond eye’ in particular and no­tions of yellow pigmenta­tion served to reproduce racialized body concepts. The second sec­tion of the chapter will focus on the effect of this racial makeup on actors and actresses and how it influenced their percep­tions and careers. Actress Myrna Loy, for example, had an ambivalent rela­tionship with typecasting as an ‘exotic siren’ for many years, while others like Warner Oland based their whole career on their impersona­tion of Orientals. In a final step, I will focus on those often overlooked ‘real’ Chinese actors who succeeded in making it onto the screen but were not allowed to play leading roles and remained extras.



9 Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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1.1 The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen Yellowface performances in mo­tion pictures cannot fully be grasped without taking into account the century-­long history of the American stage. Hollywood yellowface was informed by the long tradi­tion of Oriental stereotypes that had emerged in theaters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.10 The earliest exhibi­tion of yellowface in America probably happened in 1767 with the opening of Voltaire’s Orphan of China adapta­tion in Philadelphia.11 According to James S. Moy, this play first staged Chinese people and their culture from an exclusively white, Western perspective. As Moy emphasizes, “the no­tion of Chineseness under the sign of the exotic became familiar to the American spectator long before sightings of the actual Chinese”12 – a telling fact in regard to how yellowface would express a decidedly American perspective on Asian people in the centuries to follow. The most common representative form of Asians on stage until the mid-­nine­teenth century was that of commercial exhibi­tion. Chinese people, such as the famous ‘Siamese Twins’ Chang and Eng, supplied curiosities in freak shows, circuses, ‘museums,’ and world exhibi­tions, contributing to the no­tion that Chinese were fundamentally different from Americans.13 Such forms of presenta­tion were embedded in what historian John Kuo Wei Tchen describes as the shift from Patrician Orientalism to more commercial forms during the nineteenth century.14 While theater plays like The Orphan of China attracted mainly aristocratic ­audiences, displays of Chinese people and culture became increasingly commercialized for mass audiences in the 10 In recent years, the field of Asian representa­tions on U. S. stages of the nineteenth century has sparked scholarly atten­tion, improving our understanding of yellowface and how it was eventually transferred to mo­tion pictures. Besides the already men­tioned work by Krystyn R. Moon, see Sung Hee Choi, Performing the Other: Asians on the New York Stage Before 1870 (PhD diss., College Park: University of Maryland, 1999); James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Michelle Su-­mei Liu, Acting Out: Images of Asians and the Performance of American Identities, 1898 – 1945 (PhD diss., Ann Arbor: Yale University, 2003); Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). 11 See Moy, Marginal Sights, 9; John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orienta­ lism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776 – 1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 18 – 22; Chan, Perpetually Cool, 166 – 169. Both Tchen and Chan point to the fact that Voltaire’s play was itself an adapta­tion of a Chinese drama from 1330, which first appeared in Europe in 1735. 12 Moy, Marginal Sights, 9. 13 See ibid., 12; Tchen, New York Before Chinatown, 106 – 113, 131 – 153. 14 See Tchen, New York Before Chinatown, 97 – 123.

The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  |

nineteenth century. Tchen describes Patrician Orientalism as connected mainly to chinoiserie, like porcelains and other artifacts from China. Informed by European tradi­tions of Orientalism and re-­contextualized in the first decades of the early Republic, Chinese goods and ideas were part of bourgeois culture and served as a sign of wealth, philanthropy and status. U. S. Orientalism, however, shifted more and more towards forms of exhibi­ tion and spectacle with the emergence of ‘museums’ and performances that presented ‘live Chinese’ to paying customers – embedding Orientalism in contemporary commercial culture. These exhibi­tions attracted a generally broader audience and appealed increasingly to urban working- and middle-­class visitors who wanted to witness exotic curiosities. Significantly, commercial Orien­ talism in the mid-­nineteenth century also brought forth visual, mechanical, and staged representa­tions based on simula­tion and mimicry. Entrepreneurs and entertainers used ‘real’ Chinese and appropriated images from Chinese culture, adapting them commercially for white mainstream audiences. This exploita­tion included new forms of image reproduc­tion through print and photography as well as Chinese impersona­tions through yellowface on theater and vaudeville stages.15 The visibility of Chinese people evolved further when, beginning around 1850, the Chinese immigrant entered the theater stage as a theatrical figure played by white actors. Chinese characters had appeared in musical performances on the West Coast since the beginning of Chinese immigra­tion around 1850. These musical performances laid the groundwork for Chinese immigrant stereotypes like ‘John Chinaman,’ which emphasized racial difference and, like its African American counterparts Jim Crow and Zip Coon, served to legitimize racial hierarchiza­tion.16 The first noticeable number of Chinese impersona­tions by white performers, however, came with the popularity of Bret Harte’s poem “The Heathen Chinee,” published in the Overland Monthly in 1870.17 It tells the story of a Chinese playing cards with two other men. The men originally plan to cheat the Chinese, but the Chinese beats them at their own game. The poem became widely known, i­nspiring adapta­tions for musical performances and numerous stage plays throughout the 1870s.18 One of these plays was a collabora­tion between 15 See ibid., 123 – 130. 16 See Moon, Yellowface, 32. 17 Commonly known as “The Heathen Chinee,” the poem was first published under a different title. See Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” Overland Monthly, September 1870, 287. 18 See Moon, Yellowface, 43.

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Bret Harte and Mark Twain called Ah Sin, which opened in 1877. It featured a childlike Chinese charact­er, who merely served for comic effect and managed to solve a murder case by accident.19 Unlike earlier dramas such as The Orphan of China a hundred years earlier, Ah Sin and other plays aimed at larger audiences, opened in many urban centers on the East Coast and so moved away from highbrow entertainment. Contemporary frontier melodramas answered a widespread interest in depic­tions of life in the West and particularly of Chinese immigrants as the West’s most ‘exotic’ demographic group. As Sung Hee Choi argues, the figure of Ah Sin became a popular prototype for representa­tions of Chinese Americans: “The Chinaman became an American theatrical stock character whose primary purpose was to provoke laughter in the audience and provide exotic local color.”20 Degrading yellowface performances of John Chinaman contributed to the standard popular culture repertoire and influenced mainstream percep­tions of Chinese immigrants. One device for the ‘Orientaliza­tion’ of characters was language, specifically the use of Pidgin English or gibberish. Dialect became a common technique for marking racialized groups like African Americans or Irish immigrants in performances. As Moon asserts, the use of African American and Chinese dialect even showed some similarities that underscored the marginalizing effects: “Nonsensical gibberish, which was common in blackface minstrelsy […], was another device used to demonstrate the inferiority of Chinese immigrants and their inability to speak English coherently.”21 In regard to Chinese, Pidgin English included the inability to speak the letter ‘r’ and exchange it for an ‘l,’ as well as adding “ee” at the end of many words. This served to amuse audiences and convey Chinese immigrants’ cultural and racial distance from white Americans. Makeup and costume offered addi­tional means for the Orientaliza­tion of theatrical characters. This development becomes evident when looking at the actors who performed as Chinese on theater and variety stages. One of the most influential actors was Charles T. Parsloe, who made a career of his small, comedic roles as Chinese and who also played Ah Sin in Harte and Twain’s Broadway play.22 Portraying Chinese characters in four plays during the 1870s, Parsloe ­developed an elaborate and influential mode of Chinese impersona­tion. As scholar Sean 19 See Moy, Marginal Sights, 23 – 34. 20 Choi, Performing the Other, 67. 21 Moon, Yellowface, 42. 22 See Sean Metzger, “Charles Parsloe’s Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-­Century American Melodrama,” ­Theater Journal 56, no. 4 (2004): 627 – 651; Moy, Marginal Sights, 27 – 29; Choi, Performing the Other, 59 – 67.

The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  |

Metzger argues, Parsloe’s wig with the Chinese queue constitutes one of the most important features of his performance. Unlike makeup, which was difficult to see for audiences seated far away from the stage, the queue presented the most visible racial marker and set Parsloe apart from the rest of the cast. For Metzger, the queue was an easy signifier of Chinese Otherness and effeminacy for urban audiences and pointed to the fetishiza­tion of the Chinese immigrant that stemmed from white working class racial anxieties.23 Parsloe achieved much of his reputa­tion as a Chinese impersonator through his voice, mannerisms, and clothes. While makeup played an important role in his performance, it had not yet gained as much significance as it would later, making one reviewer comment that Parsloe looked “too pale for a Chinaman.”24 Yellowface performances of the 1870s differed from earlier representa­tions of Chinese on-­stage in their claim of authenticity. These impersona­tions were presented and received as ‘truthful’ depic­tions of Chinese immigrants, and many cri­ tics applauded the accuracy of actors like Charles Parsloe, John Leach, or Ackland von Boyle.25 Indeed, Bret Harte and Mark Twain, who had acquired authority on the topic, emphasized that seeing Parsloe act on stage was the same as seeing a Chinese on the streets of San Francisco, and while it may not have been their inten­tion, the emerging stereotypes of ‘John Chinaman’ and the ‘Heathen Chinese’ generally confirmed Chinese Otherness, legitimizing Chinese discrimina­ tion and exclusion.26 In time, other plays, like The Chinese Must Go by Henry Grimm (which premiered in 1879), soon included Chinese characters to convey a clearly anti-­Chinese stance.27 The title referred to the political agita­tion of the Workingman’s Party in California and its leader, Denis Kearney, who furiously promoted Chinese exclusion. Here Grimm explicitly employed yellowface for a larger political and racist agenda and supplied a theatrical equivalent to other degrading prints and caricatures circulating at that time. The Chinese Must Go and 23 See Metzger, “Charles Parsloe,” 635 – 636. 24 The World: New York, August 1, 1877, quoted in Moy, Marginal Sights, 29. 25 See Choi, Performing the Other, 66; Moy, Marginal Sights, 46. 26 Scholars like Gary Scharnhorst have regularly emphasized that Harte was, in fact, against Chinese discrimina­tion and that “The Heathen Chinee” was intended to satirize racial preju­ dices prevalent among Irish immigrants. I would argue that the popularity and emergence of Chinese stereotypes that followed the poem’s publica­tion proved that “The Heathen Chinee” was a free-­floating signifier that was interpreted and reproduced according to the contemporary political and cultural climate. See Gary Scharnhorst, “‘Ways That Are Dark’: Appropria­tions of Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James,’” Nineteenth-­Century Literature 51, no. 3 (1996): 377 – 399. 27 See Chan, Perpetually Cool, 175.

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similar plays laid the founda­tion for later representa­tions and portrayed Chinese characters as ‘sojourners’ and greedy immigrants, who would leave for China after gaining enough wealth in the U. S. Attempts to convey authentic portrayals of Oriental characters developed further from the 1880s onwards. This included the increased use of makeup to alter the facial features and skin color of actors and actresses. Makeup artists placed a focus on the eyes and lips especially. The costumes used on-­stage grew more elaborate and diversified, ranging from tradi­tional simple clothes to the fine, ornamented dresses of upper-­class Chinese. According to Moon, one can understand this process as an intensifying exotifica­tion: as the basic ‘types’ of yellowface characteriza­tion became more complex, they answered a general trend of rising interest in exotic artifacts within U. S. culture. However, this trend also owed to the reality of white Americans living in large metropolises on the East Coast, who had more contact with Chinese in person. The first Chinese districts emerged in cities like New York around the 1870s, where Chinese entered the labor force, worked as servants in middle-­class households, or opened businesses like laundries, curio shops, and restaurants. Chinese immigrants also opened their own theaters and entertainment establishments, which, in turn, attracted white, working class urbanites and middle-­class slummers. Consequently, yellowface impersona­tions on-­stage needed to achieve a greater illusion of authenticity by diversifying the repertoire of characters, makeup and costumes. As Moon concludes, around the turn of the century, yellowface “expanded and was codified into visual stereotypes that persist even today.”28 Starting in the 1880s, vaudeville became an important vehicle for racial imper­ sona­tions. As the most popular form of entertainment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vaudeville had its roots in minstrelsy and variety shows, consisting of several musical and comedic acts.29 While theater transformed more and more into an upper-­class form of entertainment, vaudeville attracted mostly working-­class, immigrant and ethnically diverse audiences.30 By the turn of the century, vaudeville halls populated every major city, presenting shows of t­ ouring performers. In its very essence, vaudeville gained its appeal from its play with sexua­lity and racial stereotypes, most prominently representing African Americans as well as Irish and Chinese immigrants. Through its rise to popularity and 28 Moon, Yellowface, 114. 29 See Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 30 See Nasaw, Going Out, 19 – 33.

The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  |

its own diversifica­tion, vaudeville became an immensely important ‘stage’ for negotia­tions of class, race, and gender, especially in regard to the forma­tion of a decidedly white working-­class and an expanding native-­born middle class.31 For these mass audiences, the stereotypes conveyed in vaudeville offered the possibility of distinc­tion from the racial Other. By the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese American performers began to take the vaudeville stages themselves.32 Chinese Americans applied similar strategies as African Americans and used vaudeville shows to deliver their own take on Oriental characters. The fact that ‘real’ Chinese like Lee Tung Foo or Lady Tsen Mei entered the stage challenged the discriminatory system to a certain degree.33 Like their non-­Asian counterparts, Chinese American performers played with racial identities by acting as Chinese, Irish, Scots, or African Americans. Thus, vaudeville stages opened a limited space for negotiating racial identities: in contrast to theater and film, Chinese Americans were able to play not only ‘themselves’ here, but also take up other identities. Still, the fact that only white actors were able to play whites testifies to the limits of these early forms of emancipa­tion and the persistence of white privilege in theater and film casts.

The Transfer of Yellowface to the Screen

Following its popularity in vaudeville and theater, yellowface came to form an essential part of mo­tion pictures early on. While vaudeville shows incorporated films as an element of their acts in the beginning, mo­tion pictures soon succeeded vaudeville as the most popular form of entertainment. Their shared history lasted until film emancipated itself as a separate medium and nickelodeons and mo­tion picture theaters became their very own modes of presenta­tion. Early film inevi­ tably resembled vaudeville acts, and with yellowface, it adapted its practice of racialized representa­tion. In 1894, the influential Edison Manufacturing Company produced one of its first short films, called Chinese Laundry Scene.34 The film lasts little over fifteen seconds and shows a police officer chasing a Chinese 31 The aspects of class, race, and gender of vaudeville audiences belong, in fact, to a very complex field. Vaudeville theaters had diversified into various types by the turn of the century, each catering to different audiences. See Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750 – 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108 – 120. 32 See Moon, Yellowface, 115. 33 See Moon, Yellowface, 143 – 162. 34 Chinese Laundry Scene (also known as Robetta and Doreto, No. 2), dir. William K. L. Dickson and William Heise, perf. Phil Doreto and Robetta (United States: Edison, 1894).

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laundry worker. An Italian comedy duo named Robetta and Doreto comprised the cast, who conveyed one of their vaudeville acts onto the new medium.35 The scene highlights the historical roots of film in vaudeville, the pervasiveness of yellow­face, and the use of Chinese stereotypes. Similarly, the continued popularity of Chinese characters launched many one-­reelers in the 1900s that showed white actors portraying Chinese immigrants and followed the stereotypical depic­tions of theater and vaudeville, such as The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers (1904), Smuggled into America (1907), The Yellow Peril (1908), or D. W. Griffith’s The Deceived Slumming Party (1908).36 Depic­tions of stereotypical Chinese constituted a central element of the early, vaudeville-­inspired one-­reelers, and white actors played almost all Chinese.37 Yellowface performances in mo­tion pictures reached a new level as the medium itself transformed into the feature film. With produc­tions like Broken Blossoms (1919), which showed Richard Barthelmess as the nameless character ‘The Yellow Man,’ yellowface took shape as a thoroughly aestheticized performance. For female impersona­tions, Mary Pickford’s role as Cho-­Cho-­San in Madame Butterfly (1915) had a lasting influence.38 Feature films allowed more narrative depth than the short films of the early years and offered more time for character development. At a time when mo­tion pictures found their own aesthetics and emancipated themselves from theater and vaudeville, impersona­tions of Chinese and Japanese characters were seen as the ultimate challenge for white actors and actresses and as proof of their acting capabilities. At the same time, close-­up shots focusing on facial expressions came to form part of the evolving film language, increasing the importance of makeup in order to create the illusion of Oriental body features. Mo­tion pictures therefore derived from the yellowface tradi­tion while at the same time bringing it to the representa­tional mode it is most often associated with today.

35 See Charles Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-­playing, and American Film Comedy: From Chinese Laundry Scene to Whoopee (1894 – 1930),” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 39 – 81. 36 The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers (United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1904); Smuggled into America (United States: S. Lubin, 1907); The Yellow Peril, dir. Wallace McCutcheon, perf. D. W. Griffith and Anthony O’Sullivan (United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1908); The Deceived Slumming Party, dir. D. W. Griffith, perf. Eddie Dillon and D. W. Griffith (United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1908). 37 See John Haddad, “The Laundry Man’s Got a Knife! China and Chinese America in Early United States Cinema,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives (2001), 31 – 47. 38 Madame Butterfly, dir. Sidney Olcott, perf. Mary Pickford and Marshall Neilan (United States: Famous Players, 1915).

The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  |

The shift to feature films also highlighted another fundamental impetus of yellowface: contemporary fears of so-­called miscegena­tion. When films emerged as more than an arrangement of scenes and hosted protagonists to identify with, contact between white and Oriental characters needed to avoid any no­tion of interracial sex, a fundamental taboo in film history long into the twentieth century. This especially concerned popular plots of villainous Oriental men desiring white women or luring them into opium dens and white slavery. Mo­tion pictures were in fact obsessed with narratives revolving around race and sexuality, as Gina Marchetti and others have demonstrated.39 Film producers heavily exploited contemporary fears of white slavery and interracial sex to attract sensa­tion-­seeking audiences; however, the casting of white actors ‘behind’ the yellowface masque­ rade contained the underlying racial implica­tions.

Understanding Yellowface

Only in recent decades have scholars of Asian American history begun to grasp the history of yellowface and its significance for race studies. The term ‘yellowface’ did not come into use before the 1950s, when Asian Americans began to examine the casting of white actors and actresses who played Asian or Asian American roles critically.40 The concept stressed the practice’s structural connec­ tion to blackface – the other influential form of racial masquerade in the U. S. Like blackface, yellowface is based on racism and unequal power rela­tions. It is a white appropria­tion of an allegedly Oriental racial identity erected as an object of ridicule, marked as culturally Other and threatening, and ultimately served to reassure white audiences of their racial superiority. While both blackface and yellowface have their roots in caricature and stereotyping, by the 1920s and 1930s, yellowface had formed a visual style of its own. In one of the first comprehensive studies on the representa­tion of Asians in visual media, Eugene Franklin Wong offers an outline for the theoretical investiga­ tion of yellowface.41 Wong devotes several pages to what he calls “racist cosmetology,” which he situates within the larger context of racism against Asians in the United States. In contrast to “racial cosmetology,” which would describe a 39 See Marchetti, Romance; Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegena­tion: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903 – 1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 40 See Moon, Yellowface, 164. 41 Eugene Franklin Wong, On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Mo­tion Pictures (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 40 – 50.

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system where all performers could impersonate people from every other group, regardless of race, the racist structure of yellowface allowed only whites to take up other racial identities. Wong men­tions three important constituents of “racist cosmetology.” First, he demonstrates Hollywood’s tendency to concentrate on racialized bodily differences, most importantly the epicanthic fold of the ‘Orien­ tal eye.’ Second, yellowface reinforces white actors’ and actresses’ privilege to play every role and enjoy undisputed access to major roles. Third, Asian Americans are confined to Asian roles, which in turn systematically disadvantaged them within the system of role stratifica­tion.42 Like Wong, many scholars have pointed to the lasting impact of yellowface on visual representa­tions of Asian Americans. In their study Asian Americans and the Media, Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham have pointed to the basic founda­ tions of yellowface and the broader representa­tional mode they call “yellowface logics.”43 They understand yellowface as the effect of unequal power rela­tions connected to race: “Similar to blackface, yellowface for Asians and Asian Americans takes place on, and reproduces, an unequal playing field where Asian and Asian American actors are not allowed to play and engage in practices of white identity play.”44

Referring to examples that range from the 1930s to the 2000s, they distinguish between explicit and implicit yellowface. Explicit yellowface describes the practice of playing Asian characters similar to the method outlined above. While this version has almost ceased to exist in the second half of the twentieth century, the authors men­tion famous examples: Mickey Rooney’s degrading impersona­tion of a Japanese in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the casting of David Carradine over Bruce Lee for the role of Kwai Chan in the Kung Fu television series (1972 – 1975), and Eddie Murphy’s portrayal of an elderly Chinese man in Norbit (2007).45 Up to the present day, yellowface seems less scandalized and 42 See ibid., 40. 43 Ono and Pham, Asian Americans, 59. 44 Ibid., 48. 45 Ibid., 48 – 53. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, dir. Blake Edwards, perf. Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, and Patricia Neal (United States: Jurow-­Shepherd, 1961); Kung Fu (television series), creator Ed Spielman, perf. David Carradine and Keye Luke (United States: Warner Bros., 1972 – 1975); Norbit, dir. Brian Robbins, perf. Eddie Murphy and Thandie Newton (United States: Dreamworks, 2007). Robert B. Ito has compiled a list of Hollywood stars who have appeared in yellowface, which is surprisingly long: Mary Pickford, Katharine Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Yul Brenner, Fred Astaire, Myrna Loy, Jerry Lewis, Ricardo

The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  |

more persistent than blackface. Supplying a reason for this, the authors identify “yellowface logics” in media representa­tion, which they describe as follows: “[T]he logics that assume that it is okay for the dominant mainstream to project an image of Asians and Asian Americans that it finds interesting, amusing, demeaning, off-­putting, or simply worth projecting. It is the image projected outward for popular consump­tion, considera­tion, or discussion – the logic that privileges dominant stereotypes and representa­tions over Asian and Asian American self-­representa­tions.”46

This logic, as the authors assert, also leads to implicit yellowface, which alludes to the problem that even when Asians or Asian Americans attain roles in the media, they have to perform a specific concept of Asianness. This Asianness is the result of century-­long yellowface tradi­tions and grounded in the assump­tion that Asians and Asian Americans are interchangeable, part of a homogenous group. In the only book-­length study that deals exclusively with yellowface in ­mo­tion pictures, Karla Rae Fuller follows the practice from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond.47 Fuller’s reading of yellowface, informed by performance theo­r y, aims at showing how the performance styles that comprise the field of Oriental impersona­tions shift and reconfigure over time. She identifies these performance styles by focusing on different characters she reads as stereotypes and archetypes of Oriental representa­tion. She considers villainous characters like Fu Manchu played by Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) or ambivalent performances like that of Helen Hayes in The Son-­Daughter (1932) a combina­tion of the submissive Lotus Blossom and the vengeful Dragon Lady stereotypes. She also focuses on supposedly positive portrayals of the Oriental detective which grew popular during the 1930s through films of the Charlie Chan, Mr. Wong, and Mr. Moto series.48 Pointing to the general ambivalence of Oriental performance, Fuller shows how even the allegedly positive archetype Montalban, Ingrid Bergman, John Wayne, Marlon Brando, Mickey Rooney, Peter ­Sellers, Helen Hayes, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney, and Anthony Quinn. See Robert B. Ito, “‘A Certain Slant’: A Brief History of Hollywood Yellowface,” Bright Lights Film Journal 18 (March 1997), accessed April 18, 2016, http://brightlightsfilm.com/certain-­slant-­brief-­history-­ hollywood-­yellowface. 46 Ono and Pham, Asian Americans, 59. 47 Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental. 48 The Mr. Moto series revolves around Japanese American detective Kentaro Moto, played by Peter Lorre, and spans eight films from 1937 to 1939. The Mr. Wong series comprises six films produced between 1938 and 1940 and depicts Boris Karloff as detective James Lee Wong. Karloff was replaced by Keye Luke in the last installment.

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was “as strictly contained and codified as its more malevolent counterpart.”49 Oriental stereotypes were readily available for re-­applica­tion on the Asian wartime enemy in films produced during World War II and moved again to more benign and erotic expressions in the years thereafter. Ultimately, the study sheds light on how certain trajectories of yellowface performance shifted according to their historical context while exhibiting a consistent cultural persistence. As Fuller asserts, Oriental archetype figures circulated through the decades and remained “central sites of contesta­tion and reconfigura­tion to this day.”50 She argues that the lower frequency of yellowface in recent years is less the result of an increased sensitivity than the consequence of a growing number of Asian American actors and actresses finding their place within the film business. The occasional re-­appearance of yellowface that Asian American cultural critics regularly call atten­tion to testifies to the still-­underdeveloped sensitivity. While yellowface remains a persistent phenomenon, the racial dynamics at its core point to the political and social developments in the U. S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The negotia­tion of Chinese racial identity through yellowface performance can be read as a reac­tion to shifting global and social condi­tions. As Michelle Su-­Mei Liu argues, yellowface was a way to negotiate American colonial expansion in the Pacific from 1898 onwards.51 While blackface helped to construct a past that legitimized white privilege and racial segrega­tion, early yellowface performances were directed at the future. Accor­ ding to Liu, it created a vision of a future in which the United States’ geopolitical focus was set on the Pacific and Asia. As Liu states, “yellowface, in all its horrible beauty, soothed anxieties about the United States’ future as a democratic colonial power.”52 While this argument may help to understand yellowface’s popularity, it cannot fully explain its emergence a few decades earlier. Instead, as became apparent in the overview of its historic dimensions, yellow­ face needs to be understood as a practice that points to the increasing role of immigra­tion in the social composi­tion of the United States. Culturally, yellowface emerged in the wake of Chinese immigra­tion into the U. S.; at the very center of the stereotypes connected to it stood the portrayal of the Chinese immigrant. This stereotype articulated the desire of a presumably white ­working class to distinguish itself from its racial Other. In this regard, yellowface func­ tioned similar to its counterpart, blackface. After all, minstrel shows, which 49 Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 73. 50 Fuller, 234. 51 See Liu, Acting Out, 14. 52 Ibid.

The Oriental on the Stage and on the Screen  |

featured white actors performing as African Americans, were arguably the most popular entertainment in the nineteenth century, and to a certain extent, yellowface followed the same racial mechanisms. In his seminal study on blackface, Eric Lott has analyzed it as an articula­tion of both racial anxieties and desire.53 The appropria­tion of African American culture and its remodeling into racial stereotypes for comedic effect served to contain racial anxieties of the white working class while at the same time articulating racial transgression. As Lott states, “[u]nderwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identifica­tion as well as fear, the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the forma­tion of a self-­consciously white working class.”54 One can also find this ambiguity in yellowface, whose stereotypical depic­tion did not contradict a general interest and fascina­tion with the Orient and exotic artifacts. As Robert G. Lee asserts, “to the extent that the moral ambiguities and anomalies signified by the Chinese body posed a danger of moral contamina­tion, the yellowface minstrel provided the sanc­tioned space through which to view the unknowable.”55 Blackface and yellowface consequently shared some general similarities. It is necessary, however, to keep in mind that both practices are the result of specific historical condi­tions that set African Americans apart from the Chinese American experience. Above all, in the nineteenth century, the racism of blackface performances originated from the long history of African Americans in the United States, whereas yellowface dealt with a new migrant group seen more as an external threat.56 Homi K. Bhabha’s texts on colonial discourse discuss the ambivalent func­ tion of racial stereotypes most prominently. He points out that stereotypes both recognize and disavow racial difference. As the “major discursive strategy” of colonial discourse, it

53 See Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 54 Lott, Love & Theft, 9. 55 Lee, Orientals, 43. 56 Since Lott points to the importance of sexual anxieties articulated in minstrelsy, it is important to note that Chinese masculinities and femininities were constructed similarly to those of African Americans. For example, stereotypes of Chinese masculinity featured two complementary poles: effeminacy (‘John Chinaman’/‘Charlie Chan’) on the one hand and sexual aggressiveness (‘Fu Manchu’) on the other, which parallel the stereotypes of African Americans referring to either ‘Uncle Tom’ or the threat of the ‘Black Rapist.’ On Chinese American masculinities, see Jachinson Chan, Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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“is a form of knowledge and identifica­tion that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved.”57

Bhabha understands the stereotype as a form of fetishiza­tion and articula­tion of both desire and derision that ultimately contains the sexual and racial Other by constantly reiterating simplistic dichotomies. Ono and Pham point to the usefulness of Bhabha’s concept of mimicry for the analysis of yellowface.58 They assert that Oriental impersona­tions in music and comedy performances combine aspects of mimicry and mockery. Bhabha’s describes mimicry as “a complex strategy of reform, regula­tion and discipline, which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.”59 Yellowface performances are therefore always ambivalent. They certainly articulate ­unequal power rela­tions – rela­tions which discriminate against and ridicule the figura­tion of the Chinese immigrant –, but they also represent elements of a broader fascina­tion with the exotic Other. As degrading as yellowface performances were – especially in early film –, they could also recreate a supposedly positive, aestheticized nostalgia for a premodern past. Furthermore, these performances could never escape their own artificiality and the inherent permeability of racial boundaries. Taking up different racial identities inevitably points to the constructed character of racial categoriza­tions themselves. The use of stereotypes for racial impersona­tions can at most create the mere effect of authenticity, as the latter only refers to what people accept as authentic at a certain point in time. This permeability allowed African Americans and Chinese Americans to enter the stage of racial performances themselves in the early twentieth century in order to re-­appropriate the images that circulated in U. S. popular culture.60

57 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Ques­tion: Stereotype, Discrimina­tion and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Loca­tion of Culture (1994; repr., London: Routledge, 2004), 94 – 120, 94 – 95. 58 Ono and Pham, Asian Americans, 49. 59 Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Loca­tion of Culture, 121 – 131, 122. 60 On Chinese yellowface performances in vaudeville, see Moon, Yellowface, 143 – 163. On black blackface, see Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen, Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-­Hop (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), esp. 25 – 80.

Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  |

1.2 Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body In the early decades of the twentieth century, mo­tion pictures had developed their own aesthetic of yellowface performances. While the general paradox of white actors playing Asian characters was seldom debated at all, reviewers regularly commented on the degree of authenticity an actor or actress could convey. In order to create their racial masquerade, film stars employed makeup and relied on professional makeup artists. The racial masks that Hollywood used in its crea­ tions of Orientals ranged from over-­the-­top depic­tions of villains to romanticized images of Chinese philosophers or female Lotus Blossoms. Boris Karloff ’s impersona­tion of the villainous mastermind Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) is an iconic yellowface performance. Fu Manchu, who first appeared in Sax Rohmer’s 1913 book The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu, became a widely-­known character in popular culture and the archetype of the Oriental villain.61 The book and its many sequels were adapted for the movie screen beginning in 1929 with The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu starring Warner Oland.62 While Fu Manchu became an ingrained part of the mo­tion picture industry until the late 1960s, the height of his popularity was in the early 1930s, Karloff ’s characteriza­ tion being among the most iconic. Fu Manchu is known for his hatred of white people and the cruel murder and torture techniques he uses against his opponents. In her analysis, Fuller describes how makeup accentuated his evilness. She writes: “Karloff ’s makeup in the film (eyes taped to appear smaller, long mustache, darkly painted and upwardly sloped eyebrows, heavy eyeliner, and long fingernails) was designed to create a

61 The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, dir. Rowland V. Lee, perf. Warner Oland, Jean Arthus, and Neil Hamilton (United States: Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929). For the U. S. market, the book’s title was changed to The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. 62 I exclude two serials from the UK from 1923 and 1924 because, arguably, the US-adapta­tion from 1929 was the first film that gained a wider audience in the United States. The most important releases in this respect are The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), The Return of Dr. Fu M ­ anchu (1930), Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). The character regained popularity in the 1950s with a television series and in the 1960s when Christopher Lee played Fu Manchu in several films. The impact of the character and its enduran­ce in popular culture can hardly be overestimated, as a recent impersona­tion by Nicolas Cage demonstrates. Cage plays Fu Manchu in a sequence of Robert Rodriguez’ fake trailer for Werewolf Women of the SS that accompanied the release of the 2007 film Grindhouse. On the Fu Manchu series, see Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014). For an examina­tion of the cultural relevance of Fu Manchu in the UK, see Urmila Seshagiri, “Modernity’s (Yellow) Perils. Dr. Fu Manchu and English Race Paranoia,” Cultural Critique 62 (2006): 162 – 194.

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repellent, frightening appearance. Addi­tionally, at key points in the narrative, particularly when the leading British characters are being mortally threatened, Karloff is shot in highly contrasted light and shadow, which further distorts his features. The actor’s cheeks appear sunken or fallen, giving him a somewhat emaciated appearance.”63

Performances like Karloff ’s display an unprecedented emphasis on bodily trans­ forma­tion. The effort put into facial modifica­tion is specific to yellowface, as blackface performances achieved their racialized appearances by relying mostly on skin color, hats, and wigs, as well as red paint for their lips. Yellowface makeup was crucially connected to the produc­tion and dissemina­ tion of racial knowledge about the Oriental body. By placing its focus on physical appearance and the exaggera­tion of facial features, yellowface inscribed cultural Otherness to racialized physical characteristics. The effort put into these racial impersona­tions corresponds directly to the supposedly fundamental Otherness of Asian people. As Robert G. Lee emphasizes, “[y]ellowface marks the Asian body as unmistakably Oriental; it sharply defines the Oriental in a racial opposi­tion to whiteness. Yellowface exaggerates ‘racial’ features that have been designated ‘Oriental,’ such as ‘slanted’ eyes, overbite, and mustard-­yellow skin color. Only the racialized Oriental is yellow; Asians are not. Asia is not a biological fact but a geographic designa­tion. Asians come in the broadest range of skin color and hue.”64

In order to achieve a recognizably Oriental appearance, makeup artists needed to refer to the visual knowledge about the physical attributes of the Oriental body. In doing so, yellowface both popularized and drew from racial concep­tions that were widespread in the scientific fields of biology and race theory. Therefore, to analyze yellowface, we do not only need to scrutinize the misrepresenta­tion of Chinese people in racial stereotypes, but also the genealogy of the racial concept behind it and show how these were appropriated for the display of Orientals on the stage and the screen. Yellowface makeup in mo­tion pictures and in the theater took its concep­tion of the Oriental body and Oriental facial features especially from scientific discourse. In his 1939 handbook on stage makeup, Arthur H. Schwerin brings this connec­tion between science and makeup to the fore. He writes: “The study of physio­gnomy or art of perceiving a person’s character by the features of his countenance is closely

63 Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 36. 64 Lee, Orientals, 2.

Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  |

associated to the study of make-­up.”65 As an articula­tion of Western Orien­talism, scientific race theories based their observa­tions on similar percep­tions of bodily Otherness, relying on physical measurements and knowledge fields like phreno­ logy. The discursive field of scientific racism thus linked physical attributes to racial Otherness, which in the case of the Orient was connected to the concept of a fundamental dichotomy. Mo­tion picture yellowface in the 1920s and 1930s embodies the zenith of visualizing racial difference for mainstream audiences. The phenomenon of yellowface, then, is inseparably linked to the genealogy of ‘yellow’ as a racial categoriza­tion for East Asians. The ques­tion of how and why Chinese and Japanese people were perceived as belonging to the ‘yellow race’ and how this had been connected to bodily differences is still an understudied field. In his book Becoming Yellow, Michael Keevak has undertaken an important first step by meticulously tracing the genealogy of ‘yellowness.’66 Keevak is able to reveal the complex and often-­contradictory processes that led to the forma­tion of ‘yellow’ as a racial marker for East Asians. As he shows, the percep­tion of East Asian people as having yellow skin is less the result of actual observa­tions by early travelers but rather an effect of the emergence of the scientific discourse of race: “East Asians did not […] become yellow until they were lumped together as a yellow race, which beginning at the end of the eighteenth century would be called ‘Mongolian.’”67 With the emergence of modern natural sciences in the eighteenth century, prominent scholars like botanist Carl Linnaeus and physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach began to categorize humankind along racial lines that focused on exterior attributes rather than culture or geography.68 While these categoriza­tions were ambivalent in regard to the actual skin color of Asian people, they reveal the historical desire to systematize the world and to distinguish a European and superior white race from others. The fact that the terminology of these early attempts varied (Linnaeus used the Latin term ‘fuscus’ to describe East Asians and later changed it to the negatively connoted ‘luridus’) shows the difficulties of adding a supposed Asian race into the tradi­tional white-­ black system.69 By 1795, however, Blumenbach had designed a taxonomy that put

65 Arthur H. Schwerin, Make-­Up Magic: A Modern Handbook for Beginners or Advanced Stu­ dents (Minneapolis: Northwestern Press, 1939), 17. 66 Keevak, Becoming Yellow. For the only other scholarly publica­tion devoted to this topic, see Walter Demel, “Wie die Chinesen gelb wurden: Ein Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte der Rassentheorien,” Historische Zeitschrif 255, no. 3 (1992): 625 – 666. 67 Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 2 (italics in the original). 68 See ibid., 48 – 65. 69 See ibid., 43 – 4 4.

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Figure 2  “The Color Top and Method of adjusting the Color Disks.” Louis R. Sullivan, Essentials of Anthropometry: A Handbook for Explorers and Museum Collectors (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1928), 21.

the ‘Caucasian’ at the center of the racial spectrum, with Africans and the newly introduced category of ‘Mongolians’ as the two racial poles most distanced from the white race through degenera­tion. With this step, Blumenbach had not only manifested the ‘Mongol’ as a racial category for all people from East Asia but had also linked it to concep­tions of yellowness.70 The emergence of racial systematiza­tion is important for understanding how bodily concepts began to be racialized and, through the lens of Eurocentrism, constructed as devia­tions from the white norm. Two important developments were central for these processes. First, with the manifesta­tion of the ‘yellow Mongolian’ as a racial categoriza­tion, anthropologists began to measure skin pigment with devices that merely mirrored their own preoccupa­tions. The pigment ­studies undertaken by nineteenth century anthropologists aimed at measuring ‘non-­whiteness,’ as whiteness – representing the racial norm and aesthetic ideal – supposedly meant the absence of color.71 Anthropologists described East Asians, now subsumed under the label ‘Mongolians,’ as varying in tone, ranging from brownish red, yellowish, olive, or pale yellow orange. As Keevak concludes, “the

70 See ibid., 64. 71 See ibid., 95.

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desire to find yellowness in the people of East Asia was so ingrained in the Wes­ tern imagina­tion that some anthropologists tried to prove that their skin really was yellow.”72 As a consequence, contemporary anthropologists developed special devices and color charts to verify their assump­tions regarding skin pigmenta­tion. The Color Top, for example, is an odd example of such a measurement device. Derived from a child’s toy, the color top could attach to a disk, colored differently in varying propor­tions, in order to simulate the supposed spectrum of pigmenta­tion (see fig. 2). Crucially, the four colors regarded as the fundamental pigmenta­tions of the different racial types composed the basic skin colors from which all varying shades originated: white, black, yellow, and red. Significantly distorting any color theories based on physics, anthropologists believed they could represent all possible pigmenta­tions resulting from race-­mixing by blending the respective colors. The second development was the special atten­tion scientists gave the so-­called ‘Mongolian eye,’ which became a bodily marker for yellowness. The no­tion of Asian people having ‘little,’ ‘narrow,’ or ‘sunken’ eyes goes back to the sixteenth century and was men­tioned long before skin pigmenta­tion became the epitome of race theories.73 In the nineteenth century, however, race theories like those of Blumenbach incorporated this form of the eyes and solidified it as a racial attri­bute of the ‘Mongolian’ race as a whole. The term ‘Mongolian eye’ became an inhe­ rent part of scientific observa­tions and was used to describe the allegedly ‘slanted’ or ‘slit’ eyes of East Asians. Beginning in 1832, the term ‘epicanthus’ was used to describe the fold of skin that crosses the inner eyelid and marked the ‘Mongolian eye’ – a term originally coined to describe certain eye diseases.74 As a racial marker, the ‘Mongolian eye’ also func­tioned to explain the races of mankind and as an indicator of the different stages in the human species’ development. The alleged physical curiosity of the ‘Mongolian eye’ signified a lower stage of racial development, which the white race – regarded as the race closest to perfec­tion – had already passed through. Well into the twentieth century, the terms ‘Mongolian fold,’ ‘epicanthus,’ and ‘Mongolian eye’ served interchangeably (and went unques­tioned) to describe eyes understood as an ‘abnormal’ devia­tion from the white ideal.75 These no­tions also laid the founda­tion for historical concep­tions of Down syndrome, or trisomy 21, as it is now called. When John Langdon Down first described ‘Mongolism’ in 1866, he systematized the condi­tion along racialized 72 Ibid., 72 (italics in the original). 73 See ibid., 102. 74 See ibid., 105. 75 See ibid., 107. Kevin Stuart has pointed out the persistence of this terminology. See Kevin ­Stuart, Mongols in Western/American Consciousness (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997), 100 – 107.

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Figure 3  “Erörterung des Schiefstehens der Augen bei den Japanern und einigen andern Völkerschaften.“ Philipp Franz von Siebold, Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan, 2nd ed. (Würzburg: Woerl, 1897), 299.

body concepts.76 He interpreted the symptoms of Down syndrome as signs of the ‘Mongolian race.’ Many historical observers subsequently saw ‘Mongolism’ as a form of atavism that made white people regress into the child-­like state of the Mongolian race.77 Illustrative tables devoted to the forms of the ‘Mongolian eye’ arranged racial types according to the eyes’ ‘slantedness.’ For anthropologists, the eye was clearly the most fascinating bodily feature. They regarded it as an obvious sign of a person’s racial status, so that schematic categoriza­tions like the example given above 76 Keevak, Becoming Yellow, 113 – 121; see also Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflec­tions on Natural History (London: W. W. Norton, 1980), 160 – 168. 77 As late as 1924, physician F. G. Crookshank took a strong atavistic and eugenics-­influenced stance. See F. G. Crookshank, The Mongol in Our Midst: A Study of Man and His Three Faces (London: Keegan Paul, 1924).

Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  |

pointed to the Otherness of the Oriental body by reducing it to its devia­tion from a supposed white norm. This is especially evident in their presenta­tion of a ‘normal’ European eye for comparison (as seen in the lower right, fig. 3). By the early twentieth century, the body had become the most important site for racial thinking. Physical characteristics like skin color and the shape of the eyes func­tioned as devices for racial characteriza­tion and served to legitimize the existence of a ‘yellow’ race within a solidified racial system, one which complicated the century-­old binaries of black and white. Scientific discourse showed a fascina­tion with bodily ‘devia­tions’ that seemed to prove the superiority of the white race. Even if empiric observa­tions (like general skin color) or alleged racial markers (like the ‘epicanthus’) could not prove racial characteristics, sources often fit them into a hierarchical racial system grounded in the discursive field of scientific race theories. As theorists like Michel Foucault or Judith Butler have reminded us, the body is always the product of the discourses that produce knowledge about it.78 Contemporary fascina­tion with the ‘Mongolian’ body and the study of its presumed racial characteristics consequently needs to be understood as processes of racial Othering informed by larger Orientalist presump­tions.

The ‘Science’ of Makeup

Makeup artists and actors aimed at reproducing bodily features for their audien­ces, and the long tradi­tion of racializing bodies in science and race theories informed these modifica­tions. One can see this influence clearly when we turn to the ‘­scien­ce’ of makeup itself. In 1932, makeup artist Cecil Holland described the procedures of yellowface cosmetics in an article for the American Cinematographer that bore the telling title “Orientals Made to Order.”79 Holland was head of the makeup department at Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer Studios, member of the Mo­tion Picture Makeup Artists’ Associa­tion (MPMAA ) and responsible for Boris Karloff ’s transforma­ tion into Fu Manchu in the 1932 film adapta­tion. He introduces his text with the observa­tion that, apart from the few Asian American stars, Occidentals play the majority of Oriental roles, yet he attests most of these characteriza­tions to be “convincingly oriental – some of them unforgettably so.”80 To achieve ­convincing 78 See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); see also Netzwerk Körper, ed., What Can a Body Do? Praktiken und Figura­tionen des Körpers in den Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012). 79 Cecil Holland, “Orientals Made to Order,” American Cinematographer, December 1932, 16. 80 Ibid.

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Figure 4  Boris Karloff as Dr. Fu Manchu. Detail from: Cecil Holland, “Orientals Made to Order,” American Cinematographer, December 1932, 16.

results like these, he argues, one requires both acting and makeup skills. He claims that the makeup artist has to face three problems: “First of all, the contour of the face and features must be made over – recast, as it were, in an oriental mould. Secondly, the hair must be altered to a greater or less degree. Third and last, the coloring of the skin must be changed to give the impression of yellowness.”81

The last concern may seem paradox, as films did not display color yet, but a closer look at the picture of Boris Karloff shows that he is made to appear darker (see fig. 4). This trait contrasts starkly with the makeup of the film’s protagonists, who were regularly made to appear extremely white; however, Holland’s specific use

81 Ibid.

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of the term ‘yellowness’ hints at the underlying racial concept, as any darker color tone would have achieved the same effect. Holland explains his techniques in more detail by illustrating Karloff ’s Fu ­Manchu as an example. The course of ac­tion he describes provides a telling disclosure in regard to the specific aspects of the Oriental body: “The first step, of course, was a careful study of Karloff ’s physiognomy, with reference to its potentially Chinese features – or lack of them. First of all, there were the eyes. In addi­tion to being set in the head at a peculiar angle, a Chinaman’s eyes are usually somewhat prominent. Karloff ’s are, naturally, normal European ones, and inclined to be receding under his heavy, straight brows. Therefore, in addi­tion to suggesting the celestial slant, we must build the eyes up to suggest greater prominence. This we did by carefully filling in the hollow between the eyelid and the brow. For this we use thin layers of cotton, which we shaped by saturating with collodion; after the desired thickness had been achieved, we finished it off with a surface made of nose-­putty, which we were able to mould into the contour which gave us the desired effect […]. To suggest the necessary Oriental slant, we drew the eyebrows slightly up, and, shaving off a bit of the outer ends of each, drew in a shape which gave us both the oriental slant and the ‘mephisto-­effect’ necessary for so malign a characteriza­tion [sic].”82

The descrip­tion continues with the process of modeling the nose and ears and the applica­tion of the mustache. I quoted this part at length because, above all, it gives an impression of the effort makeup artists undertook to transform white actors into Orientals. Furthermore, it shows how makeup procedures followed racialized thinking. The eyes in particular seemed important in order to preserve the illusion. Holland’s language follows contemporary dichotomies, as Oriental eyes are described as slanted, “somewhat prominent” and set at a “peculiar angle.” It also contrasts them to Karloff ’s “normal European” eyes. Holland’s descrip­tion ends with the men­tion of greasepaint and powder contrived to change Karloff ’s skin color: “a special blend created in the M-G-M makeup laboratory, […] which gives exactly the proper coloring to look and photograph like the skin of an orien­ tal.”83 Besides the general preoccupa­tion with yellow skin color, the contrivance of paint in a special laboratory to achieve the highest possible resemblance to the ‘original’ adds to the scientific background of bodily concepts in yellowface performances. Thus, the crea­tion of Orientals was not only interrelated with the field of general science – it had also evolved into a science of its own.

82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 48.

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Making Up Orientals: Historical Makeup Guides

Cecil Holland was only one of a large number of artists who released guides for the applica­tion of theatrical and mo­tion picture makeup. Most of these offered advice for general ques­tions about techniques and included sec­tions with certain ‘types’ of characters, complete with instruc­tions on how to achieve the respective appearance. Most notably, all of these guides expanded on racial types and featured special sec­tions about ‘the Chinese’ and ‘the Japanese.’ The most important features for racial makeup, here, were the eyes, eyebrows, and skin color. To increase the instruc­tional effect of these guides, the texts normally supplied the reader with several photographs that showed white actors displaying the makeup techniques described in the text. Some of these guides also included special illustra­tions and charts to provide more detail, such as diagrams on the physiology of the eye or color tables prescribing the desired skin complexion for each type. On a structural level, these guides resemble scientific studies of racial categoriza­tion, pointing to bodily attributes of each type. Other than anthropologists, who gathered their knowledge through allegedly objective observa­tion and measurement, makeup artists needed to produce results that were themselves informed by popularized accounts of the racial body. As we will see, the distinc­tion between these two processes were fluid. As the makeup artists’ aim was to replicate these racial types for contemporary audiences, they necessarily had to rely on racial assump­tions that helped to mark characters and enabled audiences to recognize these racial types. It is thus no coincidence that these guides stressed their scientific accuracy. The 1934 Guide to Theatrical Make-­Up by Charles S. Parsons, for example, defined the theory of makeup in terms of requiring expertise in two fields: art on the one hand and physiognomy on the other.84 In regard to physiognomy, Parsons asserts: “[R]acial characteristics are fairly generally known, and need not be discussed here in detail beyond remarking that the race should be as far as possible reflected in the make-­up. For example, Jews must always have a suspicion or more of a hooked nose and thick lips, Chinese and Japanese must have almond-­shaped eyes on the slant, whilst Germans and Dutchmen, Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are generally round and full-­faced. Race is also to a certain extent reflected in the general complexion; the characteristic colour, therefore, is used as the ground for the make-­up.”85

84 Charles S. Parsons, A Guide to Theatrical Make-­Up, 2nd ed. (London: Sir Isaac Pitman, 1934). 85 Ibid., 11 – 12.

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The excerpt exemplifies several conven­tions in makeup guides of the 1920s and 1930s and their rela­tion to race. First, while Parsons men­tions the special know­ ledge of physiognomy and – on the pages that follow – even gives illustra­tions of skull shapes to deliver a certain scientific background, he refers to racial characteristics as common knowledge. Second, he explains that makeup is also meant to highlight these characteristics as much as possible, pointing to the direct correla­ tion between makeup and the visual reproduc­tion of racial stereotypes. Third, similar to the scientific discourse described above, the ideal of the white race serves as an indirect norm from which other races deviate. This idea becomes apparent when he describes Europeans as full-­faced and healthy, as opposed to Jews, Chinese, and Japanese. Many authors indeed used their makeup guides for excursions into science, pointing to physiognomy and racial hierarchies. In his introduc­tion titled The Art of Make-­Up, Serge Strenkovsky devoted several pages to his elabora­tion on “racial physiognomical differences.”86 He opens with the general asserta­tion that “[t]here are five principal races: the White or Caucasian, the Yellow or Mongolian, the Brown or Malay, the Black or Negro, and the Red or American Indian.”87 He then lists several distinguishing characteristics like complexion, skull, eyes, mouth, and cheeks. The complexion of each race, he assures, follows the racial descrip­tions given above. Concerning the skull, he explains that “[a]nthropo­ logy confirms that the smaller and more misshapen the skull, the more inferior is a race in intellect and culture. The most imperfect heads are found in the Australian savages.”88 Like other guides, he draws special atten­tion to the ‘Mongolian’ race, whose orbits are described as protuberant while the outer corners of their eyes are allegedly more raised than the inner corners, which produces an “oblique shape.”89 As an illustra­tion of the particular makeup technique applied to create the Chinese type, he presents a photo of Lon Chaney as Mr. Wu in the 1927 film of the same name.90 In his already-­men­tioned guidebook Make-­Up Magic, Arthur H. Schwerin stresses that makeup artists need fundamental knowledge of biology. In a stri­ king contradic­tion to the book’s title, he explains that the results of makeup may appear as ‘magic’ but that its founda­tions lay in hard science. Again, these scientific no­tions imply an explicit racist background: 86 Serge Strenkovsky, The Art of Make-­Up (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937), 82 – 85. 87 Ibid., 82. 88 Ibid., 83. 89 Ibid. 90 See ibid., 240. Chaney’s makeup will be discussed further below.

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Figure 5  Skeleton views. Arthur H. Schwerin, Make-­Up Magic: A Modern Handbook for Beginners or Advanced Students (Minneapolis: Northwestern Press, 1939), 17.

“The amateur cannot expect to portray more than an elementary characteriza­tion, as regards to make-­up, unless he has some degree of understanding as to what lies beneath the skin. […] One does not have to be a student of make-­up or phrenology to know that there are certain marks by which a person’s moral or mental endowments may be revealed.”91

He then gives precise informa­tion on the bone structure of the human skull, accompanied by several illustra­tions (see fig. 5). These illustra­tions highlight the scientific founda­tion of the text by showing the skull, skin, and facial features of the human body in different perspectives. These charts clearly resemble the ones found in anthropological and other scientific publica­tions and show how the skull and the skin define the shape of the human head. In two of the illustra­tions above, the skull is visible as the white-­colored center of the head, surrounded by a dark layer of skin. Schwerin appears to prove to his readers that the applica­tion of makeup involves the outer skin-­layer as well as what is ‘under’ the skin. This way, makeup requires an interplay of skin and skull, with

91 Schwerin, Make-­Up Magic, 15.

Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  |

the aim of altering a person’s physical appearance. Taking into respect Schwerin’s asser­tions about the interrela­tion of skull form and moral character, these charts suggest that the ‘science’ of makeup reproduces such no­tions by emphasizing the visual. It also aims at reproducing specific character traits by accentuating certain features with greasepaint, shadows, wigs, and other methods. Employed in the right way, the illustra­tions suggest makeup can completely transform an actor’s face in any desired way, regardless of the original facial (and racial) appearance. While he also acknowledges that, according to science, something like a ‘pure race’ does not exist, he explicates that science classifies the white race into the three principal types of the Alpine, Nordic, and Mediterranean.92 Here, ­Schwerin evidently follows contemporary racial sub-­categoriza­tions. As we know from the anti-­immigra­tion and nativist debates of the 1920s, these subdivisions were not free of hierarchiza­tion, as they degraded immigrants from eastern Europe or the Mediterranean area as less desirable than those coming from western Europe. Above all, these examples demonstrate how close the practice and theory of makeup artistry was to the discourse of scientific racism. Similar to scientific discourse, makeup publica­tions concentrated heavily on the ‘Oriental eye.’ In order to achieve the supposedly slanted appearance of the eyes, actors and makeup artists undertook great efforts. A widespread technique was the use of so-­called ‘fish skin’ and spirit gum at the outer corners of the eye, followed by the applica­tion of adhesive tape to draw back the actor’s eyes. In a last step, an Oriental wig could practically hide the adhesive tape to further the illusion.93 If adhesive tape was not an op­tion, greasepaint and eyeliner could help achieve the impression of the Oriental eye. In her guidebook, Helena Chalmers expands on the crea­tion of these Oriental eyes: “An examina­tion of Chinese skulls shows that the eye sockets are set precisely the same way as those in the Caucasian; the oblique look is created by the inner corner of the upper eyelid being drawn down. Apply yellow grease paint of a lighter shade than your founda­tion to this por­tion of the eyelid. Put it on heavily and if your lashes are dark and thick here, cover them with the same paint, to prevent the eye opening up at this point.”94

92 Ibid., 61. 93 See, for example, Cecil Holland, The Art of Make-­Up for Stage & Screen (Hollywood: Cinematex Publishing, 1927), 71; Ivard Strauss, Paint, Powder and Make-­Up: The Art of T ­ heater Make-­Up from the Amateur and Class Room Standpoint (New Haven: Sweet & Son, 1936), 172; Wray Meltmar, Photographic Make-­Up (New York: Pitman, 1938), 166 – 167. 94 Helena Chalmers, The Art of Make-­Up: For the Stage, the Screen and Social Use (New York: D. Appleton, 1927), 113.

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Figure 6  “(a) A Chinese Type, (b) An Elderly Chinaman.” Helena Chalmers, The Art of Make-­Up: For the Stage, the Screen and Social Use (New York: D. Appleton, 1927), 112.

After applying yellow greasepaint, she explains, it is important to paint a black line along the eyelids and extend it upwards to accentuate the eye’s shape. The book offers an illustra­tion to explain the desired outcome, demonstrating the importance of the starkly arched eyebrows (see fig. 6). Illustra­tions providing detailed informa­tion on the complicated Oriental eye makeup were used regularly, and their visual language paralleled that of historical race studies. Literally systematizing racial types in terms of specific physical attri­ butes, these books disseminated racial knowledge much like scientific publica­tions had so eagerly in the nineteenth century. By giving instruc­tions on how to create certain racial types, they produced standardized images of their alleged bodily characteristics. Furthermore, by actively exaggerating physical attributes, these charts and illustra­tions necessarily reproduced racial stereotypes that circulated in scientific and popular discourses. Guidebooks relied on schematic illustra­tions of Oriental eyes or Oriental faces to point their readers to the important details for the racial t­ ransforma­tion.95 These images of the heavily ‘slanted’ eyes and the fact that it took much effort to achieve this effect reinforced no­tions of the Oriental eyes as Other and far 95 See, for example, Richard B. Whorf, Time to Make Up: A Practical Handbook in the Art of Grease Paint (Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1930); Rudolph G. Liszt, The Last Word in Make-­Up: Make-­Up Encyclopedia (New York: Contemporary Play, 1938); Arthur H. Schwerin, The Amateur’s Make-­Up Chartbook (Franklin, OH : Eldridge Entertainment House, 1940).

Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  |

Figure 7 (left)  “Slanting Eyes.” Rudolph G. Liszt, The Last Word in Make-­Up: Make-­Up Encyclopedia (New York: Contemporary Play, 1938), 113. Figure 8 (middle)  Oriental. Arthur H. Schwerin, The Amateur’s Make-­Up Chartbook (Franklin, OH: Eldridge Entertainment House, 1940, page unknown. Figure 9 (right)  “Tricks in Making Up the Eyes.” Richard B. Whorf, Time to Make Up: A Practical Handbook in the Art of Grease Paint (Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1930), 9.

removed from the ‘normal’ European eye (see figs. 7 – 9). In some cases, the authors also displayed photographs of themselves or assistants in yellowface makeup to exhibit the results. With these pictures, the readers could witness the actual effects of the instruc­tions and verify the possibilities for t­ ransforming a white person into an Oriental (see figs. 10 – 11). Unlike the performances in mo­tion pictures, the books did not try to convey the illusion of authenticity. Instead, the photos served as a proof for the effects their readers could achieve with makeup techniques. As a noticeable number of books alluded to ‘magic’ in their titles or in the text, these pictures testify to the miraculous powers of makeup while revealing the secret tricks of the magicians themselves. Seeing a white person in yellowface here inevi­tably points to both the curiosity of the readers and the difference between the Oriental body and the – presumably white – readers’ own.

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Figure 10 (left)  “Eyes, Oriental (grease method). Eyes, Oriental (tape method).” Ivard Strauss, Paint, Powder and Make-­Up: The Art of ­Theater Make-­Up from the Amateur and Class Room Standpoint (New Haven: Sweet & Son, 1936), 87. Figure 11 (right)  “Chinese Make-­Up.” Wray Meltmar, Photographic Make-­Up (New York: Pitman, 1938), 167.

Similar to the schematized illustra­tions of the eyes, makeup guides also reinforced the standardiza­tion of skin color. During the 1920s and 1930s, professional makeup manufacturers like Max Factor and Ludwig Leichner released color charts and number codes to identify certain color-­mixtures and indicate which tone readers needed to use for the desired effects.96 The basic component was greasepaint, which had long played a role in theater and also served in mo­tion pictures to achieve certain skin tones and enhance photographic appeal. While makeup had posed a difficult task in the early years of film, the introduc­tion of panchromatic film in the late 1920s allowed for more natural grey tones.97 With the introduc­tion of panchromatic films and the emergence of 96 A list of products and color codes from different manufacturers is provided in John F. Baird, Make-­Up: A Manual for the Use of Actors, Amateur and Professional (New York: Samuel French, 1930), 132 – 148; a reproduc­tion of a Max Factor color chart can be found in Ellen M. Gall and Leslie H. Carter, Modern Make-­Up: A Practical Text Book and Guide for the Student, Director and Professional (San Francisco: Banner Play Bureau, 1928). 97 Early films were orthochromatic, or blue-­sensitive, which means that they were sensitive to the blue-­violet spectrum and insensitive to yellow-­red colors. As a result, blue tones appeared white and red tones became dark or black on film, making skin color generally appear darker than it actually was. To counter this phenomenon, actors and actresses did not only use large amounts of greasepaint, but they also had to use complicated mixtures of blue, green, or yellow for facial makeup, which is also the reason why characters in early silent films have

Biology and the Racial Makeup of the Oriental Body  |

specialized makeup departments within all the major studios, makeup became more standardized – a development the influential makeup ­artist Max Factor also initiated by developing a special series of panchromatic scales.98 Makeup manu­facturers offered greasepaint in a wide range of skin colors, often named directly after the racial ‘type’ they were used for: Max Factor had colors called ‘Mexi­can,’ ‘East Indian,’ ‘Arab or Hindu,’ ‘Indian,’ or ‘Mulatto,’ while Stein Cosmetics had a desi­gnated color called ‘Chinese.’99 President of the MPMAA Walter L. Rodgers, who also published a guidebook on makeup, asserted that colors are known by standar­dized number codes; no. 16, for example, marks the color ‘Chinese,’ and directly follows no. 15, for ‘Othello.’100 This trend led to instruc­tions like the following one from 1930, which illuminates the racial associa­tions that always formed the basis of the color charts: “For the basic grease paint of either of these make-­ups [Chinese and Japanese; B. S.], the listed colors of ‘Chinese’ or ‘Japanese’ will be found correct. If, however, these cannot be obtained, a mixture of ‘Hawaiian’ and ‘Yellow’ will be quite as good.”101 Generally, authors advised their readers that yellow skin color was obligatory for Chinese impersona­tions, or, as Wray Meltmar asserted, that “the skin of an Oriental is darker and more yellow than that of an occidental.”102 To achieve an allegedly authentic impression, a markeup artist requires yellow, “yellowish-­ brown,” Max Factor’s no. 5 (‘yellow’), or no. 5 ½ (‘orange’) greasepaint to transform a white actor or actress into a Chinese.103 Yellow pigmenta­tion thus constituted an inherent element in yellowface performances and served to mark a person as Oriental visually. extremely white faces. The new panchromatic film, however, allowed a wider range of grey tones, which corresponded more directly with the actual colors. See Kristin Thompson, “Major Technological Changes in the 1920s,” in The Classic Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Produc­tion to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge, 1985), 518 – 531, esp. 518 – 522. 98 For Max Factor’s own in-­depth elabora­tion of this topic, see Max Factor, “Standardiza­tion of Mo­tion Picture Make-­Up,” Journal of the Society of Mo­tion Picture Engineers 27, no. 1 (1937): 52 – 62. 99 See Baird, Make-­Up, 132, 142. 100 Walter L. Rodgers, Rodgers’ Make-­Up Book (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing, 1930), 15. This standardiza­tion, however, did not appear consistently throughout the sources I consulted. 101 Whorf, Time to Make Up, 60. 102 Meltmar, Photographic Make-­Up, 165. 103 See H. Stanley Redgrove and Gilbert A. Foan, Paint, Powder and Patches: A Handbook of Make-­Up for Stage and Carnival (London: William Heinemann, 1930), 111; Baird, Make-­Up, 110; Chalmers, Art of Make-­Up, 112; Schwerin, Mage-­Up Magic, 64; Strauss, Paint, Powder and Make-­Up, 169.

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In sum, the theory and practice of yellowface makeup articulated racial cate­ goriza­tions and visual stereotypes connected to concepts of the Oriental informed by scientific discourses. In a certain way, yellowface makeup conveyed a popu­ lar culture equivalent of scientific racism; it formed the flipside of the same coin. It oscilliated between legitimizing its own practices by referring to the racial know­ledge circulating in society and actively producing and disseminating visual know­ledge of Orientals. Audiences of mo­tion pictures and theater plays witnessed more than a white actor or actress in yellow greasepaint: what they witnessed was the result of circulating, racialized visual knowledge from two interrelated discursive fields. They witnessed the performativity of race in a condensed rendi­tion as well as its firm ties to contemporary cultural and scien­tific discourses.

1.3 Racial Types: Yellowface Performances and the Hollywood System After working out the specific background of yellowface, let us now return to the public percep­tion of the actors and actresses in mo­tion pictures. For the regular moviegoer of the 1920s and 1930s, the sight of white actors and actresses in yellowface was nothing out-­of-­the-­ordinary, and critics hardly ever discussed it in-­depth. Many contemporary observers instead saw the racial masquerading as Chinese or Japanese as a standard repertoire for prolific stars and praised those who could convey an Oriental impression convincingly. In 1930, Picture-­ Play Magazine dedicated a small feature to a number of contemporary performances.104 Titled “When West Looks East,” it shows five photos of white artists in their roles as Orientals: Anders Randolf and Lydia Yeamans Titus, both of whom appeared in Shanghai Lady (1929), Warner Oland, who impersonated Fu Manchu in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), Richard Barthelmess in a still from Son of the Gods (1930), and Estelle Taylor, performing in Where East is East (1929) (see fig. 12).105

104 “When West Looks East,” Picture-­Play Magazine, February 1930, 95. 105 Shanghai Lady, dir. John S. Robertson, perf. Mary Nolan, James Murray, and Lydia Y ­ eamans Titus (United States: Universal, 1929); Son of the Gods, dir. Frank Lloyd, perf. Richard Barthelmess and Constance Bennett (United States: First Na­tional, 1930); Where East is East, dir. Tod Browning, perf. Lon Chaney, Lupe Vélez, and Estelle Taylor (United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1929).

Racial Types  |

Figure 12  “When West Looks East,” Picture-­Play Magazine, February 1930, 95.

The introductory lines explain: “Scratch through the grease paint of a screen Orien­ tal and you may find a player from Montana.”106 This line describes the pictures quite accurately as all of them except Richard Barthelmess wear heavy makeup and Oriental costumes and bear ‘slanted’ eyes achieved through adhesive tape and large amounts of greasepaint.107 Their eyes, in fact, look swollen and half-­closed under the weight of the makeup. The article, however, reassures its readers that under the surface of their racial disguise, all these stars are ‘normal’ whites with identities and origins completely unrelated to the Oriental roles they were playing. It implies that, as impressive as these transforma­tions are, the makeup merely represents a shell that resembles the visual appearance of an Oriental – a mask that could be taken on and off. Moreover, the ambiguity of the article’s title alludes 106 “When West Looks East.” 107 Barthelmess wears only light makeup and no visible prosthetics in Son of the Gods due to his character’s ambivalent racial status, which will be discussed in chapter 3.

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to two important aspects of yellowface visuality: firstly, the process of making whites ‘look like’ East Asians through makeup – based on racial stereo­types of the Oriental body –, secondly, the phrase ‘look East’ here also means ‘looking in an eastern direc­tion,’ which illustrates the Eurocentric perspective that yellowface was based on beautifully. The Western gaze on ‘the Orient’ is always unidirec­ tional in yellowface and follows unequal power rela­tions between the looking and the looked-­upon subject. Taken together, the title is an apt example of the way Hollywood contributed to the reproduc­tion of a specific Eurocentric visual knowledge about the Oriental. While the practice of yellowface was rarely discussed in general, film fan maga­ zines showed a certain fascina­tion with the racial transforma­tions of popular stars. Magazines provided a behind-­the-­scenes look into techniques that made actors and actresses appear Oriental on the screen. In 1923, Photoplay magazine featured an illustrated article about Leatrice Joy’s makeup for her role as Taou Yuen in Java Head (1923), a film that revolves around the fateful rela­tionship between a white man and a Chinese woman.108 The article titled “From China to Salem” describes Joy’s transforma­tion and emphasizes that there had been no need for adhesive tape on the eyes as “[t]he orbs of Leatrice were always mysterious and more eastern than western, anyway.”109 In the center of the page, the reader sees Joy standing in full Chinese attire and makeup. At the top of the page, there are two photos showing her face before and after the transforma­tion (see fig. 13). Paralleling the title’s dichotomy of China and Salem, Massachusetts – the two settings of the film –, a comparison is drawn between Joy’s ‘normal,’ casual appearance and her racial disguise. Similarly, Photoplay reported about Loretta Young’s makeup for The Hatchet Man (1932) in an article called “Loretta Goes Oriental.”110 The photographs show makeup artist Perc Westmore applying makeup and the applica­tion of fish skin on Young’s eyes to draw them back (see fig. 14). Another photo shows Young in full makeup, as she appears in the film. The text explains the makeup procedure and asks the legitimate ques­tion of why the producers did not cast a ‘real’ Chinese. The answer, offered nonchalantly, consists of the claim that Young is under contract for the producers and that her screen tests had gone well. As Photoplay asserts, the

108 Java Head, dir. George Melford, perf. Leatrice Joy, Jacqueline Logan, and Albert Roscoe (United States: Famous Players-­Lasky, 1923). 109 “From China to Salem,” Photoplay, January 1921, 30. 110 “Loretta Goes Oriental,” Photoplay, March 1932, 71. The film and the racial identity of Young’s character will be discussed in chapter 3.

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Figure 13  “From China to Salem,” Photoplay, January 1921, 30.

producers thought “you wouldn’t know the difference,”111 but of course the audiences for these films knew exactly who was under the makeup. The revela­tion of the makeup tricks did not spoil the filmic illusion but enhanced it instead. The resulting disguise added to the percep­tion that everything was possible on the screen and further strengthened the actors’ and actresses’ reputa­tion and perceived competence. The before-­and-­after photos also refer to two different levels of yellowface makeup. On the left, the actress appears with a focused and neutral facial expression, while a doctor-­like male figure applies the makeup. The procedure implies a scientific background and even resembles a medical procedure. After her transforma­tion, we see Loretta Young smiling and holding a fan. Here the Orientalist fantasy of Asian femininity comes into full effect and points to her actual role in the film.

111 Ibid.

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Figure 14  Detail from: “Loretta Goes Oriental,” Photoplay, March 1932, 71.

In fact, the makeup procedures became part of the stars’ artistic commitment and the physical stress that came with it was seen as artistic sacrifice. Apart from the time-­consuming applica­tion, artists characterized the ‘slanting’ of the eyes as painful and even health-­threatening. During her role as a Japanese for The W ­ illow Tree (1920), for example, actress Viola Dana reported about ‘bumps’ on her head each evening after filming, resulting from the pulling back of her eyelids six hours a day.112 While this was a price she was willing to pay, Dana refused to have her eyelashes cut. The article claims the Japanese have practically no eyelashes but explains that Dana “didn’t propose to be always a Japanese heroine.” Some procedures, thus, were presumed to be irreversible, and a lasting transforma­tion into an Oriental struck many actors and actresses as highly undesirable. Similarly, actor George Raft reported about the “torture” he underwent for his 1934 film Limehouse Blues.113 He spoke about the disastrous effects the slanting of his eyes 112 “Slant Eyes and Bumps!” Photoplay, February 1920, 37. The Willow Tree, dir. Henry Otto, perf. Viola Dana, Edward Connelly, and Pell Trenton (United States: Screen Classics, 1920). 113 Jack Grant, “George Raft Suffers Torture in Oriental Make-­Up For Role,” Movie Classic, December 1934, 6. Limehouse Blues, dir. Alexander Hall, perf. George Raft, Jean Parker, and

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had had on his previously excellent vision and claimed that he knew of actors who needed glasses after playing an Oriental role. Again, the effects of yellowface seemed to threaten his health and well-­being off-­screen. The article quotes him: “‘If by ­taking the make-­up off, I could return to normal vision it wouldn’t be so bad. But I can’t sleep at night. I’m dizzy and I constantly see double.’”114 He emphasizes that this role will certainly remain his last Oriental performance. Warner Oland’s impersona­tion of Orientals proved to be a different case, seeing how his star image was fundamentally based on his yellowface performances. Born in Sweden, Oland came to be long-­regarded as “the screen’s Oriental authority.”115 He played villainous Orientals in countless films, but he is mostly remembered for playing both the characters of the evil Fu Manchu (twice) in the late 1920s and, starting in 1931, the Oriental detective Charlie Chan in the long-­running film series.116 While Oland had relied on makeup for some of his performances, he became famous for not requiring any makeup in his role as Charlie Chan. Daily Boston Globe writer Mayme Ober Peak reported: “With the natural aids of straight black hair, brown eyes that are almost black, an olive skin tanned by sun bathing, the only thing Warner Oland has to do is to brush the ends of his eyebrows upward and the ends of his moustache downward, and grow a goatee. He turns the trick by muscular contrac­tion of the eyelids, which gives that inscrutable look of a member of the dragon kingdom.”117

Oland was considered a perfect fit for Oriental roles because of his supposedly Oriental facial features. Reinforced by his rare public appearances and the scarce informa­tion about his private life, Oland’s Oriental mysteriousness influenced his star persona decisively. For many contemporaries, he was Chinese, or more Anna May Wong (United States: Paramount, 1934). 114 Ibid., 6 (italics in the original). Similarly, an anecdote circulated in 1932 about actress Sylvia Sidney suffering from nightmares in which she finds herself with her eyes slanted even without makeup. Sidney had just appeared as Cho-­Cho-­San in Madame Butterfly (1932). See Muriel Babcock, “Oriental Heroine Roles Give Actresses Jitters,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1932. 115 Edgar Donaldson, “Running Down a Villain,” Picture-­Play Magazine, September 1920, 37 (italics removed). 116 Oland starred as Fu Manchu in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929) and The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930) and played Charlie Chan in sixteen films, roles he has in common with Boris Karloff, who appeared in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and became detective Mr. Wong in five films between 1938 and 1940. 117 Mayme Ober Peak, “Oland Needs No Makeup To Become Charlie Chan,” Daily Boston Globe, December 8, 1935.

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specifically, Charlie Chan.118 Reports about his popularity in China and even Japan further solidified this image; when he travelled to Asia in 1936, admirers greeted him with great praise.119 Warner Oland embodied the prototype of an actor who achieved yellowface performances less through makeup than his performance style itself.120 Along with his public star presence, or rather non-­presence, this aptitude allowed for the interchangeability of Oland’s off- and on-­screen persona. The article men­tioned in the beginning of this sec­tion, along with the other examples above, points to the importance of the star ‘behind’ (or ‘under’) the racial masquerade for yellowface performances. Most often, audiences could identify who was ‘under’ the racial makeup and could connect the yellowface performance to the general star persona of the artist. While the actors and actresses depicted in the photos were described as ordinary (“from Montana”), the mainstream public – and especially the readers of fan magazines – knew all too well about stars like Richard Barthelmess and Warner Oland. Inevitably, the actors’ and actresses’ supposed normalcy, which also implied their whiteness, stood in rela­tion to their transforma­tion into Orientals. This rela­tion will be analyzed in the following investiga­tion. As Richard Dyer and other scholars working in the field of star studies reminded us, stars and the ‘image’ of stars are inextricably linked to the social and cultural discourses of their times. In his book Stars, which laid the groundwork for the scholarly analysis of film stars, Dyer advocates for a semiotic and sociological reading of star images that sheds light on the society from which they emerge.121 As cultural texts, stars carry meaning to historic audiences, and studying historical star images can show how they “reconcile, mask, or expose ideological contradic­ tions.”122 The star image, or star persona, comprises both an artists’ roles on-­screen and the plethora of interviews, articles, and promo­tional material that constitute his or her alleged off-­screen presence. A star persona is therefore always produced

118 An interview in Modern Screen, which was conducted as if Charlie Chan was interviewed on Warner Oland instead of the other way around, is symptomatic for this percep­tion. See Faith Service, “Charlie Chan at the Interviewer’s,” Modern Screen, July 1937, 42; see also Mayme Ober Peak, “Warner Oland Was Always Charlie Chan On The Lot,” Daily Boston Globe, August 14, 1938. 119 See Ruth Rankin, “Charlie Chan Reveals,” Silver Screen, July 1937, 55. 120 For an analysis of Oland’s and others’ performances as Oriental detectives, see Fuller, Holly­ wood Goes Oriental, 71 – 121. 121 Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars, new ed. (London: BFI Publishing, 1998); see also Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). 122 Christine Gledhill, introduc­tion to Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), xiii–xx, xiv.

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and – as a projec­tion of a culture’s desires, ideals, controversies – informed by social discourses. The ‘real’ person behind the star image, as Dyer emphasizes, always escapes our grasp. Instead, every single text works towards the forma­tion of a star image and situates him or her within the culture the star is an element of.123 From the perspective of yellowface performances, a star’s decision to undertake a racial masquerade always relates to the respective star image. While yellowface is, of course, a broad phenomenon, each performance articulates specific no­tions about race, class, and gender that resonate vividly with the star persona at a specific point in time. From this perspective, it becomes especially appa­rent how yellowface always re-­articulates historical no­tions about Orientalness and the racial Other. Two film careers in particular exemplify the significance and complexity of yellowface for actors and actresses, the film business, and the percep­ tion of film audiences. 1.3.1 “The Man of a Thousand Faces”: Lon Chaney

Lon Chaney was one of the earliest film actors known for his Chinese impersona­ tions.124 While Chaney played in a large number of films until his death in 1930, he became known primarily for his roles as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera (1925).125 His career and legacy are closely connected to his specializa­tion in ‘freak’ roles – that is, in characteriza­tions of people who have disabilities or physical deforma­tions.126 He was known to put great effort in altering his appearance through makeup, prosthetics, costumes, and performance, which made him renowned as ‘the man of a thousand faces’ during his lifetime and beyond.127 While he was purportedly capable of playing every imaginable character, his star persona rested

123 See Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 2 – 3. 124 Lon Chaney will reappear in my analyses of The Shock (1923) in chapter 2 and Shadows (1922) in chapter 4. 125 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, dir. Wallace Worsley, perf. Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller, and Norman Kerry (United States: Universal, 1923); The Phantom of the Opera, dir. Rupert Julian, perf. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, and Norman Kerry (United States: Universal, 1925). 126 On Chaney’s film career, see Michael F. Blake, A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique ­Artistry in Mo­tion Pictures (Lanham: Vestal Press, 1995); for an account on Chaney’s star image and its connec­tion to contemporary masculinity, see Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Mas­ querade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 199 – 248. 127 See Blake, Thousand Faces, 66.

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largely on the mystery of the man ‘behind’ the mask, for he did not appear as himself publi­cly very often.128 Biographical forces – his deaf-­mute parents and the resulting early life experience with the use of gestures and pantomime to express himself – offered an explana­tion for his acting style that emphasized corporeality and visibility.129 Chaney’s placement of bodily transforma­tions at the core of his acting formed the trademark of his public persona. Karen Randell reads his presenta­tions of the deformed body as a neurotic repeti­tion of male veterans’ traumatic images after World War I.130 In this sense, his display of deformed bodies actively staged what was otherwise concealed from and repressed within public percep­tion after the war. Randell also hints at Chaney’s long-­time collabora­tion with director Tod Browning, who had worked in carnivals, circuses, and freak shows before turning to film.131 With this background, it is not surprising that most of Chaney’s films revolved around the depic­tion of difference. As Randell asserts, “[t]hese influences enable ‘difference’ to be put into the narrative as spectacle.”132 Chaney’s versatility was a cornerstone of his star persona, making audiences wonder whom he would play next and how he would achieve it. Film magazines followed the effort and painstaking procedures he endured closely. Chaney’s impersona­tion of Chinese men several times throughout his career blends in with his connec­tion to depic­tions of bodily difference. The addi­tion of Chinese roles to his portfolio emphasized his versatility and contributed to his star persona. His yellowface appearances include films like Outside the Law (1920), Bits of Life (1921), Shadows (1922), and Mr. Wu (1927).133 The presumably lost film Bits of Life features four episodes, one of them telling the story of a Chinese 128 See, for example, Ivan St. Johns, “Mr. Nobody: Lon Chaney Has Lost His Own Identity,” Photoplay, February 1927, 58. 129 Blake, 14. 130 Karen Randell, “Mad Love: The Anxiety of Difference in the Films of Lon Chaney Sr.,” Scree­ ning the Dark Side of Love: From Euro-­Horror to American Cinema, ed. Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Karen Randell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 69 – 82. 131 Tod Browning is mostly known for Dracula (1931) and notorious for his scandalous film Freaks (1932), which was banned in several states. Originally, Lon Chaney was considered to play Count Dracula instead of Bela Lugosi. On the importance of the body in Browning’s work, see Will Dodson, “Tod Browning’s Expressionist Bodies,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31, no. 3 (2014): 231 – 239. 132 Randell, “Mad Love,” 70. 133 Outside the Law, dir. Tod Browning, perf. Priscilla Dean, Ralph Lewis, and E. Alyn ­Warren (United States: Universal, 1920); Bits of Life, dir. Marshall Neilan, perf. Wesley Barry, ­Rockliffe Fellowes, and Lon Chaney (United States: Marshall Neilan, 1921); Shadows, dir. Tom ­Forman, perf. Lon Chaney, Marguerite De La Motte, and Harrison Ford (United States: B. P. Schulberg,

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immigrant. Chaney plays Chin Gow, a Chinese who travels to the United States and becomes the owner of several opium dens. When his wife Toy Sing (Anna May Wong, in her first screen credit) gives birth to a girl, he nearly strangles her and threatens to kill the child, as he had learned since childhood that girl infants are undesirable. Later in the film, a friend of Toy Sing arrives with a crucifix and as he nails it to the wall, he accidentally kills Chin Gow, who was leaning against the wall in the other room, smoking opium. Chaney’s makeup in Bits of Life stressed the ‘slanted’ eyes of his Chinese charac­ ter and connected his uncivilized and evil personality to facial deformity. For his role, he wore extreme teeth prosthetics, and as his filmic transforma­tions spawned great public interest, Photoplay magazine published a feature about his makeup for the role.134 The text opens by addressing the reader: “You have often wondered how the famous character actor could portray such terrifically ugly Chinamen. These pictures tell you.” In four photographs, we see different steps of his transforma­tion (see fig. 15). The largest and most prominent photo shows him performing the “painstaking opera­tion” of pulling at adhesive tape to give his eyes the ‘slanted’ appearance. On the bottom of the page, we see him with his fake teeth. “The hideous effects achieved by Chaney are mostly due to the teeth he wears. These are real teeth which he places over his own and which make him the ugliest man in the movies!” His yellowface performance thus emphasized the ‘ugliness’ of the Chinese charac­ter he played. The bodily deforma­tion of Chin Gow directly linked his outer appearance to his deviant character. The crooked and chipped teeth that Chaney equipped his screen character with underscored his undesirability as an opium selling, abusive, and uncivilized Chinese. Unlike in Chaney’s roles as Phantom of the Opera or Quasimodo, no sympathetic character ‘hid’ behind the abnormal, physical exterior. Instead, his yellowface performance in Bits of Life constructed a direct correla­tion between the stereotypical – in this case even more exaggerated – Oriental bodily features and the racial Otherness of the Chinese. It is telling that the Photoplay article reassures its readers eagerly that Chaney “is really an awfully nice chap,” whose film appearances – especially as a Chinese – must not be mistaken for his ‘real’ personality. Chaney gave his most sophisticated yellowface performance in the elaborate 1927 Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer produc­tion Mr. Wu (1927). The film is an adap­ tion of the popular play of the same name, which opened in New York in 1914 1922); Mr. Wu, dir. William Nigh, perf. Lon Chaney, Louise Dresser, and Renée Adorée (United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1927). 134 “Lon Chaney’s Make-­Up,” Photoplay, March 1922, 43.

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Figure 15  “Lon Chaney’s Make-­Up,” Photoplay, March 1922, 43.

and helped to establish theater actor Walker Whiteside as a typecast actor for yellow­face performances.135 It tells the tragic love story of a young Chinese woman falling in love with a white American and therefore follows the basic plot of the immensely popular Madame Butterfly theme, which – in different varia­tions – formed the basis of a large number of films at the time.136 Mr. Wu revolves around 135 Choi, Performing the Other, 91 – 93. 136 Both David Belasco’s stage play from 1900 and Giacomo Puccini’s opera (1905) massively popularized the narrative of Madame Butterfly, which is based on a short story by John Luther Long. The basic narrative revolves around a young Japanese woman falling in love with a white American man residing overseas. While the woman is deeply in love, the man takes their ­marriage half-­heartedly and soon leaves for the U. S. without her. The woman stays behind with their child, waiting desperately for his return. When the man finally returns, his new American wife accompanies him. Heartbroken, the Japanese woman commits suicide, leaving the child with the American couple. Marina Heung called Madame Butterfly “the founda­tional narrative of East/West rela­tions, having shaped the Western construc­tion of ‘the Orient’ as a

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the Chinese mandarin Mr. Wu (Lon Chaney) and his daughter Nang Ping (Renée Adorée). Following a strict Chinese tradi­tion, the wealthy and widowed Mr. Wu has designated his only child for an arranged marriage as soon as she is old enough. While playing in the family’s garden with her friends, however, Nang Ping meets Basil Gregory (Ralph Forbes), son of a British fami­ly who temporarily resides in China. The two fall in love and start an affair by meeting secretly in the garden. When Mr. Wu hears of his daughter’s affair, he is obliged by tradi­tion to take her life in order to save her soul. After sacrificing his daughter, he vows revenge on the Gregory family. Having captured Basil during his last meeting with Nang Ping, he invites Basil’s mother, Mrs. Gregory, to his place under false pretenses and orders her to sacrifice her son’s or her daughter’s life; however, Mrs. Gregory manages to kill Mr. Wu with a dagger and so saves her children’s lives. In Mr. Wu, Chaney’s performance stresses the concep­tions underlying the myth of the inscrutable and insidious Chinese. Employing heavy makeup throughout the film, Chaney performs in two roles. In the first scenes of the film, which serve as a prologue, Chaney plays Mr. Wu’s grandfather. Here we see him as an elderly, wrinkled Chinese with glasses and a long mustache. His facial appearance shows no traces of the actual shape of Chaney’s face anymore (see fig. 16). Indeed, two of the contemporary guidebooks discussed above featured Chaney’s makeup in Mr. Wu as an illustrative, groundbreaking example of Oriental racial type construc­ tion.137 Film critics applauded Chaney for his performance: “He is perfect. […] He not only looks the Chinaman of high caste, but he IS a subtle, sinister mandarin […].”138 The New York Times, however, remarked that Chaney’s impersona­tion of the “yellow man” would have been more effective through “less perfect eyebrows and more perfect Oriental eyes.”139

sexualized, and sexually compliant, space that is ripe for conquest and rule.” Marina Heung, “The Family Romance of Orientalism: From Madame Butterfly to Indochine,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (London: Tauris, 1997), 158 – 183, 160. 137 Lon Chaney even wrote the preface to Cecil Holland’s book, which apparently was a great honor for Holland, as Chaney was known to conduct his meticulous makeup himself. See Lon Chaney, preface to Art of Make-­Up by Cecil Holland; see also Strenkovsky, Art of Make-­Up, 240, fig. 55 (3). 138 Mae Tinee, “Able Cast Presents This Tale of China,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 8, 1927; see also Grace Kingsley, “Oriental Maid Suffers Again,” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1927; “Lon Chaney in ‘Mr. Wu’ at Columbia,” Washington Post, June 5, 1927. 139 Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen: The Sinister Mandarin,” New York Times, May 16, 1927.

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Figure 16  Lon Chaney as Mr. Wu’s grandfather in Mr. Wu (1927). Cecil Holland, The Art of Make-­Up for Stage & Screen (Hollywood: Cinematex Publishing, 1927), preface.

While the character of Mr. Wu is portrayed as appreciating Western customs, the thick Chinese ‘mask’ Chaney wears refers to the allegedly fixed racial traits of the Oriental villain he regresses towards as the ending approaches. Mr. Wu’s ‘yellowness’ becomes especially apparent in rela­tion to the two other important characters in the film, Nang Ping and Basil Gregory. Like Lon Chaney, actress Renée Adorée played Nang Ping in yellowface, but her role was conceived very differently as it involves the tragic fate known from other Madame Butterfly narra­ tives. Accordingly, she appears as the innocent and passive Lotus Blossom who awaits the arrival of the white man; however, her role as a joyful young girl who surrounds herself with friends and ultimately explores her sexuality resembled an Oriental equivalent of the flapper in the United States.140 While her fate follows conven­tions of the stereotypically exoticized female Asian, her introduc­tion in the beginning of the film made her intelligible to white audiences as the ‘typical’

140 See, for example, “A Flapper in the House of Wu,” Mo­tion Picture Magazine, March 1927, 45; Tinee, “Able Cast.” The ‘Chinese flapper’ in U. S. popular culture will be discussed in more detail in chapter 3.

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young flapper of the 1920s. Thus, her racial identity remains ambivalent in the first half of the film as the love story between her and Basil Gregory unfolds. The second character who renders Chaney’s Mr. Wu as racial Other is Basil Gregory, depicted as exceedingly white. Gregory’s racial status first becomes apparent in the way he intrudes into the Wu family garden, when the sight of Nang Ping compels him to jump over the wall. As is typical for the Orientalist background of the general Butterfly narrative, it shows the virile white man conquering Asian territory and projects Asian femininity as passive and sexualized.141 The degree to which Basil perceives Nang Ping as an exotic object becomes obvious in the first sentences he speaks to her. Assuming she does not understand English, he says, “I’ve seen you on a fan – or a teacup,” a remark that points to the way he objectifies her as an exotic artifact. This demonstrates how Oriental visuality derived from material culture and , as such, was connected to consumable and distributable products. Thus, all of Basil’s knowledge of Chinese culture apparently stems from images on exotic commodities, evoking the idea that one can also consume Chinese femini­nity as a commodity. The general antagonism between Basil and Mr. Wu is based on racial and gender differences. Mr. Wu wants to prevent his daughter from breaking with Chinese tradi­tion and from ‘dishonoring’ the family name through her rela­ tionship with a white man. Basil, on the other hand, appears as the epitome of white mascu­lini­t y at a time when it became increasingly uncertain what that precisely meant in popu­lar discourses.142 A photographic still used for the film’s promo­tion, where Mr. Wu has bound Basil to a tree and threatens him, best illustrates this rela­tionship (see fig. 17).143 Their costumes highlight this antagonism, displaying Gregory in a bright white shirt next to Mr. Wu’s dark, ornamented mandarin attire. One can also identify it in their facial expressions and, ultimately, Chaney’s yellowface makeup. Gregory looks sternly into the distance outside the frame, with his wild, curly hair accentuating his distinctive facial features and white complexion. Mr. Wu, in contrast, focuses on G ­ regory’s face to threaten him with eyes wide open in anger. Chaney’s extremely high 141 See Heung, “Family Romance.” 142 Apart from the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ and the post-­World War I masculinity ‘­crisis,’ the popularity of mo­tion picture stars like ‘Latin Lover’ Rudolph Valentino seemed to threaten ideals of tradi­tional white masculinity. See, for example, Studlar, Mad Mas­ querade, 150 – 198. 143 This and similar images formed the main iconography used for the promo­tion of the film. See press book for Mr. Wu (n. p.: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1927). Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Mo­tion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

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Figure 17  Still from Mr. Wu (MGM/Warner Bros., 1927). Courtesy of the Academy of Mo­tion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles.

and arched eyebrows give further promi­nence to this effect. Here, his yellowface performance reverts to the visuality of the Orien­tal villain that permeated popular culture in the 1920s. With the release of Mr. Wu in 1927 – two years before Fu Manchu conquered the American silver screen –, Lon Chaney had already established (and perfected) the visual characteristics that connected yellowface to images of the Oriental villain threatening Western civiliza­tion. As a display of bodily difference, his yellowface performance directly articulates Yellow Peril anxieties within U. S. culture. His sensa­tionalist approach to physical Otherness does not serve to overcome his character’s outward appearance and reveal his hidden virtuousness as it does in most of his other films. Instead, yellowface and Yellow Peril work hand-­in-­ hand here, establishing a direct correla­tion between the body and character of the Chinese villain. In sum, Lon Chaney’s performances constitute an important element in the genealogy of constructing the Oriental body through yellowface. Considering his overall star persona, it becomes clear that his characters helped to reinforce no­tions of Oriental bodily difference and connect it to Yellow Peril ideas. Thus, it is no coincidence that his performances became iconic for Chinese impersona­ tions and the archetype of the evil Chinese in mo­tion pictures for the years to come. He perfected not only the makeup techniques, but also the general ­no­tion of the racialized Oriental body. Unlike most of his other characters, his Chinese ones remained irredeemable, testifying to the pervasiveness of Oriental stereotypes and fostering a racist connec­tion between Oriental evilness and bodily difference.

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1.3.2 “No more Chinese, Myrna”: Myrna Loy

In terms of ironic coincidence, there was one 1930s actress in particular whose star image fitted the excerpt about actresses originating from Montana perfectly, even earning a place of pivotal importance. Myrna Loy started her career in the 1920s and rose to stardom in the 1930s, mostly due to the popular The Thin Man film series she performed in.144 Her rela­tionship to yellowface illuminates the practice and how it func­tioned within the system of Hollywood typecasting to a great extent. She was indeed born in Helena, Montana, into a farmer family of Welsh heritage as Myrna Williams.145 Her familial and geographical roots would come to form an important part of her star persona in the 1930s. Loy’s emancipa­tion from her early yellowface performances required her to emphasize that she was, ‘in reality,’ an ‘American girl.’ Her star persona’s transforma­tion from evil Oriental to all-­American girl usually amounts only to a side note, and no studies have thoroughly analyzed the precise mechanisms behind it. It is exactly this nega­tion of Orientalness, however, that reveals yellowface’s underlying racial logic. Loy’s early career was largely based on her appearances as an exotic, ‘Oriental vamp.’ Working as a dancer at Sid Grauman’s Egyptian ­Theater in Hollywood, she entered the movie business with the help of silent film superstar Rudolph Valentino and his wife Natacha Rambova. After she had made a number of minor appearances, Warner Brothers signed her on in 1925. Around the same time, she changed her name from Myrna Williams to Myrna Loy, mostly to give herself a more exotic appeal.146 When asked about the change, she frequently explained that a book of Chinese poems had inspired the friend who suggested the name to her.147 Accordingly, Warner Brothers began to typecast her as the exotic, Orien­ tal ‘siren.’ Typecasting was a common practice in Hollywood during the 1920’s, but it offered limited choices for her. Hollywood already hosted an abundance of actresses identified as either the flapper or the ‘American girl’ type. Since Loy’s 144 The Thin Man, dir. W. S. Van Dyke, perf. William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Maureen ­O’­Sullivan (United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1934). The film spawned five sequels produced between 1936 and 1947. 145 There are only few profound publica­tions covering Myrna Loy, the best and most recent biography being Emily W. Leider, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Leider, however, largely neglects the aspect of yellowface and its impact on Loy’s career. 146 Ibid., 55. 147 Leider suggests that the person (Peter Rarick) probably had modernist poet Mina Loy in mind when he invented the name. See ibid.

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early appearances had already emphasized her Oriental image, Warner Brothers decided to take full advantage of it.148 Loy’s first Asian impersona­tion was for Across the Pacific in 1926.149 From this point onwards, she would regularly play the exotic ‘siren’ who seduced white men.150 During the film’s release, Loy gained her first publicity as an exotic type. For instance, an article in Picture-­Play Magazine titled “Myrna, Are You Real?” praises her for her appearance as a Filipino “Love Girl.”151 It discusses the Chinese ring to Loy’s name, emphasizing that the star received love letters from young boys living in American Chinatowns. Apparently, she had even found one Chinese in shock from hearing she was actually a white American, as the article asserts: “The gleam went out of his slanting eyes, and the eagerness which glowed on his saffron face was masked again by his racial reserve […].”152 The article nevertheless describes her screen personality as genuinely Oriental: “There is Myrna the Oriental, with somnolent gray-­green eyes latticed in lazy appraisal, vouchsafing you her slumberous atten­tion, Myrna of the full lips puckered into sensuous curve, Myrna sleepily beguiling.”153 Loy, it seemed, met all requirements for becoming an on-­screen Oriental. After her first role in Asian drag, the popular film press agreed that Loy was especially suitable for Asian impersona­tions. By emphasizing the way her facial features made her a ‘natural’ for Oriental roles, the press chronicled how her star persona interwove closely with the vamp roles she played. As the Los Angeles Times stated, she was “able to achieve an oriental atmosphere with the slow lift of her eyelids.”154 The shape of her eyes, which could easily be made to appear ‘slanted,’ attested to her capability of playing Oriental vamps. As the film column in the Daily Boston Globe reported, “Myrna Loy’s ability to make up so skillfully for Oriental roles is attributed to the fact that she has the widest eyelids of any person in pictures. Measuring from eyelashes to eyebrows they are 50 percent wider than the average eyelid.”155

148 Ibid., 58 – 59. 149 Across the Pacific, dir. Roy Del Ruth, perf. Monte Blue, Jane Winton, and Myrna Loy (United States: Warner Bros., 1926). 150 Mo­tion Picture News called her “one of the most exotic figures to cross the silver sheet in some time.” “Pictures and People,” Mo­tion Picture News, September 25, 1926, 1159. 151 Myrtle Gebhart, “Myrna, Are You Real?” Picture-­Play Magazine, November 1926, 74. 152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 “Exotics,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1927. 155 Roscoe Fawcett, “Screen Oddities,” Daily Boston Globe, April 1, 1933, 13.

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Thus, in popular discourse, her “almond shaped”156 and “slanting Chinese eyes”157 seemed to link her inevitably to Oriental roles. Loy’s yellowface career reached its peak with her 1932 appearance as Fu Manchu’s daughter, Fah Lo See, in Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).158 The film became infamous for its over-­the-­top depic­tion of Fu Manchu as an evil embodiment of Yellow Peril anxieties that surpassed even earlier films of the series. It has also become notable for its chaotic produc­tion history.159 As previously stated, Boris Karloff played the sadistic Chinese mastermind Fu Manchu, who seeks to erase the white race from the face of the earth. Loosely following Sax Rohmer’s novel of the same name, the film recounts Fu Manchu’s attempts to obtain the sword and mask of Genghis Khan, which had surfaced during a British expedi­tion and would enable him to conquer the Western world. As the story unfolds, Fu Manchu captures and tortures several members of the expedi­tion in his laboratory and ultimately faces his archenemy, Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) of the British police. Fu Manchu’s daughter, Fah Lo See, is his willing servant, and her main func­tion in the narrative consists of displaying her sadomasochistic desire for a white man captured from the expedi­tion (see fig. 18). Myrna Loy’s performance as Dragon Lady exemplifies the racialized and gendered fears articulated in the film. As becomes apparent towards the climax – when Fu Manchu orders his Chinese army: “conquer and breed – kill the white man and take his women” –, the film (and the series as a whole) is based on fears of cross-­racial sexuality. Early on, Loy’s character is sexually attracted to Terry (Charles ­Starrett), one of the captured men, who is engaged to the daughter of the expedi­tion’s director. Fu Manchu, however, advises her to postpone any physi­cal contact with Terry until he is no longer needed as a hostage. Instead, Fah Lo See brings Terry into a cave, where two of Fu ­Manchu’s Black servants whip him. In a shot reverse shot montage, the film shows Fah Lo See’s sexual arousal at the sight of the punishment, as she instructs the servants to whip him faster and faster. Later in the film, Fu Manchu injects Terry with a serum that makes him a mental slave to his orders. Fah Lo See

156 Eve Bernstein, “Myrna from Montana,” Screenland, January 1928, 20. 157 Willard Chamberlin, “Why Don’t They Star?” Picture-­Play Magazine, July 1929, 70. 158 The same year also saw Myrna Loy as a murderous ‘half-­caste’ in Thirteen Women (1932). For an analysis, see Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 47 – 53. 159 See George E. Turner and Michael H. Price, “Behind the Mask of Fu Manchu,” American Cinematographer 76, no. 1 (1995): 68 – 74; see also Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu, 59 – 89; Leider, Myrna Loy, 95.

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Figure 18 (left)  Detail from: Jeanne North, “No More Chinese, Myrna?”, Photoplay, April 1933, 53. Figure 19 (right)  Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy). Screenshot from The Mask of Fu Manchu (MGM/ Warner Bros., 1932).

watches this procedure in excitement. Here, her sexual desire makes her the female counterpart to Fu Manchu. Objectifying the captive white protagonist marks her power over the white male body and ultimately threatens white gender ideals embodied in Terry’s premarital love for his fiancée (see fig. 19). Whereas the interracial romance between a white man and a passive Lotus Blossom – as in the example of Mr. Wu – remained unques­tioned and tolerable in mo­tion pictures, the reversal of the power hierarchy expressed in the dominant Dragon Lady and the helpless white man clearly marks as a threat to gendered and racialized boundaries. Conclusively, the role of Fah Lo See represents one of the most striking yellowface performances as a villainous and exotic Oriental vamp. By the mid-1930s, Myrna Loy had completely changed her star image, which included the renuncia­tion of any yellowface performances. The transforma­ tion of her star persona from that of an exotic vamp to a sophisticated, elegant, wealthy, and decisively white lady tells a great deal about the percep­tion of yellow­face and Orientalness in mo­tion pictures. The public now viewed her earlier performances as an embarrassing stigma that associated her with nega­ tive roles, preventing her from obtaining ‘real’ roles and becoming a true star. In order to become truly successful in Hollywood, Loy literally had to emancipate herself from Orientalness and ‘whiten’ her image, and this transforma­ tion was massively publicized in maga­zines and newspapers. A 1933 Photoplay

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article titled “No More Chinese, M ­ yrna?”160 reminded readers how she routinely received mostly Oriental parts due to her seemingly natural ability to look Chinese. Accor­ding to the author, however, Loy had always tried to distance herself from these parts in order to take the next step in her career: “Here’s the strange and weird part of it. The thing [her Oriental appeal; B. S.] has retarded her career. Exactly as though some strange, mystic force were holding her back.”161 According to the article, yellowface affected her personal as well as her professional life. The author recounts two incidents from Loy’s private life that describe her shock at hearing that people really believed her to be Chinese.162 For Loy, these increa­sing break-­ins of her star persona into her private life clearly marked traumatizing and highly undesirable events in her career. Contrary to her villainous on-­screen persona, the article stressed, Loy led a quiet, respectable family life with her mother. Her most recent roles, the article concluded, corresponded much more with her real self. Countering the negative impact yellowface had on her star persona, the discursive strategy behind Loy’s transforma­tion now presented her as a perfectly ordinary ‘American girl’ from Montana. This implied a reversal of direc­tion: her screen image of the Oriental vamp should no longer influence the percep­tion of her ‘real’ personality, but the other way around. The normal ‘girl from Montana’ should now be projected onto her screen roles, allowing her to become a truly American star. In 1934, fan magazine Screenland published an article titled “The NEW Sophisticate of the Screen!” which articulated the author’s surprise over the sudden change of Myrna Loy’s star presence.163 Screenland journalist Elizabeth Wilson admits to how reluctant she had been to interview Loy due to her bad reputa­tion: “When I first came to Hollywood, over three years ago, Myrna Loy was the last person I wanted to meet. I was sure she smelled of cheap incense, ate chop suey, and smoked perfumed cigarettes

160 Jeanne North, “No More Chinese, Myrna?”, Photoplay, April 1933, 53. 161 Ibid., 93. 162 The descrip­tion reads as follows: “At a theater, the other evening, Myrna and a friend were suddenly conscious of an earnest conversa­tion behind them. Imagine her surprise when a voice piped in, ‘Yes, Myrna Loy is Chinese. You see, our Chinese laundry man lives next to her people’ – Shock No. 2 – A member of the RKO-Radio publicity staff came dashing into her dressing room the other day. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I just won ten bucks. At noon today a fellow bet me ten dollars that it wasn’t you in the commissary. Swore you were a half-­caste Chinese woman. When I proved it was you, he nearly passed out with surprise. But he paid up.’” Ibid. (italics in the original). 163 Elizabeth Wilson, “The NEW Sophisticate of the Screen,” Screenland, November 1934, 18.

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from long jade holders.”164 Instead, the author finds Loy to be the embodiment of a ‘new’ sophistica­tion – a sophistica­tion that differed from the glamorous images of other Hollywood actresses because it resulted from the authenticity of the red-­headed, freckled, quiet actress: “She’s honest and natural, no tricks, no mirrors, no chichi.”165 The article presents several photographs to prove the difference between the old and the new Myrna Loy. The first page shows a large photograph of her standing against a dark background and greeting the reader in a fine but simple evening dress. On the second page, the reader finds several photos from her earlier, exotic roles, gathered under the headline “As She Was!” Below these pictures, one photo shows her again, sitting contemplatively in a chair (see fig. 20). Most notable is her conservative hairdo, which contrasts sharply with the vamp and Oriental hair in her older photos. The photo follows contemporary visual conven­tions for Hollywood stars and unfolds beneath the headline “As She Is!”.166 Beginning with Loy’s 1934 debut in The Thin Man, magazine articles traced her transforma­tion by contrasting her new screen presence with her previous roles. The same year, The New Movie Magazine declared that “[f ]rom make-­up and manne­ risms has emerged the Myrna from Montana—a nice girl with freckles, who is really as different as she appears to be.”167 Movie Classic visualized her departure from yellowface through a succession of photos from her most prominent roles, starting on the left with her role as a Chinese in The Crimson City (1928). The article was appropriately titled “The Evolu­tion of a Star,” as the arrangement of photos on a horizontal time axis paralleled depic­tions of human evolu­tion.168 Fan magazine Silver Screen devoted a large segment of its article about the importance of adjectives to Myrna Loy.169 The text explains how, in the era of contemporary typecasting, actors and actresses become connected to certain adjectives that reduce them to specific roles. It refers to Loy as an example of someone breaking away from old categories – in this case “exotic”:

164 Ibid. 165 Ibid., 95 (italics in the original). 166 Ibid., 19. 167 Elsie Janis, “Marvelous MYRNA!” New Movie Magazine, November 1934, 34; see also “An Oriental Girl Of Montana,” The Sun, April 26, 1931. 168 “The Evolu­tion of a Star,” Movie Classic, March 1935, 48. The theme of evolu­tion and the origin of Loy’s career in Chinese roles also resonated with the underlying evolu­tionary racial thinking, postulating a progression from lower yellow to the white race, as we had witnessed in the sec­tion above. 169 Helen Louise Walker, “Adjectives Color Their Lives,” Silver Screen, October 1935, 24.

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Figure 20  Elizabeth Wilson, “The NEW Sophisticate of the Screen,” Screenland, November 1934, 19.

“Myrna has sort of graduated, of late, from that adjective. She was ‘exotic,’ you remember, until it nearly drove her crazy. ‘Exotic,’ aside from being ‘foreign,’ seems also to connote slant eyes … and remember when Myrna was being nothing else but slant-­e yed for years? She slunk across the screen in chiffon pants, portraying the Oriental siren who lured men to various fates (mostly unpleasant) […]. Then, much to everyone’s surprise, including Myrna’s, Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer took her under its capacious wing, gave her some regular clothes to wear and she became, for goodness’ sake, sophisticated! […] [S]he blossomed out in ‘The Thin Man’ and, bless us, she was called ‘wifely!’”170

170 Ibid. (italics in the original).

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The article openly addresses the undesirability of her performances as ‘foreign’ sirens, reducing them to their ‘slant’ eyes and Oriental clothes. It substantiates the sense Loy had of losing her mind by referring to the already-­men­tioned story where she is mistaken for a ‘real’ Chinese, underscoring this event’s apparently traumatic dimension for her. According to the text, her new sophistica­tion results directly from new acting opportunities that allow her to portray ordinary, white female characters. Her ‘regular’ clothes correlate with her new, ‘wifely’ persona – the term, as the article emphasizes, explicitly serves a positive func­tion. Escaping her old roles as an Oriental siren, Loy had finally developed into a respectable white woman. The subsequent course of Loy’s career – when coverage about her shifted the focus onto her family life – further emphasized her Americanness. In 1935, Picture-­Play Magazine printed a five-­piece series about her life, which described her childhood on the family’s ranch in Montana, her father’s early death and the family’s reloca­tion to California.171 A few months earlier, it had published another article written by Loy herself – about her mother, Della Williams.172 The introductory text to the portrait of her mother serves mainly to emphasize her family’s fundamental Americanness, starting with her mother’s maiden name Della Johnson, which made her “as thoroughly American as your own front yard.”173 Her grandmother had crossed the plains in a covered wagon and given birth to Loy’s mother Della after settling in Montana. The article leads the reader to conclude that Della William’s childhood in Montana had shaped her American character the same way it positively influenced her daughter Myrna’s: “Della has always been, and still is, as sturdy, as independent, and as self-­reliant as her native State was during her – and its – youth.”174 Linking Myrna Loy’s family history to the larger history of the American westward expansion, it thus counters all no­tions of Myrna’s exotic foreignness that had impacted her public percep­tion until a few months before. Emphasizing her mother’s independence and self-­reliance, it also describes Myrna’s own character as strong enough to ‘make it’ in Hollywood.175

171 Dudley Early, “One More Human: Myrna Loy,” Picture Play Magazine, October 1935, 14. 172 Myrna Loy, “My Mother,” Picture Play Magazine, July 1935, 12. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid., 13. 175 As the opening lines of the five-­piece life story promised its readers: “You follow the actress’s first step and watch the development of a character that explains her success.” Early, “One More Human,” 14.

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In the late 1930s, Loy’s ‘dark past’ appeared as nothing more than a phase that had almost ruined her career before she could finally ‘be herself.’ She went from embodying the cultural and racial Other to personifying white Ameri­can middle-­class femininity. From an exotic lure for misled white men, she turned into an expert on ques­tions about how to have a lucky marriage.176 In the mystery-­ comedy The Thin Man and its sequels, she played the witty and playful wife of ex-­detective Nick Charles (William Powell), and as a screen couple, the two became a popular example for the joys of married life.177 In 1937, Photoplay maga­ zine published an article about “The Marriage Code of Myrna Loy,” where Loy – referred to as “the perfect wife” – explained her rules for a romantic and happy marriage.178 The text emphasized the similarities between the filmic ­couple and her own marriage with Arthur Hornblow Jr. contracted the year before. Also in 1937, Life concluded: “Myrna Loy, Oriental menace, becomes the screen’s symbol of married love.”179 The article showed private pictures of Loy and her husband enjoying a weekend at the beach. Even these articles did not refrain from ­pointing to her artistic past, when she played a “slinky, sloe-­eyed siren […], hiding her charm beneath a coat of grease paint.”180 By the late 1930s, however, she had successfully altered her star persona. The example of Myrna Loy reveals several crucial aspects of the racial dyna­ mics that were at work in the yellowface performances of white actresses. First, yellowface roles were connected to a certain type of actress with alleged facial characteristics that enabled them to become ‘exotic sirens’ and Dragon Ladies. Second, these performances were based on stereotypes that corresponded to contemporary racial discourses. Accordingly, the roles negatively affected the star persona of an actress, which in the case of Myrna Loy had potentially career-­ threatening effects. This development points to the intersec­tion of race and class in yellowface stereotypes. Within the Hollywood system, Oriental roles were much less respectable than the ones of white protagonists and pointed to deviant 176 Katherine T. Von Blon, “Myrna Loy Discovers That It Pays to ‘Play the Lady,’” Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1933; Alma Whitaker, “Myrna Loy, Once ‘Oriental,’ Now Typifies Ameri­ can Girl,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1934; “Myrna Loy’s Hand Carved Career,” Holly­ wood, February 1937, 27; Frank Condon, “Giggle Giggle Little Star,” Collier’s, December 22, 1934, 17. 177 See also James Castonguay, “Myrna Loy and William Powell: The Perfect Screen Couple,” in Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s, ed. Adrienne L. McLean (New B ­ runswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 220 – 244. 178 Lee Harrington, “The Marriage Code of Myrna Loy,” Photoplay, May 1937, 36. 179 “Myrna Loy Had Sex But Movies Guessed It Wrong,” Life, October 11, 1937, 46 – 50, 48. 180 Ibid., 47.

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and lower-­class characters. Third, to transcend these roles and racial implica­tions, a star persona needed to counter them discursively with publicity material and roles that highlighted both racial and gender conformity, which allowed Loy to reach upper-­class sophistica­tion. In order to escape her typecasting in frowned-­ upon roles, she needed to become the epitome of Anglo-­American whiteness and a mildly emancipated but ultimately domesticated, matrimonial, and de-­ sexualized femininity. After all, as her career indicates, yellowface remained a racial mask which, as contemporary discourse emphasized, disguised and contorted an actor’s or actress’s ‘real’ personality. While critics regarded Oriental impersona­tions as an artistic challenge, contemporary discourse needed to reassure audiences that there was indeed just an actor or actress from Montana under the greasepaint. Fourth, Loy’s career is an example of the underlying changes of film conven­tions. The character of the Oriental ‘siren’ was indeed less common in the late 1930s, arguably due to both the restric­tions concerning sexuality the Hays Code imposed after 1934 and Asian American activism against discriminating portrayals in film.181 The examples of Lon Chaney and Myrna Loy also point to the gendered charac­ter of yellowface. While both played villainous Orientals, in Myrna Loy’s case these roles had a much greater negative impact on her career. For Lon Chaney it was merely one of his many masks and disguises, but for Loy it became an ­obstacle to her desired career. The reason for this stigma lies in her roles’ referral to non-­white femininities that deviated from contemporary gender norms. Explicit depic­tions of female sexual devia­tion arguably met with more disapproval and scandalized white audiences more than their male counterparts did, especially as Oriental masculinity was portrayed as a form of effeminacy. Loy’s break with gender ­ideals in her early films thus had a larger effect on her ‘real’ identity, which was hard to overcome but on the other hand blended in perfectly with the cinematic conser­vatism of the ­second half of the 1930s. The cases of both Lon Chaney and Myrna Loy demonstrate how yellowface was always embedded in the contemporary culture and re-­actualized discourses of race, gender, and class. Analyzing yellowface against the backdrop of specific star images enables the historical presence of popular actors and actresses to shed light on the culture from which they emerge, supporting a fundamental no­tion 181 On the impact of the Hays Code on stardom, see Adrienne L. McLean, “Introduc­tion: Stardom in the 1930s,” in McLean, Glamour, 1 – 17; Thomas Doherty, Pre-­Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrec­tion in American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1 – 20.

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in star studies. While yellowface also shows consistent and recurring stereotypes, each performance added a different layer of meaning to it. In Chaney’s case, it was the emphasis on difference and physicality; in Loy’s, the furious erec­tion of racial dichotomies and the fabrica­tion of whiteness ex negativo. 1.3.3 “Chinese atmosphere”: Supporting Roles, Bit Parts, and Extras

The racial impersona­tions of white film stars illustrate how difficult it was for Chinese Americans to enter the film business. There were few excep­tions of actors and actresses who successfully challenged the racist system which brought forth the widespread practice of yellowface. Anna May Wong most notably succeeded in rising to stardom, although she constantly struggled with the racist repercussions of the roles she played; these made her turn her back to Hollywood and leave for Europe in 1928.182 Recently, the largely unnoticed contribu­tions of Chinese Americans to U. S. film history have attracted more atten­tion. In her collec­tion of historical photographs, Jenny Cho traces the role of Chinese within the film industry back to early silent film.183 Her publica­tion illuminates the diverse and largely forgotten history of Chinese film entrepreneurs and actors like Lady Tsen Mei and director James B. Leong, who worked together on the film Lotus Blossom (1921).184 In this context, the rediscovery of The Curse of Quon Gwon (1916), now regarded to be the first Chinese-­American feature film and one of the first films directed by a woman, was crucial for the re-­evalua­tion of Asian American film history.185 Directed by Marion Wong, the ambitious film featured an all-­Chinese-­American cast and aimed at giving an 182 Wong produced several films in Germany and the United Kingdom before eventually retur­ ning to Hollywood. On Anna May Wong’s time in the German film business against the backdrop of German Orientalism, see Pablo Dominguez Andersen, “‘So Tired of the Parts I Had to Play’: Anna May Wong and German Orientalism in the Weimar Republic,” in Cros­ sing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and Na­tional Belonging in a Transna­tional World, ed. Brian B. Behnken and Simon Wendt (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2013), 261 – 284. 183 Jenny Cho, Chinese in Hollywood, Images of America Series (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2013). 184 Lotus Blossom, dir. Frank Grandon and James B. Leong, perf. Lady Tsen Mei, Tully Marshall, and Noah Beery (United States: Wah Ming, 1921). 185 The Curse of Quon Gwon, dir. Marion E. Wong, perf. Violet Wong and Harvey Soohoo (United States: Mandarin Film, 1916). An incomplete version of the film emerged during Arthur Dong’s research for his documentary Hollywood Chinese (2008), which itself is a valu­ able source for Chinese American film history. See Hollywood Chinese (documentary), dir. Arthur Dong (United States: Deep Focus, 2008).

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authentic portrayal of Chinese life. Wong, however, apparently was unable to find a proper distributor for the resulting film; thus, it was never widely shown and became a financial failure. These early attempts notwithstanding, until the late 1930s, Chinese Americans were reduced to bit parts or supporting roles where they accompanied the white leading cast. A typical example of a Chinese actor cast in stereotypical bit parts throughout his career was Willie Fung.186 Born in China, Fung first appeared in mo­tion pictures in 1922. Until his death in 1945, he played roles in 136 films, most of them uncredited.187 His roles mainly portrayed him as a Chinese laundryman, cook, or servant – the most common representa­tions of Chinese supporting roles. In westerns, he played the stereotypical, Pidgin-­English-­speaking and simple-­ minded cook who delivered comedic relief. As such, he was the Chinese counterpart to the degrading bit parts of African Americans like actor Fred ‘Snowflake’ Toones.188 In Chinatown films like Old San Francisco (1927), Fung played one of the Chinese extras in the criminal underworld; however, his overall screen pre­ sence was more comic than threatening.189 Perhaps no other scene exemplifies the underlying racial dynamics between Fung as the ‘real’ Chinese and white stars in yellowface more clearly than the ­closing scene of The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). After Nayland Smith has defeated Fu Manchu, he and his white associates board a ship back to Europe. The group stands on deck as Smith prepares to throw Genghis Khan’s magical sword overboard to prevent any “other Fu Manchus in the future.” Suddenly, a gong rings and the group is terrified for a second, assuming it indicates Fu Manchu’s reappearance. Then the group (and the audience) realizes it is only the ship’s Chinese cook (Willie Fung), who uses the gong to announce that dinner is served. Nayland Smith calmly approaches the cook and asks him if he is, by any chance, a doctor of philosophy, law, or medicine. As the audience knows, these are the doctorates that Fu Manchu had earned and which made him the educated mastermind 186 Unfortunately, there is only little informa­tion available about Fung. See, for example, Cho, Chinese in Hollywood, 39. On the history of bit parts and ‘ethnic extras,’ see Anthony Slide, Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-­Ins ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 187 – 204. 187 The number stems from his filmography in the Internet Movie Database, accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0298699. 188 See Philip R. Loy, Westerns and American Culture, 1930 – 1955 ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2001), 201. I will further expand on Fred Toones and the interrela­tion of race in westerns in chapter 4. 189 Old San Francisco, dir. Alan Crosland, perf. Dolores Costello, Anders Randolph, and Warner Oland (United States: Warner Bros., 1927).

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Figure 21  Chinese cook (Willie Fung). Screenshot from The Mask of Fu Manchu (MGM/ Warner Bros., 1932).

he represents in the film. The cook, however, each time answers by heavily s­ haking his head and laughing foolishly. Then the camera shows him in a close-­up, revea­ ling his buck-­toothed face as he answers in strong dialect: “I don’t think so, sir!” (see fig. 21). Smith then shakes his hand and “congratulates” him before the cook walks away. This final scene clearly aims to end the film on a comedic note and to relieve the tension. It suggests that the threat of the Yellow Peril is now contained and demonstrates this by contrasting Fu Manchu with another Chinese stereotype: the simple-­minded and harmless Chinese cook who serves the laughs. In this and many other films, the racist logic of yellowface is apparent: while whites play Oriental supervillains in yellowface, the ‘real’ Chinese actors and actresses are left to play roles that are no less degrading. However, ridicule serves to contain their ‘realness.’ A ‘real’ Chinese in the role of Fu Manchu would have been absolutely unthinkable. Apart from the different attempts of Chinese Americans to enter the business on their own terms, one figure in particular played a key role in supplying Chinese ‘atmosphere’ for films. Tom Gubbins, often referred to as the ‘Mayor of Chinatown,’ served as a link between the Chinese community of Los Angeles and the Hollywood film business. Gubbins had spent his childhood in China and spoke Chinese fluently. After his reloca­tion to the United States he became a merchant in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, where he also opened a Chinese restaurant.190 He provided the studios with Chinese extras, served as a translator and contractor, and generally advised film producers on-­set. A four-­page feature from 1926 about “Our Chinese Movie Actors” in Picture-­Play Magazine offers

190 “White Man Oracle for Denizens of Chinatown,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 1924; “China­ town’s ‘Mayor’ Helps Direct Films,” Hartford Courant, November 6, 1932.

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a rare acknowledgment of Asian Americans in this field.191 The article is based on an interview with Gubbins, who explains that there are a large number of Asian American performers ­willing to play in mo­tion pictures but that they are rarely given a chance. He stresses that these actors and actresses are opposing degrading roles more and more. He is quoted with the statement: “My Chinese are trying hard – very hard – to win the respect of Americans, […]. They do not like to appear in rôles which in any way seem degrading.”192 He goes on to say that Chinese refuse to play scenes that show them in opium dens or kidnapping white girls, as was common in films of the 1910s and 1920s. This bespeaks the growing opposi­tion among Chinese Americans regarding discriminating portrayals. Gubbins is reportedly the one who helped Anna May Wong to win her first film appearance, thus helping to spawn her film career. The article enume­ rates some of the popular or aspiring Asian American actors and actresses at that time, such as Anna May Wong and her sisters Mary and Lulu, Sôjin Kamiyama, Jim Wang, May Louie, Chan Lee, Ng Ming, Elena Juarado, and Choy Sook. It finally makes men­tion of actor Willie Fung, who Gubbins compares to popular comedian Roscoe Arbuckle, and presents him in a photograph. The significance of rare articles like this can hardly be overrated in the face of how seldom these actors and actresses received acknowledgement in contemporary publica­tions or film history. Tom Gubbins’s ambivalent posi­tion between helping Asian American perfor­ mers and acting as the white ‘mayor’ of Chinatown can only be understood in the context of anti-­Chinese racism. On the one hand, Gubbins acted as a white entrepreneur and established a somewhat hierarchical posi­tion over the mass of ‘his’ Chinese extras. The novelty of a white man operating successfully in China­ town contributed to his fame in mainstream media, as this racial curio­sity served as an angle for newspaper and magazine coverage. Instead of ­focusing on the Chinese actors and actresses themselves, the articles mostly credited ­Gubbins as a fascina­ting person, contributing further to the percep­tion of Chinese as merely nameless and exchangeable extras. This form of coverage made him appear as an Orientalist expert. The underlying Orientalist logic emerges in other articles, such as a long, illustrated feature in the Atlanta Constitu­tion in 1921, which proclaimed to reveal “Some Interesting Things About His Unique Profession and the Strange People With Whom He Works.”193 On the other hand, h ­ owever, Gubbins 191 A. L. Wooldridge, “Our Chinese Movie Actors,” Photo-­Play Magazine, September 1926, 83. 192 Ibid. 193 Melvin M. Riddle, “Directing the Yellow Men in the Movies,” Atlanta Constitu­tion, June 26, 1921.

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gave Chinese Americans a real opportunity to act in films and helped to start their careers in a time when yellowface and racist discrimina­tion were common in the film business. As technical advisor on film sets, Gubbins r­ eportedly tried to prevent incorrect depic­tions of Chinese culture. This was of course a difficult task, as the film producers often had different ideas about Oriental culture than the Chinese Americans.194 As manager of the actors and actresses, he ensured that they were paid duly and treated with respect on the set; thus, Gubbins supported his Chinese American clients as much as possible within the constraints of the time period. By the end of the 1930s, Chinese Americans’ posi­tion within the film business had begun to change. While white performers in yellowface still had the privilege of playing leading roles, Chinese Americans won increasing visibility and gene­rally portrayed less stereotypical parts. A fitting example is Keye Luke’s early career, which began with his appearance as Charlie Chan’s ‘Number One Son’ in Charlie Chan in Paris (1935).195 While the archetype of the Oriental detective remains an ambivalent figure – both stereotypical and ‘positive’ – the films depict his sons as thoroughly Americanized.196 Keye Luke became an integral member of the cast, playing a supporting role and a sidekick of Charlie Chan (Warner Oland). His character had a college educa­tion and enjoyed all attributes of contemporary American culture. Moreover, he distinguished himself from his father by speaking without Pidgin-­English proverbs and displaying none of the stereotypical manne­ risms that marked his father as more Oriental than American. Luke eventually even managed to play the lead of an Oriental detective himself. In 1940, he took over Boris Karloff ’s role as Mr. Wong in Phantom of Chinatown, which composed the last installment of the series.197 Luke, who remained a Hollywood actor until his death in 1991, may not have challenged the contemporary yellowface logic openly, but as Number One Son, he succeeded in making ‘real’ Chinese Ameri­ cans so American on-­screen that they subverted the yellowface masquerade of Swedish-­born Warner Oland on a fundamental level.

194 For Gubbins’s report about his discrepancies with the film producers on the set of Mr. Wu, where he was employed as an advisor, see Rosalind Shaffer, “American Puts True Oriental Touch in Films,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 4, 1932. 195 Charlie Chan in Paris, dir. Lewis Seiler, perf. Warner Oland, Mary Brian, and Thomas Beck (United States: Fox Film, 1935). 196 On Charlie Chan see Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 71 – 102; Huang, Charlie Chan. 197 Phantom of Chinatown, dir. Phil Rosen, perf. Keye Luke, Grant Withers, and Lotus Long (United States: Monogram, 1940).

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1.4 Conclusion In 1941, Life magazine published an infamous article titled “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.”198 Published two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the article provided its readers with a “rule-­of-­thumb from the anthropometric conforma­ tions” that distinguished the allied Chinese from the Japanese wartime enemy. The article was a reac­tion to the “discharge of emo­tions”199 that occurred in the wake of the attack and apparently also addressed the problem that Chinese Americans were regularly mistaken for Japanese. When the United States entered World War II, therefore, the ability to differentiate friends from enemies had become crucial. The article was accompanied by several photos of ‘typical’ examples of Chinese and Japanese. Two large photos on the first page of the article showed the faces of each a Chinese and a Japanese man. Lines, marks, and handwritten comments drawn directly onto the photographs explained the different racial body markers for each face. With the help of these comments, the reader learned that Chinese showed a “parchment yellow complexion” while Japanese had a more “earthy” skin tone.200 The photos also explained that the Chinese had an epicanthic fold more frequently than the Japanese did. The article exemplifies two aspects relevant to the preceding chapter. First, it expressed the desire to categorize humans by their physical appearance and to inscribe racial and political meaning onto supposedly alien bodies. The visual language of these photos drew on the same racial imagery I have analyzed in this chapter. The fact that the article appropriated this visual form of racializa­ tion ­during wartime in order to identify enemies and the now positively connoted Chinese allies only demonstrates the persistence and versatility of racial thought. The effect of such images remained the same: the demarca­tion of the alien and hostile non-­white body. In the years that followed Pearl Harbor, this racism would lead to the internment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent – the ­majori­ty of them being U. S. citizens.201 Second, the apparent need of the U. S. public for advice on how to recognize Chinese and Japanese was itself 198 “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, December 22, 1941, 81 – 82. Time magazine ­published a similar article on the same day. See “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Time, December 22, 1941, 33. 199 “How to Tell Japs,” 81. 200 Ibid. 201 Research on this period of U. S. history is extensive, and there is much controversy concerning the terminology of ‘internment’ and the ‘camps’ used for the reloca­tion of Japanese Americans. For a recent contribu­tion, see Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); see also David K. Yoo,

Conclusion  |

a consequence of the common no­tion that all Orientals looked the same. As we have seen in this chapter, this no­tion was informed by the visual culture that had created the Oriental on stage and especially the screen in the decades before the war. This general imagery created the Oriental body as a construct of physical Otherness, largely recurring to a vague mixture of racist stereotypes. This chapter highlighted discursive fields that led to the crea­tion of the Orien­ tal body as a marker of Otherness. As a theatrical practice adapted for the screen, yellowface massively disseminated visual knowledge of the Oriental body d­ uring its peak in mo­tion pictures of the 1920s and 1930s. As I have outlined in this chapter, the genealogy of filmic yellowface is closely linked to Chinese immigra­ tion and the emergence of stereotypes circling around ‘John Chinaman.’ Like blackface, yellowface needs to be understood as a practice based on racial performativity and unequal power rela­tions. Especially in vaudeville, performers appropriated visual stereotypes of the Oriental Other to consolidate their own status of hegemonic whiteness. One of the central arguments of this chapter was concerned with the close interrela­tions of yellowface and scientific race theory. The chapter provided a new perspective on yellowface by focusing on the makeup techniques and lite­ rature used to transform whites into Orientals. I have demonstrated that makeup relied heavily on knowledge from the field of race theory and, as a ‘science’ itself, formed an element of the same visual culture. In order to create Orientals for the screen, makeup artists made use of racialized body concepts stemming from the long tradi­tion of biological categoriza­tions. Makeup techniques inscribed these racial concepts on the white body, popularized them, and made them consumable for audiences. With great effort and in painful detail, makeup artists focused on markers like the so-­called Oriental eye or the different shades of yellow ­complexion. They thus reproduced the scientific discourse that had constructed Chinese as Mongolian race and marked East Asians in general as members of the yellow race. As a mass entertainment media that relied on yellowface for all leading Asian characters, mo­tion pictures’ significance for the dissemina­tion of racial body concepts can hardly be overestimated. Until the mid-­twentieth century, film audiences were confronted with this form of racial masquerade and the literal embodiment of racist stereotypes. This chapter also focused on the significance of actors’ and actresses’ star personae for yellowface performances. The point of departure for the last sec­tion

Growing Up Nisei: Race, Genera­tion, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924 – 49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 92 – 123.

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of the chapter was the fact that, regardless how advanced the science of makeup was, audiences always knew who was ‘under’ the yellowface makeup. Film stars known for their racial impersona­tions, however, were themselves a construct of popular culture and should not be mistaken for a somewhat ‘real,’ off-­screen person. Here, I made use of the concept of the star ‘image’ to trace the significance of specific star personae and acting careers to the crea­tion of yellowface visua­ lity. While yellowface in general transported racist concep­tions, each star added different nuances to his or her impersona­tion. Each of these performances, as I argue, shed a light on the historic racial dynamics at work at a given point in time. I demonstrated this interrela­tion of star image and yellowface by focusing on the actors Lon Chaney and Myrna Loy. Chaney’s Chinese impersona­tions connected Chineseness to monstrosity and difference and thus helped to contribute to the crea­tion of the filmic Oriental villain that would resurface in the figure of Fu Manchu a few years later. Myrna Loy’s career proved the undesirability of ­Orient­al roles mostly ex negativo. In order to distance herself from her earlier roles as an immoral Oriental ‘siren,’ she had to emphasize her whiteness. Loy’s efforts to prove her Americanness allowed her transforma­tion into a symbol of white, heteronormative marriage. The short outlook at the end of the chapter exemplified Hollywood’s degrada­ tion of Chinese American actors and actresses who – with only few excep­tions – served as Chinese ‘atmosphere.’ The very few textual sources we have of these players testify to the fact that the Hollywood system func­tioned on a both racia­ lizing and racist practice. The preceding chapter therefore reminded us that the ‘golden years’ of Hollywood were in fact a very dark period in regard to non-­ white representa­tions.

2 Chinatown and the Visuality of Space and Race

People passing by the Strand Mo­tion Picture ­Theater in Atlanta in 1921 could marvel at a spectacularly decorated entrance lobby. In order to promote D. W. Griffith’s Dream Street, theater owner George E. Schmidt had transformed the area into a Chinatown scene.1 The transforma­tion was inspired by the film’s setting in London’s Limehouse district, known for its large popula­tion of Chinese immigrants. The decora­tion itself resembled a small street, including a Chinese restaurant, a mission, and several shops.2 The street led the way into the cinema, where patrons would later watch the movie. The decora­tion therefore blurred the boundaries between the spectacle on the screen and the world outside the cinema. Advertising stunts like this were not uncommon during the early age of cine­ma. Another example can be found for the screening of Frank Lloyd’s A Tale of Two Worlds, also released in 1921.3 The film is set in an American Chinatown and revolves around the discrepancies between American and Chinese culture. For the opening of the film, the Victoria ­Theater in Philadelphia installed a Chinese gong inside the lobby that rang every time a ticket was sold. The statue of a seated Buddha in front of the theater’s entrance added to the exotic atmosphere.4 Again, Oriental decora­tion served to promote a film that took place in Chinatown. These forms of advertising not only attracted the atten­tion of passers-­by; they also extended the filmic experience of Orientalness onto the spaces of the theater and the street. The percep­tion of Oriental space began even before the audience entered the cinema. The act of going to the movie theater resembled a trip to Chinatown, both on and off screen. It was no coincidence that theater owners tried to bring the sensa­tion of a visit to Chinatown to their cinemas. Since the late nineteenth century, the large Chinatowns of U. S. metropolises like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles had become popular tourist attrac­tions. Visiting Chinatown, eating at a Chinese restaurant or buying postcards and other Oriental artifacts had become an essential part of a trip to 1 Dream Street, dir. D. W. Griffith, perf. Carol Dempster, Ralph Graves, and Charles Emmett Mack (United States: D. W. Griffith, 1921). 2 “‘Dream Street’ Lobby Sold Griffith Play,” Moving Picture World, October 1, 1921, 546. 3 A Tale of Two Worlds, dir. Frank Lloyd, perf. J. Frank Glendon, Leatrice Joy, and Wallace Beery (United States: Goldwyn Pictures, 1921). 4 “A Big Chinese Gong Best Ticket Seller,” Moving Picture World, October 1, 1921, 545.

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these cities. At the same time, Chinatown had become a popular setting for mo­tion pictures. Since the emergence of film as a new medium around 1900, Chinatown had been among the most popular settings and served as a vehicle for the depic­tion of supposedly exotic cultures and places.5 Mo­tion pictures thus massively contributed to the construc­tion of Chinatown as a foreign space within the urban landscape of U. S. cities, as a city within a city, or as a Chinese ‘colony’ on American territory.6 The promo­tional lobby transforma­tions men­tioned above point to a specific rela­tion between mo­tion pictures and Chinatown as an urban and touristic space that I want to highlight in this chapter. While film stood in the visual tradi­tion of photography and painting, its cultural rise as the new mass medium in the early twentieth century marked the emergence of a specific new visuality and visibility of Chinatown as racialized urban space. Mo­tion pictures allowed audiences to explore Chinatown in a never-­before-­seen way. Three crucial aspects of early cine­ma mark this transi­tion. First, the fact that films were ‘moving’ pictures allowed an increased visual and narrative depth that enabled audiences to become absorbed not only by the story of the film but also by the explora­tion of its loca­tions.7 ­Second, the advent of the mo­tion picture theater as the place for the consump­ tion of films brought forth a specific visual order. The spatial arrangement for the consump­tion of a mo­tion picture – that is, the theater, the silver screen, and the rows of gazing spectators – constituted a specific visual dispositif.8 It allowed a voyeuristic posi­tion that, as psychoanalytic film theory has shown, answers to







5 Examples of early film scenes and one-­reelers are Arrest in Chinatown (United States: Edison, 1897); Chinese Procession (United States: Edison, 1898); Scene in Chinatown (United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph,1900); In a Chinese Restaurant (United States & Biograph, 1900); Reuben [Rube] in an Opium Joint (United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1905), Lifting the Lid (United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1905); and The Deceived Slumming Party (1908). See Sabine Haenni, “Filming ‘Chinatown’: Fake Visions, Bodily Transforma­tions,” in Screening Asian Americans, ed. Peter X Feng (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 21 – 52. 6 On the racial geography of Chinatown in general and particularly in New York, see Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegena­tion, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-­of-­the-­Century New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 17 – 51. 7 See Charles Musser, History of the American Cinema, vol. 1: The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Tom Gunning, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 8 My understanding of dispositif deviates from the influential apparatus theory in film studies, as I use it less in a psychoanalytical sense. Instead, I refer to Foucault’s conceptualiza­tion of the dispositif to point out the material and spatial aspects of cinema and the consump­tion of films. For the apparatus theory, see Jean-­Louis Braudy, “Ideological Effects of the Basic

Chinatown and the Visuality of Space and Race  |

subconscious desires and fears; however, within the scope of this chapter, I argue that it also constituted gazes and subject posi­tions that paralleled a touristic point of view, or a ‘tourist gaze.’ Third, the dissemina­tion of mo­tion pictures all over the United States (and worldwide) gave audiences the chance to see Chinatown – often explicitly the most famous ones in San Francisco or New York – even if they have never been there physically; thereby, ‘seeing’ Chinatown, which was typically a touristic activity, became independent from the act of traveling. Virtually everyone could visit Chinatown just by going to the movie theater. This disentanglement of the visual experience from the act of being physically on-­site facilitated a massive increase in the dissemina­tion of the visuality of Chinatown that exceeded previous forms of media like photography and painting. I argue that mo­tion pictures were an important factor in the crea­tion of a visu­ ality that constituted Chinatown as a racialized urban space. This visuality was an element of larger contemporary visual discourses of Chinatown, particularly those of tourism. As I want to show, film not only played a significant role within these discourses, but, through their imagery as well as the mode of their recep­tion, also held a unique posi­tion within the visual field of Chinatown as an urban space. There are only a few scholarly studies that address ques­tions of Chinatown spatia­ lity in mo­tion pictures. While the observa­tion that Chinatown was presented as a mysterious and dangerous place is hardly new, scholarship, for the most part, does not consider space to be an important aspect on its own. As early as 1955, Dorothy B. Jones concluded in her still informative book The Portrayal of China and India on the American Screen that the no­tion of the mysterious Chinatown was based on “visual c­lichés,” for example “secret panels which slide back to reveal an inscrutable Oriental face, […] the raised dagger appearing suddenly and unexpectedly from between closed curtains, etc.”9 However, the focus of her study – and of the majority of scholarship that followed – was on the stereotypical characteriza­tions of Chinese Americans rather than on Chinatown as a spatial construct.10 In contrast, this study will focus more on the spatial representa­tion of Chinatown that informed a great number of films and is, as I argue, a fundamentally touristic one. Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39 – 47; Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980). 9 Dorothy B. Jones, The Portrayal of China and India on the American Screen, 1896 – 1955 (Cambridge: Center for Interna­tional Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1955), 24 – 25. 10 See Eugene Franklin Wong, On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Mo­tion Pic­ tures (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); John Haddad, “The Laundry Man’s Got a Knife! China and Chinese America in Early United States Cinema,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives (2001): 31 – 47.

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In popular discourse, Chinatown was not only a mysterious and vice-­ridden space – its very spatial structure was perceived as correlating with the racial alienness of Chinese immigrants. This percep­tion was one of the crucial prerequisites that made Chinatown a popular tourist attrac­tion. Mo­tion pictures reproduced these no­tions of Chinatown and gave them a new form of visual consump­tion. The camera, now, was able to invade Chinatown’s hidden spaces and give theater audiences a glimpse at a supposedly authentic Oriental culture. The cinematic dispositif, as I argue, resembled the touristic experience of a Chinatown tour. Cinema thus adopted the tourist gaze that marked Chinatown as Other space.11 Still, it also played with ideas of Chinatown as a space of tourism and artificiality and transformed the tourist gaze into a specifically cinematic form. As we will see, film contrasted its own visuality with the practice of tourism by promising a more authentic view of Chinatown than tourism could offer. As a visual practice, however, film ultimately employed the same discursive strategies that could also be found in tourism and thereby contributed to upholding the stereotype of the old, vice-­ridden Chinese quarter. In this chapter, I will first elaborate on how American Chinatowns were perceived as an urban space in general and particularly in regard to public health discourse. Here and throughout the chapter, San Francisco’s Chinese quarter will serve as a reference because it was by far the most prominent one in popular discourse. The percep­tion of Chinatown space was closely linked to images of hidden backrooms and ‘underground passages,’ which corresponded to racialized ideas of Chinese as the Oriental Other, as I will demonstrate in my readings of The Shock (1923) and Old San Francisco (1927).12 Then, I will point to the emergence of Chinatown as a touristic space and to how this development corresponded to imagery of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Chinatown. In the following, I will first discuss how the medium film ‘intruded’ into and visualized this space in regard to the early

11 I generally follow the concept of ‘imaginative geographies’ to point to the social construc­ tion of urban space as popularized, for example, by Edward W. Soja. My understanding of Chinatown as ‘Other space,’ however, differs from Soja’s ‘thirdspace’ or Foucault’s thoughts on ‘heterotopias.’ Chinatowns were highly hybrid spaces and, as such, had a heterotopic charac­ter. This chapter, however, operates on a different analytical level, focusing more on the discourses that explicitly aimed at containing Chinatowns as closed-­off ethnic enclaves and construct them as spatial articula­tion of racial Otherness within the U. S. urban landscape. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22 – 27; Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-­and-­Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). 12 The Shock, dir. Lambert Hillyer, perf. Lon Chaney and Virginia Valli (United States: Universal Pictures, 1923).

Chinatown as Urban Space  |

documentaries of the Chinatown guide H. J. Lewis, followed by an analysis of The Tong Man (1919), A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), and Chinatown Nights (1929).13

2.1 Chinatown as Urban Space The history of U. S. Chinatowns is inextricably linked to the Chinese immigrant experience. The first urban Chinese communities that would later be labeled Chinatowns emerged around the same time the first immigrants from China came to the U. S. West Coast. The largest and most important Chinese quarter developed in San Francisco, as the city’s port served as one of the main gateways for arriving immigrants.14 Not only did San Francisco’s Chinatown gain an “iconic func­tion”15 as an architectural and cultural model for Chinatowns in the U. S., it also became synonymous with the phenomenon itself. From 1870 to the 1900s, San Francisco was home to roughly 30.000 Chinese, as Yong Chen estimates in his study, making up 25% of all immigrants in the U. S. in the year 1900.16 Other important Chinatowns formed in cities like Oakland, Los Angeles, and Seattle as well as on the East Coast, most importantly New York. For immigrating Chinese, Chinatowns served as a first destina­tion for orienta­tion and informa­tion after their arrival in the United States. While some immigrants found employment as laborers and gold miners away from the cities, Chinese urban areas also became a permanent element of cities in the West. Here, immigrants could get in contact with others, build communities, start businesses, and retain cultural customs. The forma­tion of Chinatowns as ethnic neighborhoods, however, was also the result of the contemporary xenophobia of white European Americans. After all, Chinatowns provided its inhabitants with a minimum of safety in times of racial discrimina­tion and violence. Crossing the boundary to other parts of the city 13 The Tong Man, dir. William Worthington, perf. Sessue Hayakawa and Helen Jerome Eddy (United States: Haworth, 1919); Chinatown Nights, dir. William A. Wellman, perf. Wallace Beery, Florence Vidor, and Warner Oland (United States: Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929). 14 See Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850 – 1943: A Trans-­Pacific Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 15 Ruth Mayer, “Introduc­tion: A ‘Bit of Orient Set Down in the Heart of a Western Metropolis’; The Chinatown in the United States and Europe,” in Chinatowns in a Transna­tional World: Myths and Realities of an Urban Phenomenon, ed. Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1 – 25, 3. 16 Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 60. Obtaining accurate numbers is difficult as census reports tend to state lower numbers than other contemporary sources.

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could be dangerous at times because of racial hatred.17 Addi­tionally, it was almost impossible for Chinese immigrants to buy or rent houses in other, white neighborhoods because landlords did not want Chinese to move in. On an economic level, the same racial prejudices that led to the passage of the exclusion laws spawned violence and lynch mobs against Chinese laborers, especially in rural areas and small towns, where Chinese were “driven out” of workplaces and their homes.18 Consequently, Chinese had moved away from the general labor market around 1900 and increasingly started to work in the urban centers at workplaces like laundries, restaurants, or stores, where they faced less resentment by whites. In turn, these occupa­tions not only became typically connected to Chinatown and large metropolises but also racially marked as Oriental, especially the laundry business. The contemporary no­tion of Chinatown as a sealed-­off ethnic enclave was less the expression of Chinese unwillingness to mix with other popula­tions of the cities but rather a form of security. In mainstream American society, however, Chinatown was the spatial equivalent to concepts of Chinese Otherness and immorality. Often described as a ‘city within a city,’ the quarter seemed to confirm contemporary ideas about Oriental alienness, unassimilability, and racial inferiority. Several discursive fields contri­buted to the produc­tion of a specific knowledge of Chinatown as urban space. Analyzing these discourses sheds light on how Chinatown was a socially ­constructed urban space connected to racial concepts. As scholars like Kay Anderson have pointed out, the concept of ‘Chinatown’ itself is an inherently white European American idea that structured space along racial lines and (re)produced power hierarchies. Instead of a mere descrip­tion of a geographic area, the term ‘China­town’ refers to a “social construc­tion with a cultural history and a tradi­tion of imagery and institu­tional practice that has given it a cognitive and material reali­ty in and for the West.”19 In order to understand Chinatown in its historical and cultural dimension, one needs to examine related discourses that produced spatial knowledge and ultimately shaped its visual representa­tion. 17 See Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 253 – 257. 18 Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 19 Kay Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institu­tional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category,” Annals of the Associa­tion of American Geographers 77, no. 4 (1987): 580 – 598, 581. Anderson uses Vancouver’s Chinatown but his theoretical implica­tions can be transferred to United States’ Chinatowns as well. See also Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875 – 1980 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1991).

Chinatown as Urban Space  |

The Interconnec­tions of Space and Race in Public Health Discourse

One of the most powerful discourses related to the representa­tion of Chinatown as urban space was the field of public health, which gained importance especially during the Progressive Era. In mainstream discourse, the large Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York gained notoriety for being dirty, vice-­ridden, and overcrowded. Indeed, the housing condi­tions in Chinatowns were often poor. Until the early twentieth century, most Chinese immigrant workers lived in crowded houses with inadequate sanitary facilities. To white observers these low standards of living often served as a confirma­tion of racial stereotypes. They considered the lack of hygienic infrastructure in these lower class habita­tions a result of Chinese racial inferiority, that is, their inability to conduct a clean and therefore more civilized way of life. As Nayan Shah demonstrates in regard to San Francisco’s Chinatown, discourses of public health during the Progressive Era massively contributed to the construc­tion of Chinatown as a danger for the white popula­tion of the city.20 Linking hygienic condi­tions of the tenements to the moral quality of its inhabitants, “San Francisco health officials and politicians conceived of Chinatown as the preeminent site of urban sickness, vice, crime, poverty, and depravity.”21 In the Progressive Era, ideas of health and cleanliness became strongly connected to concepts of na­tionalism and social order.22 For many reformers, health was an important factor in a civilized way of living and therefore linked to American identity. Hygiene and cleanliness served as indicators for predominantly white ideals of public health and thus marked those who were excluded from these standards as racial Other. As Shah remarks, “those who were perceived to be ‘unhealthy,’ such as Chinese men and women, were considered dangerous and inadmissible to the American na­tion.”23 Government investiga­tions into the living condi­tions in Chinatown and the attempts to map the neighborhood’s size and boundaries produced knowledge about the Chinese 20 See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (­Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 21 Shah, Contagious Divides, 1. 22 For an illuminating study with a focus on the connec­tions between race and public health, see Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879 – 1939 (­Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For a Foucauldian perspective on the p­ ublic health movement, see Deborah Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regu­lated Body (London: SAGE, 1995), 16 – 47. For a general history of U. S. public health, see John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). 23 Shah, Contagious Divides, 12.

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as a race and, ultimately, established Chinatown as an alien and separate space.24 Discourses of public health around the turn of the century therefore created a link between Chinatown as a sick and crime-­ridden space on the one hand and the supposed racial inferiority of Chinese immigrants on the other. In other words, the language of health brought forth a racial coding of space.25 The reports of the public health investiga­tions were an important political tool for the Asian Exclusion Movement, who used them to agitate against what its members perceived as an invasion of the racially inferior Chinese. In 1902, the American Federa­tion of Labor (AFL) reproduced parts of these reports in their pamphlet “Some reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice; American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism – Which shall survive?” to draw conclusions about Chinese immigrants.26 It offered long quotes from the “Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors on the Condi­tion of the Chinese Quarter,” published in San Francisco in 1885. One of the conclusions of the report reprinted in the AFL pamphlet read: “In a sanitary point of view Chinatown presents a singular anomaly. With the habits, manners, customs, and whole economy of life violating every accepted rule of hygiene.”27 Interestingly, in another lengthy passage quoted in the pamphlet, the report gave a vivid first-­hand account of a visit to Chinatown: “Descend into the basement of almost any building in Chinatown at night: pick your way by the aid of a policeman’s candle along the dark and narrow passageway, black and grimy with a quarter of a century’s accumula­tion of filth; step with care lest you fall into a cesspool of sewage abomina­tions with which these subterranean depths abound. Now, follow your guide through a door, which he forces, into a sleeping room. The air is thick with smoke and fetid with an indescribable odor of reeking vapors. […] It is a sense of horror you have never before expe­ rienced, revolting to the last degree, sickening and stupefying. […] It is from such pest holes as these that the Chinese cooks and servants employed in our homes come.”28

24 Shah, Contagious Divides, 17 – 76. 25 On the interrela­tion of race and public health, see also Guenter B. Risse, Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 26 American Federa­tion of Labor, Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice; American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism; Which Shall Survive? (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902). Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 27 Ibid., 16, originally published in W. B. Farwell and John E. Kunkler, “Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors on the Condi­tion of the Chinese Quarter,” San Francisco Municipal Reports for the Fiscal Year 1884 – 85, published by order of the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco: W. M. Hinton & Company, 1885), Appendix 162 – 231. 28 American Federa­tion of Labor, Some Reasons, 17.

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This passage is remarkable on several levels. First, it employed a rather subjective style that more resembled contemporary travel narratives than an official report. By offering a personal perspective, the text aimed at making the quarter’s condi­ tions visible to the reader. It therefore used a sensa­tionalist approach that surpassed a mere informative level. Second, it reinforced racial difference and no­tions of a Chinese invasion. This is evoked by the last sentence, which visualizes the danger of a lower race intruding into the private space of white households. The third important aspect is the fact that the AFL reproduced the report 17 years after its original publica­tion, thereby omitting possible changes of the condi­tions since then. Instead, it presents allegedly racial habits as timeless characteristics. The AFL concluded that, since the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, time had shown that the Chinese “are a nonassimilative race, and by every standard of American thought, undesirable citizens.” Furthermore, “they [the Chinese immigrants; B. S.] have not in any sense altered their racial characteristics, and have not, socially or otherwise, assimilated with our people.”29 Again, housing condi­tions in Chinatown served to conflate race and space. According to the pamphlet, the invasion of Chinese people not only referred to the large number of immigrants coming to the U. S. It also referred to the threat posed by the Chinese that surpassed the fragile spatial boundary of Chinatown. This discourse of urban space was not limited to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Historical studies of other large Chinatowns show that, fueled by Yellow Peril sentiment, they were represented accordingly.30 This leads to the conclusion that, as an abstract space, Chinatown held a specific posi­tion within discourses of urbanity in general. Representing sickness, crowdedness, crime, and vice, it was often regarded as an embodiment of all the negative and undesirable aspects of modern city life.

The San Francisco Earthquake, City Planning, and ‘The Shock’ (1923)

The 1923 film The Shock, starring Lon Chaney, reveals how Chinatown was imagined as Other space both within U. S. American cities and in contrast to rural areas. Chaney

29 Ibid., 26. 30 While the living condi­tions in New York’s Chinatown were equally bad as in other ethnic slums, Lui argues that the existence of ‘opium joints’ and the resulting odors addi­tionally contributed to ideas about the quarter’s moral threat. See Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery, 26 – 32. For an insightful analysis of the historical public health discourse in Vancouver’s Chinatown, see Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown, 82 – 92.

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was widely known as an actor for physically special or ‘freak’ roles.31 Accordingly, The Shock shows him as the mobility impaired gangster Wilse Dilling, who needs crutches. He works for a white, female underworld boss, Queen Anne (Christine Mayo), who has her headquarters in Chinatown. In the course of the film, Wilse is ordered to a rural town to expose a banker and rival of Queen Anne. But Wilse falls in love with his victim’s daughter, Gertrude Hadley (Virginia Valli), who tries to lead him out of his criminal life. When Queen Anne kidnaps Gertrude to punish Wilse for not fulfilling his mission, an earthquake destroys Chinatown, which only the two lovers survive and even leaves Wilse cured and able to walk again at the end of the film. The opening shots of the film feature an introduc­tion into the criminal setting of a Chinatown around 1900. The audience learns from the intertitles: “Delving into the ever dimming records of yesterday, a lurid page arrests the eye. Chinatown – street of crime – of fear – of hate – of mystery.” The camera shows a crowded street with mostly white, middle-­class passers-­by. The next scene is set inside the Mandarin Cafe, which an intertitle describes as a “whirlpool of vice and intrigue.” To suggest the racial dimension of Chinatown’s viciousness, the film shows a Chinese American in the entrance who is smoking a pipe. His dark silhouette contrasts with the bright and decorated interior of the café, which, moments later, is revealed to be a large room with tables where mostly white costumers eat Chinese food. The film then introduces Wilse, who sits at a table and watches a man and a woman sitting in a separate corner. The man holds the woman’s hand and pulls it aggressively while the woman passively looks down. In the given context, the shot clearly refers to prostitu­tion or another form of illicit rela­tionship. A few seconds later, a secret Morse code knocked by the Chinese man standing at the counter tells Wilse that Queen Anne wants to see him. The Mandarin Café appears to be not only a Chinese restaurant, but also a place of secret criminal activity. This is underlined by the next scene that takes place in Queen Anne’s “house of mystery,” “overlooking the Oriental quarter, yet linked to it by secret, malevolent forces.” In the middle of the dark decora­tions and furniture, the camera shows Queen Anne who is surrounded by Chinese servants. Anne, a stern-­looking middle-­aged woman, orders Wilse to leave the city and to travel to a small town named Fallbrook. At this point, the narra­tion moves to Fallbrook, which is presented as the complete opposite of Chinatown and serves to counterbalance Wilse’s connec­tion to crime and vice. As the intertitles explain, Fallbrook is “[n]ot so many miles from this seething hotbed of crime, yet seemingly in another world.” Accordingly, the first shot shows a panoramic view of the town that counters the opening scenes

31 See chapter 1 of this study.

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in Chinatown. The town is surrounded by woods and cornfields, representing the town’s associa­tion with nature and agrarian productivity. Another shot shows a small train sta­tion, which marks Wilse’s arrival. As the plot evolves, the audience learns that as soon as Wilse leaves the crime-­ridden Chinatown and enters the rural village, he tries to bring his criminal past behind him. This decision is primarily a result of his falling in love with Gertrude, a woman who introduced him to the Bible. In the end, Wilse’s turn to Christian morals appears to be incompatible with his lifestyle in Chinatown and literally leads to the destruc­tion of the quarter when he returns. The climax, marked by a moment of Wilse’s impending defeat, features a deus ex machina of a special kind. When Wilse learns that Queen Anne has kidnapped and tortured Gertrude, he is left to pray for his and Gertrude’s life. As the intertitle explains, his prayers are heard and “the hand of Providence” interferes to rescue the couple and punish the evildoers. An earthquake completely destroys Chinatown and its underworld protagonists. In long, spectacular scenes, we see how the buildings collapse and bury Queen Anne, Wilse and the others. However, Wilse survives and, after weeks of convalescence, is even able to walk again. The final scene shows him sitting outside in a wheelchair in the midst of the nursing home’s large garden, when Gertrude comes for a visit. He surprises her with his regained ability by standing up and walking to her. The final shot is the view over the ocean. The destruc­tion of Chinatown, which ultimately also buried his criminal past, released him as a recovered, morally reformed, and virile man who is able to form a heteronormative rela­tionship with Gertrude. The environment of the couple, that is the garden and the ocean, represent moral cleansing and Christian purity and stand in stark contrast to the narrow crowdedness of Chinatown. Wilse finds his true self after the destruc­tion of the space that the film marks as Other and which also signifies the hidden, uncivilized elements of his character, or, psychoanalytically speaking, the ‘Id.’ The final scene evidently refers to the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, which in turn is strongly connected to the popular percep­tion of Chinatown. The peculiar posi­tion as spatial Other that Chinatowns in general held within urban discourses became apparent in the aftermath of the earthquake, as well as in subsequent debates about city planning not only in San Francisco, but also in New York. While the San Francisco earthquake on April 18, 1906, was devastating on its own, the real catastrophe was the fire that followed and burnt Chinatown completely to the ground.32 After the fire, at a time when Chinatown’s inhabitants

32 See Erica Y. Z. Pan, The Impact of the 1906 Earthquake on San Francisco’s Chinatown (New York: P. Lang, 1995). For a recent study on the aftermath of the earthquake and its rela­tion

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were still living in shelters, the city’s mayor, E. E. Schmitz, proposed plans to relocate Chinatown to Hunter’s Point in the southern part of the city. Not only had the properties of the old Chinatown near the financial district become valuable real estate; many saw the destruc­tion of Chinatown as a chance to put an end to an undesirable neighborhood in the middle of the city. The Washington Post featured an article titled “Dens like Ratholes,” in which the author stated that “[f ] or years the Chinese quarter […] has been the cancer-­spot of the city. Packed like sardines in a box, the yellow men lived a life far removed from American ideals.”33 The tone of relief articulated in this passage characterized the post-­earthquake coverage in general. A specific discourse of ‘old Chinatown’ took shape that often referred to China­ town’s destruc­tion in a biblical language, linking the fire to a moral ‘cleansing’ of San Francisco’s allegedly degenerated quarter. One of the most famous articula­ tions of this discourse can even be found decades later in Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast from 1933, which gave a sensa­tionalist account of San Francisco’s criminal underworld: “The destruc­tion of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone from heaven was scarcely more complete than the devasta­tion of China­town and the Barbary Coast by fire and earthquake from, perhaps, the same source.”34 Asbury also states that “[a]s an organized center of vice and crime Chinatown virtually came to an end on that catas­ trophic spring day; the underworld of the Oriental quarter was never able fully to overcome the cleansing effect of the fire and earthquake, and very few of the opium resorts and slave cribs were rebuilt.”35

Asbury’s ‘history’ can be seen as an expression of nostalgia for times that were long gone, while at the same time it reproduced the myth that still surrounded Chinatown. Ultimately, Asbury exploited contemporary stereotypes of Chinatown as a space of vice and crime but disguised his own sensa­tionalism and myth-­making as a moral critique. As we will see later in this chapter, this discourse of ‘old China­ town’ was still very powerful from the 1910s to the 1930s.

to class difference, see Andrea Rees Davies, Saving San Francisco: Relief and Recovery after the 1906 Disaster (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012). 33 “Dens Like Ratholes,” Washington Post, April 22, 1906. 34 Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (1933; repr., New York: Basic Books 2008), 279. 35 Ibid., 280.

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The extent to which Chinatown was seen as public nuisance can also be seen in debates about New York’s Chinatown.36 They took place around the same time San Francisco’s quarter was destroyed and were related to it insofar as it proposed a complete destruc­tion as the only possible solu­tion. In their interconnectedness, the debates reveal a great deal about how Chinatown was constructed as a space in need of moral purifica­tion. On April 9, 1906, only few days before the earthquake, the New-­York Tribune reported that “[t]he proposi­tion to create a public park on the site of ‘Chinatown’ in order to get rid of the detestable slums and dens which now characterize the place has met with some approval, and from certain points of view seem commendable.”37 The building of a park to replace a crowded quarter corresponded to no­tions of the importance of fresh air and circula­tion for modern city planning.38 The article put responsibility for the fact that Chinatown was “a blot on the map of the city” not so much on the Chinese American popula­tion but on the criminal activities of “other races;” nonetheless, it claimed, similar to discourses on the West Coast, that “[i]f the place could be purified and kept purified, […] the gain for morality and law would be great.”39 The article thereby linked concepts of cleanliness to ideas of morality. This connec­ tion was reinforced by another article in the New York Times that directly compared the destruc­tion and planned reloca­tion of San Francisco’s Chinatown to the plans in New York. Here, the Chinese living in New York appeared as being “smoked out of their present quarters by a public improvement.”40 The image of being smoked out evoked the no­tion of the Chinese being illegitimate inhabitants or even undesired animals. Ultimately, the earthquake in San Francisco sparked debates about the ques­tion of how to move Chinatown out of the modern and reformed urban landscape. In an ironic turn of events, Harper’s Magazine even published a long article in 1907, written as an obituary for New York’s soon to be gone old Chinatown. The

36 On New York’s Chinese American community, see Arthur Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?: The Chinese in New York, 1800 – 1950 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997). 37 “‘Moving On,’” New-­York Tribune, April 9, 1906; see also “For a New Chinatown,” New York Times, August 8, 1906. Box 2, folder ‘1900 – 1910,’ Arthur Bonner Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 38 Foucault highlighted the interrela­tions between modern city planning, health, and the emergence of biopolitics. See Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 166 – 182. 39 “‘Moving On,’” New-­York Tribune, April 9, 1906. 40 “For a New Chinatown,” New York Times, August 8, 1906.

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article was appropriately titled “The Last Days of Chinatown” and illustrated with photos of street scenes. The author stated that “[w]ith the passing of Chinatown the police authorities will congratulate themselves that a populous refuge for enemies of law and order and a fertile breeding-­place of crime has been removed; the mission-­workers will be glad that a dangerous menace to the morals of the slum children of the neighborhood has been destroyed.”41

The article then gives a short history of the quarter and its residents. Together with the photos of the iconic buildings along Mott, Pell, and Doyers Streets and of Chinese Americans wearing Oriental clothes and queues, the text can be seen as an attempt of historic preserva­tion. The author tries to capture the mystical and soon to be lost atmosphere for coming genera­tions. In the end, both projects of reloca­tion in San Francisco and New York were averted. This was mostly due to the efforts of Chinese Americans themselves, who successfully opposed the plans; however, it marked the starting point for a renewal of Chinatown, as the inhabitants and merchants increasingly advocated measures to reduce crime and to build a safer and more tourist-­friendly Chinatown.

Chinatown’s Underground Passages as Marker of Racial and Spatial Otherness

A crucial aspect of the spatial structure of San Francisco’s Chinatown in contemporary discourses was the rumor that there were secret passages running through the quarter below the surface. The no­tion of these passages that were hidden from the outsider’s gaze corresponded directly with racial concep­tions of the quarter. Popular discourse therefore constructed Chinatown not only in rela­tion to the rest of the city but also in regard to its internal structure. The image of the underground passages transferred the quarter’s alleged Otherness and mystical status onto a three-­dimensional space that encompassed a horizontal and vertical axis. Horizontally, the outward appearance of Chinatown – its surface – contrasted with the ‘real’ Chinatown that lay behind the buildings’ facades. This ‘inside’ of Chinatown symbolized the ‘real’ Chinatown and at the same time a space that was unknowable and hidden from the gaze of white outsiders. On the vertical axis, the most powerful and widespread concep­tion was the image of a network of

41 Frank Marshall White, “The Last Days of Chinatown,” Harper’s Weekly, August 17, 1907, 1208.

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underground passages and rooms that meandered below the surface. In addi­tion to the images of unsanitary and overcrowded houses that were commonly associated with the quarter, the reports of secret underground dens massively contributed to percep­tions of Chinatown as an ultimately foreign city within a city. The passages seemed to prove that Chinatown was not what it seemed to be from the outside. In times of Yellow Peril race hatred, these hidden places confirmed beliefs that the mass of Chinese immigrants was unknowable and uncontrollable and therefore undermined white ideals of social order. In popular discourse, this was the place where most of Chinatown’s immoral and criminal activity took place, from opium smoking to prostitu­tion. Ever since the first investiga­tions into China­town, the crea­tion of maps had become an important technique of controlling and visua­ lizing the quarter and thereby laying bare its ‘secrets.’ Underground passages, on the other hand, were not marked on any map. Their existence remained a mystery until well into the 1920s and 1930s. Being outside of any map therefore meant being outside of explored space, outside of governmental knowledge.42 The rumors about the existence of underground passages were so persistent that many people saw the destruc­tion of San Francisco’s Chinese quarter after the earthquake as a disclosure of its inner secrets. With the old buildings turned to rubbles and no more walls to conceal their inside, Chinatown revealed heretofore hidden spaces. Finally, it seemed, Chinatown was exposed to the white gaze. The aftermath of the earthquake accordingly led to increased coverage of what the ruins of the quarter told about the now bygone old Chinatown. Three days after the catastrophe, the New York Times featured an eye-­witness report on its front page titled “Hole Where Chinatown was,” which reported that the “depth of the underground city [was] revealed by the fire.”43 The article quoted a man called W. W. Overton, who stated: “White men never knew the depth of Chinatown’s underground city. Many had gone beneath the street level […], but now that Chinatown has been unmasked, men may see where its inner secrets lay. In places one can see passages 100 feet deep. The fire swept this Mongolian quarter clean.”44

The already men­tioned article “Dens like Ratholes,” published one day later by the Washington Post, proclaimed that the “Earthquake and Fire […] Revealed Mysterious Things About San Francisco’s Pest Hole that Even the Police Knew Not 42 This corresponds to Lui’s remarks about New York’s Chinatown as being represented as a ‘terra incognita’ in early twentieth century discourse. See Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery, 17 – 51. 43 “Hole Where Chinatown was,” New York Times, April 21, 1906. 44 Ibid.

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of.”45 The reader learns that “[d]eep in the bowels of the earth, the highbinders and gamblers […] had worked for years, tunneling out underground passages and rooms, one below another” and that these rooms were used for tong m ­ eetings, 46 gambling, slave trading, and opium smoking. On April 24, the paper again reported about the passages. The article described the fate of Chinese slave girls that were imprisoned in the passages as well as the tong murders that were committed there and never became known to white outsiders.47 These reports and similar articles were disseminated in other newspapers all around the United States.48 They not only reproduced already existing concepts about the connec­ tion between spatiality and Oriental mysteriousness, these articles also expressed a certain desire to visualize a supposedly unknown Chinatown. The language of the articles transports metaphors of revela­tion and intrusion and therefore reproduced dichotomies of inside and outside. In this discourse, it was the inside of Chinatown that revealed the ‘truth’ about Chinese alienness. Only at this moment of Chinatown’s destruc­tion, a time when the spatial order was disrupted, was it possible to direct the white gaze inside. As the controversy over the passages grew, however, there were also articles that denied the existence of the passages. Ironically, one of the first of these ­articles was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper that tradi­tionally took a pro-­exclusionist and anti-­Asian stance.49 In May 1906, it released an article titled “Fire Reveals Chinatown Fake” that, again, stressed the revelatory effect of the fire that had “made of Chinatown a barren waste, and bared its ruins to the p­ ublic gaze.”50 When compared to the articles men­tioned above, it shows that the ‘truth’ this public gaze revealed could be contradictory and that the ‘facts’ could be interpreted very subjectively. Contrary to other reports, the San Francisco Chronicle concluded that “[t]he fact is disclosed that the world-­renowned ‘ten stories underground’ was only a myth.”51 The main focus of the article was on the

45 “Dens Like Ratholes,” Washington Post, April 22, 1906. 46 Ibid. 47 See “Quake Bared Secret,” Washington Post, April 24, 1906. 48 See, for example, “Odds and Ends in Story of Disaster on Coast,” Evening Telegram (Salt Lake City), April 21, 1906; “Chinatown Secret Bared by The Snn [sic] Francisco Fire,” Evening News (San Jose), May 7, 1906; “San Francisco’s Vast Army of Opium Fiends,” Los Angeles Herald, May 22, 1906. 49 For a concise study of the role of newspapers within exclusionist discourses, see Jules Becker, The Course of Exclusion: San Francisco Newspaper Coverage of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1991). 50 “Fire Reveals Chinatown Fake,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 1906. 51 Ibid.

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effect of this revela­tion on Chinatown tourism. It argued that the destruc­tion of Chinatown proved the fakeness of its tourist attrac­tions and therefore showed how tourists were betrayed by the Chinese and by tourist guides. Read from a spatial perspective, the article stated that even the inside of Chinatown, which was concealed behind walls and constituted the ‘real’ Chinatown, did not really exist or was only there to mislead white tourists. Ultimately, it again transferred racialized characteristics of Oriental two-­facedness and hideousness onto the structure of Chinatown space. Regardless of the supposed truth about the passages’ existence, the image of the tunnels proved to be persistent in the decades to come because they directly correlated the racializa­tion of Chinatown space. I argue that, on a discursive level, it makes no difference whether there really were underground passages or not. From a white perspective, the rumor of their existence alone corresponded to prevailing concep­tions of the spatial and racial Otherness of Chinatown. The underground passages were the expression of white racial concep­tions that located certain elements of the quarter vertically ‘below’ the plane of the hegemonic social order. In other words, Chinese alienness was located ‘off the map’ of hegemonic knowledge.52 Moreover, the ‘myth’ of the underground passages was part of the larger discourse of ‘old Chinatown’ and must be understood in a Barthesian sense. In his famous essay on the ideological and semiological func­tions of myths, Roland Barthes pointed out how they are fundamentally based on the erasure of history.53 Myths aim at concealing an object’s historicity and instead inscribe a seemingly natural and timeless essence. In this regard, the evolving myth of ‘old Chinatown’ with its underground passages, which was widespread in 1910s’ and 1920s’ popu­ lar culture, constantly repeated no­tions of the quarter’s connec­tion to vice and aimed at ‘conserving’ it. The fact that popular discourses always circled around the quarter’s past to a certain degree authenticated its underground features and removed their temporal distance. This persistence demonstrates how discourses attributed the quarter a vice-­ridden character and thus ‘naturalized’ Chinatown as space of Oriental Otherness. The dynamics of conserving ‘old Chinatown’ and myth-­building will resonate throughout the chapter.

52 Sources accordingly describe New York’s Chinatown as “labyrinth” and “maze,” which follows the same logic of being off the map. See Sabine Haenni, The Immigrant Scene: Ethnic Amusements in New York City, 1880 – 1920 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 151. 53 See Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” In Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 109 – 159.

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The persistence and importance of no­tions about the underground passages shows in the fact that even in the 1910s and 1920s, a large number of texts referred to them. While most of these texts denied the passages’ existence, the mere fact that it was necessary to argue against them shows that it was still a widespread idea. Their mythical status correlated with racialized no­tions of Orientalness and ultimately facilitated their evolu­tion into the epitome of the visual representa­tion of Chinatown. A 1907 report about “An Evening in Chinatown” in the Overland Monthly vividly described how, in the old Chinatown, underground “currents” surfaced in the evening: “[…] the grim undercurrent, the unsavory, mysterious underground Chinatown surges to the surface in dark, oily lurking eddies, noticed by few of the passers, and understood by fewer.”54 In a 1911 article for the Over­ land Monthly, author Robert Wilson described the spatial configura­tion of the old Chinatown in more neutral architectural terms: “Most of the buildings were provided with a cellar and a sub-­cellar, in which opium dens, gambling hells and other iniquities flourished. Never was a rag of sunlight known to penetrate one of these underground apartments.”55 Wilson continued with a portrayal of the new Chinatown as a “reproduc­tion, and the continua­tion of the old, especially, in morals, the Joss houses, ancient worship, the nerve racking music, […] the cellars and sub-­cellars.”56 While it marked a structural improvement, it was “the same old whited sepulchre, full of the curios of the under-­ground as wells as above ground,” where there “is more to be seen and left unseen to the square foot in San Francisco’s Canton [than in Canton, China, itself; B. S.].”57 Wilson’s analogy of “sub-­cellars” and Chinatown’s grave-­like (“sepulchre”) interior pointed to both the ancient character of Chinese culture as well as its connec­tion to decay and death. The article, like so many others, played with aspects of (in)visibility, hinting at a discrepancy between the new appearance of the quarter and a supposedly unknown interior underground that was still hidden from the white gaze, a contrast that was underscored by the article’s numerous illustra­tions of nearly empty Chinatown alleys. The black and white coal sketches made the houses appear in stark darkness and seemed to obscure their objects more than they visualized them. In the few pictures where Chinese Americans are seen, they are only hinted at and seem to hide in the back of the scene. Even as late as 1936, the discourse of (in)visibility that characterized the myth of the underground passages was still apparent in Charles Dobie’s book San 54 D. E. Kessler, “An Evening in Chinatown,” Overland Monthly, May 1907, 449. 55 Thomas B. Wilson, “Old Chinatown,” Overland Monthly, September 1911, 232. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 236.

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Francisco’s Chinatown.58 The book illustrates how crucial aspects of Chinatown percep­tion were reproduced by referring to the ‘old’ Chinatown before the earthquake. The publica­tion with accompanying sketches by E. H. Suydam aimed at offering a vivid historic account of the “quarter’s quality and charm […] before it completely disintegrated.”59 Thus, the book was seen as an act of preserva­tion that was directed at both the old Chinatown and the remodeled one of the 1910s and 1920s. Dobie does not elaborate further on why it was in danger of disintegra­tion, possibly because of the increasing Americaniza­tion of Chinatown. The correc­ tional inten­tion that Dobie had in mind is apparent in the introduc­tion, worth quoting at length: “It is often through the creative writers, the fic­tionists, that a public gets the most understanding interpreta­tion of a people new to it. But, in the case of the Chinese, the creative writers of America only added to the confusion. For the most part they chopped up a mess of exoticisms, stirred vigorously, added hot water and served a concoc­tion as little fundamentally Chinese as a dish of chop-­suey. They dealt in sensa­tional surfaces and from even the best of them came a spawn that ended in melodramas of the Queen-­of-­the-­Opium-­King or Chinatown-­After-­Dark variety.”60

Dobie introduces his book as a correc­tion of these distorted ideas that circulated in popular culture. He seeks to disprove them by stating the allegedly real facts about the quarter’s history. A few pages later, Dobie elaborates on what was visi­ ble inside old Chinatown. Somebody who entered a doorway in “some groping alley” might find himself “in a bagnio filled with twittering slave-­girls; or amid the sweetly sickish fumes of an opium den; or in a forbidden corridor leading to an illicit gambling club;” they might step into “a loathsome hole where a handful of lepers lay shivering” or “stumble upon the secret tribunal of a highbinder tong marking a man for destruc­tion.”61 At the same time, Dobie argued, it was equally possible that behind these doors one would find a “faithful wife stirring the rice-­ pot […]; or an old philosopher reading the precepts of Confucius […]; or a young musician drawing shrill notes out of a moon fiddle.”62 The important point here is that, as an outsider, one could never be sure what was really happening behind the quarter’s closed doors. The white gaze would have rarely been able to witness it, and therefore outsiders could only speculate. It is remarkable, however, how 58 Charles Caldwell Dobie, San Francisco’s Chinatown (New York: D. Appleton-­Century, 1936). 59 Ibid., vii. 60 Ibid., 2. 61 Ibid., 3 – 4. 62 Ibid., 4.

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Dobie replaced one racial stereotype with an equally Orientalist one. He substituted Yellow Peril concep­tions with gendered ideas of female domesticity and exoticist images of Asians as premodern philosophers. One can best observe how the book itself failed to meet its own claim of a non-­ sensa­tionalist approach in the chapter dealing with “Underground Chinatown” and its opium dens. Dobie refuted the spatial expansion of the myth, that is, a large, eight-­level-­deep underground system. According to Dobie, this myth was indeed still prevalent in the 1920s. He nevertheless affirmed the existence of a normal basement-­ level underground system in the old Chinatown that fitted the well-­known descrip­ tions. Dobie himself did not hesitate to give a sensa­tionalist account of it and thereby fell into the same rhetoric style he had criticized in the introduc­tion. According to him, underground Chinatown was “foul and sinister,” “harbored filth, disease and murder” and was a “sanctuary for fleeing assassins, opium addicts, and even lepers.”63 He concluded: “A white popula­tion would have been devastated in a month’s time had they conceived and populated such a noxious quarter. But China­men fled to it and even lived in it, strangely immune to its menace.”64 Thus, the book tried to correct false no­tions of the quarter’s history – in this case the depth of the tunnels – but ultimately reverted to racial dichotomies, that is, the claim that Chinatown’s filth seemed like a ‘natural’ surrounding for its Chinese inhabitants. Dobie’s work is a fitting example for the discursive transforma­tion from the 1910s to the 1930s, which was characterized by a specific nostalgia for the old Chinatown and at the same time served to reproduce its racialized construc­tion of space. A striking example for the way the underground passages shaped how Chinatown space was imagined – and in this case, even recreated – was the construc­tion of the ‘Underground Chinatown’ area at the 1915 Panama-­Pacific Interna­tional Exposi­tion (PPIE). The gigantic exposi­tion celebrated the comple­tion of the Pana­ma Canal and was held in San Francisco. While it stood in the tradi­tion of popular World’s Fairs of the late nineteenth century, it also signified San Francisco’s renewal and rebuil­ding after the catastrophe.65 The entertainment area of the exposi­tion, simply called ‘the Zone,’ featured an attrac­tion named ‘Underground Chinatown.’ Advertised as a replica of Chinatown’s underworld, it was basically a large system

63 Ibid., 246. 64 Ibid. 65 See Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American Interna­tional Exposi­tions, 1876 – 1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); for a recent study that focuses on the visual culture of world fairs, see Astrid Böger, Envisioning the Na­tion: The Early American World’s Fairs and the Forma­tion of Culture (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2010).

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of tunnels. For a small admission, visitors could walk through these tunnels and see staged shows that included opium dens, hatchet men, prostitu­tion and white slavery. Within the more official context of an exposi­tion where countries like China and Japan presented themselves as modern, a privately owned and commercially successful attrac­tion like ‘Underground Chinatown’ proved that racial concep­tions of Orien­tal Otherness were still very powerful.66 The organizers of the exposi­tion did not problematize the attrac­tion, and it was only after a long series of protests from the Chinese American community and objec­tions from the official commissioner of the Chinese Republic that the attrac­tion was finally closed.67 It was reopened, however, as ‘Underground Slumming’ after removing everything that could be associa­ted with Chinatown. Apart from the fact that it was referred to as the “former Underground Chinatown,” it can be argued that visitors still associated it with the famous Chinese quarter.68 The attrac­tion was not confined to the exposi­tion in San Francisco, as the Panama-­California Interna­tional Exposi­tion in San Diego, which also celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal, as well as the Interna­tional Exposi­tion in New York in 1918 also featured ‘Underground Chinatowns.’69 While the attrac­tion drew a certain degree of controversy and legitimate criticism from Chinese American associa­tions, it demonstrated that the spatial construc­tion of Chinatown in discourses of popular culture was still strongly connected to racial Otherness. Even if the passages never existed and the rebuilt San Francisco Chinatown would not allow for the existence of places like this, they were still a part of both the quarter’s criminal history in popular imagina­tion and its prevailing mystical, if modernized, status in the decades to follow.

66 See Abigail Markwyn, “Economic Partner and Exotic Other: China and Japan at San Francisco’s Panama-­Pacific Interna­tional Exposi­tion,” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2008): 439 – 4 65; Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 170 – 179. 67 “Concession on Zone is Ordered Closed,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1915. See also Markwyn, “Economic Partner,” 463. For a more detailed discussion, see Abigail Markwyn, Constructing an ‘Epitome of Civiliza­tion’: Local Politics and Visions of Progressive-­Era America at San Francisco’s Panama-­Pacific Interna­tional Exposi­tion (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-­ Madison, 2006). See also Shehong Chen, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 100 – 104. 68 “New Concession Shows Evils of Drug Habit,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 1915. 69 “Glitters of Fineries at the Exposi­tion,” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1915; an advertisement for the ‘Underground Chinatown’ in New York appeared in the New York Times, August 24, 1918, 5. According to a letter from a Chinese American reader who deplored the attrac­tion and several similar ones, the New York attrac­tion was closed after protests from Chinese American associa­tions as well. See “‘Underground Chinatown’: Wax Works Exhibit Called False Picture of Chinese Life,” New York Times, October 19, 1919.

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The Structuring and Racializa­tion of Chinatown Space in ‘Old San Francisco’ (1927)

The underground passages and the earthquake still resonated within contemporary discourses of Chinatown’s history in the 1927 Warner Bros. produc­tion Old San Francisco. Warner Oland, whose star image was strongly influenced by his impersona­tion of evil Orientals, plays Chris Buckwell, an underworld boss who secretly hides his Oriental ancestry and passes as white.70 Buckwell tries to obtain the property of Dolores Vasquez, played by contemporary star actress Dolores Costello, who is not willing to sell the land owned by her famil­y since the times when California was still under Spanish rule. While the film’s main narrative is set in 1906, the historical arc of the film spans from the eighteenth century to the years after the great fire. A nine-­minute prologue gives the history of the Spanish Californian Vasquez family that settled in the Bay in 1769, while a short epilogue hints at San Francisco’s future by showing a panorama of the rebuilt city after the fire. The film, therefore, sketches the historical background of the city from the Spanish settlement to the great fire and beyond, especially focusing on race rela­tions between Spanish, Anglo, and Chinese characters. In this respect, Chinatown is of significant importance to the film’s depic­tion of San Francisco’s urbanity, as it plays a crucial role in the story’s development and climax. A remark by Dolores’s father that “the city surges up toward us […] [and] will bury us and our tradi­tions beneath an alien civiliza­tion” can on the one hand qualify as a comment on the Anglos’ appropria­tion of their property, as the film’s opening suggests. On the other hand, as the film soon reveals, the real threat is posed not by the Anglos but by Chinatown’s underworld. Against the backdrop of the early Spanish settlement and their quarrels with the Anglos, the film unfolds its cinematic history of old San Francisco mainly by focusing on the loca­tion of Chinatown within the urban racial landscape of the early 1900s. Shortly after the prologue, the audience learns that “[t]he Chinese ques­tion had long vexed San Francisco. To keep the Mongol within the limits of Chinatown—what graft and cruelty were invoked!” The following shot shows a street in Chinatown at night, crowded with Chinese American and white ­passers-­by. The street seems to be a dead end or at least a very crooked street, reinforcing its overcrowded appearance. Therefore, the shot not only refers to the crowdedness of Chinatown but also to the labyrinth-­like structure of its streets. In

70 I will analyze his racial status in more detail in chapter 3.

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the foreground, we can see people fighting which points to the quarter’s criminal and supposedly uncivilized inhabitants. When the narrative moves to Lu Fong’s place, which is described as the “center of Chinatown’s Inner Circle,” the film’s audience can gaze at the secret and normally hidden space of Chinatown’s underworld. The film depicts this “Inner C ­ ircle” as the pivotal loca­tion of criminal activities like the female slave trade. The c­ amera shows Lu Fong (Sôjin Kamiyama) standing in front of a glittering curtain of beads and talking to a seated Chinese American, both wearing queues and fine Oriental clothes. As the audience learns, the other man is Chang Sue Lee (actor unknown), who “made his money in opium, which he imported – and spent it on beauty – which he exported.” What follows is an auc­tion of (white) slave girls, who are now visible through the curtain. One of the women stands in the middle while the others are lying lasciviously at her feet. Buckwell’s female servant, earlier introduced as “A Flower of the Orient” and played by Anna May Wong, presents the women. Lee’s connec­tion to both opium and “beauty” clearly draws the connec­tion to discourses of white slavery and the transforma­tion of women into passive objects of Oriental desire through opium addic­tion. By posi­tioning the two Chinese American men in the foreground to the left and right of the picture while they look through the semi-­transparent curtain at the group of women, the mise-­en-­scène significantly resembles the visual arrangement of a mo­tion picture cinema: for both Chang Sue Lee and the film’s audience, the scene constitutes a voyeuristic gaze onto a harem-­like arrangement, which is further emphasized by the minimal concealment that the curtain offers. 71 In paralleling the illicit Oriental gaze with the audience’s, the scene renders the women sexual objects for both the intra-­diegetic and the extra-­diegetic subject posi­tions. The curtain Lee (and the audience) is looking through can therefore be understood to resemble the very screen the people sitting in the theater are looking at (or ‘through’). The immoral quality of this voyeuristic gaze is sanc­ tioned only by establishing a distance from the seen objects on two levels. First, on a spatial level, the scene locates Chinatown outside the hegemonic social order. Only in Chinatown is it possible for such vices to exist. This racialized spatial distance is reinforced by the fact that the scene reproduces sexual fantasies connected to the Orient, thereby adding to the Orientaliza­tion of the quarter and its detachment from supposedly Western moral standards. Second, the scene is distanced on a temporal axis, meaning that the audience looked at a 71 Ella Shohat pointed to the “imaginary of the harem” in Hollywood cinema and its connec­ tion to sexual fantasies in Orientalist discourse. See Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 161 – 165.

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sexualized slave trade that happened twenty years ago and had been abolished by the time of the film’s produc­tion. Audiences could reassure themselves that they witnessed white slavery from a historical perspective, making the shocking aspects easier to consume morally. Ultimately, the temporal and spatial distance of the film’s Chinatown served to establish and legitimate a voyeuristic gaze informed by Orientalist sexual fantasies. Whereas the camera is able to penetrate the hidden spaces of Chinatown, the film also illustrates how difficult and dangerous it is for outsiders. In the further course of the narrative, the love couple of the film, Dolores and Terrence O’Shaughnessy (Charles Emmett Mack), try to find Lu Fong’s place in Chinatown. Riding a horse carriage through the crowded streets, they ask a policeman for the address. The officer knows the loca­tion, but warns them that “some find it easier to get in than to get out!” His remark points to both the labyrinthine structure of Chinatown and the danger that an intrusion into its underworld posed for outsiders. The mere fact that the police know the address but seem to have no means to fight the criminal activity taking place there points to the powerlessness of the police against Chinatown’s underworld, which is situated outside official jurisdic­tion. Dolores and Terrence continue their pursuit and enter a small alley that significantly resembles the ‘devil’s kitchen.’72 As outsiders, they are looked upon with suspicion, and when they arrive at Lu Fong’s door, their visit is communicated through a peephole. The message of their arrival leads to a hectic dissolu­tion of the slave auc­tion inside. The women are sent away and the scene behind the curtain is replaced by group of seated Chinese Americans smoking their pipes. This exchange of people together with the system of peepholes and secret areas refers to the discourse of Chinatown’s secret interior, which is hidden from the white gaze and based on Chinese two-­facedness. This is also evident in the scene where Dolores and Terrence leave Lu Fong’s place, when they are encircled and captured by the men they saw on their way in and who act under the order of the Dragon Lady character played by Anna May Wong. The capture of the protagonists marks the beginning of the film’s climax, which in turn offers the audience an even deeper look into Chinatown’s underworld and, eventually, its underground passages. After Buckwell is revealed as Chinese before the eyes of the Chinatown business partners he had double-­ crossed all along, he grabs Dolores and flees to the underground tunnels by 72 Photographer Arnold Genthe described the ‘devil’s kitchen’ as “an area where Chinese vagrants and poorer vagrants gathered.” Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal & ­Hitchcock, 1936), quoted in John Kuo Wei Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown (Mineola: Dover, 1984), 11. His photograph is discussed below.

Chinatown as Urban Space  |

Figure 22  “Inner Circle.” Screenshot from Old San Francisco (Warner Bros., 1927).

taking a secret door. The audience is informed by the intertitle that it is about to witness a deeper look into Chinatown: “The labyrinths of that mysterious ‘Inner Circle’—as remote from Occidental life as the alleys of Tientsin or the gorges of the Yangtsze.” This intertitle significantly distances the “Inner Circle” of Chinatown, that is, its underground tunnels, from the rest of the city (if not the rest of the U. S.) on two levels. First, the tunnels are contrasted on a cultural and racial level to the norms of “Occidental life.” Second, this cultural level is connected to space, as the secret and unknowable depths of Chinatown mark the point of its furthest distance from Western culture. Racial and spatial distance is used to prove Chinatown’s Otherness. The film impressively visualizes the underground tunnels as a whole new city beneath a city that itself is within a city, where the tunnels are spacious enough to appear like regular streets. One scene visualizes the sheer depth of the tunnels by showing a stairwell in side view that leads three stories underground (see fig. 22). The “Inner Circle” is even large enough to contain a full bar of dubious character which is frequented by both Chinese and white customers. The underground passages are presented as labyrinthine and form the setting for Dolores’ captivity. When a visibly drugged Dolores is about to be auc­tioned to Chang Sue Lee, she suddenly comes to her senses and realizes her situa­tion. In an attempt to escape she tries several direc­tions out of the room, but somebody standing in her way blocks every exit, rendering each a dead end in a labyrinth. Trapped and about to become Chang Sue Lee’s slave girl, Dolores’s last hope is a prayer to god. And like in The Shock four years earlier, the San Francisco earthquake func­tions as a deus ex machina in a seemingly hopeless situa­tion. What follows are dramatic and well-­done scenes of San Francisco’s destruc­tion, which leaves the story’s antagonists dead and paves the way for the forma­tion of the romantic love couple, Dolores and Terrence.

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Figure 23  Rebuilt San Francisco. Screenshot from Old San Francisco (Warner Bros., 1927).

The last scene depicts the couple with their child, looking down on the rebuilt and modern city, completing the film’s historical arc.73 As the audience learns, “[t]he ashes of disaster have blown away—the sea breeze sweeps through cleansed streets of the Oriental quarter—the City that was has become the San Francisco that is.” The panorama shot moves slowly over the city’s buildings. Significantly, the crowded street scenes of the beginning are replaced by an extreme wide shot that reveals an ordered net of street blocks. Market Street, one of San Francisco’s main streets, cuts through the middle of the urban landscape as a vanishing line, which adds to the structured impression (see fig. 23). Taking up contemporary discourses, China­town’s destruc­tion reimagines biblical cleansing, replacing vice and chaos with American moral standards and a spatial structure that is presented as flat – opposing it to the three-­dimensional unknowable space that was underground Chinatown. Old San Francisco is an important source for the visualiza­tion of Chinatown on several levels. The film not only constructed the quarter in rela­tion to the rest of the city; it also took its internal structure into account, literally leading the audience deeper and deeper into spaces of crime and vice. Furthermore, the film drew on the mythical status of the ‘old’ Chinatown that was still a very widespread idea during the time of its produc­tion in the late 1920s. It used temporal distance in order to depict shocking and scandalous scenes. There are other clues within the film that contemporary audiences could easily recognize because they refer to a widely disseminated knowledge of Chinatown’s spatiality. First, the architecture seen when the protagonists enter Chinatown referred to San Francisco’s ‘devil’s kitchen,’ and secondly, the allusion to Chinatown’s ‘Inner Circle’ was a

73 Since the white couple is of Spanish and Irish ancestry, their racial status is of importance to the film’s narrative. I will analyze their racial status in chapter 3.

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direct reference to a short story by Frank Norris. In the following sec­tion, I will trace both these features within the pictures of photographer Arnold Genthe in order to demonstrate the importance of visuality for the ongoing myth of San Francisco’s old Chinatown in the 1910s and 1920s.

Visualizing Spatial Otherness and Perpetuating the Myth of Old Chinatown

Pictures of Chinatowns in San Francisco or New York circulated widely through newspapers, magazines, and postcards. One of the most influential photographers was the German American Arnold Genthe, whose pictures of San Francisco’s pre1906 Chinatown were used until well into the 1920s and 1930s. Genthe’s pictures were a powerful element of visual discourses that constructed Chinatown as Other space and as a Chinese colony separated from the rest of the city. Significantly, he first published his photos after the earthquake in his book Pictures of Old China­ town in 1908 and a second time under the title Old Chinatown in 1913, when it was accompanied by a text from journalist Will Irwin.74 His pictures mostly show street scenes and Chinese Americans during their daily activities. As Anthony W. Lee argues, Genthe’s books depart from the visual style of important photographers of the Progressive Era. Unlike Jacob Riis’s famous book How The Other Half Lives and those of his successors, Genthe’s books did not follow a reformist impetus but a nostalgic one: “They everywhere insist on the gap between the Westernizing, even reforming, force in the new Chinatown […] and the mysterious, fundamentally untainted, and authentic quality of the old. Certainly, Genthe’s albums had their share of critical amnesia and fantasy about the character of Old Chinatown.”75

As Lee emphasizes, this nostalgia was a discursive backlash that pledged for conserva­tion in face of both Chinatown’s modernist tendencies and China’s struggle against monarchy.76

74 Arnold Genthe and Will Irwin, Pictures of Old Chinatown (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908); Arnold Genthe and Will Irwin, Old Chinatown: A Book of Pictures (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913). See also Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs. 75 Lee, Picturing Chinatown, 156. 76 According to Anthony W. Lee, the persistence of the ‘Old Chinatown’ discourse shows in the fact that another Chinatown photographer, Louis Stellman, who was often regarded as Genthe’s student, failed to get his photos published. His photos show a more culturally

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In order to situate their structuring of space, it is useful to look into the accompanying text by Irwin in the 1913 edi­tion. Here, we find the reference to Chinatown’s several circles in order to describe the spatial order of Chinatown. Irwin refers to Frank Norris’s famous short story “The Third Circle.”77 Paraphrasing Norris’s spatializa­tion of Chinatown as consisting of three circles, Irwin wrote: “The first [circle; B. S.] was the life of the streets, which never grew stale to the real Californian. The second was that prepared show which the tourist saw and which supported those singular persons, the Chinatown guides. The third was a circle away down below, into which no white man, at least none who dared tell about it, ever penetrated – the circle which revolved about their trafficking in justice, as they conceived justice, about their trade in contra-­band goods, such as opium and slave girls.”78

He also modified Norris’s concept by adding a fourth circle between that of the show and the hidden sphere. This fourth circle was composed of “family life and industrial activity.”79 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Irwin referred to a short story that reproduced racial stereotypes of the 1880s and 1890s. Norris’s original story can be read as an articula­tion of the white slavery scare, that is, the fear that white women were seduced to consume opium, thereby being turned into addicted and passive objects of Oriental desire.80 The third circle “below” the other circles was therefore not only invisible and impenetrable to whites; it was also a place where whites who happened to go there were trapped – a point of no return or a labyrinth. diverse and modern Chinatown, which, as Lee argues, did not meet popular demand in the 1910s. See Lee, Picturing Chinatown, 152. 77 The story was first published in 1897 in San Francisco’s The Wave and served as the title work of a short story collec­tion that was published posthumously in 1909. See Frank Norris, The Third Circle, with an introduc­tion by Will Irwin (New York: John Lane, 1909). See also Karen A. Keely, “Sexual Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown: ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘White Slavery’ in Frank Norris’s Early Fic­tion,” Studies in American Naturalism 2, no. 2 (2007): 129 – 149; for insights on the broader context of literature and Yellow Peril, see Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 78 Genthe and Irwin, Old Chinatown, 61. Norris’s original version reads: “[…] the part the guides show you, the part the guides don’t show you, and the part that no one ever hears of.” Norris, The Third Circle, 13. 79 Genthe and Irwin, Old Chinatown, 61. 80 See Keely, “Sexual Slavery;” for the intersec­tion of gender, race, and the “sexual Yellow Peril,” see Mary Ting Yi Lui, “Saving Young Girls from Chinatown: White Slavery and Woman Suffrage,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 3 (2009): 393 – 417; see also Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-­Vice Activism, 1887 – 1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Christopher Diffee, “Sex and the City: The White Slavery Scare and Social Governance in the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2005): 411 – 437.

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Furthermore, Irwin’s text expressed a critical stance toward the “show” circle that only existed to entertain tourists. It contrasted an inauthentic, staged China­town facade with the ‘real’ circle of family life, work, and daily activities. This theme will also form a recurring feature in the next subchapter when we turn to Chinatown as tourist space. Irwin opened a dichotomy between the ‘real’ and the fake circles of Chinatown. In doing so, he also made a distinc­tion between the visible and the invisible ‘circles’ of Chinatown space, the latter being the underground circle that escapes the white gaze. Thus, in his accompanying text, Irwin introduced the pictures by Arnold Genthe as truthful depic­tions of the authentic and day-­to-­ day life of the quarter’s inhabitants. As scholars like John Kuo Wei Tchen have shown, however, Arnold Genthe meticulously staged most of his pictures, often manipulating and cropping them to achieve a ‘documentary’ effect that demonstrated the Orientalness of the quarter. Rather than producing candid depic­tions of regular street life, Genthe favored shots that showed Chinatown as exotic space and did not contain any signs of Chinese immigrants’ Americaniza­tion.81 Instead, the reader sees dark alleys, Chinese merchants, and Chinese Americans in tradi­ tional dress. The photos omitted any indica­tion of the reality that Chinatown was indeed a highly hybridized and multicultural space. His street scenes became iconic representa­tions of the old Chinatown, often reprinted in magazines and even published as postcards. Genthe’s pictures demonstrate a desire to penetrate Chinatown’s space, as his numerous street scenes express. There are several photos like “The Alley,” “The Street of Gamblers (By Night)” or “Devil’s Kitchen (By Night)”, which depict back alleys and hidden places. Emma J. Teng reads his visual style from the pers­pective of Freud’s concept of the uncanny (das Unheim­liche), which evoked its cultural Otherness. Through his use of composi­tion, framing, and lighting, Genthe’s pictures reinforce the no­tion of the hidden third circle of Chinatown. While they disclose the subjects and places they show, the depicted alleys, balconies, and closed doors always point to the unpenetrated and unknown that lies outside the picture. As Teng puts it, “[b]y the tight controlling of space, the use of dramatic shadows, and the focus on architectural detail rather than entire buildings, Genthe recreates visually the mysterious and sinister atmosphere of the Chinatown cityscape.”82 81 Tchen shows that Genthe etched out telephone and electrical cables, changed vendor signs from English to Chinese and sometimes even etched out entire people he considered unfitting for the picture because they were white. See Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs, 14 – 17. 82 Emma J. Teng, “Artifacts of a Lost City: Arnold Genthe’s Pictures of Old Chinatown and Its Intertexts,” in Re/Collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, edited by

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Figure 24 (left)  Arnold Genthe, “Devil’s Kitchen (by Night),” (ca. 1898). Courtesy of the California Historical Society, San Francisco. Figure 25 (right)  Arnold Genthe, “A Slave Girl in Holiday Attire,” (ca. 1898). Courtesy of the California Historical Society, San Francisco.

The photograph “Devil’s Kitchen (By Night),” for example, shows a dark subterranean area littered with trash and trickle of water or other liquids (see fig. 24). Stairs in the back of the scene that lead up and out of the picture along with beams in the picture’s upper half that point to a second level evoke the impression of being underground. There is also a male Chinese American in the picture, who is heading for the stairs and whose activity and posture are not clearly identifiable. The picture conveys the impression that Genthe shot the photograph while the man was doing something or maybe he ‘caught’ him doing something, while the surroundings clearly mark the space as uninviting and unsuitable for lingering. In addi­tion to the depic­tion of street scenes, architecture and groups of ­people, Genthe also took pictures of single Chinese Americans. Some of these shots resemble the visual style of a collec­tion of ‘types.’ Most striking are the photos called “A Slave Girl in Holiday Attire” and “Dope Fiend,” which feature full shots of the

Josephine D. Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 54 – 77, 67.

Chinatown as Urban Space  |

Figure 26  Arnold Genthe, “The Opium Fiend,” (ca. 1898). Courtesy of the California Historical Society, San Francisco.

portrayed individuals (see figs. 25 – 26). In the picture of the “Slave Girl”, we see a woman walking down the sidewalk towards the camera with her eyes to the ground. The focus falls on the girl, who stands out from the rest of the scenery because of her white dress. Her downward look expresses sadness and passivity, the latter underscored by the observa­tion that she does not seem to look where she is going. Interestingly, the informa­tion that she is a slave girl would not be visible to outsiders without the cap­tion. It is only through the combina­tion of photo and cap­tion that the photograph produces a specific meaning. Furthermore, the book seldom shows pictures of Chinese American females, and in the few cases it does, they are shown with children or are somehow personalized as individuals. The picture of a woman walking down the street alone in combina­ tion with the cap­tion constructs her as an epitome of a slave girl whose social circumstances raise compassion in white observers. With this imagery, the picture also reproduces no­tions of Chinatown as a ‘bachelor society,’ where the majority of Chinese women were prostitutes.83 83 As immigra­tion restric­tion led to an imbalanced sex ratio in Chinatown, popular discourse referred to Chinatown as a ‘bachelor society’ – a place of deviant sexuality where female immigrants were potential prostitutes. See also chapter 3. On the implica­tions for race, gender, and sex, see Shah, Contagious Divides, 77 – 104; Jennifer Ting, “‘Bachelor Society’: Deviant Heterosexuality and Asian American Historiography,” in Privileging Posi­tions: The Sites of

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The picture “The Opium Fiend” shows a Chinese American man in side view who sits on a flight of steps. In the background of the steps, the audience sees a wall and barrels, which make the area look similar to the one depicted in the “Devil’s Kitchen.” The surroundings and the man’s simple, dirty clothes reinforce the idea that the audience sees a person with a low social-­class status. The man’s face is directed at the picture’s left frame. His eyes are closed or nearly closed, which, together with his almost reclining posture, expresses passivity and idleness. This picture contrasts starkly with those of busy streets or merchants at work. It conveys a calmness that is spatially and visually distanced from the typically busy Chinatown scenery. But as the surroundings and the cap­tion indicate, it is a passivity imposed by the use of opium and, as a consequence, the person is rendered a victim of his own passivity. Again, it is only the combina­tion of cap­tion and picture that identifies the man as an “Opium Fiend.” Together, these two pictures show typical vices of Chinatown, but they don’t show them directly. Instead, they show typical characters or types. Vice is thus connected to the visual representa­tion of these types, that is, to certain depic­tions of Chinese Americans. The pictures illustrate a racially codified imagery of Chinese Americans that exists outside the hegemonic, white social order. Taken as a whole, the publica­tion of Genthe’s pictures, together with Irwin’s text, did not merely document the history of a bygone Chinatown. The pictures structured Chinatown as a racialized, exotic space that was alien to white obser­ vers. Far from neutrally depicting Chinatown and the people living there, Genthe’s pictures expressed a desire to visualize the ‘real’ Chinatown and tried to obtain a glimpse of the hidden, secret “third circle.” In his depic­tion of the supposedly real, he reproduced persisting racial discourses. The pictures rendered Chinatown a closed-­off space that was merely a transplanted part of the Orient. The pictures thus contributed to discourses of Chinese containment. They showed Chinatown as foreign space and, in doing so, demarcated the boundaries of this space that separated it from the rest of the city. This containment was to a certain degree lost with the destruc­tion of the old Chinatown. With its reconstruc­tion and increase of tourism, Chinatown changed into a more permeable space that at the same time featured a more accessible or aesthetic form of Orientalness. The publica­ tion of Genthe’s pictures in 1913 and numerous articles afterwards can therefore qualify as an expression of nostalgia for the old spatial order – a nostalgia, that is, Asian American Studies, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), 271 – 280. On prostitu­tion in Chinatown and the agency of Chinese American women, see Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prosti­ tutes in Nineteenth-­Century San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

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for the mythical space that more directly corresponded to ideas of racial Otherness, nonassimilability and containment.

2.2 Chinatown as Tourist Space In 1929, Paramount Pictures released Chinatown Nights, based on the story “Tong War” by Samuel Ornitz. A review of the film in the Washington Post stated: “In case you have suppressed a desire to visit Chinatown on your trips to the big city, here is an opportunity to rid yourself of the disturbing effects of the inhibi­tion. ‘Chinatown nights being what they are,’ you will decide, ‘perhaps it is just as well that I missed them, rather than having the world miss me.’ After all, they can be experienced far more satisfactorily—particularly the shooting part—cinematically than in person. There are wild shots to spare in this melodrama of the Oriental underworld. There are tong wars and police raids and bold, bad men and drunken women. The sirens shriek and the yellow men jabber and the shots boom long and loud. […] Who of us can say what tong warfare is like? As registered here, it looks like tong warfare, and undeniably and overwhelmingly it is Chinese.”84

The review points to the rela­tion between visiting Chinatown as a tourist and seeing it in the movie theater. It expresses contemporary ideas that visits to the cinema could replace actual trips to Chinatown. Even more boldly, the review claims the filmic experience is “more satisfactory” than the experience visitors would have on-­site in a “big city” Chinatown. Not only was it safer and more convenient to see Chinatown from a comfortable theater seat; the audience might even see more than in real life, since the camera can depict subjects and places that are normally hidden from the white gaze. The review thereby illustrates central aspects of the following sec­tion, particularly the connec­tion between Chinatown as touristic space and the practice of seeing the quarter on the screen of a movie theater. In fact, one cannot completely grasp concepts of Chinatown as Other space without looking at their interrela­tion with discourses of Chinatown as a tourist attrac­tion. Furthermore, the visuality of Chinatown as touristic space massively shaped its cinematic representa­tions and vice versa. As I argue, it is possible to understand the consump­tion of mo­tion pictures as a ‘practice of seeing’ and as an element of a visual dispositif in which Chinatown played a crucial role.

84 “Review of ‘Chinatown Nights,’” Washington Post, August 12, 1929.

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The medium film gained importance because U. S. Chinatowns changed their appearance significantly in the 1910s and 1920s. Chinatown discourses entered into a phase of transforma­tion where the representa­tion of the quarter was highly contested. Chinese Americans aimed at countering negative stereotypes and making the neighborhood a safer tourist attrac­tion. By the 1930s, this transforma­tion had shifted in the direc­tion of touristic exoticism with a strong focus on architectural appearance and tourist ‘sights.’ Mo­tion pictures, however, still referred to older concep­tions of vice and crime. Chinatown films employed a specific tourist gaze in their depic­tion of the quarter in order to give audiences a supposedly authentic experience behind Chinatown’s facades. Early attempts of documentary-­style explora­tions of Chinatown, produced by a popular guide named H. J. Lewis, demonstrate this agenda. But this tourist gaze and the produc­tion of authenticity for the audience becomes even more apparent in Hollywood films. 2.2.1 Seeing Chinatown

As the preceding sec­tion already pointed out, Chinatown had long acquired a mythical status for white Americans in the early twentieth century. Contemporary discourses constructed it as space dominated by crime, prostitu­tion, gambling, and vice, which implied its status as outside the social order. In Chinatowns – most importantly San Francisco’s –, visitors could experience exotic places and people and transgress social boundaries by catching a glimpse of a strange underworld of secret societies, called ‘tongs,’ and underground passages with secret opium dens. At the turn of the century, the American public imagined Chinatowns as sealed-­off Oriental enclaves disconnected from larger parts of U. S. cultural life. Chinatown’s alien culture and Oriental habits, however, fascinated white visitors. As Ronald Takaki states in his seminal study Strangers from a Different Shore, both factors formed two sides of the same coin: “A ghetto, Chinatown confirmed views of the Chinese as unhealthy, unassimilable, and ­undesirable immigrants, yet this same negative imagery opened the way to the development of Chinatown as a tourist center – a ‘quaint’ and ‘mysterious’ sec­tion of the city, a ‘foreign colony’ in America.”85

Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, white middle- and upper-­class Americans were attracted to Chinatowns. Reports about the social depravity of the Chinese

85 Takaki, Strangers, 246.

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neighborhoods, as well as stories about gambling halls, opium dens, prostitu­tion and tong wars, stirred the imagina­tion of white Americans. From the 1890s on, the Chinatowns of large U. S. cities became popular destina­tions for the increasingly popular phenomenon of slumming. Taking trips to neighborhoods and establishments connected to working classes or with different ethnic backgrounds became a pastime for white, upper-­class urban adventurers.86 For these so-­called slummers, Chinatown promised a trip into a premodern, mystical culture and a temporary escape from everyday life, yet the transgression of racial, sexual, and class boundaries that came with the crossing of the spatial border ultimately reaffirmed social distinc­tions.87 As Chad Heap asserts, slumming “contributed significantly to the emergence and codifica­tion of a new twentieth-­century hegemonic social order,”88 mainly along racial and sexual lines. Moreover, it was exactly the underlying logic of slumming that made the boundaries visible and accessible to experience that in turn reinforced and stabilized them. While it was possible to transgress white middle-­class subjectivity temporally and in specific spaces like Chinatown, this experience nevertheless constituted itself as a direct encounter with and separa­tion from the Other. An important way of disseminating a tourist experience in the nineteenth century was the genre of travel literature. These first-­hand accounts were published as books or in journals and, for the majority of the Americans, they formed the main source of informa­tion about what a trip to Chinatown was like. In her ana­ lysis of travel literature, Barbara Berglund illustrates how these texts produced massive racial knowledge of Chinatown’s popula­tion and space.89 Chinatown marked a special touristic space, since it promised a journey to a different culture, thereby resembling a trip out of the U. S.; at the same time, the presence of Chinese within American cities marked them as foreigners and ultimately menacing aliens. Berglund states that, “while representa­tions of Chinatown as a foreign place 86 See Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885 – 1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). While Heap focuses mainly on racial encounters between affluent whites and African Americans, his study offers insights into the importance of Chinatown as well. On the emergence of urban tourism, see Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850 – 1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 87 On the pre- or antimodernist appeal of Chinatown for white tourists and bohemians, see ­Raymond W. Rast, “The Cultural Politics of Tourism in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1882 – 1917,” Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 1 (2007): 29 – 60; Malte Steinbrink, “‘We Did the Slum!’: Urban Poverty Tourism in Historical Perspective,” Tourism Geographies 14, no. 2 (2012): 213 – 234. 88 Heap, Slumming, 3. 89 Barbara Berglund, “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain: Representa­tion and Racializa­tion in Nineteenth-­Century San Francisco,” American Studies 46, no. 2 (2005): 5 – 36.

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sometimes mobilized images associated with an exotic Orient, they lacked the comfort provided by distance.”90 Berglund highlights four places that characterize the descrip­tions found in literature: restaurants, Joss Houses (Chinese temples), opium dens, and theaters. Each of these places was connected to different discourses of racial Otherness. The opium den, for example, was used to illustrate a specifically Oriental tendency toward crime and vice, while Chinese restaurants were portrayed from the perspective of food taboo and public health viola­tions.91 Chinatown’s Otherness, therefore, became connected to stereotypical sites that would often form the basis of a tourist visit to the quarter. The sites themselves not only became ‘sights’ that needed to be seen but they also became visual and spatial markers of racially coded alienness. A whole new medium of visual dissemina­tion came with the increased popularity of holiday postcards in the early twentieth century. The act of sending postcards back home became part of the touristic experience and served as visual souvenir of the trip.92 Before the mass produc­tion of cameras, postcards served as the significant medium that offered visual and personalized gifts and souvenirs of the places the tourists had visited. Because of Chinatown’s rising appeal to tourists around the same time, it became a popular subject for postcards.93 In San Francisco, they depicted mostly Chinese American children and street scenes. After 1906, the newly built pagoda-­shaped buildings on Grant Avenue became a popular subject, but even after the earthquake, a large number of postcards showed Chinatown before its destruc­tion. These cards often used photographs from Arnold Genthe like “The Street of Gamblers.” As postcards, Genthe’s photographs appeared in different varia­tions such as colorized versions, which thereby contributed to their canoniza­tion as iconic representa­tions of old Chinatown. The fact that these pre-­ earthquake postcards were still in circula­tion in the 1910s also bespeaks the fascina­ tion the old Chinatown still had at that time. One can see this in the way some postcards depicted the ‘underground’ aspects of Chinatown. There were nume­ rous cards that showed opium dens with Chinese Americans lying on benches and 90 Berglund, “Chinatown’s Tourist Terrain,” 18. 91 Ibid., 17. 92 See Daniel Gifford, American Holiday Postcards, 1905 – 1915: Imagery and Context ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2013). 93 The Daniel K. E. Ching Collec­tion of the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco holds a large collec­tion of early twentieth-­century postcards. See also Chinatown Postcard Collec­tion, ca. 1900–ca. 1980, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. For a collec­tion of reprints, see Robert W. Bowen and Brenda Young Bowen, San Francisco’s Chinatown, Postcard History Series (Charleston: Arcadia, 2008); Daniel Ostrow, Manhat­ tan’s Chinatown, Postcard History Series (Charleston: Arcadia, 2008).

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Figure 27  Postcard, “San Francisco, California. Underground Opium Den. Chinatown. Wiped out by earthquake and fire Apr. 18, 1906,” (ca. 1910s). Courtesy of the California Historical Society, San Francisco.

smoking pipes (see fig. 27). Often, the cap­tion made a direct connec­tion between the picture and the old Chinatown, for example such as “Underground Opium Den. Chinatown. Wiped out by earthquake and fire April 18, 1906.”94 The way the photo depicts the opium den corresponds to the visual discourses that originate from the 1890s. Opium smoking led people into a dream-­like state, and consequently, its use needed to be set apart from the outside world. The visual discourse connected this state of passivity, non-­productivity, and unconsciousness with the spatial detachment of opium dens. They were crowded, run-­down, and most of all below and apart from the rest of urban space. Through the overly bright flash, the aesthetic of most postcards resembles a snapshot taken in a poorly lit room. In addi­tion to showing the Chinese in the act of smoking, the pictures convey the impression that they show them in flagranti. The gaze of the camera is clearly an intrusive one that exposes the opium smokers. The perspective, which aims at encompassing the whole room from an outside point-­of-­view in order to include all men in the picture, reinforces this impression.

94 The postcards I was able to investigate in the Daniel K. E. Ching Collec­tion all show post stamps from the 1910s.

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Figure 28  Postcard, “San Francisco’s famous Chinatown, the largest outside of China itself,” (ca. late 1920s/1930s). Courtesy of the California Historical Society, San Francisco.

The imagery of postcards changed significantly in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas early postcards pictorialized sights the average Chinatown tourist would not see merely by visiting the quarter, such as opium dens, the pictures now focused more on Chinatown architecture and street sceneries. Typical sights included Grant Avenue with its pagoda architecture, ornamented lampposts, Oriental bazaars, and chop suey restaurants like the famous Shanghai Low. These postcards differed from the older ones not only by showing the newly rebuilt Chinatown but also in their visual style. They focused more on the picturesque Chinatown and its outward appearance than on the things that lay behind the storefronts. Buil­ dings like the Sing Fat Co. Bazaar or the Chinese Telephone Exchange became new icons of Chinatown’s visuality (see fig. 28). The quarter’s houses and streets look clean and in good shape and show little trace of the old run-­down houses and crowded streets. The pictures often depicted brightly colorized, decorated streets and evoked a festive atmosphere, underscoring this impression. The postcards

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constructed Chinatown as an attrac­tion that was less dominated by its myste­ riousness and its inner secrets than by its outward visual appearance. The spectacle moved away from vice and underground adventures to the surface, the storefront and the architecture of the buildings. Spatially, the attrac­tion of Chinatown moved from racialized no­tions of backrooms, underground tunnels, and dens to the front and the open street. The visual experience of a stroll through Grant Avenue to see the pagodas and dragons and decorated bazaars became the real attrac­tion of Chinatown from the 1910s on. This change in the spatial and visual concep­tion of Chinatown resulted from the efforts of Chinese Americans to make Chinatown a safer and better place for themselves and the increasing number of tourists.

Chinatown’s Transforma­tion into a Tourist Attrac­tion

By the early 1920s, the large Chinatowns of the U. S. had transformed into tou­ rist attrac­tions that had for the most part overcome negative no­tions of vice and crime. Chinatown had become a tourist-­friendly district that put its exotic attri­ butes on display and made them easily consumable. As scholars have shown, this transforma­tion took place on several levels and was due to the efforts of Chinese Americans to improve their neighborhood and counter prevailing negative i­ mages.95 According to sociologist Ivan Light the change was the outcome of increasing opposi­tion by Chinese merchants against the tongs’ criminal activities. According to this argument, merchants and restaurant owners acted against crime and tong wars because the atmosphere of insecurity and fear kept away potential customers; thus, legitimate business owners had an economic interest in the quarter’s safety and actively promoted tourism. Light offers the example of chop suey, which was invented in the early 1900s to attract white customers who had previously avoided ‘authentic’ Chinese food out of racial bias. Light argues that the “mutual incompatibility” between merchants and tongs was resolved in the long run in favor of tourism, since tourism proved economically important to both parties.96

95 See Rast, “Cultural Politics;” Lee, Picturing Chinatown; Cocks, Doing the Town; Ivan Light, “From Vice District to Tourist Attrac­tion: The Moral Career of American Chinatowns, 1880 – 1940,” Pacific Historical Review 43, no. 3 (1974): 367 – 394. 96 The article’s argumenta­tion, however, appears dated. Light first criticizes the “sex ratio explana­ tion” among sociologist and in the end reaffirms it as playing a “major role.” The sex ratio explana­tion was a common theory in sociology of the 1930s and was upheld until the 1970s. It explained Chinatown’s decline of vice with the ‘normaliza­tion’ of the sex ratio of Chinese immigrants.

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Historian Raymond Rast gives a more nuanced and complex analysis of China­ town’s transforma­tion and Chinese American agency. He argues that Chinatown’s popula­tion reacted in very heterogeneous ways to the increasing tourism that ranged from active exploita­tion of stereotypes to hostile opposi­tion. Another stra­ tegy was the attempt to change no­tions of what characterized an a­ uthentic Chinatown as such. It was especially this last group that had an impact on China­town’s percep­tion. Rast argues that “[t]hey contested white entrepreneurs’ representa­ tion of a vice-­ridden Chinatown but substituted their own claims that Chinatown’s authenticity lay in the exoticism of its architecture, theatrical performances, curios, and cuisine.”97 Chinatown became a less negative and crime-­ridden place in popular discourse, but the positive no­tions connected to architecture, curios, and cuisine were still based on a racially codified form of exoticism. Thus, while Chinese Americans were able to participate in the produc­tion of knowledge and acquired a powerful posi­tion within touristic discourses, these discourses still effected processes of Othering. Although Chinese American merchants succeeded in changing the visual appearance and the mainstream percep­tion of Chinatown until the 1920s, the Chinese American image remained a “contested terrain.”98 It required a lot of work and time for Chinese Americans to transform hegemonic discourses and gain a powerful posi­tion. Printed tourist guidebooks published to help tourists understand the quarter attest to evidence of these efforts. A special sec­tion in a small 1909 guidebook titled “Some Misleading No­tions Corrected” provided informa­tion about the most common racial misconcep­tions of the neighborhood: “Chinese don’t eat rats out here […]. There are no underground opium dens in Chinatown –­ ­haven’t been any since the fire. […] There are no ‘white slaves of yellow masters’ in San F ­ rancisco’s Chinatown, as some of the ‘Yellow Journals’ have of late tried to make the country believe. […] The health in Chinatown is remarkably good.”99

The brochure instead tried to introduce tourists to customs and habits of the Chinese like clothing, festivities, and food. Besides the short introductory texts, it mainly featured advertisements of local shops and restaurants. The guidebook, therefore, served as an alternative source of informa­tion for tourists. It criticized 97 Rast, “Cultural Politics,” 33. 98 K. Scott Wong, “Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain,” MELUS 20, no. 1 (1995): 3 – 15. 99 San Francisco’s Chinatown: An Aid to Tourists and Others in Visiting China-­Town (San Francisco, 1909), 12. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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portrayals of Chinatown in other publica­tions and the media in general. In regard to the transforma­tion of Chinatown’s public percep­tion, this brochure marks one of the early attempts on the part of Chinese Americans to counter prevalent concep­tions after the fire. While most guidebooks and travel reports of the 1910s and 1920s referred in one way or another to the legacy of the old Chinatown, their descrip­tions moved away from an emphasis on vice. They focused more and more on the exotic experience the new architecture, bazaars, and Chinese cuisine offered tourists; however, this experience of a supposedly more authentic Chinatown that now attracted tourists still connected for the most part to no­tions of cultural alienness and premodernity. Helen Purdy, for example, opens the chapter on Chinatown in her 1912 guidebook by referring to the contradictory reports about the existence of underground passages that appeared after the fire. She goes on stating that both believers and non-­ believers of the underground myth will find Chinatown appealing. People interested in the hidden and vice-­ridden aspects could still find interesting sights because the quarter had been “restored very much as it was before, save that it is cleaner, the stores are larger, their stocks are finer and more brilliant.”100 According to Purdy, one should hire a guide to see sights one would normally fail to see, including some opium dens. Purdy reassures tourists who are more interested in cultural highlights that Chinatown is as safe as the rest of the city and tourists are treated with respect. Chinatown increasingly became a symbol of a premodern culture, a space that preserved the exotic aspects of the old Chinese empire. This ultimately served to keep Chinatown displaced spatially, culturally, and temporally from the rest of the modern city. As a guidebook stated in 1913, Chinatown “is vividly picturesque, and still carries hints of ancient civiliza­tion, pomp and power of bygone empire.”101 This can also be seen in a report by Oscar Lewis in the Overland Monthly Maga­zine from 1917, appropriately titled “A Transplanted Sec­tion of the Orient.”102 Lewis states that the Chinese are especially unable to assimilate and show a highly conservative character. According to Lewis, this is the reason why Chinatown mani­ fests itself as an original reproduc­tion of China: “Although he [“the immigrant Chinaman”; B. S.] shows little adaptability or desire to adapt his customs to his surroundings, he has shown positive genius in changing his surroundings so as to make them coincide with his way of living.”103 Lewis even postulates that, instead 100 Helen Throop Purdy, San Francisco: As It Was, As It Is, and How to See It (San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1912), 138. 101 Joseph Allan Dunn, Care-­Free San Francisco (San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1913), 37 – 38. 102 Oscar Lewis, “A Transplanted Sec­tion of the Orient,” Overland Monthly, July 1917, 23 – 26. 103 Ibid., 23.

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of merely adapting slowly, this process increases over time so that the oldest China­ towns, for example in San Francisco, are the most Orientalized ones. As a result, the Chinese Americans living in these areas are said to believe they are actually in China. Accordingly, Lewis states that while a trip to Chinatown is an exciting experience, white tourists get the same impression; therefore, when a white visitor leaves this transplanted Orient, “it will take him some time to readjust himself to the Occidental world.”104 A visit to Chinatown was thus understood as a visit to China itself, or a mythical, preserved sec­tion of China. While the focus of touristic discourse shifted spatially from the underground labyrinth to the picturesque outward appearance, Chinatown’s image still oscillated between the ‘old Chinatown’ and the newer, touristic, supposedly authentic version. Descrip­tions from the 1920s often combined remarks on Chinatown’s authentic Orientalness with comments on its increasing degree of Americaniza­ tion. This corresponded to pictorializa­tions that highlight the architectural sights of Chinatown’s buildings while displaying signs of modern American culture like cars or Chinese men wearing suits; yet, the majority of texts still referred to Chinatown’s history: one could not fully grasp the new Chinatown without contrasting it to its own myth. This simultaneity of aesthetic exoticism and historic legacy still marked Chinatown’s appeal to tourists. It is remarkable, for example, that an article in Travel magazine from 1929 still referred to the underground passages and the two previously men­tioned contradictory reports of their existence.105 While the text emphasized Chinese Americans’ second and third genera­tion Americaniza­tion, it also rendered Chinatown an exotic, albeit touristic, space. Of course, an article published in Travel is directed at promoting Chinatown for tourists and must be read as such, but the text serves as a fitting example for concep­tions of the quarter as both a commercialized and exotic attrac­tion in the late 1920s.106 The author, Frank J. Taylor, summarizes Chinatown’s transforma­tion and appearance as follows: “[The young Chinese-­Americans; B. S.] reconstructed old Chinatown by building modern structures for their homes and hiding many of them behind a mask of Oriental fronts. The visi­ tor’s impression is one of gilded cupolas, upturned roofs, gaily colored and intricately carved doorways, of overhanging balconies and mingled smells of an ancient race.”107

104 Ibid., 26. 105 Frank J. Taylor, “San Francisco’s New Chinese City,” Travel, March 1929. 106 Guidebooks published by Chinatown tourist organiza­tions offered similar depic­tions. See, for example, China Town (San Francisco: China Town Views, 1937). Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 107 Taylor, “San Francisco’s New Chinese City,” 20.

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Figure 29 (left)  “The Bright Lights of Chinatown.” Frank J. Taylor, “San Francisco’s New Chinese City,” Travel, March 1929, 20. Figure 30 (right)  “On the Edge of the Financial District.” Taylor, “San Francisco’s New Chinese City,” 20.

According to Taylor, even in this new Chinatown the ‘real’ was hidden behind an Oriental “mask” – with the only difference that the hidden secret now was Chinatown’s moderniza­tion. The pictures presented in the article convey a similar impression of old and new. Two of the six photos show the iconic bulletin board where Chinese Americans could read the daily news in the Chinese language. This board also served as a popular subject for postcards, even before the fire. One of these pictures was in fact used for a postcard long before the publica­tion of the article.108 It shows a man in simple black clothes, common among Chinese workers around 1900, reading the bulletins while his small child beside him wears festive Chinese attire and looks straight into the camera. This photo is contrasted with others that show Chinatown in a more modern light. One depicts Chinatown at night (see fig. 29). The cap­tion reads: “At night Chinatown does its best to appear exotic. The brightly lighted shops with their gaudy displays, the pagoda-­ like bazaars, […] strive to create the Oriental illusion in the midst of modern San Francisco.”109 Another picture on the same page, taken from a rooftop, reinforces this contrast between “Oriental illusion” and the city’s modernity (see fig. 30). It

108 These postcards can be found in the Daniel K. E. Ching Collec­tion. 109 Taylor, “San Francisco’s New Chinese City,” 20.

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shows the edge of a pagoda in the picture’s foreground while skyscrapers of the city’s financial district dominate the background. Chinatown, as Americanized as it may appear in the late 1920s, still marks a spatial Other that is less connected to vice and more to exotic sights and attrac­tions.110 In sum, Chinatown discourse was contested and transformed in the early twentieth century. While Chinatown’s visuality and spatiality changed, no­tions of the ‘old Chinatown’ still operated as an essential point of reference. Two ques­tions remain: how did these discourses shape the touristic experience, and how did they relate to mo­tion pictures? In other words, how have mo­tion pictures altered the touristic experience and, to a certain degree, replaced a real trip to Chinatown, as hinted at in the review of Chinatown Nights men­tioned at the beginning of this subchapter? In order to grasp this connec­tion, we first need to look into some theoretical thoughts about tourism and the touristic gaze in general. 2.2.2 The Tourist Gaze, Staged Authenticity, and the Cinematic Dispositif

The arrival of film marked a new way to experience Chinatown that was based on a transforma­tion of the tourist gaze into the cinematic dispositif.111 The concept of the tourist gaze was introduced by John Urry and was highly influential within tourism studies and beyond.112 Urry derives his concept of the tourist gaze from Foucault’s genealogy of the medical gaze in his The Birth of the Clinic. For Urry, the tourist gaze, like the medical gaze, is not directed at something pre-­existing or non-­discursive. Instead, it is directed at an “epistemic field, constructed linguistically as much as visually” and based on “the ‘discursive determina­tions’ of 110 Another striking example for this oscilla­tion between nostalgia and modernity is a six-­part series of articles published in 1933. See Ernest Lenn, “Chinatown – Then and Now,” Article series. San Francisco News, August 21 – 26, 1933. Each installment offers a nostalgic report on one of the ‘typical’ Chinatown characteristics and their slow disappearance, for example ‘Hatchet Men,’ ‘Slave Girls,’ and ‘Tong Wars.’ 111 Jean-­Louis Braudy has famously identified the camera, the projec­tion, and the arrangement of the theater seats as central aspects of the cinematic dispositif, which constitutes the processes of subjectifica­tion and ideology. See Braudy, “Ideological Effects.” In German media studies, Knut Hickethier influentially applied the concept to television, emphasizing that television erected a new mode of consump­tion at home, which drastically differed from the cinematic dispositif. See Knut Hickethier, Film- und Fernsehanalyse, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012), 19 – 21. 112 John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, rev. ed. (London: SAGE, 2011). Since Jonas Larsen did not co-­author the earlier edi­tions, I will refer to John Urry as the one who introduced the concept.

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socially constructed seeing or ‘scopic regimes’”113 Gazing is a performance that structures the world and places the gazing subject in rela­tion to the seen objects; therefore, the tourist gaze “in any historical period is constructed in rela­tionship to its opposite, to non-­tourist forms of social experience and consciousness.”114 Within the study of tourism, Urry argues, one can use the objects of the gaze to analyze what is considered ‘normal’ within a society and how the touristic experience seemingly contrasts it. According to Urry, “[g]azes organize the encounters of visitors with the ‘other’, providing some sense of competence, pleasure and structure to those experiences. […] It is the gaze that orders and regulates the rela­tionships between the various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visu­ally out-­of-­ordinary, what are relevant differences and what is ‘other’.”115

Signs that mark the difference between a ‘normal’ and a touristic experience discursively shape and construct this gaze. The sight of specifically connoted landscapes, respectively cityscapes, as well as people and aspects of social life that reinforce the subjective feeling of being outside the ordinary constitute this gaze. In regard to Chinatown, examples would include the sight of the iconic pagoda-­style roofs or a visit to an Oriental bazaar, which are recognized and read as signifiers of a touristic experience. While for Urry, tourism seems to be based on a simplistic dichotomy of ‘normal’ versus ‘touristic’ experiences where the latter is constructed through ‘departures’ from everyday routines, he makes sure to add complexity to the concept of the gaze. He points to the way gazes are connected to power rela­tions and specifically to how touristic photographs can be understood as elements of asymmetrical power rela­tions. He also men­tions more recent approaches involving the one-­directedness of the gaze and explores possibilities for returning it that would introduce a reciprocal understanding of power rela­tions.116 I argue that the concept of the tourist gaze can help to analyze the importance of early twentieth century mo­tion pictures that revolve around Chinatown. This line of argument takes into account both the imagery itself (the gazed-­upon objects of the films) and mo­tion pictures as a visual practice (the mode of consump­tion). 113 Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, 1 – 2. 114 Ibid., 3. 115 Ibid., 14. 116 Ibid., 204 – 205. Urry and Larsen refer to Darya Maoz’ concept of the mutual gaze, which takes into account both the tourist gaze and the local gaze. See Darya Maoz, “The Mutual Gaze,” Annals of Tourism Research 33, no. 1 (2006): 221 – 239.

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The visuality of the films places them within the discursive field of tourism outlined in the preceding sec­tion. The films use specific places, characteristics, and other signs that situate them within the epistemological field of touristic know­ ledge. The touristic experience itself is, on a second level, reinforced by the way mo­tion pictures are consumed. The spatial arrangement of a theater, the practice of watching movies qualifies as analogous to tourism. The audience in a theater occupies a row of seats and remains immovable, with its gaze fixated in direc­tion of the screen. The dispositif of the cinema – that is, the one-­directedness of the gaze, the objects on the screen, and the gazing subject – reproduces the touristic gaze within a fixed and closed-­off space. The immovability and arrangement of large groups seated one row behind the next recalls the arrangement of gazes in contemporaneous rubberneck buses. To a certain degree, the directing of the gaze onto the screen marks the vanishing point outside the theater room. Mo­tion pictures mark a transi­tion from the tourist gaze of guided tours to that of the so-­ called rubberneck buses.117 The cinematic gaze is indeed a mediated tourist gaze because the seated arrangement of a mo­tion picture cinema resembles a tour bus, while the all-­seeing camera, capable of invading virtually every hidden space in Chinatown, takes over the act of ‘guiding’ the tourist. During a time when discourses of Chinatown were ambiguous, contested, and transi­tional, the touristic visuality of films set in Chinese quarters had an important effect on popular concep­tions of Chinatown.118 It served to popula­ rize hegemonic concepts of Chinatown as touristic space and offered new forms of touristic consump­tion. Furthermore, there is a reciprocal rela­tion between the touristic gaze in the cinema and on-­site in Chinatown itself. The tourist gaze can itself become a second-­grade tourist gaze when people who have seen a specific sight on screen travel to the loca­tion of the film. Urry himself men­tions this rela­ tionship and calls it the “mediatized” or “movie-­induced gaze.”119 Tourists visiting

117 In the 1920s, ‘Rubberneck buses’ referred to the phenomenon of the tourist-­filled buses that drove through the quarter, often accompanied by a guide who commented on the sights by using a megaphone. Urry and Larsen men­tion the tourist bus as an example for the “spectatorial gaze,” which “involves the collective glancing at and collecting of different signs that have been very briefly seen in passing at a glance.” Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, 20. 118 My analysis does not deny the analytic importance and simultaneity of other gazes at work in the consump­tion of mo­tion pictures, for example Laura Mulvey’s widely influential concept of the male gaze. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 – 18. 119 Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, 106 – 118. See also Roger Riley, Dwayne Baker, and ­Carlton S. Van Doren, “Movie Induced Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 25, no. 4 (1998): 919 – 935.

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Chinatown may have recognized certain sights from mo­tion pictures and during the time period concerned in this study they most likely had specific expecta­tions that were informed by mo­tion pictures. The second theoretical framework that connects film and tourism concerns the theme of authenticity in tourism.120 The ques­tion of how and if there can be authenticity within tourism is one of the most central and widely-­discussed within tourism research.121 In his seminal article, Dean MacCannell introduces the concept of “staged authenticity.”122 According to MacCannell, tourists who visit unknown places and people are motivated by the desire for authentic experien­ ces; however, authenticity is directly connected to aspects of space.123 Referring to theories of sociologist Erving Goffman, MacCannell differentiates between front and back regions. Whereas back regions mark the space of absolute privacy, where people either pursue their private life or do their work, front regions mark the public space that is especially created for tourists and has a show-­like appeal. While tourists are always motivated by the desire to experience the ‘real’ back region, this aim is compelled to fail.124 Urry takes up this thought and explains that the tourist gaze into the back regions marks an unacceptable intrusion, so that tourist entrepreneurs “gradually come to construct backstages in a contrived and artificial manner.”125 MacCannell, for his part, introduces a continuum between front and back. Without ever reaching the real back, certain front regions appear more authentic than others because they give the impression of a back region. MacCannell, therefore, understands touristic space as “a stage set, a tourist setting, 120 While Raymond W. Rast applied this concept to Chinatown, I will further elaborate on its usefulness for filmic depic­tions. See Rast, “Cultural Politics of Tourism,” 41. 121 For a recent overview of the different conceptualiza­tions of authenticity, see Yujie Zhu, “Performing Heritage: Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 3 (2012): 1495 – 1513; Kjell Olsen, “Authenticity as a concept in Tourism Research: The Social Organiza­tion of the Experience of Authenticity,” Tourist Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 159 – 182. 122 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also his more recent contribu­tion to the debate, Dean MacCannell, “Why it Never Really Was About Authenticity,” Society 45, no. 4 (2008): 334 – 337. 123 MacCannell explains this desire in terms of a pilgrimage and the quest to experience something other than the shallowness of modern life. He also men­tions David Riesman’s influential concept of “other-­directedness” and Herbert Marcuse’s “one-­dimensional” man. This theoretical framework shows how MacCannell’s thinking is rooted in sociologic discourse of the 1960s, which must be seen in historical perspective. I argue, however, that his general idea of touristic space is still useful for contemporary analysis. 124 Note how this spatiality corresponds to the descrip­tions of Chinatown space earlier in this chapter, especially Will Irwin’s (Frank Norris’s) explana­tion of the different circles. 125 Urry and Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, 10.

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or simply, a set depending on how purposely worked up for tourists the display is.”126 It follows that the display of tourist space and the produc­tion of authen­ ticity can parallel the produc­tion process of mo­tion pictures that rely on sets and performers to achieve a similar effect for the camera. Both forms of “sets” are a reac­tion to the intrusive gaze of an audience and both situate the gazing subject within a visual dispositif. MacCannell also men­tions a dilemma that arises out of the practice of guided tours: during a tour, as he states, “outsiders are allowed further in than regular patrons […]. At the same time, there is a staged quality to the proceedings that lends to them an aura of superficiality.”127 This remark hints at the phenomenon that tourists, like moviegoers, are part of a social constella­tion that accepts the staged character of their experience in exchange for the possibi­ lity of gazing at something extraordinary. MacCannell’s text sparked a debate about authenticity which brought forth a plethora of studies and defini­tions that can be classified into broader trends.128 In contrast to early objectivist approaches, construc­tionist theories assume a critical stance on the existence of authentic objects or experiences in general. Instead, these theories understand authenticity as discursively produced and constructed through processes of meaning-­making and interpreta­tion. The focus of investiga­ tion shifted from ‘object authenticity’ to the realm of tourist subjects. Tourism, in this perspective, is based on specific images, stereotypes, and expecta­tions; therefore, the reproduc­tion or intersec­tion of these discourses and power rela­ tions produces authenticity.129 The ques­tion of authenticity in tourism ultimately leads to ques­tions of authentic culture in general. If authenticity is understood as an effect of discourse, then no original exists anymore to separate the authentic from its inauthentic copy, a dichotomy found in early works like MacCannell’s. 126 MacCannell, The Tourist, 100 (italics in the original). He further elaborates: “[sets; B. S.] are physically proximal to serious social activity, or serious activity is imitated in them; they contain objects, tools and machines that have specialized use in specific, often esoteric, social, occupa­tional and industrial routines; they are open, at least during specified times, to visita­ tion from outsiders.” Ibid. 127 Ibid, 98 (italics in the original). 128 A central platform for this debate was the journal Annals of Tourism Research. Most of these studies are ethnologic field studies of touristic phenomena without an outspoken historical perspective. This complicates the crea­tion of a general theoretical framework. For a useful classifica­tion of these approaches, see Nina Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 26, no. 2 (1999): 349 – 370. 129 See Zhu, “Performing Heritage,” 1497. For important articles on this theoretical perspective, see Edward M. Bruner, “Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduc­tion: A Critique of Postmodernism,” American Anthropologist 96, no. 2 (1994): 397 – 415; Erik Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditiza­tion in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 15, no. 3 (1988): 371 – 386.

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Instead, scholars like Eric Hobsbawm have famously shown how cultures are based on the “inven­tion of tradi­tion” and the (re-)produc­tion of origins.130 While these constructivist approaches criticize ideas of objective authenticity and focus instead on representa­tional or symbolic authenticity, scholars who take a strong postmo­ dern stance abandon the concept of authenticity altogether. In this approach, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum, where representa­tions do not refer to an original anymore and instead displace the real with a hyperreal copy, has become influential.131 Some studies suggest a stronger focus on the actors of tourism, which involves the tourists as well as the hosts.132 An important approach is the concept of performative authenticity. Broadly speaking, performative authenticity takes into account the rela­tion of language and bodily performance as informed by John L. Austin’s influential Speech Act Theory and the work of other performativity theorists like Judith Butler. According to scholars like Yujie Zhu, the important characteristic of performative authenticity is the emphasis on becoming as opposed to the no­tion of people or objects being authentic in a static or intrinsic manner. The approach, he writes, “emphasizes the dynamic process of ‘becoming’ authentic through embodied practice.”133 While Zhu proposes this concept as a bridge between postmodern constructivism and subjective existentialism, I read performativity in a stronger, Butlerian sense that takes into account the discursive nature of embodiment and bodily practices. Bodies are not ‘outside’ of discourse but produced in and through them. Embodied practices, therefore, have to be read accordingly as elements of discourses.134 In conclusion, I find it useful to hold onto MacCannell’s spatial structuring of authenticity but prefer to interpret it from a constructivist or discursive pers­ pective that also includes aspects of performativity. Within the historical field of Chinatown tourism, authenticity is an effect of touristic discourse. This discursive

130 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Inven­tion of Tradi­tion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 131 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simula­tions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 132 See Erik Cohen and Scott A. Cohen, “Current Sociological Theories and Issues in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 39, no. 4 (2012): 2177 – 2202. 133 Zhu, “Performing Heritage,” 1500. 134 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). For an overview of the rela­tionship between the performative turn and German histo­ riography, see Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold, “Geschichtswissenschaft und ‘performative turn’: Eine Einführung in Fragestellung, Konzepte und Literatur,” in Geschichtswis­ senschaft und “Performative Turn”: Ritual, Inszenierung und Performanz vom Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Steffen Patzold (Köln: Böhlau, 2003), 1 – 32.

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field constructs a spatial arrangement of Chinatown where the backstage is the locus of authenticity; however, the shift from the 1910s on places the emphasis on authentic facades, or front regions, that reproduce copies, or better, simulacra, of Chinese architecture. The actors in tourism – the tourists as well as the residents and touristic performers of Chinatown – contribute to the effect of authenticity. One of the embodied practices of performative authenticity is the tourist gaze that constitutes power rela­tions and subject posi­tions. As I argue, this visual dispositif also emerged from the practice of seeing Chinatown movies in theaters. Audiences of Chinatown movies looked at screens to see actors performing, both Chinese Americans and whites, within a set that resembled Chinatown. The reason for the fascina­tion with Chinatown films lay partially in the underlying scopophilia that to some extent resembled a touristic visuality. I will examine the connec­tion between the cinematic and touristic dispositifs by analyzing several films. This analysis will include two different forms of filmic representa­tion that, as I argue, are nonetheless interrelated in their visuality. First, I will analyze a documentary-­style film conducted by a Chinatown guide that marks early connec­tions between tourism and film. Then I will turn to mo­tion pictures that use Chinatown as a setting. 2.2.3 Filming Chinatown: H. J. Lewis and the Figura­tion of the Chinatown Guide

Chinatown tourism in the early twentieth century was inextricably linked to the figure of the Chinatown guide. These guides were known to attract their customers with sensa­tionalist accounts of Chinatown’s depravity, crime and vice. Slumming parties and tourist groups in search for an encounter with Chinatown’s underworld would employ the services of a guide for two reasons. On the one hand, the use of a guide increased the (subjective feeling of ) safety within the group. On the other hand, the local knowledge of the guide appeared to guarantee access to Chinatown’s hidden places and a deeper look into the quarter’s secret and authentic culture. These guides were mostly whites; sometimes even policemen acted as guides, which points to the invasive character these tours perpetuated.135 The police could 135 Barbara Berglund’s analysis of travel reports offers great insights into the rela­tion between tourists, guides, and Chinatown inhabitants before and around 1900. See Berglund, “China­ town’s Tourist Terrain,” 9 – 17. Significantly, the film Chinatown Squad (1935) portrays an ex-­ policeman working as a Chinatown guide. Chinatown Squad, dir. Murray Roth, perf. Lyle Talbot and Valerie Hobson (United States: Universal Pictures, 1935).

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gain entry to vice resorts by kicking in doors and making the whole tour look like a raid. This practice not only demonstrated police coercion and racial discrimina­ tion against Chinatown’s inhabitants but also the hierarchic objectifica­tion that formed the basis for the tourists’ consuming gaze.136 Corrup­tion among the police forces was widespread. The police consequently developed a financial interest in maintaining and participating in the vice/tourism connec­tion.137 It was an open secret, however, that a large part of the guided tours depended on staged scenes, where actors were paid to perform illegal activities for the adventure-­seeking tou­ rists. An open letter by Chinese Consul-­General Ching Paoshi [Pao Shi] in 1904 addressed these problems. Reprinted in the San Francisco Examiner, it stated: “I am informed that the licensed guides of Chinatown make a practice of showing white visitors through opium dens and bagnios, exacting an addi­tional fee from their patrons, the size of which depends upon the depth of the depravity exposed to view. I am informed that some of the guides have fitted up opium dens of their own, solely for show purposes, and the exhibi­tion of vice is furnished by white and Chinese vagrants, whose only wage is the drug they smoke. […] I am informed that men wearing stars and representing themselves to be members of the Police Department frequently escort large parties of white sightseers of both sexes through the places referred to.”138

The Chinatown guide is a figura­tion constructed by and inextricably linked to touristic discourses of Chinatown. As a figura­tion, the Chinatown guide served as the necessary link between the touristic subjects and the space and people they encounter. In Chinatown, the guides gained an especially powerful posi­tion because of the quarter’s mysterious and alien status that made it highly inaccessible to outsiders. They are important to my study for two reasons. First, their existence was based on the touristic desire to get a glimpse of the ‘real’ Chinatown. Guides provided this local knowledge and could lead the tourists into allegedly authentic spaces. The tourists had to rely on the guides in order to see the sights they presented, and the guides themselves directed the tourist gaze. Second, as the protest letter shows, this form of tourism connects directly to practices of staging scenes, exhibiting, and acting presented to a touristic audience. Ultimately, both developments correspond to the produc­tion and consump­tion of mo­tion pictures on a structural level: the aspects of acting and performing are similar to a film set, and the rela­tionship between the guide and his group furthermore resembles the 136 Ibid. 137 See Rast, “Cultural Politics of Tourism,” 45 – 4 6. 138 “Chinatown to Keep Out Guides,” San Francisco Examiner, September 21, 1904.

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rela­tionship between cinema audiences and the mise-­en-­scène of films. The following quota­tion from a 1934 article in the San Francisco News exemplifies how the guides were connected to staged authenticity. “The Chinatown guide, like Chinatown itself, has undergone a metamorphosis. Time was, before the Fire, when ruthless imaginative showmen organized the Chinatown Guides’ Associa­tion, thrilling gullible tourists with hectic presenta­tions. Scowling Chinese, knives gleaming in the moonlight, or axes grasped in their fingers, shuffled past. Trapdoors opened, a screaming white girl sprinted by, pursued by a jabbering Chinaman. […] Shuddering tourists huddled together as they entered reeking opium dens. By the light of a glittering candle they saw Chinese sprawled about, opium pipes hanging limply from their mouths. The Chinatown Guides’ Associa­tion was San Francisco’s first little theater movement.”139

This vivid descrip­tion of the old Chinatown guides’ methods directly links them to elements of theater, show, and staging. Tourists obviously consumed these shows willingly, even if they knew they were illusions to a certain degree; however, the guides shared an ambivalent rela­tionship to authenticity, as they needed to pre­ sent themselves at least partially as truthful authorities. This again resembles the cinematic dispositif, as film always needs to disguise its inherent illusory quality and remain intelligible by producing effects of authenticity. The article continued by juxtaposing the old Chinatown guides with the newer genera­tion, demonstrating the transforma­tion of both: “Your Chinatown guides of today are alert, baggy-­trousered Chinese college students, employed by the Chinese Trade & Travel Bureau. […] The visitors gape at the architectural designs, strange styles, the obsolete tradi­tion of temple worship. But they seem disappointed because there are no hatchet-­men, no sing-­song girls.”140

While the methods of the guides changed with the character of Chinatown itself, the expecta­tions of tourists remained largely the same. I argue that the introduc­tion of rubberneck buses partly overtook the discursive figura­tion of the guide, notwithstanding the fact that buses could not completely replace the depth of a personal tour by foot. In another stage, the func­tion of the guide – that is the presenta­tion of the old, mysterious (staged) Chinatown – was transferred onto the cinematic dispositif. Now the camera offered insights the on-­site Chinatown hardly could.

139 Ernest Lenn, “‘Welcome, Stranger!’,” San Francisco News, October 10, 1934. 140 Ibid.

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The way Chinatown guide H. J. Lewis actively used film around 1912 illustrates the rela­tion between tourist guides and mo­tion pictures as well as the possibilities the new medium opened. “Captain” Lewis began conducting guided tours through San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late 1880s. The San Francisco Call devoted a small article to him and “his experience taking parties through [the] local orient.”141 According to the article, Lewis was a licensed guide who spoke Chinese fluently and had close contacts with many people in Chinatown. The article asked Lewis for his perspective on the touristic experience and why most tourists “do not see half of San Francisco’s real Chinatown.”142 Lewis responded that “[a] Chinaman regards you with suspicion until he has known you a matter of twenty or thirty years. […] The only way […] to see Chinatown right is to see it on foot, and with a guide who knows the people of this bit of the orient.” The article adds that Lewis followed a different approach than the rubberneck buses that rushed through the quarter. Instead, Lewis explains that he takes “his parties in and out of Chinatown’s quaint streets and byways, and makes sure that they miss nothing of the real charm of one of San Francisco’s most attractive features.” The article also featured a portrait of Lewis, showing him with steady gaze, clothed in uniform with a badge on his breast and a hat typical for Chinatown guides. As a Chinatown expert, Lewis also conducted tours through other Chinese neighborhoods, including the one in Los Angeles. An undated leaflet that advertised his “Official Balloon Route Trip ‘Seeing China Town’” shows the same portrait on the front.143 On the left and right side of the photo are Chinese letters. On the back, it shows four pictures of street scenes with Chinese Americans wearing queues, hats, and dark tradi­tional clothes on the street in Chinatown. The focus clearly falls on the people, not the buildings of Chinatown. The cap­tion reads: “Seen on the Personally Conducted Trip Through Chinatown, Los Angeles. The largest Chinatown in United States [sic].” The pictures suggest the people seen on it are the ‘sights’ of the tour. The Chinese Americans are the object of the tourist gaze and the pictures themselves appear like snapshots from an explora­tion into an unknown culture. Reinforcing this impression, the remainder of the leaflet’s text lists the sights of the tour: “Some of the Sights Seen only on Our Chinatown Trip – Temples of Worship, […] Chinese Families, their habits and modes of ­living, Chinese Musicians, playing many kinds of queer musical instruments, 141 “Chinatown Guide is Interesting Person,” San Francisco Call, March 10, 1912. 142 Ibid. 143 “Official Balloon Route Trip ‘Seeing China Town,’” undated leaflet, 4 pages. Daniel K. E. Ching Collec­tion, Chinese Historical Society of America Archive, San Francisco. The text men­tions Lewis’s 16-year experience as guide and interpreter. When compared to the informa­ tion given in the newspaper article above, the leaflet can be dated to the year 1904.

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Figure 31  H. J. Lewis. Screenshot from Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco (1912).

[…] Chinese Dens and their inhabitants,” followed by stores, restaurants and songs sung by Chinese children.144 Lewis clearly presented his tours as a trip into an unknown culture and promised a look into the habits and environment of people characterized as foreign and Other. Apart from his on-­site tours, Lewis made use of the film medium and created a new way to experience Chinatown on the silver screen. His films mark an early example of the connec­tion between film and tourism. To create his cinematic version of a trip to Chinatown, Lewis shot several scenes in San Francisco that corresponded roughly to the sta­tions of his tours – that is, street scenes, restaurants, tenements, Joss houses, bazaars, and stores.145 The collec­tion of scenes was titled Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco and formed the basis for his “Oriental travelogue,” a show that included the screening along with introductory remarks and anecdotes by Lewis. With this travelogue, he traveled the country’s theaters and, by use of this new mode of percep­tion, reached a broader audience for his Chinatown tours. Instead of his tour group, it was now Lewis who travelled to theaters, and conversely his audiences could travel to Chinatown just by going to a show and looking at the screen. The camera now incorporated the tourist gaze and framed the scenes and sights of Chinatown for the film audience. The scenes themselves are clearly staged, with the only difference that they had been staged in front of the film team and the camera instead of a group of tourists.

144 Ibid. 145 The Prelinger Archives in San Francisco hold two collec­tions of Lewis’s scenes and made them available online. See Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco, dir. H. J. Lewis (1912). Internet Archive, accessed April 18, 2016, http://archive.org/details/0779_Seeing_ Americas_Greatest_Chinatown_San_Francisco_Part_I_09_49_35_00 http://archive.org/ details/Seeing_Americas_Greatest_Chinatown_San_Francisco_Part_II.

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Figure 32 (left)  Chinatown view from above. Screenshot from Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco (1912). Figure 33 (right)  Chinatown street. Screenshot from Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco (1912).

A closer look at Lewis’s filmic tour reveals how he tried to find a visual equivalent for the tours on-­site. The first scene shows Lewis himself standing in front of the camera in his uniform (see fig. 31).146 The background is white and features Chinese symbols similar to the arrangement in the leaflet men­tioned above. Lewis nods in the direc­tion of the camera, takes off his hat and welcomes the audience. The following scenes show a panorama of Chinatown from a birds-­eye perspective (see fig. 32). This shot serves to locate the quarter geographically within San Francisco’s urban landscape. The scenes are filmed from a rooftop and show seve­ ral pagodas and numerous flags of the newly founded Chinese Republic. The buildings that belong to Chinatown appear darker than the buildings of the rest of the city that are visible in the background. Next are shots taken on street-­level that show storefronts, passers-­by, parked cars, and carriages. Some scenes show Lewis together with tourist groups, with Chinese American children or standing alone in front of famous buildings (see fig. 33). Apart from these street views, the majority of scenes can be categorized into two groups distinguished by whether Lewis is visible as a guide or not. The first group, where Lewis does not appear, consists of scenes that show celebra­tions, cere­ monies, and habits. There are, for example, scenes that show a Chinese parade, a

146 There is very little informa­tion on Lewis and his films. While there is no way of knowing if the scenes from 1912 collected in the Prelinger Archives show the correct order, the first scenes are clearly opening sequences. There is also reason to believe that Lewis conducted single scenes in changing order, rather than one finished film. The sources men­tioned below point to the assump­tion that filming and showing these scenes were an ongoing project until at least 1920.

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Figure 34 (left)  Men smoking pipes. Screenshot from Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco (1912). Figure 35 (right)  Woman behind a fan. Screenshot from Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco (1912).

religious ceremony, and a Chinese theater performance. Most of the scenes show men performing certain customs or attending their daily jobs. They include depic­ tions of Chinese men who sit together smoking pipes, men gathered around a table to gamble, and Chinese showing workplaces like herbal stores and butche­ ries (see fig. 34). These scenes clearly attempt to illustrate supposedly typical customs in Chinatown. The men shown in the scenes are visibly acting for the camera. This impression is reinforced not only by the way they behave and look into the camera, but also by the way the groups and rooms are arranged for the mise-­en-­scène; however, the film aims to depict them as acting natural. The reason why Lewis is not visible in these scenes is the attempt to create the illusion of an undisturbed and unnoticed view into the daily life of Chinatown’s popula­ tion and places. Significantly, the only time the camera focuses on a woman, the imagery refers to sexuality and could also be a staged depic­tion of a ‘slave girl.’ The scene shows a woman in fine dress hiding her face behind a fan (see fig. 35). The camera slowly follows her body to her feet, constituting a fetishizing male gaze. This scene reverts to the sexualized representa­tion of Chinese women as passive and mysterious objects of desire and, within the context of the filmic tour, serves as a rare and illicit gaze at Chinatown’s hidden secrets. The second group contains scenes that show H. J. Lewis introducing or e­ xplaining something for the audience and thus actively ‘guiding’ it. We see Lewis holding up a newspaper in Chinese language and explaining with his fingers that Chinese text is read from top to bottom. Another scene shows Lewis cutting a vegetable in half and presenting it to the camera. He also holds up pieces of meat, thereby trying to familiarize the audience with Oriental food habits. One small segment, wherein Lewis investigates the catacombs of a building, impressively shows how

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Figure 36  H. J. Lewis walking in the catacombs. Screenshot from Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco (1912).

Lewis takes the viewer on an explora­tion of Chinatown space (see fig. 36). The camera’s posi­tion is outside on the street and the audience sees a brick wall. Large holes enable viewing into a dark area that seems to be the cellar of a building. The whole scene looks like a ruin after the earthquake and the run-­down building is surrounded by debris. The bright sunlight on the outside contrasts with the camera’s gaze into the hole through which we see Lewis walking in the shadows. There are contours of people sitting in the dark who greet him. The visuality of this scene is reminiscent of the depic­tions of depravity men­ tioned earlier in this chapter, and this semi-­underground tenement is the closest Lewis gets to showing his audience ‘underground Chinatown.’ The scene represents the impoverished and crime-­ridden part of Chinatown. Lewis invades this space not only with his camera but also in person by entering the catacombs. The scene consequently serves two aims. First, Lewis shows his audience the mythical, well-­known depravity and crime of Chinatown that at this point still forms an important part of touristic discourses of Chinatown. A reference to underground Chinatown is still obligatory for a detailed tour through the quarter, especially for the theater audience who can safely explore it while being far away from the ‘real’ Chinatown. Second, the scene reaffirms Lewis’s posi­tion as experienced guide and his profound knowledge of the hidden parts of Chinatown. It helps to establish his authority as a professional tourist guide both on and off the screen. While Lewis advertised his “Oriental Travelogue” as a realistic and authentic look into Chinatown, the visual style of his films and his method of produc­tion were largely based on a sensa­tionalist presenta­tion that constructed the objects of his camera as Other. A hint of his working method appeared in a newspaper article in the San Francisco Call, published in 1913 and only a few months after the paper had declared Lewis an “interesting person.” Under the headline “Arrest

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Drug Fiends Posing for Movies,” the short article stated: “While posing for a moving picture machine this morning, 20 drug fiends who had agreed to inject morphine into their bodies upon the promise of being given $1 cash and all the morphine necessary for the exhibi­tion, were arrested.”147 The article continued by explaining that deal was made by H. J. Lewis, who was filming on a vacant lot in Chinatown. Apparently, Lewis was not afraid to use all means necessary to obtain footage of the stereotypical dope fiends of the quarter. Instead of staging scenes for tourist groups, he used paid ‘actors’ for his cinematic travelogue. Despite the openly stereotypical and hierarchic visualiza­tion of Chinatown as foreign space, reviewers rated Lewis’s films as objective documenta­tion. In an article in the Moving Picture World called “Seeing San Francisco’s Chinatown,” the author reports that “Captain Lewis delivers an entertaining and instructive lecture, interjecting many anecdotes” of his year-­long experience as a guide.148 It continued by emphasizing how Lewis transferred the touristic experience to the film medium: “The produc­tion is really a personally conducted tour […]. Captain Lewis has endeavored to film the district so that the spectator of his picture sees just about what he would see if brought through the Oriental quarter of the coast city. Many of the scenes are instructive as well as interesting. The guide has screened several places of interest in Chinatown that he claims have never before been filmed. […] [He has] also secured scenes showing an aged Chinaman ­smoking opium – showing just how the drug is prepared for smoking, etc. There is nothing sensa­tional or offensive in the film.”149

Here, the text emphasizes the documentary impetus of the film. The reviewer’s asser­tion that there is “nothing sensa­tional” in the film indicates that this was a common assump­tion connected to depic­tions of Chinatown. The promo­tion for the film, however, specifically exploited its sensa­tional appeal and the prospect of exciting views. An advertisement from 1920 promised that the film exposed San Francisco’s “queer underworld” and continued: “You will see scenes and hear details which you would be unable to hear or see in Chinatown itself. Educa­ tional! Startling! Uplifting!”150

147 “Arrest Drug Fiends Posing for Movies,” San Francisco Call, October 16, 1913; see also “Paid Hop-­Heads to Pose,” Variety, October 24, 1913, 17. 148 “Seeing San Francisco’s Chinatown,” Moving Picture World, November 4, 1916, 679. 149 Ibid. 150 “Advertisement for ‘Seeing Chinatown,’” Fredonia Censor, October 27, 1920.

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Lewis’s shows were based on the same visual dispositif as Chinatown tourism, but they transferred it to a new setting of cinematic consump­tion. The screen, in the case of Lewis’s films, resembled a window the audience looks through and that followed a touristic desire. However, film added the important factor of distance from what it visualized, which, as I argue, reinforced the underlying processes of Othering. Physical contact and interac­tion between the gazed-­upon objects and people were no longer possible in the theater. The distance from the objects depicted on the screen consequently facilitated a more conscious differentia­ tion between the viewing subject and the images. The audience could always rest assured that they are de facto not on-­site but in most cases very far away from the real Chinatown the films depicted. In sum, two characteristics are important for Lewis’s visual presenta­tion of China­town. First, his film was seen as an adequate replacement for taking the tour in person. To a certain degree, film could now convey the impression of ‘being there’ and seeing the typical sights of the quarter. This impression corresponded to the visuality and mise-­en-­scène of the film, which reproduced the rela­tions between subject and object that also characterized the guided tours. Second, the film produced a specific visibility of Chinatown and Chinese Americans that was informed by the photographic tradi­tion and at the same time exceeded it. The camera produced a touristic gaze based on the illusion of the camera’s and the audience’s non-­involvement. It mixed the touristic experience with the documentary claim of objectively showing something without participating in it. This led to the impression that the film could show the audience more than they would see on an on-­site tour. The camera could both invade into seemingly every space and film people in their daily activities without them knowing they were performing for an audience. 2.2.4 Chinatown Films

At first glance, mo­tion pictures seem to func­tion differently than documentary films like H. J. Lewis’s Oriental travelogue. As I want to demonstrate, however, Chinatown films were part of the same touristic discourses and based on the same touristic gaze that I outlined above. Mo­tion pictures were an important factor in creating, reproducing, and transforming Chinatown as a touristic space. China­ town films reveal a visuality that reverted to tourism as well as the racialized discourses of space and Chinese American Otherness. In the 1920s, when the U. S. Chinatowns had moved away from vice and crime and increasingly gained touristic appeal through picturesque architecture and safety, mo­tion pictures contributed to

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upholding the legacy of the ‘old’ Chinatown.151 As a visual practice, the consump­ tion of Chinatown films resembled a touristic trip that reproduced the no­tion of Chinatown as a space of Oriental Otherness and exoticism. Moreover, a number of films aimed at achieving the effect of authenticity by directly referring to the fakeness of tourism and promising a view of Chinatown’s underworld that was only possible in cinema. Peter Stanfield offers an excellent account of Chinatown as cinematic space and why it mainly served as a setting for early films of the gangster movie genre.152 He argues that Chinatown’s connec­tion to crime in mo­tion pictures implicates both the crossing and containment of racial boundaries. Referring to a vast array of films and literary sources, he traces how Chinatown served as a “symbolic space”: “in America’s racially polyglot cities ‘Chinatown’ func­tioned as an imaginary place in which dominant cultural defini­tions of racial and ethnic difference could be produced, contained, and policed. Thus the loca­tion of ‘Chinatown’ needs to be examined more fully to understand it as a fabrica­tion; which will then enable an apprecia­tion of why the figure of the gangster is a common occurrence in this setting.”153

He concludes that the trope of the Chinatown gangster ultimately served to “rehearse and confirm norms of racial difference and identity using Chinatown […] and the Chinese […] to define that which constitutes received no­tions of 151 The late 1920s and 1930s saw a ‘boom’ of Chinatown mysteries and films otherwise connected to the quarter. Apart from the films discussed here and in the other chapters, see The Detec­ tress, dir. Bruno C. Becker and Gale Henry, perf. Gale Henry and Milburn Morante (United States: Bull’s Eye, 1919); Chinatown Charlie, dir. Charles Hines, perf. Johnny Hines and Louise ­Lorraine (United States: First Na­tional, 1928); The Law of the Tong, dir. Lew Collins, perf. Phyllis ­Barrington and John Harron (United States: Willis Kent, 1931); The Secret of Wu Sin, dir. Richard Thorpe, perf. Lois Wilson and Grant Withers (United States: Invincible Pictures, 1932); The Mysterious Mr. Wong, dir. William Nigh, perf. Bela Lugosi and Wallace Ford (United States: Monogram Pictures, 1934); Captured in Chinatown, dir. Elmer Clifton, perf. Marion Shilling and Charles Delaney (United States: Consolidated Pictures, 1935); Secrets of Chinatown, dir. Fred C. Newmeyer, perf. Raymond Lawrence, Nick Stuart, and Lucile Browne (United States and Canada: Commonwealth, 1935); I Cover Chinatown, dir. Norman Foster, perf. Norman Foster and Elaine Shepard (United States: Banner Pictures, 1936); Shadow of Chinatown, based on the serial of the same name, dir. Robert S. Hill, perf. Bela Lugosi, Herman Brix, and Luana Walters (United States: Victory Pictures, 1936); King of Chinatown, dir. Nick Grinde, perf. Anna May Wong and Akim Tamiroff (United States: Paramount, 1939). 152 Peter Stanfield, “‘American as Chop Suey’: Invoca­tions of Gangsters in Chinatown, 1920 – 1936,” in Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, ed. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 238 – 262. 153 Stanfield, “American As Chop Suey,” 257 (italics in the original).

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legitimate American culture.” In other words, the presence of a supposedly alien Chinese culture within the United States and its constructed connec­tion to crime served to demarcate the boundaries of a racially coded, legitimate concep­ tion of Americanness. It was this transgressive interplay of space and race that made Chinatown both a tourist destina­tion and an important setting for filmic narratives. Moreover, both tourism and film share a common history that can be traced back to the very beginnings of the film medium itself. In an insightful article, Sabine Haenni analyzes the interrela­tions of Chinatown slumming tours in New York and early films produced around 1900.154 Haenni outlines how the early 1900s saw the commodifica­tion of Chinatown slumming and how early Chinatown films “appropriated a form of urban spectatorship” informed by sightseeing and popular culture. Instead of pointing to the affirmative traits, Haenni highlights the transformative effects for urban, white, middle-­class subjectivities. “On Chinatown tours and in Chinatown films, white viewers and tourists could experience not a stable, hierarchical regime, but a regime predicated on fluidity and bodily transforma­ tions, as well as a fundamentally modern subjectivity not grounded in concepts of identifica­ tion or stable identity. […] [S]uch new ways of experiencing themselves and the city, I would suggest, ultimately allowed white Americans to negotiate – and be in control of – a racialized, urban modernity.”155

In sum, Haenni understands New York’s Chinatown of the early 1900s as a “kind of virtual reality in which they [white, middle-­class men and women; B. S.] could experience a variety of transforma­tions that remained absent from their everyday lives.”156 The commodifica­tion of Chinatown, which included its representa­tion and consump­tion through mo­tion pictures, accompanied and facilitated this allure. In order to provide an outlook on how later films departed from these early transformative features and on the “narrative crises” that emerged in the 1910s, Haenni also considers three films which starred Sessue Hayakawa: The Secret Sin (1915), The City of Dim Faces (1918) and The Tong Man (1919).157 According 154 Haenni, “Filming Chinatown,” 21 – 52. 155 Haenni, Immigrant Scene, 148. 156 Ibid., 184. 157 The Secret Sin and The City of Dim Faces are considered lost films. Haenni uses archival scripts for her analysis. The Secret Sin, dir. Frank Reicher, perf. Blanche Sweet, Hal Clements, and Sessue Hayakawa (United States: Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play, 1915); The City of Dim Faces, dir. George Melford, perf. Sessue Hayakawa and Doris Pawn (United States: Famous Players-­ Lasky, 1918).

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to Haenni, these films exemplify the contradictory posi­tion of Chinatown films from that era, as they oscillate between the sensa­tionalist approach of early cine­ma and newer trends of “producing a moral narrative that attempts to discipline and contain the enclave.”158 Films moved away from the transformative aspects of the quarter and instead based their narratives on the racial and spatial boundaries that delimited it. As a result, films like The Secret Sin (1915) and The City of Dim Faces (1918), which feature white female protagonists endangered by opium addic­ tion and so-­called miscegena­tion, simultaneously incorporate and condemn the pleasures of Chinatown. The aesthetic of fakeness is further circumvented by an increasing awareness of Asian American subjectivity. Referring to the star persona of Sessue Hayakawa and his efforts to fight stereotypical characteriza­tions, Haenni reads The Tong Man as an attempt to open new perspectives on Chinatown as racialized and commodified space; however – as Haenni concludes and as we will see later in this chapter –, these depic­tions ultimately revert to structures of hegemonic racial hierarchy. Haenni briefly touches on two important ideas in her analysis. First, she observes that early films modeled themselves after Chinatown slumming tours, especially since films at the time were more a series of scenes than a vehicle for a coherent narrative; they in turn resembled the ‘scenes’ of a bus tour. Second, to a certain degree, films aimed at preventing people from visiting Chinatown on-­site and at making them consume its filmic equivalent instead. Haenni claims that even when taking the transformative effects into account, “in everyday life racial and social hierarchies were maintained” and that “the anxieties surrounding the commodifica­ tion of Chinatown […] had everything to do with the fear that Chinatown was not just a virtual reality but an actually existing neighborhood.”159 As already hinted at, slumming and tourism ultimately served to establish boundaries and identities rather than do away with them. Haenni’s film analysis gives a useful genealogy of Chinatown films that one must take into account for the time period of this study, yet we have to keep in mind that the film medium underwent an important transforma­tion itself. These early one-­reelers had a fundamentally different aesthetic and visual language than the feature film that emerged in the 1910s. As Haenni already hinted at, these early films belong to the age of, as Tom Gunning termed it, the “cinema of attrac­ tion.”160 Apart from the lack of narrative, early films were based on an ‘exhibi­tionist’ 158 Haenni, Immigrant Scene, 170. 159 Ibid., 184. 160 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attrac­tion: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-­Garde,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3 – 4 (1986): 63 – 70.

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style. This exhibi­tionism openly played with the technique of filmmaking and its own mediality, not least because it was still a new form of visuality and not yet s­ tandardized. It therefore stands in diametrical opposi­tion to the voyeuristic style that Christian Metz attributed to mo­tion pictures.161 The film language that evolved with modern feature films offered a voyeuristic gaze with a focus on coherent narrative. These films conceal their own artificiality by making the audience secretly witness the ac­tions on the screen. This element, I would argue, is also important for the tourist gaze in Chinatown films. In the films relevant to my study, Chinatown fakery and theatricality is still important, but the films re-­ introduce effects of authenticity by concealing the very tourist gaze they constitute.

Looking Behind Chinatown’s “Placid Exterior” in ‘The Tong Man’ (1919)

The 1919 mo­tion picture The Tong Man starring the Japanese American actor Sessue Hayakawa reveals both how Chinatown was imagined and how its visualiza­tion was based on establishing a tourist gaze. Hayakawa plays a hatchet man called Luk Chan, who falls in love with Sen Chee (Helen Jerome Eddy). Sen Chee’s father is Louie Toy (Toyo Fujita), a wealthy Chinatown merchant who secretly deals with opium. The drama unfolds when Louie Toy refuses to pay protec­tion money to the Bo Sing tong. The tong’s leader Ming Tai (Marc Robbins), who desires the merchant’s daughter, wants to punish Toy’s disobedience. He orders hatchet man Luk Chan to kill Louie Toy, making him murder the father of the woman he fell in love with. The film’s perspective on Chinatown’s underworld, which is almost devoid of white characters, offers its audiences a profound look into the hidden locales and secret activities commonly associated with the quarter. The film’s depic­tion of Chinatown space and Chinese American characters plays an important role in Ruth Mayer’s concept of ornamentaliza­tion.162 As a starting point, Mayer observes that the Chinese antique and curio shops as well as the fi ­ gure of the Chinese merchant play a crucial role in early silent film. She highlights “the func­tion of commercial sites and scenarios of consump­tion in the Chinatown film, the func­tion of themes, that is, that are less fraught with immediately negative associa­tions.”163 Again, Chinatown appears as a space of 161 See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 162 Ruth Mayer, “The Glittering Machine of Modernity: The Chinatown in American Silent Film,” Modernism/Modernity 16, no. 4 (2009): 661 – 684. 163 Ibid., 662.

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transforma­tions, but in Mayer’s view, these transforma­tions concern the rela­tion of subjects and objects that she describes through the concept of ornamentaliza­ tion.164 In this respect, the term refers both to the “hieroglyphs” and decor found in Chinatown and to the wider field of modern culture’s embrace of sensual stimula­tion, commodifica­tion, and decadence. Mayer, however, is less interested in objectifica­tion as such than in filmic depic­tions of Chinatown where “things and people merge into a­ mbiguous arrangements, with people being displayed like things and things taking a considerable degree of agency.”165 In her view, this qua­ lity makes Chinatown a nexus for the media­tions of modernity, where stereotypes “are not consolidated and cemented, but rather juggled around.”166 The interplay of different levels of meaning and visibility will also play a crucial role in my reading of Chinatown films. Films like The Tong Man, according to Mayer, actively play with processes of ornamentaliza­tion on the intradiegetic level and the audience’s ability to “look behind the curtain.”167 By offering the audiences a way to read and interpret the meanings beyond the ornamental surface, the films present themselves as a genuinely modern medium. While the processes Mayer men­tions are certainly important elements in understanding the early twentieth century and decidedly ‘modern’ popular culture, her analysis focuses mainly on the medium itself. In other words, if Chinatown films emphasize the medium’s modernity, then, as I argue, the mode of their visuality and consump­tion adopts the genuinely modern pastime of a touristic trip. My reading connects these films to the historical and cultural underpinnings I have laid out in the preceding sec­tions. The Tong Man opens with a scene that directly connects Chinatown to ­no­tions of crime and lawlessness, situating the audience in the middle of it. The opening shows a street scene at night, which the intertitle locates “[i]n the heart of China­ town.” The audience witnesses a stranger walking down a near-­deserted street. Moments later, the man is approached from behind by another male, who shoots him in the back and runs away (see fig. 37). As the shot man sinks to the ground, we see a police officer running to the crime scene from the other end of the street. After halting briefly at the victim, he starts chasing the assassin and runs out of the picture. This opening scene introduces Chinatown as a dangerous space where people are shot on the street. While the prompt appearance of the officer implies the quarter is also a policed space, the audience soon learns that the police have essentially no control over it. 164 Ibid., 663. 165 Ibid., 664. 166 Ibid., 681. 167 Ibid., 678.

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Figure 37  Chinatown street scene. Screenshot from The Tong Man (Haworth Pictures, 1919).

The scenes that follow provide further insight into the “heart” of Chinatown by depicting two crucial places in its underworld. First, the audience witnesses a ­meeting of the Bo Sing tong, which the intertitle describes as “the most powerful and dreaded of Chinatown’s secret societies; dealing in blackmail and assassina­tion.” The meeting takes place in a large, ornamented room with lampions and Chinese artifacts. The tong’s head, Ming Tai, stands in front of a shrine-­like object as he speaks to the others. The main topic of the meeting is Louie Toy’s refusal to pay protec­tion money to the tong, as a consequence of which the society decides to hold a “blood-­call” and discuss further measures against him. The room, therefore, marks the space of Chinatown’s own legislative body. As in contemporary concep­tions of the tong system, the Bo Sing tong decides over the life and death of its enemies; thus, the ornaments of the room refer not only to its Orientalness but also to its status of being outside of the U. S. governmental system and jurisdic­ tion. In the course of the film, the importance of this room is further emphasized. The second space the films shows in its opening scenes is introduced as “Ming Tai’s gambling and ‘hop’ joint, operating under the imposing title ‘The Royal Pekin Club’ [sic].” The implied discrepancy between the title and the club’s real purpose refers to the dichotomy between Chinatown’s internal structure of fake facades on the one hand and real backrooms on the other. While the name upholds the idea of a legitimate business, the vicious activity that actually takes place inside would possibly remain unknown or invisible to outsiders. The scene opens in a simple, smoke-­filled room packed with tables. At these gambling tables, we see Chinese Americans in plain working-­class clothes smoking long pipes (see fig. 38). Reinforcing the hidden and exclusive character of the establishment, the door is locked from the inside with a large bar and secured with a peephole. The staff opens the door to let in Luk Chan, “highbinder and opium smuggler: the Bo Sing Tong’s most feared hatchet-­man.” Chan enters the room confidently and with a cigarette pressed between his lips. When he posi­tions himself in the middle of

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Figure 38  “The Royal Pekin Club.” Screenshot from The Tong Man (Haworth Pictures, 1919).

the room and looks around, the intimidating effect of his presence on the men at the tables become evident as everyone evades his gaze and looks down. The tension rises when Chan grabs his hatchet and throws it at an old man sleeping in a corner. The hatchet lands just inches away from the man’s head and consequently makes him wake up in shock.168 Chan laughs and claps the man on his shoulder, indicating that the throw was meant as a joke. While this act relieves the tension of the situa­tion and shows Chan in a more sympathetic light, he remains in control of the situa­tion, as becomes apparent when he orders the shocked men at the tables to stop gaping and go on with their business. The two spaces, the tong headquarters and the opium joint, introduce the audience to Chinatown in the first few minutes and set the atmosphere for the entire film. The scenes convey the impression that spectators receive a realistic view of Chinatown’s ‘Inner Circle’ and the day-­to-­day activities that take place behind closed doors. The film’s depic­tion of Chinatown was in fact controversial at the time of the film’s release in 1919, not least because it was produced by Sessue Hayakawa’s own produc­tion company Haworth Pictures. As Daisuke Miyao chronicles in her comprehensive book on Hayakawa’s stardom, white critics praised The Tong Man while it caused uproar in Chinese communities.169 Chinese Americans protested the sensa­tionalist and stereotypical portrayal of Chinatown and its focus on vice 168 This scene and the realistic effect of the hatchet landing next to the man’s head apparently was shocking to contemporary audiences, as this review shows: “Knives are thrown by skillful hands and a hatchet lands most realistically athwart the face of a belligerent, causing mere onlookers to have a momentary impression that they have witnessed a hideous accident and have felt on their cringing flesh the splash of warm blood.” “Review of ‘The Tong Man,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1919. The term “onlookers” in this case applies to the spectators in the theater as well. 169 See Daisuke Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transna­tional Stardom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 180.

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and crime. The film’s approach also contradicted Hayakawa’s own criticism of exactly those Orientalist representa­tions in mo­tion pictures that had motivated him to create his own produc­tion company. Miyao discerns, however, that by 1919 ­Hayakawa was not in complete control of Haworth Pictures anymore because of its distribu­tion company Robertson-­Cole’s rise in influence. This financial development led to a phase of “re-­orientaliza­tion” for Hayakawa and a return to the more popular stereotypical roles.170 Critics of the film nonetheless applauded the film’s artistic and realistic portrayal of the quarter and Hayakawa’s authentic depic­tion of a Chinese American.171 That the film was judged so differently speaks volumes for the racialized expecta­tions that white audiences had of Chinatown. As Miyao puts it, “the controversy over The Tong Man reveals the film’s Orientalist traits that looked ‘realistic’ only to American audiences.”172 The film, therefore, must be understood as an articula­tion of tourist discourses that still strongly shaped popular concep­tions of the quarter. While The Tong Man certainly offers a more complex perspective on Chinatown than the vast majority of earlier films, its structuring of space is connected to a specific form of tourist gaze that is indicative of late 1910s’ and 1920s’ discourse. The film portrays Chinatown as socially more complex than most other films, a claim supported by its sole focus on Chinese Americans. Haenni illustrates how the film’s portrayal of private space, such as Sen Chee’s room, exemplifies this attribute. Through this perspective, it “open[s] a space for Chinese subjectivity.”173 In the end, however, the narrative cannot sustain this subjectivity, making the film “sacrifice both Chinatown and its characters’ ability to become modern urba­nites.”174 The film ultimately introduces complexity but falls back into an Orientalist logic of Chinatown as premodern crime-­ridden space. This reversion is due to the film’s general spatializa­tion of Chinatown and its connec­tion to the tourist gaze. The film continues to establish its narrative and visual style through depic­tions of Chinatown backrooms. The film’s loca­tion is clearly contrasted to the pictu­ resque Chinatown tourists normally were able to see. As the intertitle after the opium joint scene indicates, “[b]y day Chinatown’s placid exterior sleepily cloaks its wiles and intrigues.” The text is followed by a shot of an almost empty street in Chinatown by day. Next, we see the decorated facade of the Canton Bazaar, with Louie Toy standing in the door and saying goodbye to a customer. The following 170 Ibid., 168 – 194. See also Haenni, Immigrant Scene, 179. 171 Haenni, Immigrant Scene, 179 – 180. 172 Ibid., 180. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid., 182.

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scene contrasts this by showing a young man named Lucero, who, according to the intertitle, is “a Lascar sailor ashore from a long voyage,” in front of a building entrance arguing with a group of white men. He accuses them of gambling with crooked dice and having stolen his money this way. The men push him away and are about to leave when Lucero grabs a knife and throws it at one of the men’s back, killing him in broad daylight. Again, there are police officers nearby, and they start to chase Lucero through Chinatown. A few moments later, he passes Louie Toy’s bazaar and runs inside to ask for help. Toy reacts quickly and hides him behind the counter. Toy then posi­tions himself in the entrance and diverts the chasing policemen by stating: “Him lun up Dupont, down Saclamento; you no like stop dlinkee tea?” His use of the broken English that was commonly attri­ buted to Chinese Americans and widespread in popular culture significantly adds to his disguise as innocent merchant. In fact, Louie Toy plays the role of the typi­ cal Chinese immigrant that the officer obviously believes him to be, as he skips further conversa­tion and runs in the pointed direc­tion. The police’s ignorance of Louie Toy’s involvement in the underworld of Chinatown bespeaks their powerlessness due to their lack of ‘inside knowledge’ of the quarter’s criminal network that is literally hidden behind the facade of the curio shop. This scene points to a form of Chinese American agency, since playing the ­stereotypical role of a Chinese American could also be a good way to sell artifacts to tourists; but within the logic of the film, it instead reveals no­tions of Oriental two-­facedness. Louie Toy, as the audience knows, is involved in opium smuggling. The next scene reinforces his criminal background: Sun Chee advises her father to keep Lucero under his protec­tion, asking, “Father, would you give this poor creature to the police, your enemies?” Toy agrees and thus Lucero becomes an important character in the further development of the plot. The scene as a whole serves to contrast the “placid exterior” of Chinatown, symbolized by the curio shop’s front stage and embodied in Louie Toy’s acting as Chinese merchant, to the interior of Chinatown visualized in the beginning of the film. The film allows its audience to gaze into the hidden backrooms of Chinatown – that is, the supposedly authentic space that tourists seek but normally fail to see, much like the ignorant police officers do. Several times during the film, the police’s lack of knowledge of both Chinatown’s space and its inhabitants stands in stark contrast to the audience’s abili­ty to witness the actual incidents that take place. After Luk Chan refuses to kill Sun Chee’s father, he is on the death list of the Bo Sing tong. Followed and attacked on the street, Chan escapes his assassins by climbing up the exterior stairs of a building. Here, the police officers who have seen him assaulting the other tong members follow him. A spectacular chase on the quarter’s rooftops

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follows, with the characteristic pagodas of San Francisco’s Chinatown visible in the background. The chase results in Luk Chan shooting an officer and once again contrasts the visuality of Chinatown as touristic space with acts of crime and murder. Luk Chan eventually reaches the conference room of the Bo Sing tong, seen in the beginning of the film, and hides inside the dragon statue. The officers are puzzled by his disappearance but do not investigate the statue closely enough. The dragon had played a crucial role earlier, when the tong members had voted over Louie Toy’s fate. In this ritual, the dragon’s eyes began to glow and it released a “divine token”, ordering the tong to kill Toy. The dragon therefore holds a mystical posi­tion and reveals the tong’s connec­tion to supersti­tion. It can be read as symbol of the anti-­modernism and cultural Otherness of the secret Chinese Bo Sing society. Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that the dragon as an artifact of Chinese mysticism is ‘out of reach’ for the Occidental gaze, as personified by the police. Luk Chan later uses the dragon a second time to hide himself and Sen Chee from Ming Tai, but in this scene, which is also the climax of the film, Ming Tai is not fooled by the maneuver. He approaches the dragon and is about to expose the two, but right at this moment Lucero appears and shoots Ming Tai from behind. This time the dragon serves to prepare the love couple, Luk Chan and Sun Chee, for the film’s narrative closure, which involves their return (or flight) to China. The dragon as a symbol for Orientalness signifies the protagonists’ transforma­ tion into Chinese. The very last scene of the film shows the silhouettes of Chan and Chee aboard a ship to China, an implica­tion which is crucial for the concep­tion of Chinatown space as a whole. Early in the film, Luk Chan confides in Sun Chee that he wants to leave for China with her; there, he says, he will “no longer be Luk Chan, tong-­man and outcast, but a merchant prince.” As Miyao has pointed out, the couple differs from the rest of Chinatown’s inhabitants in their American-­influenced costumes and white make-­up.175 The fact that the happy ending of the film is only possible through their return to China underscores their displacement. As Haenni states, the ending constructs Chinatown as a “nonreproductive space, a fact that presumably was reassuring to (paranoid) white spectators and unsettling for Chinese

175 Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa, 182. In contrast to the other Chinese tong members, Luk Chan is often seen with hats and clothing that refer to the cinematic representa­tion of an American gangster. He also wears white makeup, which distinguishes him from the rather dark faces of the other protagonists. Mayer describes Sun Chee’s costumes as “a mix between orientalism and chic new womanhood,” giving the impression of a Chinese flapper. See Mayer, “Glittering Machine,” 674.

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spectators.”176 While I agree that the romantic couple of the film is distinguished visually and morally from Chinatown’s underworld, there are several reasons why the film’s ending can be read as a result of Luk Chan’s deep involvement in criminal activity. First, he wants to finance his voyage by selling a large amount of opium. Second, he shoots police officers and therefore would be a fugitive of criminal prosecu­tion as soon as he leaves Chinatown’s own jurisdic­tion. While Luk Chan was an assassin and therefore must have committed murders before, the killing of policemen could mean that he crossed the line of internal affairs within the tongs. Finally, Luk Chan’s betrayal causes the death of the tong’s leader and as a consequence makes him lose every source of support within Chinatown’s secret societies. He has thus, at the end of the film, become a fugitive of jurisdic­tion and an outcast both inside and outside Chinatown. The film, therefore, denies him the op­tion of leaving Chinatown’s criminal underworld and leading a lawful life outside its boundaries. Growing up in Chinatown in this sense means either making a criminal career or returning to China; either way, Chinese Americans have no place in U. S. society besides Chinatown. To spectators, the film both offers a touristically motivated look into Chinatown’s ‘authentic’ underworld and reinforces the no­tion of Chinese American containment, along with the spatial dichotomy that constitutes Chinatown as Other space.

Tourism and Authenticity in ‘A Tale of Two Worlds’ (1921)

While The Tong Man only implicitly contrasts the “placid exterior” of Chinatown to the criminal activity of its underworld – that is, the touristic facade – from its supposedly authentic backrooms, the 1921 mo­tion picture A Tale of Two Worlds explicitly refers to the tourist gaze to locate and legitimize its narrative. It highlights prevalent tendencies in mo­tion pictures from this period to acknowledge Chinatown’s status as a fake tourist attrac­tion on the one hand and continues to ‘authenticize’ the films’ depic­tions of crime and vice on the other. Many mo­tion pictures of the 1920s oscillate between these two poles and refer to the former to legitimize the latter. A Tale of Two Worlds was directed by Frank Lloyd for Goldwyn Pictures and stars Leatrice Joy. The film opens with a prologue that shows China during the Boxer Rebellion. The audience witnesses how a family of white American merchants gives their child to the family’s servant, Ah Wing (E. Alyn Warren), to

176 Haenni, Immigrant Scene, 182.

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protect it from the revolting Boxers. Moments later the Boxers invade the house and kill the child’s parents. The servant takes the child to a U. S. Chinatown and raises her under the name Sui Sen. Growing up under Ah Wing’s protec­tion, Sui Sen (Leatrice Joy) believes that she, too, is Chinese. The drama unfolds when Sui Sen is forced to marry the film’s antagonist, the underworld boss Ling Jo (­Wallace Beery), while she secretly has fallen in love with the white American Robert ­Newcombe ( J. Frank Gledon). In the end, Ling Jo is defeated and Sui Sen learns that she is white, a revela­tion that enables the forma­tion of the white love couple and thus the film’s happy ending. The film’s use of Chinatown as its setting is crucial on several levels of its visual consump­tion. As men­tioned in the introduc­tion to this chapter, Chinese artifacts serving as lobby decora­tions helped to advertise the film, blurring the boundary between the outside world and the inside of the theater. Addi­tionally, there are reports that the film’s presenta­tion in New York’s large movie palaces – owned by influential theatrical impresario S. L. Rothafel – included a special interlude. 177 The temporal and spatial shift from Peking and the Boxer Rebellion to present-­day United States that marks the transi­tion from prologue to the actual plot served as an opportunity to stop the film’s presenta­tion and insert a short extra-­filmic show element. As Rothafel describes, the film faded out and the screen moved up, “revealing a stage setting of a balcony in Chinatown. A girl singer, costumed like Leatrice Joy as ‘Sui Sen’ in the picture, then sang the Chinese lullaby from ‘East is West.’ The setting was in the centre of the stage, masked by a scrim decorated with long Chinese banners, and the singer was flooded with mellow lights.”178

The interlude fulfilled two func­tions. First, it referred to the popular Broadway play East Is West by Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer, which also dealt with the subject of a white girl brought from China to the United States, believing to be Chinese.179 Robert Hood Bowers’s “Chinese Lullaby” was probably well 177 This is men­tioned in Photoplay’s review of the film. See “Review of A Tale of Two Worlds,” Photoplay, June 1921, 53. See also the promo­tional text by Rothafel himself, S. L. Rothafel, “How I Presented ‘A Tale of Two Worlds,’” Wid’s Daily, April 3, 1921, 22. Rothafel was an important film exhibitor and highly influential for the style of silent film presenta­tions. The mode of presenta­tion is still an understudied aspect of the cultural history of silent cinema. See Ross Melnick, American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Enter­ tainment Industry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 178 Rothafel, “How I Presented,” 22. 179 The popular play was adapted as mo­tion picture twice in the years to follow, 1922 and 1930. See chapter 3.

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known to large parts of the New York audience. By making the connec­tion to the play, the audience could familiarize itself with the basic plot A Tale of Two Worlds. Second, the replica of a Chinatown balcony signaled the change of loca­ tion that followed the interlude. In fact, this interlude shows that Chinese artifacts and Chinatown set pieces were used not only outside the theater and on the screen, but also behind the screen inside the theater, addi­tionally erasing the boundaries between the Chinatown on and off the screen. The film’s setting further emphasizes this effect, for it is itself only a replica of a Chinatown. While the intertitles do not explicitly locate the narrative in San Francisco, the scenery of the film clearly represents the city’s famous Chinatown. The press book of the film also hints at this inference, stating that “a reproduc­tion of a street in the Chinese sec­tion of San Francisco was needed” for the produc­tion of the film and that the set included “the construc­tion of a Chinese street two blocks in length, with overhanging balconies on the houses, shops decorated with lanterns, Tong signs, and fish stores […].”180 In this way, the Chinatowns both on and behind the screen were mere copies of an idealized concep­tion of San Francisco’s quarter. Since even the ‘original’ China­town in San Francisco was from a touristic viewpoint connected to aspects of fakeness and staging, the film added a meta-­level of fakeness by using a replica of a tourist attrac­tion for a film that actively played with the touristic gaze. ­Following MacCannell’s thoughts on authenticity, the set used in the filming of A Tale of Two Worlds becomes virtually undistinguishable from the ‘stage set’ that tourists would find on-­site in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Since both sets are requisites for the performance of staged authenticity, the former is no less authentic than the latter; however, the film re-­authenticizes the cinematic Chinatown through its strategies of Othering. This development will become clearer when we turn to early scenes of the film that introduce Chinatown. The film depicts San Francisco’s Chinatown as a thoroughly touristic space. After the intertitle explains that the following scenes take place in a “Chinatown in a large Western American city many years later,” the audience looks down a crowded street that fits the descrip­tions of the Oriental quarter in the press book. After a few opening shots, we see a group of people following a tourist guide down the street and in the direc­tion of the camera (see fig. 39). The group has a visibly white upper-­class appearance and follows the guide closely. The guide points out exciting facts, indicating a house where “[f ]ive murders were committed […] in one night.” 180 Press book for A Tale of Two Worlds (New York: Goldwyn Pictures, 1921), 4. Copyright Collec­tion, Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Chinatown as Tourist Space  |

Figure 39 (left)  Chinatown guide and tourist group. Screenshot from A Tale of Two Worlds (­Goldwyn Pictures, 1921). Figure 40 (right)  Chinatown tourists. Screenshot from A Tale of Two Worlds (Goldwyn Pictures, 1921).

The camera focuses on two young women in the group who are clearly intrigued and fascinated by the guide’s revela­tions. Next, the tourists pass a group of men, comprised of Chinese American workers and a white man whom the guide labels as “dope fiend.” Shocked by this informa­tion, the two women fall behind the rest of the group to stare blatantly at the man (see fig. 40). The reverse-­shot shows the man coughing, which increases the women’s excitement even more until they finally run away to catch up with the group. The film’s focus on the two women points to the gendered quality of slumming and tourism. Not only does the film represent tourists as typically white and upper class, it also refers to discourses of female fascina­tion and white slavery scare that were connected to Chinatown slumming men­tioned earlier in this chapter. The women’s attrac­tion to the thrills of the sightseeing tour is clearly larger than for the rest of the group and hints at the possibilities of social transgression that appealed especially to women. On the other hand, their shocked faces can also be seen as an expression of the dangers that contemporary discourse articulated in regard to female slumming – that is, dangers of social depravity, drug addic­tion, and miscegena­tion for white woman­ hood. The film, however, uses a twist to point to the fakeness of Chinatown tou­ rism: after the women leave, the audience sees that the alleged dope fiend was just acting as one. The audience sees him and the other men around him laughing about the credulity of the women; thus, the audience in the theater learns about the fake show that the tourists are made to believe. While the film informs the audience about the staged authenticity of tourism early on, its own strategy of dealing with the ‘real’ backrooms of Chinatown becomes obvious shortly afterward. The very next scene opens with the intertitle: “But no mere tourist will ever see the real life of Chinatown,” followed by a short shot showing a policeman patrolling the sidewalk of a dark alley. The camera shows him

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striding in front of a door in a brick wall. This shot can be read as a visualiza­tion of the boundary-­crossing from the touristic sphere to the authentic backrooms. The calmly walking officer symbolizes the police’s ignorance of what is apparently happening behind that door. The camera, however, is able to cross this line of visibility and promises the audience a look into the intrigues behind that door which even the police do not know about. Accordingly, the next shot opens inside a room that, as the audience is made to believe, lies behind the officer and the brick wall. Inside, we see three Chinese in Oriental attire sitting at a table and smoking pipes. As the audience learns, the man in the middle is Ling Jo, who was responsible for the death of Sui Sen’s family back in China and who now is “a gambler, a tong leader and a slave dealer.” A few moments later, the intertitle announces “Pretty girls for sale” to let the audience know a slave auc­tion is about to begin. Ling Jo’s servant brings in a group of Chinese women in fine Oriental dress who line up in front of the men. This scene not only serves to introduce the film’s villain, Jing Lo, but also to differentiate the touristic sphere of Chinatown from the authentic criminal underworld. By portraying the tourists ironically in the beginning, the film acknowledges the exis­ tence of Chinatown’s fake status. In a second step, however, the camera’s intrusion of the backrooms gives the audience the impression that not everything is in fact fake. The camera in this case follows the touristic desire to witness the ‘real’ Chinatown. This, as it turns out, is not possible by merely following a tourist guide but only by the semi-­documentary experience that mo­tion pictures offer to their audiences. The film’s structuring and racializa­tion of Chinatown space becomes even more apparent when we take into account the portrayal of the protagonist, Robert Newcomb. Introduced as a “student of Chinese literature and art,” Newcomb is portrayed as a white expert of Chinatown with an upper-­class family background. From a spatial perspective, his home stands in stark contrast to the implicated dangers of Chinatown. Newcomb’s caring mother, who worries constantly about her son, symbolizes this protected and safe space. The first time she appears in the film, Newcomb brings home a Chinese book. When she sees it, she visibly sighs, rolls her eyes and confesses: “I hate having you spend so much time in Chinatown.” Her aversion to the quarter can be read both from a racial and class perspective. Chinatown as a space marked by Chinese alienness and lower class inhabitants, depravi­ty, and vice is in her view not the right place for someone coming from a white upper-­class home. When Newcomb comes home the next time, he explains: “I’ve got Chinatown on the brain. The place and the people fascinate me.” He thereby refers indirectly to discourses that connect Chinatown to the subjects of addic­tion and ‘becoming Chinese’ as a threat to white men and women. A ­ ccordingly, his mother reacts by kneeling down beside her sitting son and touching his arm with both hands, a gesture which suggests nursing and comforting.

Chinatown as Tourist Space  |

Newcomb’s fascina­tion with Chinatown exemplifies a contemporary Orientalist subject posi­tion. Following Edward Said’s thoughts on Orientalism, Newcombe’s privileged posi­tion and academic background make him an expert in Chinese culture and posi­tion him within the field of Orientalist knowledge. His visits to Chinatown resemble scientific explora­tions into foreign space, driven by a scien­ tific interest that ultimately constitutes Chinatown as Other space. If we take into account the gendering of ‘the Orient’ as passive, feminine, and sexualized, it is no surprise that Newcomb falls in love with Sui Sen, whom he at this point believes to be Chinese.181 While the further progression of the narrative justifies his mother’s concerns about the dangers of Chinatown, it also averts the racial implica­tions by revealing Sen’s whiteness. Newcomb’s educa­tion and Orientalist knowledge also distinguish him from white Chinatown tourists and keep him from falling for the fake tourist show. In the beginning of the film we see him enter Ah Wing’s curio store, where he meets a young Chinese American man called “The Worm” (Yutaka Abe, known to audiences as Jack Abbe, who also played Lucero in The Tong Man), who is “the servant of Ah Wing and Sui Sen’s slave.” The Worm carries a Chinese book, and when he sees Newcomb, he tries to sell it to him: “That is a very old book – maybe worth a hundred dollars.” Newcomb understands this is a trick and exposes him by offering one dollar for it instead. The two men laugh, make the deal, and, in the further course of the film, become friends. There is a second occasion when the audience sees The Worm trying to trick tourists. When Newcomb meets him again in the shop, he is working on an “antique bowl.” Newcomb nonchalantly answers: “When it gets to be a thousand years old, let me see it.” A few scenes later, however, The Worm succeeds in selling the allegedly antique bowl to a couple of wealthy tourists by stating: “It was the favorite bowl of the great-­grand-­mother of the Emperor Chi Yang, and is now a thousand years old.” The upper-­class woman buys it for a hundred dollars without hesita­tion. While this episode not only demonstrates how authenticity is created through credible make-­believe and the ignorance of tourists, it also shows the agency of Chinese Americans within the tourist industry. The Worm exploits the tourists’ concepts about China and Chinatown by telling them what they expect to hear. The upper-­class couple is visibly fascinated by seemingly Oriental artifacts and – through their class and racial posi­tion – able to take possession of the Orient. Chinatown merchants like

181 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr., London: Penguin Books, 2003). 206 – 208; Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 73 – 74.

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The Worm, however, are in the empowered posi­tion to make objects (and space) appear authentic by actively playing with the tourists’ concep­tions of Orientalism. The film crosses its own demarca­tion between the touristic and the authentic sphere in the further development of the plot. Ultimately even Newcomb (and with him the audience of the film) has to face the fact that the dangers of Chinatown’s underworld are real. Jing Lo has funded explora­tions to China to find an antique scepter of the Mings. Due to the unlikelihood that this scepter will ever be found, Ah Wing has promised Jing Lo that if he finds it, he can marry Sui Sen. To Ah Wing’s misfortune, one of Jing Lo’s emissaries returns from China with exactly that scepter in his hands. Jing Lo displays his gratitude by giving the emissary his money, while at the same time locking him up. The next shots reveal the man trapped inside a torture room, where the ceiling can be lowered. Jing Lo gives orders to crank the mechanism and commands the musicians in his main room to play music until the man is dead. This torture room is indeed a common feature in literature and mo­tion pictures of the early twentieth century and finds its most extreme form in the Fu Manchu films of the late 1920s and 1930s. It coincides with depic­tions of the stereotypical Oriental villain as a devil doctor or mad scientist.182 The Fu Manchu films of the late 1920s and early 1930s massively drew from the discursive connec­tion between Oriental evilness and the use of secret walls, trap doors, and peepholes as well as hypnosis, poison, and torture techniques. In A Tale of Two Worlds, the torture room represents the ultimate backroom of Chinatown, an authentic spatial arrangement of the Chinatown underworld. The film depicts touristic sights and events like the Chinese New Year’s Parade and the ceremony for the (forced and ultimately averted) marriage of Sui Sen and Jing Lo, offering its audience the glimpse into popular rituals connected to Chinese culture. But the visualiza­tion and spatializa­tion of Chinatown here only func­tions to legitimize the depic­tion of the secret torture room. Towards the end of the film, Newcomb finds himself trapped in exactly that room, while Jing Lo is starting his wedding ceremony with Sui Sen. Newcomb escapes with the help of The Worm and manages to lock Jing Lo up instead, a turn of events that marks the end of the film. It is ques­tionable whether the audience in the theater believed the room to be a realistic feature. Rather, the spatial arrangement of a secret room with a moveable ceiling was playing with (or exploiting) the connec­tion between 182 See, for instance, Ruth Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014); Tina Chen, “­Dissecting the ‘Devil Doctor’: Stereotype and Sensa­tionalism in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu,” in Re/Col­ lecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Josephine D. Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 218 – 237.

Chinatown as Tourist Space  |

Chinatown and Chinese mysteriousness and the cultural and spatial unknown. Within the narrative of the film, however, the secret backrooms of Chinatown became authentic on several levels. First, the ironic portrayal of Chinatown tourism distances it from the film’s own depic­tion and disguises its own tourist gaze. The above-­men­tioned authentic rituals like Chinese New Year reinforce this effect. Second, Newcomb – a white student of Chinese culture who usually sees through the touristic facade of Chinatown – becomes a victim of its underworld. His perspective and knowledge resemble that of the audience in the cinema. His capture therefore signifies the breaking in of the ‘real’ Chinatown and serves to render crime and vice as authentic. From a spatial perspective, the film takes the sensa­tionalist and mythical vice aspects of Chinatown discourse and locates them in an allegedly authentic backroom that is marked as non-­touristic, although the film arguably satisfies the touristic gaze of the audience in the theater.

“All of Chinatown is a Fake”: ‘Chinatown Nights’ (1929)

Chinatown Nights from 1929 exemplifies the connec­tions between Chinatown, tourism, and mo­tion pictures explicitly and in doing so also points to the transforma­tions that took place in the late 1920s. In fact, the film was promoted as a unique glimpse into the secrets of Chinatown. The press book of the film stressed its touristic appeal by stating: “Chinatown Nights reveals secrets, [sic] millions of visitors to the large cities of the United States seek in the ‘planned’ sightseeing tours of the luring Chinatown districts. The opium dens, the secret passages, the sacred joss houses and the hidden meeting places of the powerful tong leaders play an important part in the picture.”183

Again, the consump­tion of the mo­tion picture was compared to an actual visit to Chinatown, an approach that also dominated the film posters. These advertised with the tagline: “Where East Meets West the Thrills Begin! Take a trip through the mysterious American Orient.”184 While the expression “American Orient” points to the presence of the cultural Other on American territory, the word “trip” here refers to the partial departure from U. S. culture that was associated 183 Press book for Chinatown Nights (n. p.: Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929), 1. Copyright Collec­ tion, Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 184 Ibid.

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with Chinatown tourism. This percep­tion becomes even more apparent when we look at the promo­tional advice given to exhibitors in the press book. Titled the “Ballyhoo Stunt,” Paramount Films suggested the following: “Locate a good ‘barker’ in your city, arrange the loan of a large automobile bus and exploit ‘China­town Nights’ as a trip through the ‘mystic, mysterious land of the Orient […].’ Supply the barker with a megaphone and have him try to sell free trips through Chinatown to anyone who will ride in the bus. If a few people accept the offer at one corner, the bus should move along to another, the ‘barker’ talking in the manner of a sightseers’ guide during the ride. When the bus is nearly full, the bus should proceed to your theatre and deposit its passengers.”185

It remains unknown if exhibitors used this strategy for their promo­tion, but considering the sensa­tionalist advertisements men­tioned above, it is not unlikely that it was at least partially realized.186 Further augmenting the touristic appeal of the film, the press material claimed Samuel Ornitz, the author of the original novel Tong War, was “recognized as one of the greatest living authorities on Chinese life” in the U. S.187 By stating his expertness in Chinese culture, the filmic ‘trip’ gained a higher level of authenticity. Accordingly, Ornitz did not only represent an authori­ty in the field of Chinese customs; he also fulfilled the abstract role of a guide that ensured a look into the ‘real’ Chinatown. The film’s connec­tion to tourism, however, goes even further: it also actively makes tourism a subject of the narrative. Chinatown Nights tells the story of the white, upper-­class woman Joan Fry (­Florence Vidor), who falls in love with Chuck Riley (Wallace Beery), a white China­town underworld boss. Both ques­tion the resulting rela­tionship, because of their different backgrounds. Addi­tionally, Riley is in the middle of a tong war against his rival Boston Charley (Warner Oland), leader of the Hip Sing tong. When Joan tries to end the conflict by convincing Riley to give up his criminal enterprise, he breaks up with her. Since Joan had given up her ‘uptown’ life for Riley, she wanders Chinatown as a homeless woman. In the end, Boston Charley abducts Joan while she is intoxicated and throws her out of his car in front of Riley’s house.188 Seeing 185 Ibid., 4. For a similar sugges­tion to use a Chinatown bus, see press book for The Hatchet Man (n. p.: First Na­tional & Vitaphone, 1932), 3. Mo­tion Picture Stills, Posters and Paper Collec­ tion, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. 186 There is, however, a report of one theater in Jacksonville, Florida, using a “Chinese ricksha [sic] […] being pulled by a boy garbed in a Chinese costume and wearing a sign on his back announcing the attrac­tion.” “Chinatown Nights,” Film Daily, July 31, 1929), 10. 187 Press book for Chinatown Nights, 3. 188 Peter Stanfield, who men­tions the film briefly in his article, reads this kidnapping scene as an explicit depic­tion of the “miscegena­tional impulse” of Chinatown. See Stanfield, “American as

Chinatown as Tourist Space  |

Figure 41  Film poster. Press book for Chinatown Nights (n. p.: Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929), 12. Courtesy of the Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

her in this desolate condi­tion finally makes Riley realize his love for Joan. The film ends with the love couple’s departure from Chinatown and its criminal underworld. The overarching theme of the plot is that of a white ‘society girl’ getting lost in Chinatown and finding herself attracted to the criminal environment. A promo­ tional teaser poster also refers explicitly to the underlying white slavery scare, stating: “Hundreds of pretty white girls visit the Chinatowns of big cities yearly – never to return. What becomes of them?”189 The official poster also depicts Joan Fry as an endangered white woman, carried by Chuck Riley and watched upon by an oversized Oriental face in the background (see fig. 41). A closer look at the poster reveals three Chinese Americans standing in the background, looking around suspiciously in front of Chinatown buildings. This depic­tion of Chinatown as a hideout for dubious Chinese men who pose a threat to white womanhood corresponds to the tagline that promoted the film: “There is more mystery in one Chinaman standing in a shadowy Chinatown doorway, [sic] than in all the mystery stories ever written. […] Come, learn the fate of this pretty white woman lost in the American Orient.”190

Chop Suey,” 245. While it is true that the scene marks the point where Joan finally ‘belongs’ to Chinatown, I understand it as a more indirect articula­tion of miscegena­tion discourse. The scene does not directly hint at a sexual threat, and Boston Charlie never explicitly shows any sexual interest in Joan. 189 Press book for Chinatown Nights, 1. 190 Ibid., 5.

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While the fact that the Chinatown boss in Chinatown Nights is white seems unusual at first, it becomes clearer from a gender perspective. A white masculine character is needed to guarantee the white woman’s rescue from the dangers of Chinatown. Two factors motivate Joan Fry’s fascina­tion with Chinatown and her fall from virtue. First, as men­tioned earlier, Chinatown gives her the opportunity to transgress moral boundaries and gender ideals. This eventually leads to the alcoholic excess which also marks her fall from grace. Second, her attrac­tion to Chuck Riley stems from his powerful posi­tion within the criminal underworld. Riley, however, goes through a transforma­tion as well, as he saves Joan and becomes a law-­abiding husband. This, in turn, guarantees the return to normative gender roles and the consequent happy ending. In sum, the film needs the figure of the white gangster who becomes the male hero to counter Joan’s fall from normative class and gender ideals. The film both refers to tourism on a structural level and explicitly depicts it, as can be seen in the opening and ending scenes that frame the narrative. In the beginning of the film, we see a limousine stopping at a traffic light. Joan Fry opens a window and throws out a hat that belongs to the man accompanying her. While the man gets out of the car and picks up the hat, she remarks: “I resent men that don’t know the difference between a limousine and a Pullman sleeper.” Her reference to the sleeping wagon implies that the man had used the privacy of the limousine to make sexual advances. Suddenly Joan hears a male voice announcing the departure of a Chinatown bus tour. Joan is so captivated by the guide’s promise to see the “mystic mysterious regions of the Orient” that she leaves the limousine and enters the bus, taking her bewildered male company with her. Seconds later, the two sit on a rubberneck bus, where the uninterested man complains: “This is ridiculous, Joan. You know Chinatown is all a fake.” Joan nonchalantly answers: “Then you should feel quite at home.” This scene portrays Joan as a self-­determined and sexually emancipated ‘New Woman’ who does not depend on a man to enjoy an urban lifestyle. In fact, her sudden fascina­tion with Chinatown expresses her willingness to experience something out-­of-­the-­ordinary, something (or somewhere) that poses an alternative to her so far unpleasant and uninteresting date. As men­tioned earlier, Chinatown here serves as a way to escape her status of a white, upper-­ class woman and transgress these cultural boundaries. The extent to which this trip is an explicitly gendered one becomes obvious when we later see the man sleeping on the bus, left alone by the other passengers, including Joan. He is bored of Chinatown but has apparently also lost interest in Joan after she rejected his sexual advances.

Chinatown as Tourist Space  |

The depic­tion of the Chinatown bus tour resembles the tour we have seen in A Tale of Two Worlds. During the whole tour, we hear the guide commenting on the sights in a sensa­tionalist manner. In one shot, we see two Chinese Americans standing in a small shop, as one watches the headlights of the bus approaching. Realizing that the group of tourists is coming, he puts on tradi­tional Chinese attire and steps out on the street. He walks a few steps so that the tourists can see him and then disappears in a basement door. This staged scene is accompanied by the voice of the tour guide, who explains: “Ah, Ladies, please, there is a broken victim entering the den right now.” Seconds later, when the bus has passed, the film audience sees the man back inside his shop, where he remarks to his friend: “Americans very dumb!” The scene consequently structures Chinatown as a touris­ tic show. Again, Chinese Americans exploit the gullible white tourists and their expecta­tions of the “American Orient.” That the tourists rely on a rubberneck bus constitutes a difference between Chinatown Nights and A Tale of Two Worlds. The similarities the rubberneck bus shares with the theater audience in regard to the visual dispositif becomes clear when we recall the “Ballyhoo stunt” in the press book that suggested a fake Chinatown tour where customers are dropped off in front of the theater. One can thus speculate that audiences of the film who have been on rubberneck buses themselves before entering the cinema obtain the same viewing posi­tion inside the theater (that is, the rows of seats directed at the screen) and consume a cinematic expression of a Chinatown tour. While the film at first reinforces no­tions of staged authenticity by showing men acting as dope fiends, the bus tour comes to a sudden stop when the ‘real’ Chinatown breaks in. The tour is disrupted by the discovery of a body that lies on the street. The group gathers around the body and initially believes it to be part of the trip, or as one man puts it: “Just another rubber Chinaman to fool the rubbernecks.” But the group has to face the fact that the body is indeed a dead man. Chuck Riley, the white boss of Chinatown, appears on the scene and gives orders to leave the area, which the evidently frightened Chinatown guide follows instantly.191 Only Joan refuses to get back on the bus, apparently fascinated by both the crime scene and the gangster. Joan’s departure from the tour signifies the moment when the film leaves the level of a mere touristic tour and the camera progresses further behind the scenes of staged authenticity. In short, at this point the tourist gaze of the theater audience departs from the intra-­diegetic tourist gaze. 191 This scene was apparently inspired by actual events, as there are reports of tourists who involun­ tarily became witnesses of tong murders. See, for example, “300 Sightseers See Chinatown Murder,” New York Times, November 22, 1920.

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In the course of the film, the audience witnesses at least three aspects of China­town that constitute the film as a ‘trip’ into the authentic Chinatown that lies behind the touristic facade. First, it shows the lethal shootings that accompany the tong war. After Joan’s departure from the tour and a short exchange with Chuck Riley, she realizes she is unable to go home the same night, because there are still shootings in the street. Even Chuck, who has so far made a calm and confident impression, becomes aware of the danger and carries Joan into his headquarters where the two spend the night. Another dangerous situa­tion occurs when Joan returns to Chinatown with some of her upper-­class friends a few days later. Again, the threat arises within a touristic setting, since they visit the Chinese theater, a typical tourist attrac­tion. Chuck warns Joan that it could be dangerous to go inside, but Joan is determined to attend the show. Her friends hesitate first but then join her because they fear that Joan could otherwise “go native,” as they call it, if they leave her alone in Chinatown. Both Chuck Riley and Boston Charley attend the show with their tong men. The film shows some theater scenes playing and the elaborate costumes of the actors and actresses, but the tension between the two tongs ultimately leads to a shootout between them that finds several men dead and the rest of the theater audience fleeing in panic. Although Joan’s friends also run out of the theater, Joan again stays with the injured Chuck. Ironically, this scene can be read as the moment Joan really ‘goes native’ and decides to stay in Chinatown with Chuck. It marks Joan’s final detachment from her friends, who only visit the quarter for slumming adventures. The second aspect the film focuses on is Chuck’s highly frequented bar and amusement place Riley’s in Chinatown. Depicted as a ‘joint’ of rather ­dubious character, it is the place where customers with a mostly white upper-­class background enjoy alcohol and dancing. Several scenes also hint at the sexual implica­ tions of the establishment by showing drunken women taking their male company upstairs, where they pass Chuck’s office. Although Chuck owns the place and uses it as a headquarter for his tong business, he complains that he is “sick of those uptown women that come down here for a thrill.” The statement already suggests that Chuck is not the immoral gangster he appears to be. 192 In one scene,

192 Chuck’s aversion is motivated equally by both moral standards and class distinc­tion. This can be seen in another scene where he criticizes Joan and urban slummers in general for coming to Chinatown and “looking us over like animals in a zoo.” To him, these people are merely “bored uptown women and […] cake eaters.” While his critique of being the victim of ­Othering gazes opens up an interesting perspective, the “us” in his verdict remains problematic. After all, Chuck himself is white and his business thrives on tourism.

Chinatown as Tourist Space  |

Joan is about to leave the office after a fight with Chuck when she runs into an intoxicated woman who asks Joan: “Are you going my way?” In this context, the ques­tion’s double meaning refers to the alleged dangers of an excessive lifestyle and the sexual liberalism of the ‘New Woman,’ – in short, the disgraceful fall from gender and class norms that seems to constantly menace Joan. This threat corresponds to Mary Ting Yi Lui’s observa­tion that Chinatown as space offers a pivotal understanding of contemporary discourses that rendered racial and class mobility within the modern urban metropolis a threat to the “respectability and safety” of white women. Describing contemporary fears, she asserts: “If allowed to wander among the Chinese immigrant popula­tion, sooner or later these women would become ensnared by the tendrils of the Chinatown web.”193 These moral boundaries, therefore, had to be constantly reinforced and policed, as one can also see in the film’s narrative. Here “her way” means the path that, in the eyes of some contemporaries, leads white women into drug use, promiscuity, and prostitu­tion. The third spatial aspect of the film is its portrayal of Chinatown’s underground passages. Towards the end of the film, the police attempt to end the tong war through massive controls of immigra­tion papers among the tong members. The film shows how dozens of police officers arrive at a narrow Chinatown street to raid a house. Through a small window, they discover a basement room crowded with Chinese immigrants. The officers then brutally break down the doors with axes, only to find the same room completely empty. As the next shot reveals, the Chinese immigrants escaped over a stairwell that leads underground and into a narrow tunnel filled with fleeing men and women. While the room the police raid appears to be a crowded habita­tion rather than an opium den, the scene illustrates several ways in which the film constructs Chinatown. It portrays Chinatown as unknown space that ultimately cannot be policed, as it had already become apparent earlier in this chapter. The sheer number of officers that enter the room and inspect it only adds to the impression that in Chinatown, more police do not equal more control. Instead, Chinese use the secret system of underground tunnels to stay under the radar of police surveillance and governmental control. Moreover, and this is the important point here, the portrayal of the habita­tion and the raid answers the touristic desire of the audience. As we have seen in the advertisements of H. J. Lewis’s guided tours, the sight of the living condi­tions of Chinese immigrants – that is, the crowded rooms and the modes of living – was an integral part of any Chinatown tour

193 Lui, Chinatown Trunk Mystery, 80; see also ibid., 81 – 110.

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that claimed to offer authentic sights. The film offers a short glimpse into that innermost circle of Chinatown, and since the film never really focuses on the immigrants’ perspective, they are reduced to objects of the touristic gaze of the film’s audience. The forceful break-­in of the police parallels the intrusion of the camera into the private space. While the film itself revolves around the love story of a white couple, the Chinese Americans merely appear in the background. Even these short shots into the private space correspond to contemporary expecta­tions of Chinese immigrant living condi­tions. This is taken even further when Chuck explains his strategy for avoiding any deporta­tions of his men. He hands out immigra­tion papers of Chinese who are already dead in order for them to take their identities. According to him, Chinese names and faces are hard to distinguish for white officers. This was, and still is, a fundamental element within racial discourse. Within the context of the film, this statement underscores the no­tion that the Chinese are nothing more than an undistinguishable mass of extras. Chinese, here, live either in crowded underground habita­tions or as criminal tong members and murderers. In sum, the film distinguishes its own visuality from the practice of tourism while at the same time promising a more authentic view of Chinatown, but as a visual practice, the film ultimately employs the same discursive strategies that one finds in tourism. The ‘look behind the facade’ serves as a way to produce authenticity, but the visual dispositif the film partly composes and actively reproduces is a fundamentally touristic one. Chinese Americans are devoid of any possibility of agency and remain the Other, the backdrop against which the fundamentally white plot unfolds. Likewise, Chinatown as a space remains the dangerous and unknown space that one can explore but not really grasp. For uptown slummers it is a space of social and moral transgression. The basic strategy Chinatown Nights employs to produce the effect of authenticity and disguise its own reliance on the tourist gaze becomes ­obvious in the very last scene. As already men­tioned, the film ends the same way it opens – with a Chinatown tour. This time, however, we see an unknown ‘uptown’ couple sitting in the last row of the rubberneck bus, apparently weeks or months after the happenings of the main narrative. When the bus passes the building that had belonged to Chuck Riley, the guide explains the building “housed the famous white boss Chuck Riley” and that it was where he “lived and loved the woman for whom he abandoned all his empire.” In this moment, Boston Charley steps out on the street. Visibly pleased by the atten­tion he receives from the tourists, he even raises his hand to greet them. The guide announces: “Look, Ladies and Gentlemen! There you see Boston Charley himself. The shrewdest, cruelest emperor of Chinatown since the

Conclusion  |

one and only Chuck Riley.” The very last shot then shows the couple in the last row while the bus drives away from the camera. The man yawns and the woman laments: “Baloney! All of Chinatown is a fake. I don’t believe there ever was such a guy as Chuck Riley.” This closing scene serves several purposes. First, it frames the main plot with two Chinatown tours and reinforces no­tions of Chinatown Nights as a ­sightseeing trip on its own, but unlike the two staged tours, the narrative of the film goes beyond the touristic level. In other words, the two bus tours serve as entry and exit points of a trip extending much deeper behind the facades. Second, unlike the bored tourist couple at the end, the audience in the movie theater can read the woman’s statement as an ironic comment. Given that the film has shown a tong war with several shootings, a police raid and the inside of Chuck Riley’s amusement ­palace, the theater audience knows that – at least in the intra-­diegetic world of the film – Chinatown is in fact not all fake and Chuck Riley did exist. This reading leads to the third func­tion of the closing scene: blurring the lines between fact and fic­tion. The couple’s boredom with Chinatown tourism to a certain degree corresponds to contemporary discourse that oscillated between the quarter’s Orientalness and exoticism on one side and its staged touristic set-­ ups on the other, as we have seen in earlier sec­tions of this chapter. By skillfully circumventing the couple’s statement in the concluding scene, the film offers a legitima­tion of contemporary myths about the criminal and mystical hidden circle of Chinatown. The film audience could laugh at the ignorance of the couple, but at the same time this ignorance would recur in the real world. The film’s ‘message,’ therefore, is a testimony to the unknowable Chinatown. A ‘white outsider’ could never really refute the existence of this hidden Chinatown, and this ultimately makes Chinatown Nights a powerful and affirmative element of the historical discourse that I outlined in this chapter.

2.3 Conclusion In the late 1920s, the Chinatowns of U. S. metropolises had become commercial tourist attrac­tions whose appearance had dramatically changed since the early twentieth century. The contemporary visual culture, which linked Chinatown to Oriental Otherness, however, remained largely the same. This chapter has demonstrated that film – mo­tion pictures as well as films like Lewis’s travelogue – as a practice of seeing accompanied these processes and massively contributed to the crea­tion of Chinatown as a space situated outside white ideals of social order. In order to understand the connec­tions between Chinatown, space, and tourism, I

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have first outlined how turn-­of-­the-­century discourses linked racial concepts of Chinese foreignness to space. As I argued, the discourse of ‘underground passages’ and the ambivalent (in)visibility of hidden backrooms projected the alleged inscrutability and mysteriousness of Chinese onto the spatial structure of the quarter. As a consequence, Chinatown symbolized a ‘city within a city,’ that is a closed-­off space set apart from the rest of the city. Moreover, contemporary discourse also attributed an internal structure of outside appearance and a hidden interior to Chinatown. The emergence of slumming, and later tourism, was fundamentally based on the promise to experience Chinatown’s manifold thrills by crossing spatial, racial, class, and gender boundaries. The visuality of Chinese Otherness formed the basis for the white ‘tourist gaze’ – a gaze that aimed at intruding the hidden space in search for authenticity. The tourist gaze produced a dichoto­my between Chinese Americans as looked-­upon objects on the one hand and white middle-­class tourists on the other. It expressed a desire to catch a glimpse at the impenetrable backrooms. The similarities between mo­tion pictures and tourism became apparent in the aspects of staging authentic performances in preconceived settings, as it was common in Chinatown tours. As I have argued, the interrela­tions between these fields went even further. Mo­tion pictures employed this touristic visuality both on a narrative level and in their func­tion as a social practice by offering a specific viewing posi­tion. The cinema as a space which offered a seated group of people a ‘window’ into the quarter’s innermost secrets constituted a cinematic dispositif which contributed to percep­tions of Chinatown as space of Oriental Otherness. As the film analyses in this chapter demonstrated, mo­tion pictures ridiculed the artificiality of Chinatown tourism in order to create authenticity themselves by offering an explicitly filmic gaze at Chinatown’s hidden backrooms. It was here in the theaters that the myth of the vice-­ridden, criminal Chinatown, which so strongly stirred popular culture’s imagina­tion, continued to exist while the inhabitants of the actual Chinese quarters had begun to make their neighborhoods safer and more tourist-­friendly. The preceding analyses also shed light on the example of ‘China City’ men­ tioned on the very first pages of this study. ‘China City’ was the Chinese quarter in Los Angeles, erected in 1938 with the help of a mo­tion picture set designer and film requisites. Having traced the strong interrela­tions between film and tourism, this chapter gave an explana­tion as to why it was indeed no coincidence that ‘China City’ was to a large part designed as a walk-­in film set: both mo­tion pictures and Oriental attrac­tions followed the same visual logic. Throughout this chapter it also became clear that the complete recrea­tion of a film-­inspired

Conclusion  |

Oriental city in the late 1930s can be seen as a continua­tion of the processes we already witnessed in the lobby transforma­tions of the 1920s discussed in the opening remarks of this chapter. The difference between these two reproduc­ tions of filmic depic­tions of Orientalness is only gradual; both phenomena are linked to the contemporary visual culture of Chinatown that most prominently manifested in mo­tion pictures. A significant and yet unmen­tioned detail in regard to the ‘China City’ project was the fact that it had a direct competitor: a second quarter called ‘New Chinatown,’ which opened only a few weeks later.194 These two Chinatowns were the outcome of disputes between Christine Sterling, the entrepreneur behind ‘China City,’ and members of the Chinese community who had a different vision for a new neighborhood. ‘New Chinatown’ was supported by civic leader Peter SooHoo Sr. and Chinese American businessmen and was “the first Chinatown in the United States owned, controlled, and operated solely by Chinese Americans.”195 While it was – like ‘China City’ – planned to attract tourists who, after all, were an important economic factor for Chinese Americans, ‘New Chinatown’ was more concerned with economic independence and housing opportunities for the community.196 Los Angeles’ two Chinatowns stand as a symbol for the cultural processes at work during the time period this chapter is concerned with. Chinatowns both on and off screen were a contested terrain and their visual representa­tions oscillated between Orientalist concep­tions of the Other on the one hand and Chinese American agency on the other. Tourism was an important aspect in general, as it was not only informed by white sensa­tionalism but also sustained many Chinese American businesses. ‘China City,’ however, needs to be understood as a continua­tion of the Orientalist and sensa­tionalist projec­tions that had informed

194 To be more precise, at this point Los Angeles had three Chinese quarters, the third being around City Market where many Chinese moved to in the 1930s. But unlike ‘China City’ and ‘New Chinatown’, this district was not build from scratch and purposely designed as a Chinatown. See William Gow, “Building a Chinese Village in Los Angeles: Christine Sterling and the Residents of China City, 1938 – 1948,” Gum Saan Journal 32, no. 1 (2010). Accessed April 18, 2016, http://www.chssc.org/History/ChinatownRemembered/Neighborhoods/Residents_of_China_City.aspx; see also the photo collec­tion Jenny Cho and The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, eds., Chinatown and China City in Los Angeles, Postcard History Series (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing 2011). 195 Gow, “Building a Chinese village,” pagina­tion missing in the online version. 196 William Gow reminds us that ‘China City’ became an important space for many Chinese Americans as well. A strict differentia­tion between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ Chinatown would be a stark simplifica­tion. See Gow, “Building a Chinese Village.”

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percep­tions of Chinese Americans since the late nineteenth century. The quarter was supposed to be a replica of white concep­tions of the Orient on U. S. territory. ‘New Chinatown,’ on the contrary, articulated a decidedly Chinese American identity. It generally exploited white preconcep­tions but also put them to use for Chinese American interests. The quarter was explicitly countering the negative associa­tions of the historic Chinatown by offering a clean appearance with wide streets and a large plaza. The new Chinatown, which still is today’s Chinese ­quarter situated north of downtown Los Angeles, was not designed as a ‘transplanted Orient,’ but expressed a genuinely Chinese American perspective. It is thus not without a certain irony that ‘China City’ had become a footnote in Los Angeles’ history. After two fires, one in 1939 and a more devastating one in 1948, the quarter did not reopen and disappeared from the city’s map.

3 Becoming White/Becoming Yellow: Americaniza­tion, Assimila­tion, and the ‘Oriental Problem’

In 1932, First Na­tional Pictures released The Hatchet Man, starring Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young as Chinese Americans in heavy yellowface makeup. Robinson plays Wong Low Get, a hatchet man for one of San Francisco’s tongs and also a successful businessman. One of the general topics of the film is the discrepancy between the tradi­tionalism of the tong and Wong’s modern, supposedly American lifestyle. In the end, it is his past as a tong man that prevents him from leading a carefree life and accordingly becoming a modern Chinese American. In fact, it is his identity as a hatchet man that does not quite fit into the film’s portrayal of a modern 1930s Chinatown. As the Los Angeles Times observes in its review: “Oriental tradi­tion and American jazz intermixed […]. It is an Occidentalized Orient which sweeps the screen at Warner Brothers Hollywood Th ­ eater these days, with the Hon. Edward G. Robinson genuflecting before the shrine of his ancestors in ‘The Hatchet Man.’ Raucous American jazz breaks ever and anon upon the contempla­tion of Buddha; San Francisco street clothes contrast sharply with dragon-­and-­brocade backgrounds; and hatchets fly swiftly to their marks before lifted revolvers can bark.”1

The review points at the Americaniza­tion of the Chinese American community in the 1920s and 1930s. The author describes the “Occidentalized Orient” as a clash of Western and Oriental culture: jazz, street clothes, and revolvers symbo­ lize American culture, whereas Buddhist shrines, ornamental backgrounds, and hatchets stand for China’s ancient tradi­tions. Chinatown marks the space where these stereotypical attributes result in a thrilling mixture, but a closer look reveals a reproduc­tion of the dichotomy between genuinely Oriental and Occidental cultures as two poles that don’t allow for any hybrid forms rather than an actual intermixture of cultures. After all, it is jazz music that makes Buddhist contempla­ tion impossible and street clothes that “contrast sharply” with Chinese ornaments. The hatchet might be a faster weapon than a revolver, but in this sense, it is also connected to ideas of a premodern skillfulness. Ultimately, Americanness grows



1 Philip K. Scheurer, “‘Hatchet Man’ colorful,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1932.

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more and more visible in the Chinatown described by the text, but as Wong’s struggle with identity in The Hatchet Man shows, Orient and Occident are nonetheless incompatible. In this way, Americanness stands for modernity, whereas Chineseness is connected to tradi­tionalism and backwardness. This chapter will explore contemporary discourses revolving around the Ameri­ caniza­tion, or assimila­tion, of Chinese immigrants and their American-­born descendants in the 1920s and 1930s. Far from being passive aliens or sojourners, Chinese immigrants have fought for citizenship, educa­tion, and acceptance since they first arrived in the United States; however, in the light of Chinese exclusion, ideas about Oriental unassimilability were hard to overcome. It was only in the early twentieth century, with the heightened visibility of the American-­born genera­tions, that white European Americans began to acknowledge the lasting presence and influence of Chinese Americans. In a cultural climate of nativism, racism, and Americanism, the presence of Chinese immigrants posed ques­tions about the fitting-­in of Orientals in a supposedly closed-­off, monolithic American culture. The so-­called ‘Oriental problem’ was discussed in popular culture and became a much-­debated topic in the field of sociology. The ques­tion of whether Chinese Americans were, or could become, part of the American ‘melting pot’ consequently sheds light on how the American public imagined categories like na­tion and race.2 The focus of my analysis will be on films that feature a rather noteworthy and significant plot device that was popular in the 1920s and 1930s – the change of a character’s racial identity. Surprisingly many films of this time period featured a main character disguising his or her ‘real’ race and passing as white or Chinese, either inten­tionally or unknowingly. The revela­tion of the character’s ‘true identity’ usually marks a crucial point in the narrative or signals its climax. There are, however, different forms of this racial transforma­tion that I want to discuss in this

2 The melting pot concept, which goes back to the 1908 play of the same name by Israel Z ­ angwill, originally articulated a positive migratory perspective on the U. S. immigra­tion experience. Since the second half of the twentieth century and in the light of the Civil Rights Movement, however, the concept was criticized and replaced by models that accentuate differences and cultural pluralism. I use the term in its historical sense. See Philip Gleason, “The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?” American Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1964): 20 – 4 6. The concept was influentially re-­evaluated in the 1960s by Glazer and Moynihan. See Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish in New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963). Their book and its later re-­assessments illustrate the larger debates accompanying the turn from assimila­tionist theory to cultural pluralism. See for example Josh DeWind, Charles Hirschman, and Philip Kasinitz, eds., “Immigrant Adapta­tion and Native-­Born Responses in the Making of Ameri­ cans,” special issue, Interna­tional Migra­tion Review 31, no. 4 (1997).

Becoming White/Becoming Yellow  |

chapter. The first group of films portrays the emergence of Chinese American identities by focusing on conflicting concepts of race, gender, and genera­tion. In films like The Hatchet Man, cultural change is understood along the lines of a genera­ tional gap, but there is also a second group of films that openly address problems of racial and cultural belonging. The main characters of these films literally grow up in the belief of being Chinese and lead a supposedly Oriental life, while in the end they are revealed to be white. This is indeed a rather common narrative that was popularized by the already men­tioned film A Tale of Two Worlds (1921) and the play East Is West, which was adapted for the screen in 1922 and 1930.3 While the racial revela­tion here seems employed mainly to ensure the forma­tion of the white love couple at the end and to avoid sugges­tions of miscegena­tion, there is clearly more to it. These films show people that deal with ques­tions of identity in a hybrid, multicultural setting and, as a result, with ques­tions of their own migrant history. All these films commonly exemplify the performative aspects of race and racial passing, but at the same time they underline the existence of an essential racial identity. I argue these films offered a visual mode to address ques­tions regarding the racial and cultural identity of Chinese Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. The plot device of a character’s change of racial identity has seldom been analyzed and is at best acknowledged as a curiosity of early mo­tion pictures; however, these films as well as the broader field of films that depicted Americanized Chinese immigrants served as a crucial vehicle for the discussion of hybrid identities. Filmic portrayals of genera­tional conflict and racial transforma­tion actively drew on debates and conflicts that shaped contemporary discourses of immigra­tion and immigrant assimila­tion. They focus on the topics of identity and belonging and, in doing so, resonate with the overwhelming fascina­tion that 1920s’ society displayed in regard to the ques­tion of whether Chinese Americans could be ‘American.’ This chapter will first analyze the discourse of Americaniza­tion in popular culture and its rela­tion to the history of Chinese Americans in the early twentieth century. This sec­tion will focus on aspects of agency within the immigrant community, how it dealt with Chinese and American culture, and how this was perceived in (white) popular media. Against this backdrop, the sec­tion will analyze the films Old San Francisco (1927) and The Hatchet Man (1932) and indicate the significance of the popular phenomenon of the ‘Chinese flapper.’ 3 East Is West, dir. Sidney Franklin, perf. Constance Talmadge, Edward Burns, and Warner Oland (United States: Constance Talmadge, 1922); East Is West, dir. Monta Bell, perf. Lupe Vélez, Lew Ayres, and Edward G. Robinson (United States: Universal Pictures, 1930).

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The second sec­tion of the chapter will focus on the ‘Oriental problem’ in popu­ lar and academic discourses, particularly sociology. It will trace how Chinese Americans became an object of scientific study during a time of increased atten­ tion to race rela­tions in the U. S. This will also reveal how scientific discourses reproduced knowledge about concepts like Americanism and assimila­tion. I will then use these findings to analyze mo­tion pictures that show characters ‘becoming white’ or ‘becoming yellow,’ like East Is West (1930) and Son of the Gods (1930).4

3.1 Americaniza­tion and Second-­Genera­tion Chinese Americans In 1924, Photoplay printed an article about the actress Anna May Wong, who by that time had become an interna­tional film star and was at the peak of her career.5 Wong was one of the very few Asian American actors and actresses who could achieve stardom in the first half of the twentieth century.6 She had gained in popularity in 1924 through her role in the immensely popular film The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with Douglas Fairbanks, and the article aimed to introduce Wong to the readers of Photoplay.7 It was titled “Where East Meets West,” an allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s infamous phrase about the incompatibility of Oriental and Occidental culture; however, it uses Wong’s star persona to disprove this verdict. As the author makes clear in the subheadline, “[i]n spite of Kipling, you can put an Oriental kernel in an Occidental shell.” The text continues:



4 I do not use the term ‘becoming’ in a strictly Deleuzian sense; rather, I use it to describe the non-­essentialist and constantly changing features of cultural identity. In doing so, I follow Stuart Hall’s thoughts on cultural identities: “Cultural identity […] is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transforma­tion. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.” Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222 – 237, 225. 5 Beverly N. Sparks, “Where East Meets West,” Photoplay, June 1924, 55. 6 On Anna May Wong, see Graham Russell Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012); for a more theoretically informed approach to her career, see Anthony Bernard Chan, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 1905 – 1961 (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2003). 7 The Thief of Bagdad, dir. Raoul Walsh, perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Snitz Edwards, and Charles Belcher (United States: Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, 1924).

Americaniza­tion and Second-­Genera­tion Chinese Americans  |

“From crown to sole, Anna May Wong is Chinese. Her black hair is of the texture that adorns the heads of the maidens who live beside the Yang-­tse-­Kian. Her deep brown eyes, while the slant is not pronounced, are typically Oriental. These come from her Mongol father. But her Manchu mother has given her a height and a poise of figure that Chinese maids seldom have. She was born in Los Angeles and was raised as are other Chinese children [sic]. But something in her environment changed her mental trend. She was artistic, she loved beauty. In school she picked up the ways of the West. […] She read American books. She was even a close student of the Bible. Then, one day, she had a chance to become Chinese ‘atmosphere’ in the pictures. From that time on, her development into an American was rapid. Wong Lew Song disappeared and, in her place, came Anna May Wong. She has put aside the mental garment of her nativity. Psychologically speaking, she has the mind flexings of an Occidental. The East has given her the outward semblance of mystic, luring China, but the shell of the Orient serves to conceal but the mental brilliance of the Occident.”8

To illustrate this claim, two large photographs accompany the article. One shows Wong in a Chinese dress; the other depicts her in an all-­white jacket and skirt, also wearing a black tie and a hat (see fig. 42). This latter picture serves to demonstrate Wong’s Americanness, also underscored by the cap­tion which describes her as “[t]he screen’s only Chino-­American flapper.”9 I quote the article at length because it exemplifies several elements addressed in the following chapter. While the chapter will not deal with Anna May Wong directly, her star persona in general – and particularly as described in this article – reflects larger discourses of Americaniza­tion. In other words, the way Wong is perceived and described in popular culture operates as a personalized form of abstract assump­tions about the “development into an American” that the text refers to.10 First, a strong body-­mind dualism pervades the text. The author focuses on Wong’s bodily appearance by linking features like her eyes and hair to her Oriental origins, but it acknowledges that an Occidental mind dwells under this shell. Second, the author emphasizes a clear genera­tional gap that differentiates Wong from her “Mongol” father and her “Manchu” mother, traceable to the fact that she was born in Los Angeles and not in China. Third, her “mental brilliance of the Occident” is not just a result of her intelligence but also of her consump­tion of American cultural commodities like American books, especially the Bible, and other “ways of the West.” Fourth, the Western environment that she grew up in is portrayed as an influence that completely changed her and set her apart from her Chinese 8 Sparks, “Where East Meets West,” 55. 9 Ibid. 10 On the theoretical framework of star studies, see chapter 1.

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Figure 42  Beverly N. Sparks, “Where East Meets West,” Photoplay, June 1924, 55.

background. This claim goes as far as to encompass the complete disappearance of the ‘old’ Anna May Wong and a transforma­tion into a completely new person with a genuine American identity. These themes will all play a crucial and recurring role within this chapter, as they form the very basis for the way processes of so-­called Chinese American assimila­tion were made intelligible during this period. A final important feature, of course, is Wong’s connec­tion to cinema. While Wong is described as an all-­American girl in this and many other articles, her on-­screen roles usually reduced her to stereotypical depic­tions of exotic femininity.11 The diffi­ culties in overcoming these discriminatory roles proved to be a great burden that overshadowed her rela­tion to Hollywood. American culture could consequently facilitate the transforma­tion into an American, as the article and contemporary 11 See Chan, Perpetually Cool; Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transforma­tion of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

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discourse postulated, but the role of cinema itself – as the backbone of modern American culture and vehicle of Americaniza­tion – remains debatable, as we will see. 3.1.1 Chinese American Activism and Americaniza­tion

When Photoplay released the article reproduced above in 1924, the American ­public’s representa­tion of Orientals had undergone a number of important changes. Chinese Americans could already look back on a long history of fighting racism and claiming civil rights. Chinese American organiza­tions confronted European Americans with the topics of discrimina­tion and political participa­tion and started to raise public awareness of these issues. The history of these processes, however, is still largely unknown, and there are few studies that trace these developments from a Chinese American perspective. Prominent scholars of Asian American history have criticized historiography’s remaining emphasis on what happened to Chinese Americans as objects of racial discrimina­tion – a history from the pers­ pective of the excluders, rather than the excluded.12 This is partially due to a lack of sources – a lack that makes the time period between 1882 and 1943 appear as the “silent years” of Chinese American history.13 As the two recent decades of scholarship have begun to reveal, however, Chinese Americans did not passively accept discriminatory laws and racial exclusion.14 In spite of persistent discourses that constructed Chinese immigrants as sojourners and unassimilable foreigners, most Chinese immigrants and their American-­born children chose the United States as their home and struggled for their place in a racially stratified society. At the legislative level, protests and t­ rials aimed at the abolishment of immigra­tion restric­tion.15 Political participa­tion was 12 This critique was expressed by Roger Daniels as early as 1966, and only in the last two deca­ des have scholars begun to answer to this change of perspective on a broader scale. See Roger Daniels, “Westerners from the East: Oriental Immigrants Reappraised,” Pacific Historical Review 35, no. 4 (1966): 373 – 383. 13 Shehong Chen, Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 4. 14 An important and programmatic contribu­tion was K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, eds., Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); see also Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882 – 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 81 – 102. 15 See Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigra­tion Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Charles J. McClain,

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especially difficult for Asian immigrants, as American law denied them the right of naturaliza­tion. Their classifica­tion as “ineligible to citizenship” dated back to the Constitu­tion, which granted naturaliza­tion only to “free, white persons.” While the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 expanded these rights to include African Americans, the Constitu­tion still saw Chinese as racial and legal aliens. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 not only prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the USA; Sec­tion 14 of the Act also restated the denial of naturaliza­tion to Chinese immigrants. Accordingly, Chinese immigrants could not vote or participate in the political system to avert the increasingly anti-­Asian legisla­tion. The Exclusion Act thus reinforced the no­tion that the Chinese already present in the U. S. were to remain aliens and perpetual foreigners. Chinese Americans contested these laws on many levels over several decades, but the U. S. Supreme court confirmed the denial of citizenship because of race in the two important cases of Ozawa v. United States (1922) and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923).16 Efforts to improve the situa­tion of the Chinese community in everyday life accompanied Chinese Americans’ ongoing protests against exclusion. Civil acti­ vism began almost immediately after the passing of the Exclusion Act.17 Historian Qingsong Zhang revealed the importance of Wong Chin Foo, one of the earliest Chinese civil rights activists in U. S. history. Wong, who had come to the U. S. in 1869, founded a bilingual weekly newspaper called Chinese American in 1883 to promote a mutual understanding between Chinese Americans and white mainstream society.18 According to Zhang, the name of the newspaper might be the first men­tion of the term ‘Chinese American’ at all: “It was refreshing and earthshaking for the Chinese to identify themselves as Americans in an era when they were usually referred to by such insulting terms as ‘heathens,’ ‘celestials,’ ‘John Chinaman,’ and ‘Chink’. It was also a challenge to the popular stereotype that the Chinese were not interested in becoming American citizens, and it reflected the desire of Wong and other naturalized Chinese for respect, recogni­tion, and equal rights from their adopted country.”19

In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimina­tion in Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 16 See Chan, Asian Americans, 90 – 96. 17 See Pei-­te Lien, The Making of Asian America through Political Participa­tion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 1 – 41. 18 Qingsong Zhang, “The Origins of the Chinese Americaniza­tion Movement: Wong Chin Foo and the Chinese Equal Rights League,” in Wong and Chan, Claiming America, 41 – 63. 19 Zhang, “Origins,” 49. See also John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orienta­ lism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776 – 1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 281.

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In 1892, after the passing of the Geary Act that extended Chinese exclusion for another ten years, he founded the Chinese Equal Rights League, the first Chinese civil rights organiza­tion in the U. S. While most legal claims of Wong’s activism remained unsuccessful and his biography grows vague after 1900, the organiza­ tion laid the groundwork for further political and social activism. Another prominent associa­tion of the early Chinese Americaniza­tion movement was Native Sons of the Golden State (NSGS), an organiza­tion of U. S.-born Chinese Americans formed in 1895 in San Francisco. Its name alluded to Native Sons of the Golden West, a powerful nativist organiza­tion of U. S.-born European Americans.20 While the NSGS modeled itself after their European American counterpart, the name was also a reac­tion to and critique of the latter’s anti-­ Asian stance. The self-­proclaimed purpose of the NSGS was “to fully enjoy and defend our American citizenship; to cultivate the mind through the exchange of knowledge.”21 The NSGS encouraged Chinese Americans to make use of their right to vote. After a short phase of inactivity, the controversies over the 1904 renewal of the Chinese Exclusion Act brought new life to the group. This led to the group’s support of the 1905 anti-­American boycott in China, which criticized the discriminatory exclusion of Chinese in U. S. immigra­tion laws. As historian Sue Fawn Chung demonstrates, an increased awareness of the political developments in China went hand-­in-­hand with a politiciza­tion of the American community.22 One of the major accomplishments of the organiza­tion was the founding of the Chinese Times in 1924 – the first successful daily newspaper published by Chinese Americans without support of the Chinese government. In 1929, after years of expanding na­tionwide, the organiza­tion changed its name to the Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA). The years between 1920 and 1940 mark the height of the organiza­tion’s development. During these years the NSGS/CACA started to have more influence and visibility than more tradi­tional organiza­tions like the Chinese Six Companies.23 The members of the NSGS/CACA could take advantage of both inherited American citizenship and American high school and college educa­tion, which facilitated their political investment and interac­tions with European Americans. The increasing number of second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans became a crucial factor for the cultural life in American Chinatowns and the percep­tion 20 Sue Fawn Chung, “Fighting for Their American Rights: A History of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance,” in Wong and Chan, Claiming America, 95 – 126, 99. 21 Quoted in Chung, “Fighting,” 98 – 99. 22 Ibid., 101. 23 Ibid., 118.

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of Americanized Chinese in mainstream society. Within the Chinese communities, American-­born children were the ones who held U. S. citizenship – with all the political rights that came with it – by law, and it was in the 1920s that a large number of second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans started to become visible on the political and cultural scene. According to Sucheng Chan, the percentage of American-­born children within the Chinese popula­tion rose from 1% in 1870 to 29% in 1920. Numerically this meant that out of approximately 62,000 Chinese in the U. S. 18,000 were American citizens.24 In addi­tion to the right to vote it held, this genera­tion had learned English early on, making it more accustomed to Ameri­ can culture in general. As Chan states, within their families, second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans held a posi­tion between their parents’ Chinese-­influenced lifestyle and new forms of Chinese American identity, thereby becoming “mediators between two cultures.”25 This transi­tion also influenced the percep­tion of young Chinese Americans in white mainstream discourse, where the new politically active and educated genera­tion became a symbol for the Americaniza­tion of Chinese. Since Chinese unassimilability was often explained by a lack of families in Chinese communities, the increasing number of American-­born, American-­educated children became an important factor. In her study about “the children of Chinatown”, Wendy Rouse Jorae challenges what she calls the “bachelor-­society para­ digm.”26 This paradigm, which is still widespread in scholarship, describes San Francisco’s Chinese community as male-­dominated and devoid of fami­lial structures and still renders early twentieth century immigrant children and ­fami­lies largely invisible. In early twentieth century discourses, the absence of familial networks was seen as one of the biggest obstacles for the Americaniza­tion of immigrants. After all, according to the mainstream public, the domestic family formed the founda­tion of American society as the prerequisite for learning moral standards. The often-­presumed lack of women and children in San Francisco’s Chinatown reinforced the no­tion that Chinese men lived in a sealed-­off space that was impenetrable for American cultural values. By analyzing census reports, however, Jorae shows that the split-­household model – which describes a situa­ tion in which the husband leaves his family in China – was gradually replaced 24 Sucheng Chan, “Race, Ethnic Culture, and Gender in the Construc­tion of Identities among Second-­Genera­tion Chinese Americans, 1880s to 1930s,” in Wong and Chan, Claiming ­Ameri­ca, 127 – 164, 127. Like most historic census data, these numbers need to be read cautiously. As Chan asserts, the number of American citizens within the Chinese community must not necessarily be U. S.-born. The overall trend, however, is clearly visible. 25 Chan, “Race, Ethnic Culture,” 128. 26 Wendy Rouse Jorae, The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Fran­ cisco, 1850 – 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 2.

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by two-­parent families living in the U. S. as early as 1880. Families that followed the tradi­tional model of the core-­family made up 72% of all households in 1900.27 This went hand-­in-­hand with a strong increase in birth rates of American-­born children, beginning around 1900. The growing number of children had a large impact on the Chinese American community. As Jorae emphasizes, it was those American-­born children that shaped the forma­tion of Chinese American identities and the struggle against discrimina­tion: “American-­born Chinese children, in particular, helped lay the founda­tions of a Chinese Ameri­ can community by staking a claim to their due rights as American citizens. Born, raised, and educated in America, native-­born Chinese children struggled with problems common to all second-­genera­tion immigrant children but were burdened with the addi­tional problems posed by growing up in a segregated and racist society.”28

Ques­tions of educa­tion and its effect on the Americaniza­tion of Chinese Americans became a highly politicized topic in early twentieth century. On the one hand, children faced a segregated school system that resulted from fears of race mixing and reproduced racial hierarchiza­tion. While the system of segrega­tion only technically included primary school because of the relatively small number of Chinese American children that continued on to high school and college, the underlying racism continued throughout their educa­tion. On the other hand, Chinese American organiza­tions and white Progressive reformers alike emphasized how hard-­working and capable American-­born children were. They pointed out the eagerness of young Chinese Americans to learn and educate themselves. Academic achievements and a fundamental understanding of American values were seen as proof for the success of Americaniza­tion school programs that had been promoted in the 1910s and 1920s. For many contemporaries, second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans were excep­tionally able and willing to ‘become American.’29 They thus held a peculiar posi­tion within white mainstream U. S. society and its ideas about Americaniza­tion. As Jorae points out, most children experienced a mixture of both Chinese and American schooling that corresponded to their cultural hybridity.30 27 Jorae, Children of Chinatown, 50, table 4. Jorae points to the problematic nature of census data. The increase of families also has a class background since it was easier for families from higher classes and merchants to enter the United States. 28 Ibid., 4. Jorae’s sole focus on Chinese, however, fails to acknowledge the fact that the United States was a racially stratified and segregated society, which affected other communities as well. 29 Jorae argues that the origins of the Model Minority myth of the 1950s and 1960s emerged in the reformist discourses of the early twentieth century. See ibid., 138 – 139. 30 See ibid., 123.

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Chinese Americans’ fight for civil rights and recogni­tion also encompassed protests against stereotypical depic­tions of Chinese and China in popular culture and in mo­tion pictures especially. In 1935, the Chinese Cultural Society of America first published the Chinese Digest, the first publica­tion catering to second-­ genera­tion Chinese Americans.31 The first issue featured a short manifesto that explained the necessity of an English-­language newspaper dealing with topics of both Chinese and American culture. According to the editors, the Chinese Digest was “fighting on five fronts,” the first of which was the problem of misrepresenta­ tions in mo­tion pictures: “KILLING A CELESTIAL: There are no people in America more misunderstood than the Chinese. From the time of ‘Sand-­lot Kearny’ to the present, the Chinese is pictured as a sleepy Celestial enveloped in mists of opium fumes or a halo of Oriental philosophy, but never as a human being. The pulp magazines and Hollywood have served to keep this illusion alive. The ‘Chinese Digest’ is fighting to kill this Celestial bogey and substitute a normal being who drives automobiles, shops for the latest gadgets, and speaks good English.”32

In criticizing the depic­tions of Chinese in Hollywood mo­tion pictures, the Chi­ nese Digest aligns their argument with several other attempts to protest cinematic stereotypes.33 It is the tone and militancy of the manifesto that clearly separates it from earlier publica­tions. As such, it bespeaks a new level of self-­consciousness about Chinese Americans that fueled their battles against discrimina­tion. Rather than just criticizing that mo­tion pictures were racist, the text articulates bewilderment that Chinese Americans still had to fight these depic­tions in the mid1930s. As we will see later in this chapter, the new self-­consciousness of Chinese Americans and their demand to be treated as “normal beings” was clearly visible in popular discourses.

31 See Julie Shuk-­yee Lam, “The Chinese Digest, 1935 – 1940,” Chinese America: History & Pers­ pectives (1987): 118 – 137. 32 “Why the Digest?”, Chinese Digest, November 15, 1935, 8. 33 In the 1920s, for example, the China Institute in America started campaigns against certain mo­tion pictures. They reported that “[o]n several occasions the Institute has lodged protest against certain mo­tion picture films which present wrong ideas of China to the American public, resulting in revisions of the films.” Eugene Shen, China Institute in America (New York, 1928), 6. Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. See also John Haddad, “The Laundry Man’s Got a Knife! China and Chinese America in Early United States Cinema,” Chinese America: History & Perspectives (2001): 31 – 47.

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‘Old San Francisco’ (1927) and the Emergence of the Americanized Chinese

The late 1920s and early 1930s mark a time when old stereotypes did indeed begin to incite criticism. Ques­tions of assimila­tion and the heightened visibility of ‘modern’ Chinese Americans led to the simultaneity of old stereotypes and new filmic concep­tions of Oriental identities. The 1927 film Old San Francisco aptly illustrates the cinematic emergence of new forms of Chinese American identity. Whereas Chapter 2 of this study focused on the spatial aspects of the film, this sec­tion takes a closer look at the practice of passing as white and the racial transforma­tion of the film’s antagonist Chris Buckwell (Warner Oland). I read his ability to pass as white as a filmic reference to the new visibility of ‘Americanized’ Chinese in popular culture. The film’s historic setting in pre-­earthquake San Francisco reinforces this commentary. The temporal distance of the narrative allows the film to hint at Chinese Americaniza­tion and at the same time contain it through its reference to the ‘old Chinatown’ myth and Buckwell’s death during the religiously charged earthquake. The film can ultimately portray Buckwell as an outwardly white American in the beginning but punishes his racial disguise at the end of the film by burying him under the city’s rubble. The scene that reveals Buckwell as Chinese is central to the film’s overall narrative. Buckwell is a wealthy businessman from San Francisco’s Chinatown who tries to obtain the property of Spanish-­Californian family Vasquez, not without sexual attrac­tion to the owner’s daughter Dolores Vasquez (Dolores Costello). The audience knows Buckwell as the “Czar of Chinatown,” a man whose origins are unknown. The revela­ tion of Buckwell’s own Chinese background comes at a point when Dolores’s father has just died from a heart attack during an attempt to defend his property against the intruding Buckwell, who not only tries to take his land but also to rape his daughter. Dolores witnesses her father’s death and runs towards him. In the subsequent scene, Dolores takes up the family’s sword and becomes spiritually charged with the ghosts of her Spanish ancestors. Lighting effects and her posture recall Christian icono­ graphy, further emphasized by cuts to ringing church bells and a Jesus statue (see fig. 43). Standing with the sword of her family and surrounded by a Christian aura, she stares at a panicked Chris Buckwell who attempts to escape. Buckwell tries to cover his face with his coat to protect himself from the divine light and Dolores’s gaze, but as the intertitle explains, “[i]n the awful light of an outraged, wrathful, Christian God, the heathen soul stood revealed.” As he lowers his arm, Dolores – and with her the film audience – sees he has ‘slanted’ eyes (see fig. 44). He looks once more at Dolores and then runs away like a hunted animal. This narrative twist enables Dolores to denounce Buckwell to the Chinese of San Francisco’s Chinatown, who have an interest in bringing down the oppressive “Czar of Chinatown.”

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Figure 43 (left)  Dolores Vasquez (Dolores Costello). Screenshot from Old San Francisco (Warner Bros., 1927). Figure 44 (right)  Chris Buckwell (Warner Oland) revealed. Screenshot from Old San Francisco (Warner Bros., 1927).

The scene contrasts Dolores’s Christian spirituality and Buckwell, who is reduced to his Oriental physical form, sharply. In this sense, it refers to the general body-­ mind dualism that pervades discourses of Americaniza­tion. While Dolores’s true identity becomes apparent through her literally visible Christian faith, Buckwell cannot escape the racial status that is revealed qua his now clearly recognizable Oriental body features. His masquerade of acting as a a white businessman may fool people ‘at first glance,’ but his fundamental Otherness is revealed through the absence of a Christian ‘soul,’ a flaw that inevitably links him to immorality and crime. Within the narrative of the film, his now-­revealed Orientalness retro­ spectively condemns his desire for the white female protagonist and serves to explain his transgressive rape attempt a few moments before. Old San Francisco’s depic­tion of a Chinese passing as white has spawned scho­ larly atten­tion before. Michael Rogin has aptly analyzed the racial constella­tions in the film’s narrative.34 He takes a closer look at the history of racial masquerade and passing and demonstrates their effects on the forma­tion of a white American identity. He argues that “racial cross-­dressing turned Europeans into Ameri­ cans not only on Frederick Turner’s mythological frontier but also in the cities, where blackface made white Americans out of Irish Immigrants on the ‘cultural borderland’ […] between the Anglo-­Saxon and colored races.”35 Mo­tion pictures, 34 Michael Rogin, “Making America Home: Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimila­tion in the Transi­tion to Talking Pictures,” Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 1050 – 1077. Reprinted in Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 121 – 156. 35 Rogin, “Making America Home,” 1052.

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he argues, continued this tradi­tion and helped Irish and Jewish immigrants to overcome their “ambiguous racial status.” Racial masquerade like blackface and yellowface in mo­tion pictures ultimately pointed to white privilege and enabled these immigrant groups to become white. Rogin’s reading of Old San Francisco and other films like The Jazz Singer (1927) follows this argument.36 He argues that the revela­tion of Buckwell’s Chinese ancestry produces a significant shift: “the movie transfers alienness from Anglos who endanger Spanish to Orientals who menace whites.”37 Consequently the original threat that Anglos posed to San Francisco’s Spanish popula­tion in the nineteenth century, which is shown in the film’s opening sequences, turns into a threat of a now Chinese Buckwell to the Spanish-­Irish love couple in the early twentieth century. Drawing from contemporary Yellow Peril discourse, the film employs the Oriental threat against other immigrants, who in turn appear white; as the object of Oriental desire, Dolores ultimately crosses the boundary into white woman­hood. Rogin writes: “Victimiza­tion Americanizes and thus whitens Dolores, and the movie discovers whites as the true victims.”38 He then concludes: “Racial cross-­dressing in both films [The Jazz Singer and Old San Francisco; B. S.] collapses the division separating Anglos from some other Americans, but it allows Spaniard and Jew in by keeping Asian and black out. Buckwell’s crime is not ­passing; it is the threat to white womanhood from his Oriental blood.” According to Rogin, Old San Francisco therefore tells the city’s history against the backdrop of c­ hanging racial boundaries, unifying a white Californian popula­tion against the new m ­ enace of Oriental alienness. Amanda M. Page takes up this line of thought in her analysis of racial passing of Chinese in Old San Francisco and Walter White’s novel Flight from 1926.39 Whereas narratives of racial passing often reveal the failure of the black-­white binary and emphasize racial ambiguities, Page states that Buckwell’s passing in Old San Francisco “is presented as an act of racial trespass, not as a representa­tion of the paradoxes of American racial categoriza­tion.”40 She reads the film against the backdrop of the legal debates about the defini­tion of whiteness that surrounded

36 The Jazz Singer, dir. Alan Crosland, perf. Al Jolson, May MacAvoy, and Warner Oland (United States: Warner Bros. 1928). 37 Rogin, “Making America Home,” 1059. 38 Ibid., 1062. 39 Amanda M. Page, “Consolidated Colors: Racial Passing and Figura­tions of the Chinese in Walter White’s Flight and Darryl Zanuck’s Old San Francisco,” MELUS 37, no. 4 (2012): 93 – 117. 40 Ibid., 103.

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the famous Supreme Court decisions in 1922 and 1923. The cases of Takao Ozawa v. United States and United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind confirmed Asian ineligi­ bility for US citizenship by denying them the racial status of whiteness. The Court limited whiteness to popular and scientific concep­tions of the Caucasian race or, in the case of Thind, to racial “common knowledge.”41 The portrayal of racial passing in Old San Francisco, Page argues, follows this logic. She concludes: “In this film, Asians simply cannot be assimilated, no matter how European they appear. With blood quantum trumping phenotype, ‘one drop’ is redefined to include Chinese Americans as well as African Americans.”42 Buckwell’s passing as white remains unnoticed and so suggests he lacks physical features that connect him to Orientalness. His masquerade, however, is revealed in the above-­men­tioned scene with the help of Dolores’s Christian faith and her religious gaze, making his “heathen soul,” rather than his physical appearance, the feature that marks him as an Orien­tal. His passing has a fundamentally religious dimension, as Page emphasizes, and contrasts sharply with Dolores’s Christianity. However, the film re-­inscribes ­Buckwell’s “soul” onto his body once he is revealed, as a close-­up of his face and eyes indicates. For Page this represents one of the affirmative paradoxes of the film: “Buckwell’s Chinese ‘soul’ manifests itself visually in the film; the film therefore upholds the logic of Thind despite a passing plot that seems to be premised on the idea that race cannot be easily detected.”43 In sum, through its depic­tion of a Chinese passing as white, the film merely reaffirms the racial categoriza­tions it seems to ques­tion.44 Both Rogin’s and Page’s insightful readings, however, fail to read Buckwell’s passing as a sign of his (unsuccessful) Americaniza­tion. While it may be less visible than in other films discussed in this chapter, Old San Francisco testifies to the increased visibility of new Chinese American identities in 1920s’ popular culture. Two important traits of Buckwell’s character illustrate his ambivalent posi­tion within the racial logic of the film: his rela­tionship to the other Chinese and his own split personality. 41 Ibid., 96. 42 Ibid., 103. 43 Ibid. 44 The fact that Swedish-­born actor Warner Oland plays the Chinese character complicates the matter even more. As Page remarks, “[t]he absurdity of a Swedish actor passing for a Chinese character who passes for a white American in a film that condemns racial passing undercuts the film’s message about the dangers of crossing racial and ethnic boundaries, yet it also highlights the fact that racial construc­tion is ultimately a white performance projecting white racial fantasies – as contradictory and circular as they may be.” Ibid., 97.

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The first trait that highlights Chris Buckwell’s Americaniza­tion is his difficult rela­tionship with the other Chinese characters of the film. Buckwell is introduced as a powerful person within the San Francisco society. He wears fine suits and has an African American servant, who is the only Black person in the entire film. The audience first sees Buckwell as he is about to meet representatives of Chinatown in his office, presumably tong leaders. The men wear Chinese clothes and are arguing before Buckwell enters the room. As the audience has learned a few moments before, the “Chinese ques­tion” – that is, the expansion of China­ town into other parts of the city – poses an apparent threat to San Francisco, and Buckwell is the only one who has the power to keep the Chinese within their ­limits. When Buckwell enters the room, the intertitle explains: “Cruel, mysterious, crafty—Chris Buckwell had grafted his way from an unknown origin to power. Czar of the Tenderloin—chief persecuter [sic] of the Chinese.” He sits down at his table while the Chinese stand before him. Gesturing dominantly, Buckwell accuses the Chinese of buying property outside of Chinatown and demands they sell it back to him for a low price. As he sees the Chinese hesitating, Buckwell asks: “Do you want me to close your district – tighter than a Chinese drum!” A close-­up then shows the spokesman of the group, whose name is later revealed to be Lu Fong (Sôjin ­Kamiyama), followed by a shot to the man next to him, who secretly starts p­ ulling a blade from his robe. The tension between Buckwell and the Chinese is finally relieved when Lu Fong signals the man to put the blade away. Suddenly Lu Fong puts on a smile, raises his hands, and looks up as if submitting to a higher spirit. He tells Buckwell: “I bow to the wisdom of Confucius: ‘When thy adversary is in power, yield to him.’” He stresses his statement by bowing to Buckwell. Pleased by Lu Fong’s submissiveness, Buckwell stands up and calls him a “wise Chinaman.” These few seconds sum up the rela­tion between the Chinese tong leader and the “Czar” of Chinatown who passes as white. Lu Fong’s Confucian quote and his unexpected and exaggerated submissiveness are clearly a masquerade as well. In fact, Lu Fong passes as a stereotypical Chinese in this scene to release the tension and avoid any further risks. The Chinatown businessman passes as the passive and pacifist Confucian Chinese to secure his business while on the other side Buckwell, who passes as white, is fooled by Lu Fong’s masquerade and feels reaffirmed in his power over the Chinese qua his alleged whiteness. Thus, this scene shows racial masquerades on both sides of the table. Whereas Lu Fong’s passing as Chinese points to the stereotypical concepts of Orientalness and subversively plays with them, Buckwell’s decep­tion by this performance resembles a posi­tion of white ignorance and paradoxically confirms his passing as white.

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Both the Chinese and Chris Buckwell fight for business interests that are connected to territorial expansion. In this conflict, both parties follow the principle of economic profit and property ownership, ultimately pointing to the Americanness of both the Chinatown Chinese and Buckwell, the Chinese passing as white. Both have acknowledged an American capitalist logic, but unlike Lu Fong and the other tong members, Buckwell hides his racial status; he thus crosses a line that, as Rogin and Page have already pointed out, cannot be crossed. It is not Buckwell’s Americanness that leads to his downfall, as the Chinese of China­ town show behaviors that are as American as Buckwell’s. It is that he hides his true racial identity. The second trait pointing to Buckwell’s Americaniza­tion is the way the film visua­ lizes his split personality between the businessman Buckwell and his ‘true’ identity as a stereotypical Oriental villain. Buckwell literally hides away everything that attests his Chinese ancestry. Buckwell’s house features a hidden basement where he secretly practices his decidedly Oriental and correspondingly un-­Christian religion and hides his brother Chang-­Loo (Angelo Rossito). A few moments after meeting the tong leaders, Buckwell is shown walking downstairs to a hidden room, putting on a Chinese robe and praying in front of a statue. He prays for forgiveness for the sins he has committed against his “own people.” In the back of the secret room, there is a small cage where Buckwell has locked up Chang-­Loo, later revealed as Buckwell’s “Mongolian brother.” Chang-­Loo is of small stature and keeps accusing Buckwell for the lie he is living and the sins he has committed. At one point Buckwell attempts to pull a knife on his brother but changes his mind. In the hidden room, the audience also sees Buckwell’s female servant, introduced as “a flower of the Orient.” Played by Anna May Wong, the servant’s role is a stereo­ typical depic­tion of an evil Dragon Lady that helps Buckwell against his enemies. Within the film’s racial logic, Buckwell’s secret identity as an Oriental villain serves to counterbalance his outward whiteness. The sudden revela­tion that ­Buckwell worships Oriental spirits, keeps his brother in a cage, and has an evil, female servant renders him an archetype of the Yellow Peril villain that meets the fundamental exoticist and sensa­tionalist stereotypes of mo­tion pictures. ­Buckwell’s secret identity is the ultimate proof that his passing is a ‘trespass’ and that he will never be able to become white. His brother clearly symbolizes the ‘soul’ or racial essence that he suppresses and disconnects from his public appearance but will ultimately never be able to overcome. Old San Francisco is a visualiza­tion of Orientalness that acknowledges the emergence of new, Americanized Chinese identities but also re-­erects racial boundaries by condemning racial passing as illegitimate trespass. Buckwell represents an Oriental that appears to be white not only physically and through his clothes but

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also through his powerful economic posi­tion. As such, he has adopted a degree of Americanness, but at the same time the film marks his racial transgression as a threat the moment he is revealed as the stereotypical villain that was so widespread in Yellow Peril popular culture. In contrast, the ‘real’ Chinese are not rendered a direct threat as long as they stay within their territory or, in the logic of the film, acknowledge – and adhere to – their racial status. 3.1.2 The Americanized Genera­tion and the ‘Chinese Flapper’

In popular discourse, the shifts and discrepancies between persistent stereotypes of alien and unassimilable Chinese on the one hand and the growing group of self-­ conscious, emancipated Chinese Americans that embraced an American lifestyle on the other hand were understood along genera­tional lines. It was an Americanized youth that began to fill the streets of the urban centers. These American-­born adolescents conflicted with both the common concepts of the Chinese sojourner and the older genera­tion of Chinese immigrants – that is, their parents. Between these extremes, young Chinese Americans started to form genuine Chinese American identities that were neither completely Chinese nor completely American.45 In this regard, the phenomenon of the ‘Chinese flapper,’ a new genera­tion of young female Chinese Americans, was widely debated in the mainstream public as well as Chinese communities. The discourse of the ‘Chinese flapper’ merges all-­important aspects of Americaniza­tion into a concentrated form and says a lot about contemporary concepts of race, gender, and genera­tion, yet scholarship has not thoroughly investigated it. The 1920s mark an important period for the emergence of a Chinese American identity in which young Chinese Americans embraced American culture. In her study Being Chinese, Becoming Chinese American, Shehong Chen describes these processes.46 Her analysis takes a transna­tional perspective that focuses on Chinese Americans’ rela­tionship to the political and cultural developments in China. The political instability of China after World War I and in the 1920s changed the China-­oriented outlook of many Chinese. According to Chen, the Chinese Na­tio­nal Party’s alliance with the Soviet Union and coopera­tion with Communists mark a break with China for many Chinese in the United States.47 45 For a study of Chinese American identities in the late 1930s and beyond, see Gloria Heyung Chun, Of Orphans and Warriors: Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 46 Chen, Being Chinese, 146 – 178. 47 Ibid., 146 – 147.

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This in turn favored the emergence of a Chinese American consciousness. As Chen asserts, the coming of age of an American-­born genera­tion that saw the U. S. as their home brought radical changes for the Chinese communities: “[The Chinese; B. S.] willingness to accommodate to norms of American mainstream society peaked in this period.”48 Chen men­tions the installment of beauty contests in American Chinatowns and organiza­tions such as the YWCA and the Square and Circle Club, a Chinese American women’s service organiza­tion, as indicators for the increasing prominence of female Chinese Americans in the public eye; however, these developments, as Chen and other scholars like Judy Yung emphasize, did not merely replace Chinese tradi­tions but were added to the cultural repertoire of second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans.49 Accordingly, white mainstream newspapers and magazines noticed the ­ongoing transforma­tions within urban Chinese communities. From the 1920s to the 1930s, the phenomenon of ‘Americanized Chinese’ fascinated white observers almost as much as their supposed Otherness had in the decades before. Newspapers, for example, pointed out that contrary to popular concep­tions, men with ‘pigtails’ could hardly be found anymore.50 Others reported how Chinatown’s male popula­ tion adopted American clothing fashion and customs like cigarette smoking.51 The public also paid special atten­tion to changes in Chinatown attrac­tions that reflected Americaniza­tion trends. Jazz concerts were happening in Los Angeles’s Chinese theater because the tradi­tional shows, as the Los Angeles Times states, “no longer finds favor with the Americanized Chinese.”52 Another consequence of this development was the opening of cocktail bars in San Francisco’s Chinatown. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the alleged dropping of old conven­tions and the enjoyment of American drinks marked “another step towards modernity […] [and] was part of a series of moves toward fusion with Western civiliza­tion.”53 Second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans were thus becoming more visible in mainstream popular culture, signifying crucial shifts within the immigrant community. 48 Ibid., 147. 49 Chen, Being Chinese, 147; Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 50 Diana Rice, “‘Left Their Pigtails behind Them,’” New York Times, March 30, 1924. 51 “Chinatown’s New Americans,” New York Times, February 23, 1930. 52 “Chinese ­Theater is Jazzed Up,” Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1925. 53 “Chinatown Cocktail Bars,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1936. In this regard, San Francisco’s night club ‘Forbidden City,’ which opened in 1938, played an important role in offering American forms of entertainment to Chinatown’s popula­tion. See Yong Chen, Chi­ nese San Francisco, 1850 – 1943: A Trans-­Pacific Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 197; Chun, Orphans and Warriors, 65 – 68.

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The ‘Chinese flapper’ was the most visible phenomenon associated with the Americanized genera­tion. The increasing number of Chinese American females that embraced a modern, Western lifestyle aroused the interest of many contemporaries. In 1922, the Los Angeles Times published the article “The Whispering Shadows of Chinatown’s Alley.”54 The article’s focus on the genera­tional changes that shaped the district becomes clear in the sub-­headline: “Lotus-­lipped Chinese Flappers Are Breaking Down Old Tradi­tions in Restless Quest for Freedom.” This descrip­tion demonstrates that the emergence of emancipated Chinese Ameri­cans was still understood in tradi­tional Orientalist concep­tions that reduced Chinese flappers to their sexualized and exoticized appearance. The emphasis on Other­ ness continues in the opening lines of the article: “[t]hat is the main trage­dy of Americaniza­tion of aliens, particularly of orientals, that they never can be wholly ours, nor can we be theirs; there is that fine line, you know, that mustn’t be crossed.”55 While the text aims at pointing out the trends of a modern youth culture in China­town, it makes clear in the beginning that no matter how Americanized they appear, the racial boundary kept Chinese Americans from becoming “ours.” This fundamental difference is upheld throughout the article as it describes how Chinese Americans enjoy jazz music, parties, and university classes. “There’s evident in Chinatown a subtle straining at bonds, an undercurrent struggle of the new seeking to undermine the old. In the young faces you see a restlessness and beneath the placid exterior of the old ones there must be uneasiness. The girls, held chattels for so many centuries, have broken the bonds that tied them to tradi­tion, they are becoming Americanized more quickly than are the boys. They have sylphlike grace, these Chinese flappers, an inherited charm of movement. Their lemon-­colored faces sparkle with mischief, there is a gaining humor gleaming in their narrow black eyes […].”

The article describes a stark genera­tional gap between a restless youth and their parents, who by contrast appear passive and secluded from America’s modern tendencies. It also gives the “Chinese flappers” the most atten­tion. Ironically, it describes these emancipated flappers by referring to their exotic beauty and racially coded physical features, reinforcing an Orientalist perspective that stresses their Otherness. Following the logic of the text, even the newly achieved “freedom” does not prevent the double discrimina­tion and objectifica­tion as both Orientals and women. 54 Myrtle Gebhart, “The Whispering Shadows of Chinatown’s Alleys,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1922. 55 Ibid.

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While the fascina­tion with ‘Chinese flappers’ must be seen against the backdrop of other important developments in U. S. culture and gender ideals, the ‘Chinese flapper’ held a crucial posi­tion within the discourses surrounding the Americaniza­tion of second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans. The immensely popu­ lar and influential style of the flapper was connected to several cultural shifts of the 1920s and has become iconic for the decade’s legacy as ‘The Jazz Age’ or the ‘Roaring Twenties.’56 The typical flapper was a young woman with bobbed hair and scandalously short skirts who took full advantage of the time period’s expanding possibilities for modern entertainment and mass consump­tion. She smoked ciga­ rettes, drank alcohol, spent her evenings dancing, and explored her sexuality in a heretofore unknown – or rather, less visible – manner. To a certain degree, the flapper was an outcome of early feminist struggles for the so-­called ‘New Woman.’ Changing social and cultural condi­tions around 1900 had led to an increased call for female equality in not only the right to vote but also in educa­tion, the labor market, and sexuality. The flapper, however, put a more hedonistic twist to it and favored a lifestyle that embraced consump­tion. Fashion, magazines, and Hollywood stars played a crucial role in the emergence, dissemina­tion and, ultimately, in the commodifica­tion of the flapper ideal. Hollywood films used the character of the flapper early on, and it became part of the star persona of actresses like Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, or Louise Brooks. In regard to understanding the special significance of the ‘Chinese flapper,’ it is crucial to work out some of the historiographical and theoretical thoughts about the flapper phenomenon in general. Whereas the flapper phenomenon stood for a confident and active femininity that departed from older Victorian ideals, scholars have criticized the tendency to overestimate the degree of equality and ‘sexual libera­tion’ that came with it. Estelle Freedman famously criticized historical scholarship on the 1920s for giving the impression that early feminism ended with the success of the suffrage movement.57 ­According to her, scholars have characterized the decade as a time when women were treated equal for the first time but remained politically disinterested, ­creating the ­no­tion that women did not make use of their new possibilities. In this view, 56 See Kelly Boyer Sagert, Flappers: A Guide to an American Subculture (Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010); Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Crown, 2006); for an insightful study that focuses on the transna­tional aspects of the ‘modern girl,’ see Alys Eve Weinbaum et al., eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consump­tion, Modernity, and Globaliza­tion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 57 Estelle B. Freedman, “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 61, no. 2 (1974): 372 – 393.

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the reduc­tion of 1920s femininity to the icon of the flapper served to portray women as sexu­ally liberated and equal, which was in turn taken as an explana­ tion for the decline of the feminist movement. According to Freedman, however, “[t]he portrayal of the 1920s as a period of full equality, when in fact discrimina­ tion […] was abundant, has perpetuated a myth of equality.”58 She adds that the claim “that women were politically apathetic but sexually active during the 1920s […] c­ reate[d] sexually stereotyped historical roles for w ­ omen.”59 Scholars following this critique have begun to emphasize the differences of emancipa­ tion in spheres like politics, labor, educa­tion, family, and sexuality and in their rela­tion to categories like class and race.60 As Lynn Dumenil concludes in her study about 1920s’ culture, “for most women the modern goals of equality and personal autonomy were often elusive.”61 An important critique of 1920s discourses on sexuality came from C ­ hristina Simmons. She criticized a simplistic understanding of flappers and ‘New Women’ as symbols of sexual libera­tion and offered an analysis that follows Michel ­Foucault’s reassessment of the repression hypothesis.62 She argues that discourses of sexuality in the early twentieth century created a “myth of Victorian repression” that made the 1920s appear as a radical departure from old ideals of sexuality and gender while it was, in fact, rather a re-­adjustment. ­Simmons understands the alleged dichotomy of Victorian repression and sexual libera­tion as a discursive strategy to adjust old gender hierarchies to the social transforma­tions of that period. “It constituted a strategic modifica­tion rather than a decline of male dominance. Although the new morality was made possible above all by women’s greater political and economic activity […] the new sexual discourse of the 1920s and 1930s attacked women’s increased ­power.”63 While 1920s discourse acknowledged female sexuality and desire, it also reproduced tradi­tional concepts of male dominance. The new regula­tions of sexua­ lity, ultimately, were made a prerequisite for a ‘healthy,’ modern marriage. In 58 Ibid., 393. 59 Ibid. 60 For a cultural history of the New Woman with a focus on gender and performance, see Angela J. Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the Ameri­ can 1920s (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000). 61 Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 98. 62 Christina Simmons, “Modern Sexuality and the Myth of Victorian Repression,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 157 – 177. 63 Simmons, “Modern Sexuality,” 158.

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regard to the alleged sexual excesses of the modern flapper that some saw as a threat, Simmons concludes that “sexual revisionists idealized the flapper, whose explora­tions of female sexuality remained relatively limited and were driven by romantic love.” By putting the search for the ‘right’ man at the core of the flapper’s sexual encounters, the re-­adjusted gender order incorporated a more liberal sexuality. Mo­tion pictures, I want to add, played a crucial role in this development, as they usually followed a similar strategy. Stephen Sharot, who analyzed the connec­tions between the flapper star personae and class and gender, has observed that mo­tion pictures featuring prominent stars connected to a flapper image resolve their narratives by establishing a romantic love couple, preferably from the middle or upper class.64 The flapper phenomenon and its public percep­tion also offer possibilities for investigating concepts of age and genera­tion in general. In her analysis of 1920s’ discourses on youth culture, Laura Davidow Hirshbein investigates how public discourses defined concepts of youth and old age and how they related to gender and na­tional identity.65 Her observa­tions are based on theories about the way concepts of genera­tion and age shape how reality is perceived and how they are used to explain social transforma­tions along the lines of biologism: “In the 1920s, commentators used the image of genera­tional conflict to explore the implica­tions of new and old in American society and to organize rapidly shifting social, cultural, political, and economic worlds. In addi­tion, commentators used the language of genera­tions to make sense of changes in gender ideals, as twentieth-­century men articulated anxieties about loss of independence and control within the workplace, and women struggled to redefine femininity in post suffrage amendment society.”66

In other words, the language of genera­tions was used to make sense of social and cultural phenomena to make them intelligible and to give them a biological, that is, ‘natural,’ meaning. The younger genera­tion and especially the flapper served to identify and signify social change. This genera­tion was then connected to the future and fate of the na­tional order, which in turn was imagined as dependent on the func­tioning family. Following Paula Fass, Hirshbein argues that the “the frequent discussions of youth in the 1920s had less to do with a specific cohort 64 Stephen Sharot, “The ‘New Woman’, Star Personas, and Cross-­Class Romance Films in 1920s America,” Journal of Gender Studies 19, no. 1 (2010): 73 – 86. 65 Laura Davidow Hirshbein, “The Flapper and the Fogy: Representa­tions of Gender and Age in the 1920s,” Journal of Family History 26, no. 1 (2001): 112 – 137, 112. 66 Ibid., 113.

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of young people than a popular preoccupa­tion with evolving na­tional identity.”67 The increasingly important category of age served to divide both one genera­tion from another and separate different genera­tions along the same gender lines. This created an antagonism between old and young women, where “older women were represented as part of an older moral order, one that did not necessarily have any relevance in the modern world.”68 This division strengthened the perceived genera­ tional solidarity between young women and young men. Hirshbein points out that genera­tional conflict and the related differences in moral and gender ideals where seen by some as the most important issue of their times. This even led some commentators to the idea that the young genera­tion was a whole different race, rendering the differences between old and young as unbridgeable and threatening as the dangers that some saw in the movement of the ‘New Negro.’69 Examples like this illuminate how age and genera­tion became powerful concepts which, like gender, race, and class, produced social divisions. The 1920s was arguably one of the first decades where the concept of youth became a signifier for social change and moderniza­tion within a fully developed mass culture. The historical and theoretical observa­tions on the discourses of sexuality and age are fruitful for an analysis of the percep­tion of the Chinese flapper in the 1920s. Discourses on the Chinese flapper followed a similar strategy to re-­adjust sexualized stereotypes of Oriental exoticism and to reproduce racial Otherness via the category of age. As the article in the Los Angeles Times at the beginning of this sec­tion has already indicated, Chinese flappers were represented as emancipated, educated, and active members of a new Chinese American genera­tion; however, in popular discourse, these depic­tions continued to reduce Chinese women to their ‘lotus-­lipped,’ sexualized appeal and to diminish the political and cultural repercussions of their new-­found freedom. In general, the concept of the young Chinese American genera­tion served to understand the emergence of new migrant and hybrid identities. It was because of their alleged Americanness that this young genera­tion departed from the passiveness and alienness of their parents. The concept of an Americanized genera­tion served to make Chinese Americans visible as an element of American multicultural society. As a carrier and signifier of change, this allegedly monolithic genera­tion was set in opposi­tion to their parents’ genera­tion of aliens and sojourners.

67 Ibid.; see Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 68 Hirshbein, “Flapper,” 119. 69 Ibid., 125.

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In 1923, the New York Times published an illustrated article about the “Flappers of Chinatown” that sheds light on the percep­tion of young Chinese in popu­lar discourse.70 The article opens with a descrip­tion of a young woman named “Mah Jong,” presumably a stand-­in for the Chinese flapper in general. Mah Jong is described as a fashion oriented young woman with bobbed hair, silk pantaloons, and high heels. In a reference to Kipling, the article states: “the Chinese flapper, American-­born, is the East and the West in one, and so eternally exotic. She is the flower of two peoples and of two ages.” Mah Jong, the article continues, is even more up-­to-­date with modern – that is, Parisian – fashion than the ordinary white women, able to walk freely “in these free garments, not with the mincing gait of China’s tradi­tion, nor yet with the swinging stride of Caucasian girls suddenly given the liberty of knickers.” Accordingly, the text is accompanied by two photos. One of them shows two young Chinese Americans sitting next to each other, both looking at an opened cosmetic box that one of the girls holds in her hand. The cap­tion explains: “Two Chinese Flappers of San Francisco Not Unacquainted with the Lip Stick.” The second photo shows one of the girls sitting and rolling a cigarette. The article itself continues with a rhetorical trick by contrasting Mah Jong to her “sister.” This sister is described as the complete opposite of Mah Jong, not only because she does not ‘bob’ her hair. The article reads: “She has a sister, this pagan young woman. The sister is Miss Pung Chow. Mah Jong cares little save for her own sweet will and the inescapable duties of life. But Miss Pung Chow is very conscientious. She is sedate, devout. She is a Christian. […] There is no touch of rouge on Miss Pung Chow’s cheeks or lips; her complexion is clay-­sallow.”71

The text contrasts Mah Jong both with white girls and the more tradi­tional lifestyle of her “sister” – that is, the Christian youth of the Chinatown missions. Mah Jong, the article explains, believes herself to be progressive and thinks of religious women as modern “slave girls.”72 This progressiveness, however, sets her apart from her parents and to a large part from her own genera­tion as well. The text finishes on a rather dark note by referring to the ‘price’ Americanized children of Chinese families have to pay for rejecting their heritage. “They are pure bloods,” it concludes, “who often suffer

70 “Flappers of Chinatown,” New York Times, May 27, 1923. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid.

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the penalties of the half caste.”73 This way, the article draws a direct connec­tion between age, gender, and race. The Americaniza­tion of young Chinese, the adop­ tion of modern U. S. fashion and progressiveness distinguishes them from more tradi­tional Chinese immigrants. This results in a state of hybridity as well as a loss of racial identity with all the negative consequences of belonging to neither Chinese nor white Americans. The Chinese flapper has hardly been a subject of academic scholarship, but in a fascinating article, Judy Yung offers insight into the life of the Chinese Ameri­ can journalist Flora Belle Jan, who advocated a flapper lifestyle and shared her experiences publicly.74 According to Yung, Flora Belle Jan demonstrates the ambi­ valent posi­tion that second-­genera­tion Chinese American women held within 1920s culture: “[American-­born Chinese Americans’; B. S.] ability to acculturate was constrained by intergenera­ tional and cultural conflicts at home and racism, sexism, and economic segmenta­tion in the larger society. Having to negotiate between cultures, between American ideals of democracy and the realities of socioeconomic and political exclusion, Chinese Americans, like their Mexican American and Japanese American contemporaries, responded in a variety of ways based on the interplay of historical forces, cultural values, family circumstances, and individual personalities. The majority of second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans chose to adopt a bicultural lifestyle or a blend of what they took to be ‘the best of the East and the West’ while maintaining a segregated existence from mainstream society.”75

According to Yung, Flora Belle Jan is an important example of a Chinese female that rejected and criticized Chinese customs and claimed an American identity. Being a typical flapper, Yung describes her as “modern, independent, sophisticated, and frank in speech, dress, morals, and lifestyle.”76 Flora Belle Jan’s biography and her self-­reflexive outlook are indeed illuminating. Growing up in Fresno, California, she followed a career as a journalist and managed to 73 Ibid. 74 Judy Yung, “‘It Is Hard to Be Born a Woman but Hopeless to Be Born a Chinese’: The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 18, no. 3 (1997): 66 – 91. One of the reasons Jan’s life is so well documented is the fact that she held close contact to the sociologists on Robert E. Park’s project on assimila­tion, who considered Jan a fascinating case study. Her sociological documents also serve as a recurring theme in Henry Yu’s work, which I discuss further below. See Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migra­tion, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 75 Yung, “‘It Is Hard,’” 68. 76 Ibid., 69.

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publish texts in newspapers and journals like Fresno Bee, San Francisco Examiner, and the Chinese Students’ Monthly. In most of her texts and personal correspondence, she expressed her ‘flapperism’ through her critical stance towards the restric­tions of Christianity as well as Chinese religion and customs. She was well-­educated and attended the University of California, Berkeley, while at the same time she expressed her love for “fashion, romance, and a good time out;”77 however, she also was confronted with discrimina­tion on campus, where she was excluded from white sororities and found it difficult to connect to the rest of the white flappers or date other students.78 The complexity of Jan’s hybrid identity became obvious in her writing. In one of her texts, she compares female students from China with native-­born coeds like herself. According to Jan they “are shy and retiring, their hair is seldom artistically arranged, they have little sense of color harmony, they lack campus spirit, they have no style whatsoever.” American-­born students, in contrast, “powder and rouge, marcel their hair, trip gaily on impossible French heels, talk slang, flirt openly with boys, dance, drive cars, and go out late, unchaperoned.”79 In a story that, a­ ccording to Yung, can be considered autobiographical, the main character Ming Toy is a Chinese American flapper that breaks with her parents’ tradi­tions and leaves her Chinatown home. Jan writes: “Ming Toy has never seen China and has no desire to see China. Ming Toy was born in Chinatown, but she has no desire to live in Chinatown. Ming Toy is American.”80 Jan’s own life took a turn when she married a student from China and in 1932 even went to his homeland with their child. According to Yung, Jan saw her marriage as unsatisfactory and an obstacle to her career aspira­tions. A reason for this, as Yung observes, was Jan’s difficulty to cope with her husband’s more tradi­tional concepts of marriage. This became worse when Jan moved to China, where she refused to adapt to Chinese customs and was discriminated against by Chinese colleagues.81 A troublesome pregnancy and the hardships of the nascent war with Japan affected her health and heigh­ tened her desire to return to the USA. Jan managed to return to San Francisco with her two daughters in 1948, but restric­tions caused her to leave her husband and son in China. Never regaining full health again, she died only two years later.

77 Ibid., 72. 78 Ibid., 76. 79 Flora Belle Jan, “Strangers Who Have Met: Chinese Girls of the East and West,” The Chinese Christian Student 2 (1927), 10 – 11, quoted in Yung, “‘It Is Hard,’” 77 – 78. 80 Flora Belle Jan, “Afraid of the Dark,” The Interpreter, September 1927, 17 – 19, quoted in Yung, “‘It Is Hard,’” 74. Not coincidently, ‘Ming Toy’ is also the name of the protagonist in East Is West. See below. 81 Yung, “‘It Is Hard,’” 83.

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This case study of Flora Belle Jan offers illuminating insights into the negotia­ tions of culture and identities that shaped young Chinese Americans. As Judy Yung concludes, Jan’s life “reminds us of the different responses that Chinese Americans have brought to bear on cultural conflicts and the high costs that women of color had to pay for the racial and gender inequalities of our society.”82 While Jan serves as an example of an emancipated young woman that criticized both Chinese and American culture, her case also shows how her ‘Americaniza­tion’ as a flapper was still restricted by the discrimina­tion that resulted from racist discourses. The ‘Chinese flapper’ was hotly debated within the Chinese American community. As the comparison between Chinese and Chinese American girls in Flora Belle Jan’s text indicated, the flapper style ultimately raised ques­tions of Americaniza­tion and belonging. In 1939, the Chinese Digest published an article titled “Chinese Girls: Two Types”, written by an anonymous author.83 The text describes the differences between women who were born in China and native-­born Chinese Americans, who the author calls toa-­sung. The most obvious difference, according to the author, is the way they dress: “The toa-­sung comes out in anything or almost nothing, depending on the weather: whereas the real China-­born wears her dress long and unrevealing, hot or cold. If you examine them more closely, you’ll find that the toa-­sung plucks her eyebrows, paints her fingertips with the vilest red, and is now subsisting on a two-­hundred calorie-­a-­day diet—Hollywood, you know. The China-­born, on the other hand, engages in none of these practices. The closest she gets to Hollywood is when she dons a pair of colored glasses made in China.”84

The text clearly refers to the flapper-­type Chinese American and connects the concept to fashion and sexual liberty. Above all, the toa sung’s Americaniza­tion stands in direct rela­tion to mo­tion pictures, stardom, and related beauty ideals – as a style that affects appearance and body concepts. To a certain degree, the ‘Chinese flapper’ becomes American via her body by literally incorporating Hollywood ideals; however, – and this is the important point for the author – the Americaniza­tion of ‘Chinese flappers’ inevitably has to fail because of bodily characteristics and their rela­tion to race, as the following lines demonstrate: “The difference between these girls of course is that the toa-­sung are thoroughly ‘occidenta­ lized.’ […] And I regret that—the extent of their Americaniza­tion, I mean. I object to that 82 Ibid., 86. 83 “Chinese Girls: Two Types,” Chinese Digest, March–April 1939, 10. 84 Ibid.

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only because the American-­born Chinese cannot be assimilated like the European immigrant. After all, you can’t invite a toa-­sung to your next week-­end [sic] party; it just simply isn’t done. And vice-­versa. Since this is the case, I’m all for Chinafica­tion of the toa-­sung and leave Ameri­ canism for the real Americans.”85

Similar to the texts men­tioned at the beginning of this chapter, the author introduces racial boundaries as the ultimate obstacle to full Americaniza­tion – a line that cannot be crossed. All attempts of assimila­tion are therefore bound to fail. Following this argument, the text openly criticizes the ‘Chinese flapper’ and pledges to the preserva­tion of Chinese customs and “Chinafica­tion.” This author further elaborates on this claim by giving examples of toa-­sungs and addressing their lack of interest in the political turmoil of late 1930s’ China. The article shows that the flapper as a concept was conflated with Americanism, and that parts of the Chinese American community took a critical stance towards an excessive idealiza­tion of U. S. popular culture and advocated a China-­oriented perspective. In sum, the ‘Chinese flapper’ became a signifier for American femininity and consumer culture. Within white mainstream popular culture, the flapper was perceived as a curiosity that became synonymous with the young, America­nized genera­tion; however, the ‘Chinese flapper’ was also represented as an exotic and sexualized figure that in turn reproduced no­tions of Chinese alienness and, ultimately, the inability of Chinese to ‘overcome’ their racial status. For Chinese American women, the flapper style offered a form of resistance and facilitated the forma­tion of hybrid identities, which were not welcomed by all members of the Chinese American community. This is the discursive network articulated in mo­tion pictures concerning unstable and hybrid identities. In the following passage, I will track these threads into the 1932 film The Hatchet Man. Americaniza­tion, Genera­tion, and Gender in ‘The Hatchet Man’ (1932)

The Hatchet Man was released in 1932 by First Na­tional Pictures and starred Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young as Chinese Americans. Directed by William A. Wellman, the film is an adapta­tion of the play The Honorable Mr. Wong by David Belasco and Achmed Abdullah, which presumably had never been produced.86 It

85 Ibid. 86 This is hinted at in Philip K. Scheurer, “‘Hatchet Man’ Colorful,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1932.

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is one of the few films that focus on Chinese and Chinese American characters and presents Chinatown as a decidedly modern and Americanized space. The film constructed Americanized Chinese characters through the categories of gender, race, genera­tion, and age. I argue that the film indeed offered new and groundbreaking ways to illustrate Chinese American characters. It did so by focusing on the different ways that Chinese American identities articulated themselves in the 1920s and 1930s and consequently stands as a rare example of a film almost completely devoid of white characters; however, the film constructed cultural changes along opposing genera­tional lines and ultimately has to be understood as an element of the discursive network that re-­inscribed young, second-­genera­ tion Chinese Americans into discourses of racial Otherness and Orientalism. The narrative revolves around Wong Low Get (Edward G. Robinson), a former tong member and assassin who has become a legitimate businessman but still struggles with his past. In the film’s prelude, the audience learns that during Wong’s time as a hatchet man in San Francisco’s Chinatown of the 1910s, he had been ordered to kill a good friend. As a last favor, this friend asks Wong to take care of his six-­year-­old daughter, Toya San. The film then jumps to the present day, where Wong leads a respectable life. Over the years he has fallen in love with the grown-­up Toya San (Loretta Young) and now finally asks her to marry him. The couple’s harmony is disrupted by the appearance of Harry En Hai (Leslie F ­ enton), a young Chinese American from New York who is hired as a bodyguard for Wong. Harry meets Toya at a jazz club and the two start an affair. When Wong realizes that Toya loves Harry, he lets the couple go but is, in turn, expelled from the tong for refusing to murder his rival. Years later, Wong, who now lives as a field worker, receives a letter from China, written by Toya. Wong learns that Toya is in a ­mise­rable posi­tion, having followed Harry after his deporta­tion for opium smuggling. Alarmed by her letter, Wong manages to go to China and – retransformed into a hatchet man – rescues Toya from her imprisonment in an opium den. To prove his heritage and skills in front of his enemies, Wong throws a hatchet at a wall. The closing scene of the film reveals this hatchet has also fatally hit Harry, who was standing on the other side of the wall. The film combined characteristics of typical Chinatown movies with elements of the gangster genre. In the early 1930s, Edward G. Robinson’s star image was connected to roles of gangsters and gamblers, especially since his breakthrough appearance in Little Caesar in 1931.87 The Hatchet Man clearly made use of his

87 Little Caesar, dir. Mervyn LeRoy, perf. Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Glenda Farrell (United States: First Na­tional, 1931).

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Figure 45  Film poster. Press book for The Hatchet Man (First Na­tional/Warner Bros., 1932), 13. Courtesy of the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

image and gave Robinson’s persona a new twist.88 The film’s promo­tion was centered on Robinson and almost all posters prominently used a picture of him where he is illuminated in a way that makes his contours cast large, mysterious shadows on his face (see fig. 45). The taglines used in some of the posters emphasized his character’s profession as an assassin. They proclaimed: “He was born with the right to kill!” and “Hatchet Man of the notorious Lem Sing Tong, his very name struck terror into the hearts of his enemies!”89 In this way, the promo­tion concentrated solely on tradi­tional no­tions of China­ town’s underworld and secret tong organiza­tions while the film’s narrative offers a more complex view of Wong’s identity as an Americanized immigrant. It becomes apparent that even in the 1930s, film advertising still relied on old stereotypes and genre conven­tions of the 1910s and 1920s. Despite the rather typical promo­tion, the film was received positively by most critics, who also noted the Americanness of the characters depicted. Most revie­wers 88 It was not Robinson’s first portrayal of a Chinese, however; he had played a Chinatown ­gangster in the 1930 version of East Is West, discussed later in this chapter. 89 Press book for The Hatchet Man (n. p.: First Na­tional & Vitaphone, 1932), 12. Mo­tion Picture Stills, Posters and Paper Collec­tion, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

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praised the film’s Chinatown setting, the costumes and, as the Washington Post put it, Robinson’s “remarkably realistic performance as the Chinese T ­ ongman.”90 They paid special atten­tion to the makeup that was used for the leading cast’s yellowface performances, specifically the transforma­tion of Loretta Young.91 While most reviews focused on the main story of love and crime, some critics also acknow­ ledged the film’s underlying topic of Americaniza­tion. Toya San is identified as a “native Chinese flapper,”92 whereas Harry, her new lover, is described as a “young, Americanized, gin-­drinking Chinaman”93 and as an example of the “occiden­ talized youth.”94 There was, however, a point of critique in some reviews which demonstrates that for some contemporaries, the protagonists were characterized as too American. Some critics remarked that the dialogue interfered with the illusion of Orientalness. The Chicago Daily Tribune stated: “Sets, costumes, scenery, and photography gratify the eye – but the dialogue as delivered by whites made up as orientals is banal and falls flat. […] Silent, they might have gone over. Talking – NO!”95 The New York Times articulated a similar criticism: “Mr. Robinson’s acting is of high order, but his intona­tion and general manner of talking seem rather far from the Oriental, granting that Wong was born and bred over here. He looks more like an American masquerading as a Chinese and not caring whether he was successful in disguising his real identity. Even his lines do not savor of the ordinary concep­tion of the yellow man’s speech.”96

Addi­tionally, the author addressed how Loretta Young’s dialogue affected the percep­tion of the character she plays: “This Toya sometimes talks like a college girl, and when she lapses into the vernacular she is fond of saying ‘And how?’”97 The leading cast was thus criticized for not matching their dialogue to the otherwise ‘authentic’ Oriental performance – or, in other words, the dialogue disrupted the illusion of Orientalness because it was too American. The racial masquerade achieved through heavy makeup and setting registered as inconsistent because the

90 Nelson B. Bell, “The Hatchet Man,” Washington Post, February 14, 1932. 91 See chapter 1 of this study. 92 Bell, “The Hatchet Man.” 93 “Review of ‘The Hatchet Man,’” Photoplay, March 1932, 48. 94 Scheurer, “‘Hatchet Man’ Colorful.” 95 “‘Hatchet Man’ Better Silent, but It’s Talkie,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 6, 1932. 96 Mordaunt Hall, “Clever Staging in ‘Silent Witness,’” New York Times, February 14, 1932. 97 Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen,” New York Times, February 4, 1932.

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characters did not fulfill the expecta­tion of broken English that was connected to it – and which had been cultivated by mo­tion pictures for decades. In sum, Chinese Americans were not expected to speak perfect English. This obsession with the characters’ way of speaking is striking and points to the discomfort that many contemporaries had with giving Chinese Americans a ‘voice.’ The special atten­tion to the cast’s voices may be caused by the novelty of sound film in the early 1930s, but this technology was introduced four years before the release of The Hatchet Man and was common by then. Jonathan Munby has pointed to the important feature of sound for the gangster film of the early 1930s.98 In regard to gangster films, Munby argues that immigrant protagonists speaking vernacular language played a crucial role. During the time of the Great Depression, it gave those social groups a voice that had previously been literally unheard in mo­tion pictures. Through their voice, their language, and their accents, characters directly articulated subject posi­tions of people marked as Other either because of their class or their racial status: “The talking gangster openly broached the issues of class and cultural exclusion that had frustrated his ambi­tion (and that had been ‘naturalized’ in the silent-­era gangster).’”99 Consequently, margina­ lized groups could speak in their ‘own’ voice now. Accordingly, Olaf Stieglitz has shown how the shift to sound film, together with the social upheaval of the Great Depression, opened possibilities for a “cinema of change.”100 Early sound films of the 1930s needed to find new ways to incorporate actors’ and actresses’ voices and brought forth films that enabled controversial readings and new perspectives for socially diverse and stratified Depression-­Era audiences.101 In The Hatchet Man, the effect of the characters’ voices is similar; however, the emancipatory and subversive aspects lie not in their ethnic accents but, on the contrary, in their overtly ‘American’ way of speaking. By giving Chinese American characters the ability to speak in an un-­Oriental manner, the film enabled them to gain a subject posi­tion previously unseen (or unheard) in American cinema. It was a step in the direc­tion of ‘becoming American,’ but because it conflicted with tradi­tional no­tions of Chinese Otherness, it was perceived as unrealistic and represented the ‘line that cannot be crossed.’ 98 See Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 99 Munby, Public Enemies, 43. 100 Olaf Stieglitz, “‘Are We Not Men?’ Sound, Gender, and a Cinema of Change, 1930 – 1933,” in Machine. Bodies, Genders, Technologies, ed. M. Michaela Hampf and MaryAnn Snyder-­ Körber (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012), 233 – 250. 101 See Alice Maurice, “‘Cinema at Its Source’: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early ­Talkies,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 49 (2002): 31 – 71.

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Despite its elaborate produc­tion, distinguished cast, and its rather innovative topic, the film has not gained much scholarly atten­tion. A notable excep­tion is Peter Stanfield’s article on Chinatown gangster films, in which he offers a brief, but nonetheless illuminating, interpreta­tion.102 He focuses on the racial implica­ tions of the film’s portrayal of the Jazz Age. While Stanfield identifies Toya’s and Harry’s enthusiasm for jazz culture as signs of their Americaniza­tion, he reminds us that jazz was perceived as an African American influence on white culture that symbolized the perils of modernity. Jazz was a decisively American phenomenon, but in popular discourse it was also represented as Black and an expression of primitivism and regression. Stanfield stresses that the film hardly shows any white characters, while at the same time Chinatown seems to be taken over by African Americans and Irish immigrants. Stanfield reads the film’s depic­tion of Chinese Americans according to their interrela­tion to other racial minorities and discourses of modernity: “The threat to Chinatown, then, is not directly posed by white American culture; rather it comes from two cultures—Irish proletarian culture and black American culture—that are complementary in their outsider status to the white mainstream but that have been given a symbolic cultural centrality under the aegis of modernity. The brutish nature of the Irish mobster underscores the downside of consumer culture’s promise of inclusivity, while the instinctual primitivism of black culture returns an authenticity lost within the mass-­produced artifice of modernity.”103

Stanfield’s article brings to the fore how jazz culture was racialized in the 1920s and 1930s. While this is certainly an important development in regard to the cultural history of jazz in general, it does not completely illuminate the role of American culture in The Hatchet Man. According to Stanfield, the film ultimately follows the logic that “the adop­tion of black culture leads […] to the destruc­tion of the host culture.”104 Against the backdrop of the larger discourses of Americaniza­ tion and Chinese American identities, the exclusive focus on jazz as a symbol of African American culture falls short. Instead, I want to offer a more complex reading that focuses on the emergence of Chinese American identities and their representa­tion in the film. 102 Peter Stanfield, “‘American as Chop Suey’: Invoca­tions of Gangsters in Chinatown, 1920 – 1936,” in Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, ed. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 238 – 262, especially 253 – 255. 103 Ibid., 255. 104 Ibid.

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The film starts with a prologue which serves to establish a genera­tional shift in the main narrative. The opening scenes where Wong Low Get receives the order to kill his best friend take place in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 15 years before the main story begins. The portrayal of Chinatown follows tradi­tional conven­tions, as we see Chinese crowding the streets in Oriental clothes and the men wearing queues. The unrolling of a dragon flag signals the outbreak of a tong war, which causes the people to flee from the streets and to barricade their storefronts. The scene suggests that tong wars are common and people instantly take the usual precau­tions. Next, we see Wong Low Get entering the council room of the Lem Sing tong (see fig. 46). He is dressed in all-­black C ­ hinese clothes, including his hat. Throughout the film, these clothes will indicate when Wong is acting as a hatchet man and serve as a contrast to the Western suits he wears later in the present-­day timeline. The tong members are seen sitting at tables, arranged as a circle with Wong standing in the middle. Wong refuses to fulfill the order to assassinate an enemy because he has known the victim since his childhood, when they “came over on the same boat from China.” He looks desperately at the silent men around him, visualized through a pan shot that shows one indifferent face after another. The shot clearly conveys his sense of being encircled and unable to avoid his duty. The tong leader Nog Hong Fah (Dudley Digges) then reminds Wong of his oath to the tong, which is “an oath before your honorable ancestors.” Wong accepts his fate and carries out his mission in the next scene. This prologue does more than just explain how Toya was ‘given’ to Wong. The depic­tion of ‘old Chinatown’ serves to outline tradi­tional Chinese culture, dominated by the secret organiza­tions of the tongs. Wong is represented as loyal, but his departure from these ideals is already implied in his refusal and his emphasis on personal bonds over the rigid system of the tongs. These scenes ultimately serve to highlight the contrast between the old and new Chinatown. The film then jumps to present day and depicts a completely different and modern Chinatown. As the intertitle explains, “San Francisco’s Chinatown of today is a far cry from that which we have just seen. Gone are the warring tongs—gone are the queues and chop-­sticks.” Large Chinese shops, advertising, cars and passers-­by in American suits reinforce this impression. The film cuts to the office of Wong’s import-­business, where he works with his assistant and his secretary, Miss Ling (Toshia Mori) (see fig. 47). Wong wears a fine business suit and sits at his large desk. Miss Ling’s outfit also reflects American fashion; it includes a skirt, high heels, and a pearl necklace. A few seconds later, Nog Hong Fah, the old tong leader, pays Wong a visit. Their cultural differences have now become visible through the tradi­tional clothes and Chinese hat the tong

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Figure 46 (left)  Wong Low Get (Edward G. Robinson) as hatchet man. Screenshot from The Hatchet Man (First Na­tional/Warner Bros., 1932). Figure 47 (right)  Wong in his office with Nog Hong Fah (Dudley Digges) and Miss Ling (Toshia Mori). Screenshot from The Hatchet Man (First Na­tional/Warner Bros., 1932).

leader wears. Nog is puzzled when he sees Miss Ling and closely inspects her ­appearance. When she leaves the room, the camera follows Nog’s gaze on her bare legs. Wong realizes that Nog is appalled by the new femininity Miss Ling stands for and remarks: “Chinese girls have legs, you see, just like their white sisters. That is a fact that we of old China hardly knew before.” Nog stares in disbelief, takes a Chinese fan out of his pockets and frantically blows air into his face. This reac­tion amuses Wong and arguably the audience as well; furthermore, it is a visual reference to both Nog’s anger and his sexual excitement. He regains composure a few seconds later and answers Wong in a derogatory tone: “America has taught us many other things – equally as foolish. Our women are being spoiled by indulgence and freedom.” His remark once more underscores the conservatism of his genera­tion. When Wong reveals his plans for his marriage proposal to Toya and men­tions his hopes for Toya’s love and consent, Nog is shocked again. Wong calmly explains that times have changed and Chinese girls are no longer bound to the household. Instead, as he asserts, they go to school to learn things that are more useful. In sum, this scene characterizes Nog Hong Fah as a member of a tradi­tional, patriarchic genera­tion, which apparently has not changed in the last decades. Within the visibly Westernized surroundings of Wong’s office, he appears as an anachronism, whereas Wong has clearly opened up to the American ways of life and female emancipa­tion. The scene marks the break that separates the old from the young genera­tion, yet Wong’s own genera­tion stands apart from Toya’s flapper culture, as the following scenes show. Toya’s introduc­tion into the film follows contemporary portrayals of the typical flapper. The camera traces her in the middle of a crowded dance hall, dancing

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with a man to the music of a jazz band. The two compose the only non-­white couple seen on the dancefloor. The scene directly follows-­up Wong’s men­tion of school educa­tion and accordingly contradicts his assump­tion by conveying that Toya should be at school at the moment. She is dressed up, wearing makeup, a skirt, a hat, and a fur around her neck. The man in her arms will later be revealed as Harry En Hai from New York, the man she leaves Wong for. Toya enjoys the music and remarks on how she can “forget everything” when she dances, ­pointing to no­tions of regression and escapism surrounding jazz music and youth culture. When she states her duties at school will prevent her from coming to the dance hall more often, Harry answers: “This school thing won’t get you anywhere.” This comment, as we learn later in the film, is an early indica­ tion of Harry’s criminal career that leads to Toya’s deporta­tion and mise­r y. Here the film follows the time period’s logic of sexual liberty and alcohol consump­ tion of the flapper posing a threat to feminine ideals and morals. The scene ends when Toya’s friends remind her they all need to leave now to avoid trouble at home. Toya is about to exit when Harry pulls her back and kisses her behind a Japanese screen panel. She is shocked at first, but when she reapplies her lipstick later, she reveals a smile. This scene characterizes Toya as the typical young girl caught between the responsibilities of school educa­tion and family life on the one hand and leisure, dance, and sexuality on the other. These activities are not portrayed negatively, as she upholds her time limit and men­tions the importance of school; however, it is ultimately her attrac­tion to her young, Americanized lover Harry that leads to her downfall. The Chinese influences on her identity become apparent in the next scene, which shows her at home and ends in Wong’s marriage proposal. The scene opens in Wong’s impressive Chinese garden, complete with pagodas, ornaments and a bridge to a large Buddha statue. Toya now wears a fine, sequined Chinese dress and pants (see fig. 49). When Wong enters the scene, he also wears Chinese clothing. Toya and Wong’s Chinese American identities become connected to space this way. Their Americanness is accentuated outside while at work or, in Toya’s case, while going out to dance. The private space of their home, in contrast, expresses their connec­tion to Chinese customs and serves as a refuge from American influences. For her birthday, Wong gives Toya a watch and a moment later his mother’s betrothal ring. Toya realizes the ring’s meaning and answers: “American ways have not made me forget my duty to my father.” Wong does not take this as an honest answer and warns her: “Wait. Duty is not consent. Things are different since your father dictated his wishes concerning your future.” Toya takes a few moments to think before c­ onfirming her decision: “The crescent moon is very beautiful and life would be very sweet

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Figure 48 (left)  Toya San (Loretta Young) at the dance hall with Harry (Leslie Fenton). Screenshot from The Hatchet Man (First Na­tional/Warner Bros., 1932). Figure 49 (right)  Toya San in the garden. Screenshot from The Hatchet Man (First Na­tional/Warner Bros., 1932).

with you as my lord and master.” The dialogue is indeed significant, as Toya’s imagery and vocabulary still indicate her attachment to Chinese customs. Wong then walks to the large Buddha to pray and promises to always make her happy. The scene demonstrates both Toya’s and Wong’s decidedly Chinese American identities, which comprise American and Chinese elements; however, the marriage proposal foreshadows that Toya’s role as Wong’s wife collides with her flapper lifestyle. From this point on in the film, both characters evolve in different direc­tions. Whereas Wong is forced to resume his work as a hatchet man, Toya starts going out to dance with Harry and falls in love with him. Wong’s retransforma­tion into a hatchet man follows the outbreak of a new tong war in Chinatown. At first he is the only one opposing the tong’s planned retalia­tion of two murders and insists that “tong wars are dead.” Instead, he proposes diplomacy and requests negotia­ tions with the rivalling tong, but when his efforts fail and his assistant is found dead, he travels to Sacramento to act as a hatchet man one more time. Wong again adopts his old identity as tong assassin, which transforms him back into the person he was before he became a legitimate entrepreneur. Within the film’s logic, he indeed becomes Chinese again. Toya, on the other hand, meets Harry again, who is employed as a bodyguard for her and Wong because of the tong war. While Wong is away in Sacramento, we see her at home, lying on the bed in Chinese clothes. She is visibly bored and starts to dance on her own to the jazz music that plays in the background. Harry, who has silently observed her, steps into the room and starts seducing her. “What does that remind you of ?” he asks. “Doesn’t it make you want to go places – and do things?” Toya protests at first but then gives in. A few scenes

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later, Toya has exchanged her Chinese clothes for an American dress again and goes out to dance with Harry. The scenes indicate her dissatisfac­tion with the restraints of her marriage and her desire to go out and enjoy the amusements as she did during her former flapper lifestyle. Harry further seduces Toya by promising her a life full of modern, urban enjoyments in New York City. He explains: “I’m a big shot in New York. I’ll show you the swellest time you ever had in your life. You weren’t made to be an old man’s doll, darling. You need somebody like me, somebody more your own age. Somebody who knows how to – make you happy.” Harry correspondingly acts as the personalized promise of a Jazz Age lifestyle comprising youth, wealth, leisure, alcohol, and sexuality. At this point of the film, Wong in turn stands as an Americanized Chinese retransformed to meet tradi­tional tong customs and bound to it by age and genera­tion. After Toya leaves her husband for Harry, Wong’s transforma­tion goes even further, ultimately resulting in his loss of cultural belonging and class status. As a consequence of Wong’s choice not to kill Harry when he had the chance, Nog Hong Fah initiates his expulsion from the tong for “having acted in a manner unworthy of the great Lem Sing Tong.” Shunned by other tong members on the street and left without his trading partners, Wong is forced to close his business. Having lost his business, Wong leaves the city and becomes a field worker, making him blend in with the other Chinese immigrant laborers around him. The scene that introduces the film’s finale takes place months or years after the events previously depicted. It opens with a stark contrast to the urban setting that formed the scenery of the film up to this point. A pan shot shows a large open field where we see Chinese field workers. The camera follows Wah Li, Toya’s old nurse, who is searching for Wong. The nurse hands him a letter from China in which Toya tells him how miserable her life in China is. Dressed in simple clothes and a Chinese hat, Wong has transformed from a middle-­class businessman to a field worker, undistinguishable from the other men in the field. He has become a Chinese laborer and so became part of the immigrant group that was commonly associated with the justifica­tion of Chinese exclusion. The transi­tion from the urban metropolis to the rural farmlands marks his complete severance from a modern American lifestyle. Wong’s return to China to rescue Toya symbolizes the last step in a transforma­ tion that is the exact reversal of his former development into an Americanized Chinese. His return parallels his becoming Chinese again. Not only does he turn into a hatchet man again; he also regains his virility. A scene where he buys back his hatchets from a pawnshop signifies his repossession of phallic masculinity.

Americaniza­tion and Second-­Genera­tion Chinese Americans  |

Another shot of him on the steamer to China, which shows him shirtless and heavily perspiring as he shovels coals in the engine room, further reinforces this effect. When he reaches China, he re-­establishes himself as the self-­confident hatchet man in all-­black clothes possessing almost supernatural prowess. Harry, on the contrary, devolves into a nightmare-­ridden opium addict who has sold Toya to the den’s female owner, Madame Si-­Si (Blanche Frederici), as a “serving girl.” In this way, the house of Madam Si-­Si conforms to concep­tions of the secret opium den and the discourses of ‘yellow slavery’ and prostitu­tion. China, as it is depicted in the film, follows the conven­tions of portrayals of American Chinatowns in mo­tion pictures. Wong steps calmly into the establishment and takes Toya with him. He threatens to kill everyone standing in his way and proves his skills by throwing a hatchet that – inten­tionally or not – kills Harry standing on the other side of the wall. The Hatchet Man portrays Chinese Americans as active participants of a modern American lifestyle, but at the same time it also contains their Americaniza­ tion and erects racial boundaries. Both characters, Toya and Wong, are portrayed as hybrid identities that follow contemporary trends of consump­tion, leisure, and business without abandoning Chinese customs; however, throughout its narrative the film punishes the flapper lifestyle of Toya and reverses Wong’s emancipa­tion from his occupa­tion as hatchet man. This structure is based on the crea­tion of genera­tional differences. Wong is younger and more American than the tradi­tional tong associa­tion. He manages to start a thriving business that sells Chinese artifacts. As the main protagonist, his degree of ‘assimila­ tion’ – rejecting both an exclusively tong-­oriented tradi­tion and Toya’s overtly Ameri­can flapper lifestyle – presents itself as the ideal while Toya and Harry stand for the genera­tion of American-­born Chinese Americans who fully indulge in m ­ odern forms of entertainment and fashion. The ‘Chinese flapper’ Toya becomes as a victim of her own desire for amusement and sexuality. She has crossed a line that the film establishes as an unbridgeable boundary. ­Choosing Harry over Wong ultimately leads to her deporta­tion and her suffering as a slave girl in China. Whereas white flappers in mo­tion pictures find ‘the right man’ in the end, Toya must be rescued by Wong, who had to accept his cultural ­legacy in order to save her. The film ends in China and it remains ques­tionable if the characters can return to the U. S.; thus, their crossing of racial and cultural boundaries leaves them de-­Americanized in Wong’s homeland China. Their deporta­tion/return to China appears as a logical and inevitable consequence of becoming too American.

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3.2 The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Ques­tion of Race The second group of films discussed in this chapter portrays characters who grow up in the belief of being Chinese and in the end are revealed as white. A number of them follow the narrative of a China-­born white orphan girl brought to America by a Chinese character and raised in Chinatown. Such is the immensely popular story of East Is West, a play by John B. Hymer which was adapted for the screen in 1922 and again in 1930. It also forms the basic plot for the films A Tale of Two Worlds (1921) and Chinatown After Dark (1931).105 A varia­tion can be found in Son of the Gods (1930), which features a male protagonist who believes he is Chinese but passes as white for his upper-­class friends and the woman he falls in love with. These films display a contemporary fascina­tion with Orientalness, a preoccupa­ tion with the performative aspects of race and, to a certain degree, its fluidity. By first exploring the Orientalness of the character and then debunking it as a purely arbitrary and cultural attribute, the films highlight the constructed character of race. This narrative articulated a heightened interest in racial categoriza­tions and racial passing as well as ques­tions of so-­called Chinese immigrant assimila­ tion that were especially prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s. This subchapter will focus first on the political and cultural implica­tions of nativism that formed the basis for the restrictive immigra­tion policy of the 1920s. The main segment will then emphasize the sociological scholarship that emerged during that time. The so-­called Chicago School of Sociology devoted itself intensively to the alleged ‘Orien­tal problem’ and investigated the degree of what they understood as assimila­tion of Asian immigrants. This immensely broad and powerful discourse will be outlined as an Orientalist form of knowledge produc­tion that, in a Foucauldian sense, produced racial concepts and ultimately created the objects it professed to study. I will then discuss East Is West and Son of the Gods, which I read as visual elements of discourses that created popular no­tions about racial identity and the Americaniza­tion of Chinese immigrants. These films, as I argue, both permeated and re-­erected racial boundaries by connecting race to culture and essentialist concepts of identity.

105 Chinatown After Dark, dir. Stuart Paton, perf. Carmel Meyers, Rex Lease, and Barbara Kent (United States: Ralph M. Like, 1931).

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Nativism and Race

The ques­tion of so-­called assimila­tion of immigrants had become a much-­debated topic in the early twentieth century, largely influenced by nativist organiza­ tions, advocates of eugenics, and, on an academic level, scholars from the field of sociology. The broad nativist movement saw unrestricted immigra­tion of the so-­called ‘new immigrants’ between 1890 and 1920 as a threat to U. S. society. Based on contemporary ideas of race, nativists in particular opposed immigra­ tion from southern and eastern Europe, including that of Jewish immigrants, whom the nativists saw as inferior, non-­white races. While nativist tendencies were mainly directed against European immigrants, they also operated at the core of discourses that elicited debates about the capability of Asian immigrants to ‘assimilate’ into U. S. society. In his seminal and enduringly relevant study, John Higham outlined the history of nativist thought in the U. S. and identified “racial nativism” as the founda­tion of early twentieth century debates about immigra­tion.106 While he claims nati­ vism can be seen as a constant of the political landscape throughout history, it was during the Progressive Era that it became strongly attached to race. No­tions of racial superiority, as he argues, became “the most important nativist ideology”107 in the early twentieth century. According to Higham, nativist thought resurfaced as a powerful discourse shortly before World War I as a reac­tion to the numerical increase and changing origins of the ‘new immigrants.’ At its core his study traces the rise of an ideology that ques­tioned the belief in the United States as a haven for all immigrants and the tradi­tional melting pot narrative: “The war [World War I; B. S.] virtually swept from the American consciousness the old belief in unrestricted immigra­tion. It did so, very simply, by creating an urgent demand for na­tional unity and homogeneity that practically destroyed what the travail of preceding decades had already fatally weakened: the historic confidence in the capacity of American society to assimilate all men automatically. And with the passing of faith in the melting pot there perished the ideal of American na­tionality as an unfinished, steadily improving, cosmopolitan blend.”108

106 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860 – 1925 (New ­Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955). 107 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 131. 108 Ibid., 301.

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Despite his rather dated theoretical background and language, Higham aptly analyzes one of the most important discourses of the century’s onset and traces the interrela­tions between race theory, eugenics, and na­tionalist thought; however, his focus lies on the impact of European immigra­tion and places the U. S. East Coast at the geographical center of his atten­tion. The West Coast and the role of anti-­Asian and anti-­Mexican discourses remain largely absent.109 Higham indeed fails to see the connec­tions between nativism and Yellow Peril discourses, viewing the latter as a different form of racial thought that appeared largely independent from racial nativism.110 In recent years, scholars have shed more light on the interrela­tions between immigra­tion, na­tionalism, and the emergence of hegemonic whiteness.111 These studies have brought to the fore the importance of race as the fundamental cate­ gory of U. S. na­tionalism and restric­tionist immigra­tion policy. Most research, however, focuses on European immigra­tion, as these immigrants far outnumbered the Chinese and Japanese people who already faced exclusion and restric­tion since 1882 and 1907, respectively. Scholars like David R. Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson have analyzed how nativist no­tions against European immigrants were legitimized on the basis of racial hierarchy and eugenicist fears of ‘mongreliza­ tion.’ These early works from the new field of whiteness studies show how the modern concept of whiteness emerged and how it gradually changed over time, eventually coming to include groups that ‘became white’ through the use of the scientifically-­informed ‘Caucasian’ category.112 The nativist fear of immigra­tion is first and foremost one of racial ‘degenera­tion’ and weakening of the American ‘old stock.’ The problem of assimila­tion, then, was not so much a ques­tion of cultural adapta­tion but of racial compatibility. As Gary Gerstle states, nativists perceived immigrants from southern and eastern

109 This critique, along with Higham’s own reassessment, is articulated in Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Rymers, “John Higham and Immigra­tion History,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 1 (2004): 3 – 25. 110 See Higham, Strangers in the Land, 132. 111 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigra­tion, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Robert Júlio Decker, “White Subjects, Govern­ mentality, and Immigra­tion Restric­tion in the United States, 1894 – 1924,” in Colonialism and Beyond: Race and Migra­tion from a Postcolonial Perspective, ed. Eva Bischoff and Elisabeth Engel (Münster: LIT, 2013), 33 – 52. 112 Jacobson, Whiteness, 8.

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Europe as deriving “from such poor racial stock that they would never metamorphose into Americans.”113 They saw the capacity to become American as a racial prerequisite that determined whether immigrant groups could be ‘lifted’ to the level of American political, cultural, and moral standards. As Jacobson concludes: “[T]he problem this [European; B. S.] immigra­tion posed to the polity was increasingly cast in terms of racial difference and assimilability; the most significant revision of immigra­tion policy, the Johnson-­Reed Act of 1924, was founded upon a racial logic borrowed from biology and eugenics; and consequently, the civic story of assimila­tion […] is inseparable from the cultural story of racial alchemy […].”114

While Jacobson refers to the racial discourses of European immigra­tion, this interrela­tion of assimila­tion and racial knowledge appears in the discourses of Asian immigra­tion as well. The reconsolida­tion of whiteness that Jacobson identifies for the 1920s was, after all, always stabilized by distinguishing it from its racial Other – and this prominently included the Orientals.

The Chicago School of Sociology and the ‘Oriental Problem’

During a time when nativism gained massive cultural and political power, a group of sociologists started researching what was commonly referred to as the ‘Orien­ tal problem.’ Their scholarly investiga­tion expressed a desire to ‘measure’ the assimila­tion of Chinese and Japanese immigrants and their native-­born offspring. During a time of heightened interest in European immigra­tion and its impact on U. S. society, a study about a race regarded as completely alien posed a fitting terrain for the investiga­tion of race rela­tions in general. Sociology’s interest in the assimila­tion of Asian immigrants also needs to be seen in rela­tion to what was commonly called the ‘Negro Problem,’ which referred to contemporary no­tions of unsuccessful or even impossible assimila­tion of African Americans.115 The concept of assimila­tion stood at the center of contemporary sociological thought, and these sociologists popularized it on a massive scale. Proceeding from the concept of the United States as a melting pot, assimila­tion theory was based on the premise that immigrants lose their cultural (and racial) roots over 113 Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Na­tion in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7. 114 Jacobson, Whiteness, 8. 115 See Yu, Thinking Orientals, 38 – 39.

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time and become part of a hegemonic mainstream American culture.116 Immigrants consequently had to adapt to the customs, tradi­tions, and lifestyle of their ‘host’ society. Ultimately, the concept implied the existence of a homogenous, white American culture that immigrants could aspire to. Assimila­tion therefore both defined cultural differences and reinforced the idea of a single, unchanging American identity. Robert E. Park was the central figure of the Chicago School of Sociology, and his theory of the ‘race rela­tion cycle’ would become highly influential with the American public. Park had worked in the field of ‘race rela­tions’ since his time with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute. He joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1914 and became synonymous with the then-­developing ‘Chicago School.’117 His theory of the ‘race rela­tion cycle’ described the process of assimila­tion as a succession of four stages: contact, competi­tion, accommoda­tion, and assimila­tion.118 According to his theory, when two groups come into contact, competi­tion and conflict are inevitable and generally result from a shortage of jobs or space. This conflict enters the accommoda­tion phase through the victory of one group over the other or the decrease of competitive pressure. The last step, a complete assimila­tion, results from interracial rela­tionships, shared memories and experiences. According to Park, this process is not limited to race rela­tions in the United States but universal for all places where different races come into contact. The final stage of assimila­tion is inevitable and represents the ‘natural’ outcome of interracial contact. The irreversible character of the cycle demonstrates Park’s belief in social and cultural progression. In fact, the title of one of his central texts, “Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific,” exemplifies how Park envisioned the assimila­tion of Asian Americans as part of America’s historical progression into the West.119 After the comple­tion of territorial expansion, racial rela­tions appear as one of the last challenges to the dominance of white Anglo-­ Saxon Americanism. The task of sociologists, then, was to identify the degree of assimila­tion and investigate factors that obstructed the process. The year 1924 saw the initia­tion of the Survey of Race Rela­tions on the Pacific Coast with Robert E. Park as its research director. The survey was a large project

116 See Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimila­tion: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 437 – 471. 117 For a history of the Chicago School, see Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 118 See Stanford M. Lyman, “The Race Rela­tions Cycle of Robert E. Park,” Pacific Sociological Review 11, no. 1 (1968): 16 – 22; Yu, Thinking Orientals, 39 – 42. 119 Robert E. Park, “Our Racial Frontier on the Pacific,” Survey Graphic 56, no. 3 (1926): 192 – 196.

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combining the joint work of sociologists and missionaries who investigated the ‘Oriental problem’ on the U. S. West coast. Sociologists like J. Merle Davis were in charge of conducting interviews and gathering statistical informa­tion. They worked together with Christian missionaries, who had long-­term experience working with Asian immigrants, as they organized Americaniza­tion programs and actively advanced religious conversion of immigrants to Christianity. Influential missionaries like Sidney Gulick, furthermore, had actively opposed anti-­Asian agita­tion for several years and authored political pamphlets that promoted the assimilability of Asian immigrants.120 The Survey of Race Rela­tions on the Pacific Coast, Henry Yu argues forcefully, has to be understood as an Orientalist project. By defining and investigating the field of the supposed ‘Oriental problem,’ the scholars of the Chicago School ultimately produced racialized knowledge of ‘the Oriental’ as racial Other.121 Moreover, they in turn constituted themselves as white, progressive and cosmopolitan experts of this Oriental Other through their very investiga­tions and academic practi­ ces.122 In this sense, the Chicago School must be understood as a continua­tion of the Orientalist tradi­tion of academic knowledge. Complicating this fact, Asian American scholars soon joined the white sociologists to study their own place in U. S. culture. The racial dichotomy between subject and object of investiga­tion is in consequence not as simple as it may appear at first glance; nevertheless, the effect of sociological discourse was the categoriza­tion of Orientalness, whiteness, and racial assimila­tion. The institu­tionaliza­tion of the sociological investiga­tion largely produced the concept of the ‘Oriental problem’ and the social effects connected to it.123 Among the central themes of the sociological research, two are especially important in their rela­tion to mo­tion pictures: first, the fascina­tion with interracial marriage and sex; second, the theoretical split between mind and body. The Chicago School studied interracial marriage intensively, resulting in a series of case studies that analyzed marriages between Oriental men and white women. One reason, according to Yu, was researchers’ assump­tion that “physical differences and [spatial; B. S.] distances […] could be traversed and overcome by a process of purely mental change such as cultural assimila­tion. Interracial sex and marriage, the most intimate contact that resulted from popula­tion migra­tion and contact, 120 See, for instance, the Pamphlets on Japanese Exclusion Collec­tion, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 121 Yu, Thinking Orientals, 10. 122 Ibid., 84 – 90. 123 Ibid., 12.

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provided the perfect site for investigating such processes.”124 The general inte­rest in this topic, however, is not completely understandable without taking into account the anxieties about so-­called miscegena­tion expressed in contemporary Yellow Peril discourse. As Yu elaborates, influential thinkers of eugenics and race theory like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard connected the supposed threat to white supremacy and the danger of racial degenera­tion to sex and race mixing; thus, intermarriage became one of the central fields of the study and gained the most public atten­tion.125 The sociologists understood intermarriage and sexual rela­tions as the ultimate marker for successful assimila­tion of Asian immigrants. Significantly, research only took into account the marriage of Chinese men to white women, which a numerical dispropor­tion cannot wholly explain. Instead, this bias expressed common no­tions of sexuality and race by which Oriental men highly desired white women, whereas from a white perspective, Oriental women were seen not as possible partners but as objects of eroticized sexual fantasies or degraded as prostitutes.126 The researchers, however, were not interested in the physical or biological aspects of sexual rela­tions and the racial status of children. To them interracial sex was merely the most intimate form of contact, which sheds light on their overall attempt to define assimila­tion along cultural lines and detach it from the physical body; however, the very interest in interracial marriage was based on a general acknowledgement of difference, either bodily or mentally. Yu concludes that “[t]he sociologists’ emphasis on intermarriage as an interesting phenomenon theoretically reinforced rather than erased the boundary between Oriental and white.”127 Similarly, the mo­tion pictures in this sec­tion exploited the sensa­tionalistic appeal of a possible interracial love couple. While these narratives take much time to portray the couple’s ‘true’ love as detached from racial boundaries, the taboo of miscegena­tion is averted in the end. The second aspect is the body-­mind dualism that points to the increasing importance of culture as a concept for social theory and the nascent delegitimiza­ tion of essentialist race theory. Within the context of the ‘Oriental problem,’ 124 Ibid., 56. See also Henry Yu, “Mixing Bodies and Cultures: The Meaning of America’s Fascina­ tion with Sex between ‘Orientals’ and ‘Whites,’” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North-­American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 444 – 4 63. 125 Ibid., 57. 126 See Gina Marchetti, Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fic­tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10 – 45; Laura Hyun-­Yi Kang, “The Desiring of Asian Female Bodies: Interracial Romance and Cinematic Subjec­ tion,” Visual Anthropology Review 9, no. 1 (1993): 5 – 21. 127 Yu, Thinking Orientals, 63.

The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Ques­tion of Race  |

however, sociology was unable to completely avoid no­tions of the exotic body. While missionaries emphasized the spiritual aspects of assimila­tion and sociologists the mental transforma­tion, it was the Oriental body that served as a visible marker of the supposed Otherness. In sum, the result of assimila­tion was always thought of as something Orientals could achieve even though their bodies were so different. “Assimilated Orientals possessed proof of the universal nature of spirit/ mind/culture while at the same time displaying physical bodies that showed the differences that cultural assimila­tion could erase. Thus, Oriental bodies became the perfect measuring device.”128 As a consequence, researchers were always seeking visible signs of Americaniza­tion that contradicted the Oriental appearance. In this respect, clothing became an important aspect and a central metaphor. Clothing visibly marked an immigrant’s assimila­tion by exchanging the ‘native dress’ for American-­style clothing, but as Yu asserts, the sociologists also saw the body and its physical features as a racial uniform that could reflect spiritual or mental changes. While the body could show traces of the spiritual process of assimila­tion, clothes – like costumes in theater – could become a disguise that concealed or emphasized the subject’s true degree of assimila­tion.129 By stressing the mental aspects of assimila­tion over the physical body, the sociologists argued that Americaniza­tion was as easy as changing clothes. The racial ‘costume,’ then, could be exchanged and pointed to the degree of assimila­tion. The face as an unchanging physical marker could serve as a ‘mask’ that ­enabled racial disguise. According to Yu, Robert E. Park was fascinated by Asian Americans who spoke perfect English and showed no mental signs of their racial heritage. In Park’s view, the supposed contradic­tion between the bodily appearance on the one hand and the mental prerequisite on the other could lead to the percep­tion of the Oriental face as a mask that hid the American identity ‘behind’ it.130 As a consequence, we might add, the ‘Oriental face’ or ‘mask’ ultimately pointed to stereotypical no­tions of the inscrutable Oriental again. It becomes obvious that while the Chicago School tried to avoid biological racism, they could not escape racialized no­tions about the Oriental body. Racial thought, I argue, cannot be eliminated by ignoring the body – that is, by ignoring it as an object constituted through centuries of racialized discourses. The no­tion of racial masquerade and the importance of clothing was a crucial aspect of the way mo­tion pictures visualized Americaniza­tion and racial transforma­tion. Since the main protagonists in films that depict the change of racial identity were white and therefore 128 Ibid., 67. 129 Ibid., 66 – 67. 130 Ibid.

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did not show supposedly Oriental facial features, their racial transforma­tion was facilitated by their missing ‘racial mask.’ Much of the films’ racializa­tion processes happens via clothing and decora­tion instead, reinforcing no­tions of ‘cultural’ assimila­tion.

“Americans in the Making”: Searching the (Americanized) Oriental

The survey of the Chicago School constituted just one element of the larger scientific discourse of Oriental Americaniza­tion. An anthropological project undertaken in the 1930s highlights the body’s essential role in racial categoriza­tion. On March 21, 1935, the San Francisco News published an illustrated article titled “Chinatown Youngsters Tested under SERA to Learn Changes in Race.”131 The three photos at the top of the article showed Chinese American scientists measuring young children from San Francisco’s Chinatown (see fig. 50). One picture shows a man in a white coat standing in front of a boy and holding a measuring instrument to his face. According to the cap­tion, the man is Dr. Thomas A. Wong, who “gives the cephalic test to the youngster;” this term apparently denotes the measuring of facial features. The photo next to it shows a similar procedure applied to the chest of a young boy. The article explained that “under the direc­tion of Dr. Thomas A. Wong, the most extensive anthropology tests ever made on Chinese people are being carried on here as an [sic] SERA project.”132 The experiment was allegedly an initiative by Samuel D. Lee, who investigated the physical changes of American-­born Chinese Americans: “Interested in his kinsmen,” the article stated, “[Lee; B. S.] wondered if the new environment reflected changes in their physical characteristics.” In order to research these changes, the coordinators conscripted 3,000 young children for measuring, and according to the article first results that showed changes in physical stature and “cranial features” were already at hand. It concludes, that “[h]eads of American-­born Chinese are found to be larger, but growth of their bodies slower 131 “Chinatown Youngsters Tested under SERA to Learn Changes in Race,” San Francisco News, March 21, 1935. SERA stood for the California State Emergency Relief Administra­tion, which funded the project. See Survey of Social Work Needs of the Chinese Popula­tion of San Fran­ cisco, California (n. p.: California State Emergency Relief Organiza­tion, ca. 1935). Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 132 Ibid. See also Victor Jew, “Getting the Measure of Tomorrow: Chinese and Chicano Ameri­ cas under the Racial Gaze, 1934 – 1935 and 1942 – 1944,” in Racial Transforma­tions: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States, ed. Nicholas De Genova (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 62 – 90, 66.

The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Ques­tion of Race  |

Figure 50  Detail from: “Chinatown Youngsters Tested under SERA to Learn Changes in Race,” San Francisco News, March 21, 1935.

than their brothers and sisters living in China.”133 In the only scholarly text on this project, Victor Jew compares the Chinatown project with a similar study undertaken on Mexican Americans in the 1940s.134 He comes to the conclusion that “[i]n these two instances, race-­making discourses operated to fix in place two hard-­to-­fit popula­ tions, and the appeal to science served in both cases to generalize tendencies and supply a predic­tion of how these groups would conform to the American na­tion.”135

Again, it is more the high interest in the topic than the actual results that are significant. As Jew emphasizes, the study did not produce conclusive results and was not even published in a scholarly article. The fascina­tion with matters of racial assimila­tion, however, can hardly be overestimated. We have to keep in mind that the 1920s witnessed a huge success of eugenicist and racist works like Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color, which had been edited fourteen times in three years.136 Stoddard, a friend of the equally influential eugenicist Madison Grant, saw white civiliza­tion endangered by the geographical expansion of ‘colored’ races. For Stoddard, the “ques­tion of Asiatic immigra­tion is incomparably the greatest external problem which faces 133 “Chinatown Youngsters Tested.” 134 Jew, “Getting the Measure,” 62 – 90. 135 Ibid., 64. 136 See Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 136.

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the white world […] [and] threatens not merely our supremacy or prosperity but our very race-­existence.”137 As the title of the book suggests, Stoddard used the metaphor of an immigra­tion flood that threatened the “inner dikes,” or “race-­ frontiers,” of the white world.138 While advocates of eugenics painted apocalyptic scenarios, other texts tried to investigate the topic in its complexity. A large number of books were devoted to the defini­tion of Americanism, its ideas and morals, and how the ‘new immigrants,’ and especially Orientals, could transform into ‘100 percent Americans.’139 Some books, like Winthrop Talbot’s 1917 work Americaniza­tion, attempted to define and conserve supposedly American ideals and point to the Ameri­ canizing effects of U. S. cultural institu­tions.140 Others connected the concept of Americaniza­tion directly to racial differences. This is apparent, for example, in a text published in 1919 by Emory S. Bogardus, a sociologist from California who later joined the Survey of Race Rela­tions on the Pacific project. In his book, Essentials of Americaniza­tion, Bogardus presents a sociological analysis of the processes of Americaniza­tion and calls for an optimiza­tion of corresponding social programs.141 He distinguishes between native- and foreign-­born people in need of Americaniza­tion, subdividing the first group into the “average American,” the “American Indian,” the “Negro,” and the “Appalachian Mountaineer.” While ­Bogardus emphasizes that all Americans must be Americanized to some degree, it is obviously the white, Anglo-­Saxon, Protestant “average” American who “must lead the way sincerely, nobly, and democratically if others are to follow.”142 The group of foreign-­born people follows contemporary racial classifica­tion and is divided into “North European,” “South European,” “Slavic,” “Hebrew,” “Asiatic,” and “Mexican” immigrants. While Bogardus uses this classifica­tion in regard to the “traits” of migratory groups, he makes a different distinc­tion when it comes 137 Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World-­Supremacy, with an introduc­ tion by Madison Grant (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 251. 138 Stoddard, Rising Tide, 236. 139 See Higham, Strangers, 204. Apart from the studies men­tioned below, see, for instance, Peter Roberts, The Problem of Americaniza­tion (New York: Macmillan, 1920); Bertram Schrieke, Alien Americans: A Study of Race Rela­tions (New York: Viking, 1936); Francis J. Brown and Joseph Slabey Roucek, eds., Our Racial and Na­tional Minorities: Their History, Contribu­tions, and Present Problems (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1937); William Carlson Smith, Americans in Process: A Study of Our Citizens of Oriental Ancestry (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1937). 140 See Winthrop Talbot, ed., Americaniza­tion: Principals of Americanism, Essentials of Ameri­ caniza­tion, Technic of Race-­Assimila­tion, 2nd ed. (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1920). 141 Emory S. Bogardus, Essentials of Americaniza­tion (Los Angeles: University of Southern Cali­ fornia Press, 1919). 142 Ibid., 78.

The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Ques­tion of Race  |

to the “methods” of Americaniza­tion. Here, he only distinguishes between Europeans and Asiatics, because, as Bogardus explains, “the presence of the Oriental in America raises the problem of bringing together two civiliza­tions which in many ways are opposite in character.”143 Although this division clearly contradicts the former principle of classifica­tion, Bogardus reinforces a Eurocentric no­tion of Orien­tal Otherness. While he meticulously distinguishes between diverse races and organizes them into different groups, he reduces the problems of Americaniza­tion methods to the dichotomy of Orient versus Occident when he refers to culture. How observers began to differentiate between already partially assimilated Chinese and the ‘new’ threat of Japanese immigrants becomes apparent in Samuel P. Orth’s 1921 book, Our Foreigners, which tells a racially based history of the United States and their immigrants.144 Although the subtitle refers to “Americans in the Making,” the book itself evidently emphasizes racial stability over transformative effects. It begins with the descrip­tion and history of the “American stock” before presenting alleged threats to this stock, apparent in chapter titles like “The Negro,” “The Irish Invasion,” “The Teutonic Tide,” “The Oriental,” and “Racial Infiltra­ tion.” As the titles indicate, immigrants – and African Americans – are first and foremost seen as Others and as invasive. Orth depicts immigra­tion as a challenge to the “American stock,” which calls for measures of assimila­tion to guarantee the survival of the white American popula­tion. His history of Chinese immigra­tion follows the common narrative of Californian working class racism.145 He ends the chapter by opposing the ‘new’ threat of the “persistent aggressiveness of the Japanese” to the Chinese: “Their [the Japanese; B. S.] cunning, their aptitude in taking advantage of critical circumstances in making bargains, have by contrast partially restored to popular favor the patient, reliable Chinaman.”146 He presents the Chinese in a positive light because they have already faced exclusion for forty years and have become a constant popula­tion group, whereas Japanese immigra­ tion was a relatively new phenomenon. Ultimately, the favoring of Chinese over Japanese merely moves racialized stereotypes of the Oriental from one group to the other by having them compete over Americaniza­tion directly. In the 1920s, Chinese and Chinese American scholars started to participate in the immigra­tion debate, and while most of them stayed within the theoretical 143 Ibid., 195. 144 Samuel P. Orth, Our Foreigners: A Chronicle of Americans in the Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921). Library of Congress. 145 Orth basically follows Mary Roberts Coolidge’s outline of Chinese immigra­tion history. See Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigra­tion (New York: Henry Holt, 1909). 146 Orth, Our Foreigners, 204.

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framework of the Chicago School, they contributed to a more differentiated view.147 One of the most prominent scholars was Ching Chao Wu, a scholar from China who earned his doctoral degree in Chicago and later returned to China. His socio­ logical disserta­tion from 1928 investigated different aspects of Chinese American lifestyle in Chinatowns and carried the title Chinatowns: A Study of Symbiosis and Assimila­tion.148 Wu disregarded racial differences on the basis of mental capacities between Chinese and white Americans. He also emphasized the willingness of second-­genera­tion Chinese Americans to adapt to American traits regarding, for example, fashion; however, for Wu a “final barrier” called “race conscious­ness” posed a crucial obstacle for successful assimila­tion.149 As he elaborates, “[…] so far as their [U. S.-born Chinese; B. S.] mental equipment is concerned, both innate and acquired, they differ very little from the average American. But there is one great diffe­ rence between them and the Americans; that is, their skin is yellow and they do not look like Americans. […] In spite of the fact that the native born Chinese differ greatly from the Chinese coming from China in their mental make-­up, the American people classify all of them under the general category ‘Chinese,’ or ‘Orientals,’ or ‘Foreigners.’ They are so classified not because of what they are, but because of what they appear to be.”150

Wu’s concept of race-­consciousness then describes Chinese American awareness of being perceived as Other because of their outward appearance. The result of being treated as a foreigner, no matter how Americanized native-­born Chinese Americans consider themselves, ultimately leads to personal feelings of foreignness; thus, he stresses the importance of how people perceive themselves and others and how this relates to the identity of second-­genera­tion immigrants. This discrepancy between physical appearance and personal identity Park had described with the metaphor of ‘racial masks’ can ultimately lead to a reversal of Americaniza­tion, as Wu notes. “The most interesting fact is that race-­consciousness transforms some native-­born Chinese who once thought they were Americans, into Chinese again.”151 He supports this argument with quota­tions from the Survey of Race Rela­tions that show how some Chinese Americans turned away from American culture because they were constantly confronted with no­tions of their not belonging by white Americans. 147 Yu, Thinking Orientals, 93 – 150. 148 Ching Chao Wu, Chinatowns: A Study of Symbiosis and Assimila­tion (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1928). 149 Ibid., 287 150 Ibid., 287 – 288. 151 Ibid., 289.

The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Ques­tion of Race  |

Albert W. Palmer’s Orientals in American Life, published in 1934, illustrates how powerful the metaphor of masks and the concept of a divergence of body and mind was in the discourse of assimila­tion.152 Palmer based his book on his experiences as a Christian missionary and specifically focused on Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino Americans. The way he introduces the book is telling: “To the Western mind the Oriental seems to wear a mask. There is something inscrutable about him—his face, which seems so unresponsive, his eyes which tell no certain meaning. To those who do not know them well, all Chinese, Japanese or Filipinos seem to look alike. They do not have those varia­tions of hair or coloring or even of features which make it so easy to tell us Occidentals apart; and this uniformity, because of its very strangeness, sometimes seems ominous—a kind of uncanny, depersonalized, robot-­like regimenta­tion which is not quite human, and might prove sinister in crisis. What’s behind the Oriental mask?”153

Palmer then continues by looking behind that “mask” and tracing the history, customs, and organiza­tions of the three Oriental groups in American society. Overall, he emphasizes his optimistic outlook on the possibility of assimila­tion, even though he supports the exclusion laws. In his view, the legisla­tion had averted an even larger racial problem and ultimately helped to “allay the fears of the white popula­tion and so [made] possible the saner, fairer and more appreciative attitude against the Chinese.”154 Apparently, Palmer sees himself as an advocate for this “saner” outlook on Chinese Americans. In his chapter on future developments in the field of race rela­tions, Palmer uses the image of the mask to explain the body-­mind-­dualism in regard to Americaniza­ tion. He describes how some members of the younger genera­tion “have made the adjustment by coming completely over to the American side,” leading to the observa­tion that “[e]xcept for the masks of Oriental features they wear, you would never dream they were anything but American.”155 Again bodily features are imagined as a disguise that obscures the truly American mind ‘behind’ it. This use of the word mask refers to no­tions of a static, unchangeable external feature; thus, the fixedness of the “Oriental mask” represents both the image of inscrutability and that of stable, racialized body concepts. Both features point to the idea that the facial features of Asian immigrants prevent the white gaze from seeing the true identity of Orientals. The Oriental body inevitably refers to Otherness. For 152 Albert W. Palmer, Orientals in American Life (New York: Friendship Press, 1934). 153 Ibid., ix. 154 Ibid., 33. 155 Ibid., 139.

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Palmer, however, even these stable masks were beginning to change and adapt to the American mind that has developed behind it. He ends his outlook with the observa­tion that “the physical bearing and even the facial expression of Orientals born in this country are shifting in the American direc­tion.”156 According to Palmer, scientific studies had shown second-­genera­tion children as taller, heavier and having longer legs than their parents. Addi­tionally these transforma­tions were supposed to affect eyelids and eyelashes and, most noteworthy for Palmer, “the shape of the mouth and general openness and responsiveness of the countenance.”157 The reasons for these “adjustments” remain unknown, but Palmer men­tions American furniture, food, dentistry, “general freedom of life, or subconscious imita­tion of the dominant type” as possible causes.158 Palmer’s concept of Americaniza­tion is therefore not merely a mental process. In an odd interrela­tion of mind and body, it can result in bodily assimila­tion – that is, in processes of ‘becoming white.’ Significantly, it is only through physical modifica­tions leading to decreased Orientalness that full assimila­tion can be achieved. In other words, the Oriental body is again the last obstacle for Americanness, and instead of dismissing racialized body concepts altogether, Palmer advocates that the Oriental body needs to succumb to the ideal of whiteness. In his view, however, bodily adjustment paves the way for a better future in race rela­tions via the disappearance of the “Oriental mask:” “Is it too much to believe and hope that, sooner or later, an enlightened and intelligent Ameri­ can public opinion will discover that these Oriental young people, born and reared among us, are not just replicas of the old type foreign born Chinese or Japanese, but a new type? When that day dawns and we come to see that the Oriental masks are looking more and more like American faces and that behind them are personalities which think and feel as we do and ­cherish similar dreams and ideals, then the barriers will crumble away.”159

Palmer’s thoughts on Americaniza­tion stand as an example for the way many contemporaries constructed Americaniza­tion along racial lines. While the degree of assimila­tion varied for each observer, the concept itself was always focusing on whiteness and a vague American lifestyle as the ideal Asian immigrants had to aspire to. Observers increasingly understood race as a performative category connected to culture instead of the body. At the same time, the vast number of scientific studies began to claim knowledge of the Oriental and reproduced it as a 156 Ibid., 163. 157 Ibid., 164. Palmer, however, does not men­tion his sources for these observa­tions. 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid.

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racial category. In this regard, it is significant that almost all studies see the ‘color line’ as an unbridgeable racial boundary that cannot be crossed or, as Palmer’s text demonstrates, as the focal point for bodily transforma­tion itself. All these studies demonstrate the will to categorize Asian immigrants through the construct of the Oriental and to understand their place within an i­ ncreasingly nativist U. S. society. Scholars tried to scientifically investigate the degree of Americaniza­tion, but in order to do this, the vague concept of Americaniza­tion itself needed to be filled, delineated, and ultimately distinguished from Orientalness. This is exactly the discursive field that mo­tion pictures helped to produce, visualize, and popularize on a massive scale.

Becoming White in Mo­tion Pictures: ‘East Is West’ (1930)

Films featuring the plot device of a character who grows up as Chinese and is, in the end, revealed to be white articulated the above-­men­tioned discourses of racial identity and assimila­tion. Usually the narrative twist enabled the forma­ tion of the white love couple and averted any implica­tions of interracial sex. At first glance, the use of such a twist may seem perplexing and rather illogical, but in mo­tion pictures of the 1920s and 1930s, the phenomenon was not completely uncommon.160 The popularity of depic­tions of Chinese characters ‘becoming white’ must be understood as visual and narrative elements of assimila­tionist discourses. In films like A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), East Is West (1922 and 1930), and Chinatown After Dark (1931), the female Oriental Character falls in love with a virile, all-­American man, giving the film enough opportunities to play on typical Chinese and American characteriza­tions. While the films’ depic­tion of the two unequal partners falling in love gives them an anti-­racist aura, the characteriza­tions of racial differences and the twist at the end re-­erect exactly those boundaries the film purportedly tried to erase. Characters passing as Oriental exemplify contemporary no­tions about race as a performative construct connected to culture. The ‘true’ racial identity is not visible to the other characters, detaching race from bodily features and making it the result of dress, language, and behavior. In the end, the missing ‘Oriental mask’ of the white actors and actresses allows for a complete assimila­tion: yellowface performance ensures that mask is merely professional makeup and the person ‘behind’ it was white from the very beginning. Usually,

160 See Roger Dooley, From Scarface to Scarlett: American Films in the 1930s (San Diego: ­Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 205.

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the act of becoming white at the end is merely the result of an A ­ mericanizing influence from the male lover or something that was always secretly present in the female character’s mind. Universal Picture’s 1930 version of East Is West, based on the immensely popu­ lar 1919 Broadway play by Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer, is illustrative for the narrative of a female character who becomes white. The film follows the play rather closely. It revolves around a supposedly Chinese girl named Ming Toy (Lupe Vélez), who is saved from being sold at an auc­tion in China by a young, American man named Billy Benson (Lew Ayres) and is subsequently brought to the United States. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, Billy’s Chinese friend and advisor Lo Sang Kee (E. Alyn Warren) takes care of Ming Toy, who quickly adapts to the American – or rather, modern Chinese American – lifestyle. Unfortunately, Ming Toy is mistaken for a prostitute while she stands on her Chinatown balcony and soon has to face deporta­tion. Meanwhile, the powerful “Chop Suey King” Charlie Yong (Edward G. Robinson), a “half-­caste” Chinese with dubious background, has become obsessed with Ming Toy. To save Ming Toy from going back to China, Lo Sang Kee sees no other op­tion than to give her to Charlie Yong. Once again, Billy Benson appears and rescues Ming Toy by kidnapping her and taking her to his family’s house. The two fall in love but have to deal with the disapproval of Benson’s parents and friends. In the meantime, Charlie Yong still searches for Ming Toy, but just as the couple tries to escape him, Ming Toy’s Chinese ‘father’ sees the two and recognizes her. He then defuses the situa­tion by explaining that Ming Toy is the daughter of white missionaries and was kidnapped as a child. Now officially white, Ming Toy does not have to deal with deporta­tion anymore and stops serving as the love object of Charlie Yong. Thus, the revela­tion paves the way for the love couple and the happy ending of the film. The film’s depic­tion of a supposedly Chinese slave girl who comes to America and ultimately becomes a member of a white, upper-­class household was controversial at the time of the film’s release. Karen Kuo has highlighted how the film faced problems with U. S. censors, mainly because of the slave market scene.161 161 See Karen Kuo, East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), 24 – 25. Kuo asserts that the Hays Commission prevented the film from being distributed and Universal Pictures filed it as an unreleased film. My findings, however, hint at the fact that the film was indeed shown in U. S. theaters. See, for instance, “Review of ‘East Is West,’” New York Times, November 1, 1930; Mae Tinée, “Review of ‘East Is West,’” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 20, 1930. It was the film’s interna­tional distribu­tion that proved to be problematic, as it was banned in British Columbia and Cuba and caused stark opposi­tion at its presenta­tion in Shanghai. See Ruth Vasey, “Foreign Parts: Hollywood’s Global Distribu­tion and the Representa­tion

The ‘Oriental Problem, ’Nativism, and the Ques­tion of Race  |

Internal correspondence between the Mo­tion Picture Producers and Distributors Associa­tion (MPPDA ) and Universal Pictures bespeaks a heightened awareness of not offending other countries, not least because this would hurt interna­tional sales revenues.162 The slave market scene and the general depic­tion of Chinese as gangsters were problematized stronger than they had been in previous deca­ des. The film, however, also expresses the specific liberties that characterize the cinema of the pre-­code era.163 As Robert Sklar has famously asserted, the time period starting with the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 and ending with the strict enforcement of the so-­called Hays Code in 1934 marks “Hollywood’s Golden Age of Turbulence.”164 For a short period of time, the social and economic turmoil of the Depression, together with the technological shift to sound film, brought forth movies that took a sensa­tionalistic, socially controversial, and morally open stance. In the case of East Is West, this applies to its immigrant cast and most importantly to the Romanian-­born Edward G. ­Robinson and Mexican actress Lupe Velez. It also applies to the film’s liberal use of sexualized language and imagery. Ming Toy’s seemingly innocent but nevertheless omnipresent sexuality in particular shapes the film’s general undertone. In fact, Kuo has argued that the film’s controversy lay not only in the offensive depic­tion of Chinese, but in the way Ming Toy’s sexuality blurred the boundaries between white and Chinese femininities. Ming Toy’s status as ‘yellow slave girl’ and as sexually active is contained as long as it corresponds to her racial alienness, but her disclosure as white in the end points to general no­tions of deviant white sexuality and threats to domesticity that were prevalent in the late 1920s. As Kuo asserts, “if white women can be mistaken for Chinese women, and if women in general are understood as inclined to sexual promiscuity, then there is a real crisis in maintaining the racial and sexual purity of Ethnicity,” in Movie Censorship and American Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Francis G. Couvares (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 212 – 236; Yiman Wang, “The Crisscrossed Stare: Protest and Propaganda in China’s Not-­So-­Silent Era,” in Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, ed. Jennifer M. Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 186 – 209, esp. 195 – 196. 162 Letter from John V. Wilson to Henry Henigson, May 23, 1930, and letter from Frederick Herron to Colonel Jason S. Joy, January 15, 1931. Produc­tion Code Administra­tion Records, Mo­tion Picture Associa­tion of America (MPAA), Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Mo­tion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. 163 ‘Pre-­code era’ generally refers to the time period between 1930 and 1934, before the so-­called Hays Code began to be strictly enforced. The Hays Code was the basis for the censorship of films that depicted allegedly immoral scenes, for example sexuality, profanity, or criminality. 164 Robert Sklar, Movie-­Made America. A Cultural History of American Movies, New York: Random House 1975, 175.

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of the white family.”165 Ming Toy’s racial ambiguity thus renders her sexual Otherness a signifier for the larger social transforma­tions of femininities that allegedly posed a threat to white womanhood. Numerous comedic elements lighten the film’s dramatic story; many of these involve the naïve and vivacious characteriza­tion of Ming Toy. Addi­tionally, Edward G. Robinson delivers an over-­the-­top impersona­tion of a self-­confident and ridi­ culous Charlie Yong, which is clearly an ironic nod to Robinson’s gangster image. As a result, the film “crops out a note of burlesque,” as the Los Angeles Times put it.166 The two main Chinese characters, speaking broken Pidgin English and always referring to themselves in third person, reinforce this effect. While the original theater play featured a humorous note, some observers judged the 1930 film as an “overzealous attempt to modernize the lines and the ac­tion of the […] drama, resulting in just another Chinese-­American play.”167 The film’s many references to American Jazz Age culture, however, were already apparent in the earlier versions.168 The film presents Ming Toy as a Chinese immigrant carelessly meandering between Chinese and U. S. customs and tradi­tions. Representing each of these cultural spheres are the two men who desire Ming Toy: Billy Benson and Charlie Yong. The first minutes of the film serve to present Ming Toy’s life in China, contrasted afterwards with her new life as an Americanized Chinese in Chinatown. Ming Toy’s supposed father Hop Toy (Tetsu Komai) decides she is too clumsy to be of any help on her family’s farm and wants to sell her at a “Love Boat” auc­tion. The Love Boat func­tions as a market for selling women to the highest bidder and is also connected to the ‘import’ of so-­called sing-­song girls to the United States. As it turns out, Charlie Yong, who appears later in the film, is involved in this business. Before bidding begins, the women are presented and potential buyers inspect their teeth and feet. At the auc­tion, the audience meets Billy Benson, an upper class American and son of the U. S. ambassador to China. His friend, the Chinatown merchant Lo Sang Kee from San Francisco, accompanies him. Ming Toy enters the auc­tion in a festive Chinese costume. She sings the musical theme of the original play – that is, the second song of the “Chinese Lullaby” by Robert 165 Kuo, East Is West, 27. 166 John Scott, “Vivacious Star Plays Ming Toy,” Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1930. 167 W. A. Whitney, “Film Review of East Is West,” Washington Post, November 23, 1930; for informa­tion about the original play, see Gerald M. Bordman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914 – 1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 94 – 95. 168 See “East Is West Trailer,” (EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 2014), accessed April 18, 2016, http://youtu.be/QySm_qotNMs. The 1922 version of the film was considered lost until 2005 when the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam was able to obtain a private copy. The Institute released a trailer for the film to celebrate the comple­tion of its restaura­tion in 2014.

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Hood Bowers.169 Billy Benson is instantly fascinated by her appearance. He pulls her abusive father away and starts talking to her. One of the first comedic moments is Ming Toy’s answer to Benson’s remark that “Americans just don’t buy women.” She responds: “Too bad you Americans are not civilized like Chinese.” Benson, however, arranges a deal and convinces Lo Sang Kee to buy Ming Toy in his stead and to take care of her in San Francisco. The scene perfectly exemplifies a Eurocentric perspective on Oriental backwardness and sexual exoticism. While at first glance the commodifica­tion of women is ironically criticized, the white hero uses exactly this principle and his economic wealth to ‘rescue’ the object of his exotic desire. The Orient is ultimately rendered a passive feminine space waiting to be conquered and lifted to Western standards. Ming Toy, who has learned English in a Christian mission, instantly fantasizes about her future in the United States: “America fine place. Women free – can spend all of my money. And, oh, I love to see the Statue of Liberty!” The very next scene visualizes Ming Toy’s journey to the United States and points to the transformative effect of her arrival. In a montage, we simultaneously see her semi-­transparent face and the different stages of her journey in a long cross-­fade, so that the audience sees both the visual sights of her journey and Ming Toy’s facial expressions as she witnesses them. The voyage begins in a Chinese harbor where we see a small sailboat. A large steamship follows this sequence to evoke astonishment in Ming Toy’s face. Next, we see the skyline of San Francisco and busy streets lined by skyscrapers. Ming Toy is visibly impressed and smilingly raises her eyes as if to look at the high buildings. The sequence ends in Chinatown, where the montage changes significantly: now we see Ming Toy’s face in the middle and a multiplicity of six more faces that circle around her face in the center (see fig. 51). Why is this final montage added at the end of the sequence? It may certainly signify the overwhelming impression that such a journey has on Ming Toy, who in this case stands for every immigrant coming to the United States. The scene clearly points to the contrast between her ‘simple’ life in China and the sheer complexity of urban life and countless opportunities of American modernity. More than this, however, the scene also serves as a visual marker for the multiplica­tion of 169 Robert Hood Bowers, Chinese Lullaby: The Song Featured by Lupe Velez in ‘East Is West.’ Sheet music (1919; repr., New York: G. Schirmer, c. 1930). Daniel K. E. Ching Collec­tion, Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco. The lullaby consists of two songs. The lyrics are: (a) “Sing song, sing song so Hop Toy; Allee same like China boy, but he sellee girl with joy: Pity poor Ming Toy!; (b) “A ripple I seem On life’s mystic stream, Tossed at the waters’ will; So I dare dream I’ll be, Like the poor ripple, free; When the troubled ­waters grow still. A still.” There is a short note in the sheet music that explains: “Song (a) is in Ming Toy’s ‘Pigeon English’; Song (b) in the good English she learns later in the play.” Ibid.

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Figure 51  Ming Toy (Lupe Vélez), multiple faces montage. Screenshot from East Is West (Universal, 1930).

Ming Toy’s identity and the beginning of her racial transforma­tion. At this point in the narrative, she starts to fully embrace American popular culture and leaves her Orien­tal past behind. Following contemporary discourses of assimila­tion, the change of her loca­tion and the influences of Western culture have ‘Americanizing’ effects on her identity. This does not happen all at once and does not mean a complete disconnec­tion from her past but instead opens up a multiplicity of identities, or hybridity, that emerges in Ming Toy’s character throughout the rest of the film. The splitting of her identity also points to the fact that to a certain degree, she always carried her white essence inside her, which is now becoming apparent. The next scene opens with a street scene in San Francisco’s Chinatown and portrays Ming Toy as a naïve, young woman who eagerly adopts different cultural traits without really knowing what they mean. In a remarkable crane shot, we see a modern and busy Chinatown street. On one balcony we see a woman playing with her chewing gum and looking down on the passers-­by below her.170 Next, we see Ming Toy standing on the balcony on the opposite side of the street as she plays with her chewing gum and, observing the other woman, meticulously imitates her behavior. The other woman leans over the railing and yells “Yoohoo” to the men on the street, throwing them flowers when they stop to look up. Not realizing that these invita­tions indicate sexual approaches and prostitu­tion, Ming Toy does the same.171 A few moments later, this behavior leads to complica­tions, as

170 In the copy of the film I was able to view, it is not clearly visible if this woman is Chinese American or not. Kuo refers to her as a white. See Kuo, East Is West, 47. 171 On another level, the shot in which the camera looks over Ming Toy’s shoulder to the ­balcony on the other side of the street beautifully illustrates the cinematic gaze. The other balcony serves as a screen where Ming Toy witnesses and learns traits of American culture in a structurally similar way as the audience in the cinema does. The fact that the first thing she sees in

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Ming Toy attracts the atten­tion of a religious reformer, Dr. Fredericks. She calls him teasingly, throws him a flower, and invites him with an imitated twinkle in her eye to come inside. Apparently, she realizes neither what these invita­tions signify nor that she is approaching the wrong man. Fredericks steps into Lo Sang Kee’s store on the ground floor, accuses him of housing a prostitute, and announces that Ming Toy will face deporta­tion. In this case, Ming Toy’s enthusiasm for blending in with her surroundings has negative consequences because they refer to stereotypes surrounding Chinatown vices. As the film progresses, however, it becomes apparent that Ming Toy’s transforma­ tion into a white American includes a phase as a Chinese American flapper, similar to the character of Toya San in The Hatchet Man. Ming Toy constantly chews gum and at one point is seen reading the book Ex-­Wife by Ursula Parrott. The book, published anonymously in 1929, portrays a ‘New Woman’ who leaves her cheating husband and discovers New York’s hedonistic lifestyle of drinks, music, and sexuality.172 Accordingly, Ming Toy displays typical influences of Jazz Age popular culture. When Lo Sang Kee orders her to take out her chewing gum and “pray to Joss” to excuse her misbehavior on the balcony, she kneels down in front of the Buddha statue, takes a new gum from under the table and prays: “ […] Just help Ming Toy be nice like American girl. Ming Toy wants just some legs, learn do jazz dance fine, and be happy.” Moments later she hears jazz music from the other side of the street, where Charlie Yong has his entertainment parlor. Ming Toy steps on the balcony, watches the people dance, and starts to dance the Shimmy on her own. This is the first time Charlie Yong notices Ming Toy as he sees her dancing from his side of the street. Indeed, the character of Charlie Yong as a “half-­caste” Chinese and half-­legal Chinatown gangster is as exaggerated and ridiculous as it is reinforcing of racial and gender boundaries. In the first scene that introduces Charlie Yong, he sits in an easy chair and smokes while his three wives surround him – two doing his manicure and pedicure and the third one scratching his back. The scratching makes him laugh and giggle in a shrill, high-­pitched, effeminate tone that characterizes him as an extravagant character before he even says a word. He constantly reminds people around him of his prestige as “Charlie Yong wise guy [sic]” and even owns a parrot, which imitates him saying this. When the three women are finished with their work, he puts on a monocle, inspects them one after another, this ‘meta-­filmic’ Chinatown is prostitu­tion can, in this respect, be read as an ironic critique of the medium’s own racist stereotypes. 172 Ursula Parrott, Ex-­Wife (New York: J. Cape & H. Smith, 1929). The book was adopted for the screen under the title The Divorcee (1930).

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and concludes: “You’re too old. Just like faded roses. I got to get new woman.” Officially, Charlie Yong owns several chop suey restaurants, but, as indicated, he also owns the “Love Boat” business. Despite his seemingly masculine lifestyle and his objectifica­tion of women, he remains an ambivalent caricature of a dominant underworld boss. His character mainly serves to deliver laughs, through either his ridiculing parrot, his misunderstanding of phrases, or his general over-­the-­top self-­assurance. Reinforcing his effeminateness, he is not even close to winning a physical fight at the film’s climax. As a result he does not completely obtain a posi­tion of masculine power and virility. Even though he is wealthy and controls the underworld, his character lacks intelligence and physical fitness. He therefore only serves as a contrasting foil for Billy Benson’s white masculinity. Within the constella­tion of the film, Charlie Yong’s ambivalent gender identity intersects directly with his racial hybridity. Unlike Ming Toy, his racial status is not connected to cultural assimila­tion but the outcome of ‘biological’ race-­ mixing, which even in pro-­assimila­tionist debates was a hot topic and generally a stronger cultural taboo. Charlie Yong describes himself as “fifty-­fifty Chinaman – half American, half Chinese.” In his typical manner of speaking about himself, he also introduces himself by announcing: “American clothes, Chinese heart – biggest shot in San Francisco.” His fine American suits and his economic wealth define his Americanness. Conversely, his objectifica­tion of women and inability to cope with the emancipated Chinese flapper Ming Toy ensure that he remains within the realm of the stereotypical Chinese underworld boss. The very last scene demonstrates how Charlie Yong fails to attain a white, hetero­ normative, masculine posi­tion. He tries to kidnap Ming Toy when she is alone in the garden of the Benson family but cannot overpower Billy Benson, who comes to her rescue. Ming Toy joins the fight and bites Charlie Yong in his leg, which makes him whine and scream – again in a high-­pitched, shrill tone that recalls animal sounds or the screams of a baby. The couple escapes and the powerless Charlie Yong now depends on Hop Toy, whom he had hired as an assassin to kill Billy and who at this point does not know that Benson’s lover is the girl he raised as his own. When Hop Toy realizes he is facing Ming Toy, he refrains from his mission and reveals her racial status. Charlie Yong then states he is no longer interes­ ted in Ming Toy, proclaiming “Charlie Yong says ‘stick to your own race.’ White woman’s teeth – too sharp.” On one level, this refers of course to Ming Toy’s bite, but on a second level, he refers to the emancipated lifestyle of the modern, white flapper genera­tion. This is even more remarkable when we bring to mind how, according to film conven­tions and popular discourse, Chinese men desire white women even more, such as in Old San Francisco (1927) or A Tale of Two Worlds

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(1921). In 1930, the ‘New Woman’ had already acquired a cultural posi­tion that broke with older tradi­tions presenting them as passive victims of Oriental desire. White American men in turn needed to be ‘strong’ enough to handle new forms of emancipated femininity. In sum, this last remark from Charlie Yong renders him both Chinese and effeminate while it renders Ming Toy white and American. Ming Toy’s process of becoming American bases itself to a large extent on her distinc­tion from “fifty-­fifty Chinaman” Charlie Yong. This becomes apparent as soon as Ming Toy lets Billy Benson kidnap her to escape Charlie Yong and starts to live in the white, upper-­class family house. With her childish behavior, she brings chaos into the conservative household and constantly teases the family’s butler Thomas, which leads to numerous comedic moments. While this childishness and naivety can arguably be read as a representa­tion of Oriental backwardness and discourses on the joyful ‘naturalness’ of premodern civiliza­tions, Ming Toy can detach herself from her Chinese past. This becomes obvious in a crucial scene where Charlie Yong pays a first visit at the Bensons’ home to negotiate Ming Toy’s return to him. He remarks that Billy Benson has no right to love Ming Toy because she is a “China girl.” Ming Toy clings to Billy firmly and answers: “Ming Toy got nothing China. Don’t think China, don’t feel China, don’t know why god put me in China.” ­Billy’s father joins the dispute and concludes that Charlie Yong has the right to ask for Ming Toy because he has the permission of Dr. Fredericks to marry her. Billy then confesses that he is in love with Ming Toy, but his father warns him about the negative consequences this would have on his social status. Then Charlie Yong warns Ming Toy that if she marries Billy, he will kill him. This remark causes Ming Toy to throw a tantrum. She slowly walks to him and shouts, calling him a tramp. Finally, she calls for Thomas, the butler, to throw Charlie Yong out and refers to him as a “chink.” Charlie Yong takes his hat and leaves without saying another word. The whole dialogue and especially the use of the pejorative word “chink” marks a point in Ming Toy’s turning away from her own Chineseness. She now starts to think of herself as American, but this is only possible by distancing herself from the other Oriental character. This shift also corresponds to the way Universal Pictures promoted the film. One of the posters describes Ming Toy as a “99% American girl,” and another shows a drawing of Ming Toy in Chinese dress, carrying a fan. The text reads: “That’s little Ming Toy, Chinese Sing Song girl, who hated Chinks but loved a big, handsome American.”173 Ultimately, she gains a more privileged racial posi­tion by denying her origin and degrading Charlie Yong as a lower “half-­caste” Chinese. 173 Press book for East Is West (n. p.: Universal Pictures, ca. 1930), 7. Copyright Collec­tion, ­Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washing ­ton, DC.

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The limits of Ming Toy’s cultural assimila­tion and racial Otherness, however, become apparent only a few moments later. Billy’s parents do not really consent to his plans to marry Ming Toy and feel certain he will change his mind once he reveals his lover to his upper-­class friends; therefore, the next scene shows a dinner party in the Benson mansion with drinks and piano music. Billy walks around and engages in small talk while everyone waits for his fiancée to join the party. Then Ming Toy appears on the stairs in a festive Chinese dress and suddenly all conversa­tion and music falls silent. An awkward silence fills the room, and in the end, Billy’s guests start to leave the party. Billy obviously has crossed a racial boundary, which is unacceptable for his class status. After this shock, Ming Toy and Billy have a conversa­tion about the chances for their future. Ming Toy thinks it is her fault and cries, “Oh, why did god make yellow people bad? Why did he not make all people white?” Billy tries to console her, saying, “Yellow people aren’t bad. Only a few white people think so.” Ming Toy, however, is not sure if the two can be together as a mixed-­race couple. Although she saw herself as American earlier, she feels unable to cross the racial line. “But suppose we have little baby that grow pigtail?” she says. Billy tries again to argue against it and remarks they can still cut off the pigtail. This rather shallow conversa­tion still refers to the film’s central ques­tion of whether race is a cultural or a biological construct and of how boundaries can be crossed. The film gives the answer to these ques­tions, of course, by revealing Ming Toy’s whiteness just a few minutes later. Accordingly, Ming Toy utters the very last sentence of the film, telling Billy, “Now our babies not have pigtails.” The film’s climax, however, only adds her whiteness to her already achieved cultural assimila­tion on a certain level. In sum, the film displays possibilities for Chinese assimila­tion but re-­erects racial categories. Ming Toy’s process of ‘becoming white’ requires her white essence, which was there all the time; furthermore, her attainment of whiteness is only possible by distancing herself from the “chink” Charlie Yong as an effeminate and ultimately evil Oriental. As a “half-­caste,” Charlie Yong represents both the typical villainous Chinese and the negative outcomes of “race-­mixing,” leaving him in a negatively attributed state of hybridity connected to his effeminate gender identity.

“We Don’t Think of Him as a Chinaman”: ‘Son of the Gods’ (1930)

Released the same year as East Is West, Frank Lloyd’s Son of the Gods is based on a similar narrative but adds a different twist to the common narrative of ‘­becoming white.’ The First Na­tional/Vitaphone produc­tion tells the story of Sam Lee (­Richard Barthelmess), son of a wealthy Chinese merchant from New York. At

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the beginning of the film, Sam attends college away from home. He shows no visible signs of his alleged Oriental heritage, and his male friends tolerate him because of his wealth and generosity. This changes when Sam and his friends are going out one night, and the girls that accompany them find out about Sam’s secret identity. Frustrated by racial prejudices, Sam leaves college and returns home to his father Lee Ying (E. Alyn Warren) in New York. He makes plans to disembark on a steamship to travel and experience manual work; however, he soon begins working for a playwright in Monte Carlo, where he also meets Allana Wagner (Constance Bennett). They go out and eventually fall in love, but when she finds out Sam Lee is Chinese, Allana confronts him and publicly lashes him with her riding crop. To make things worse, Sam learns his father is dying and that he needs to return to the United States. After his father’s death, Sam renounces any further attempts to be white and lives a Chinese lifestyle like his father, cutting all ties with American business partners. One day, a police officer from San Francisco visits him and tells him he was a foundling, meaning he is not Chinese. Meanwhile, Allana has regretted her reac­tion and realizes she loves Sam, whether he is Chinese or not. At the end of the film, when she visits him to confess her love, the ques­tion of his race has become obsolete and the two can live together happily. The film differs from East Is West because it focuses on a male character and because Sam passes as white in the beginning, later trying to ‘become Chinese’ before he is ultimately revealed to be white. Richard Barthelmess’s performance as Sam Lee arguably benefited from his star image connected to his role as a Chinese in D. W. Griffith’s highly-­acclaimed 1919 film Broken Blossoms. Whereas Barthelmess appeared in yellowface makeup back then, his role in Son of the Gods could not rely on physical markers. In fact, the film is based on the paradoxical situa­tion of a white actor playing a white man who believes to be a Chinese man passing as white. The lasting impact of his star image and his acting partially solved this discrepancy. As Life magazine noted, “Mr. Barthelmess has never been more believable, in fact, he is so believable that you soon forget to ques­tion the matter of a full-­blooded Chinaman who does not look very oriental.”174 Sam Lee’s hybrid identity, which forms the basic angle of the film, was central to its promo­tion, as the posters demonstrate (see figs. 52 – 53). Showing both the American and the Oriental version of Sam Lee, these advertisements illustrate the opposing double identity of the film’s main character. His facial features remaining the same, Sam’s Chinese cap clearly marks his Oriental identity whereas his accurate Western hairdo identifies him as white American for the most part. Addi­tionally,

174 Harry Evans, “Review of ‘Son of the Gods,’” Life, March 14, 1930.

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Figures 52 and 53  Film posters. Press book for Son of the Gods (New York: First Na­tional and Vitaphone, 1930). Courtesy of the Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

the Oriental faces differ in the tone of the skin in both pictures. The Oriental face on the left slide is significantly darker; the poster to the right contrasts with it by relying on a colored drawing instead of a photo. While this differentia­tion has no equivalent in the film itself, the posters might be making use of it to emphasize the different racial identities, contrasting extreme whiteness to ‘coloredness.’ While the film has not gained much scholarly atten­tion, Gina Marchetti offers an illuminating reading of Son of the Gods that focuses on the intersec­tions of class and race.175 According to Marchetti, the film deals with issues of class and the threats of class mobility against the backdrop of the Great Depression. It addresses class in its interrela­tion with race, making the solidifica­tion of class accept even the transforma­tion of race. As Marchetti puts it: “Individual identity 175 Gina Marchetti, “‘They Worship Money and Prejudice’: The Certainties of Class and the Uncertainties of Race in Son of the Gods,” in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 72 – 91.

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is so confused that changing race is presented as easier than moving up or down on the social ladder of class. In fact, as the supposedly physically self-­evident fact or races becomes problematic, class divisions, prerogatives, and identities go unchallenged.”176 During a time of economic turmoil and financial bankruptcy, the film stresses the importance of class as an important and stable necessity for identity. The film thus “ambivalently recognizes fundamental changes of identity while also denying the possibility of any type of upward or downward class mobility.”177 As Marchetti emphasizes, however, the film seldom addresses class directly, even though it permeates the whole narrative. Instead, the film “displaces the issue of class onto issues of racial, ethnic, and sexual identity.”178 Marchetti investigates these entanglements and demonstrates that Sam Lee’s status as upper class Chinese differentiates him from both white and Chinese working classes and renders his racial identity subordinate to class belonging. My reading of Son of the Gods takes up some of Marchetti’s insights but employs a different perspective. I argue that the film constructs an ambivalent picture of racial belonging and identity that is deeply characteristic of 1920s and 1930s assimila­ tion discourse. Interestingly, the film seems to criticize racism, as the audience is posi­tioned to sympathize with the main character while he repeatedly suffers from race hatred. Even though Sam is partially accepted in white, upper-­class society circles, he can never completely overcome his racial heritage, and the two revela­ tions of his alleged Chinese identity both end in an emo­tional catastrophe. He also cannot ‘become Chinese’ because Chineseness in this film is, as Marchetti observes, deeply connected to class. His attempt to become Chinese makes him a lonely, emo­tionally unfulfilled merchant who distracts himself with working class amusements that leave him equally joyless. Again, the film’s portrayal of racial and cultural transforma­tion both tells us about the malleability of racial boundaries and delineates what it means to be a white American and a Chinese respectively. The film’s opening scenes present Sam Lee as a wealthy college student whose appearance and behavior would not suggest any non-­whiteness besides his Chinese name. Sam is shown playing a polo game for his college team while his friends cheer for him from the stands. The significance of polo here is manifold and helps to introduce Sam as an apparently normal white young man. First, the game of polo is connected to no­tions of an upper-­class lifestyle, requiring not only t­ raining but a lot of money to sustain the horses. As a typically Anglo-­Saxon sport, it places Sam within the lifestyle of white college life. Sam’s strikingly white outfit, which 176 Marchetti, “‘They Worship Money,’” 73. 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid.

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we see when Sam meets a friend after the game, visually reinforces this effect. It not only marks Sam as white through the color of the clothes; it also renders him indistinguishable from the other, presumably white players. Second, polo is significant on another level, as it is a decidedly colonial game that Britain ‘imported’ from the Orient; thus, in an abstract sense, the transna­tional movement of a game that originated in the Near East and India and its subsequent ‘whitening’ through British colonialists resembles Sam Lee’s own history as a son of a Chinese immigrant ‘whitened’ through his class status. Sam’s acceptance as Chinese American college student depends largely on his wealth. This becomes apparent right after the polo game when a teammate thanks Sam for lending him one of his ponies. Seconds later, one of Sam’s college friends, “Kicker” (Frank Albertson), approaches and asks him for money – not for the first time, as it appears. Kicker needs money because the polo game visit is part of a date he and his friend “Spud” ( James Eagle) have with girls from the college. When Sam goes into the changing room to get money, Kicker sees Spud and the three girls marveling at Sam’s expensive sports car. This leads him to the idea that Sam could join the date. A ride in Sam’s car would impress their company and it would spare Kicker his need to borrow money. Sam is reluctant at first because he wanted to spend the day studying, but Kicker succeeds in convincing him. Unlike his two friends, Sam is portrayed as leading an exemplary life at college, one that is devoted to physical and intellectual achievements rather than leisure activities and sexual explora­tions. When all five of them take a trip in Sam’s convertible, Sam still seems detached from the rest of the group. The others begin singing and playing ukulele, and only Alice (Dorothy Mathews), who sits beside Sam in the front, shows interest in him. The trip reaches an abrupt end when Sam invites the group to an expensive dancing parlor, where their female company finds out Sam is Chinese. When they enter the establishment, the girls leave to freshen up and the boys wait for a table; however, their female company does not return. They send for Spud and Kicker to come to a separate room, where they accuse the boys of taking them out with a “Chinaman.” Mabel (Barbara Leonard) confronts Kicker, explaining they met a friend who told them about Sam. “How dare you bring us out with a Chinaman!” she accuses. Kicker tries to soothe them: “Well, we don’t think of Sam as a Chinaman. Why, he is a high-­class gentleman. You gotta go through with this!” But Mabel does not change her mind and instead cries that she would rather die than be asked to dance by Sam: “Sam Lee, a Chink – Oh, I wouldn’t let him touch me!” Kicker says Sam does not “look Chinese” and explains his class background. “Sam’s father is the richest Oriental in New York. He’s the Chinese Marshall Field. Sam has millions! […] You’re crazy to do a trick like this. Working

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your way through college and turning up your nose at a swell fellow like him.” But the girls do not calm down. Even though Kicker and Spud agree to bring the girls home and leave without Sam, they also profess solidarity by assuring them that they will not go out with them again. The boys tell Sam that they have to leave because one of the girls has gotten sick, but Sam clearly knows the reason behind their sudden departure. While the whole group accepts Sam as long as he can provide access to upper-­class amusements like cars and night clubs, the aversion to his racial identity is clearly gendered. Sam’s male friends can ignore his Chinese background and manage not to “think of him as a Chinaman” as long as they benefit from his wealth. Upper-­class females, on the other hand, perceive Sam’s Orientalness as a direct threat to their white womanhood.179 They cannot put class before race, and so they reduce Sam to his status as member of an undesirable race who threatens their own class status, for they do not just fear dancing with him but also the possibility that someone they know could see them in the company of a Chinese. For Sam this incident marks the decisive reason for leaving college and ques­ tioning his identity. Frustrated by racial discrimina­tion and class-­related snobbery, he plans to do manual labor. This attempt to explore different identities and escape class restric­tions coincides with a change of setting that leads him to Europe. Before Sam leaves, he complains to his father: “The only friendships I could make were those that I bought with your money. I’ve been insulted and ostracized, looked down upon, treated as something unclean.” His father, Lee Ying, tries to encourage him with spiritual advice, but Sam stresses that his problems in college always referred to his racial belonging: “Nothing mattered but the fact that I was Chinese.” He then explains he wants to earn his “own bread” during his travels and no longer depend on his father’s money. His determina­tion to be self-­sufficient is directly connected to his wish of gaining a more masculine posi­ tion. “How I merely want to be a man,” he laments. When his father asks if his duties will be hard, Sam argues from the perspective of racial solidarity. “Well, no harder than others performed by my countrymen every day,” he replies. In this way, Sam wants to explore how Chinese American workers face their daily lives. This scene illustrates Marchetti’s observa­tion that the film is heavily based on the dichotomy and opposi­tion between Chinese Americans as socially accepted “mandarin merchants” and as stereotypically undesired and excluded working-­class 179 Alice, who had talked to Sam in the car, reacts differently from the other two girls and remains silent. She seems excited when Kicker men­tions the “millions” that Sam owns and therefore is able to put class before race, apparently only desiring Sam for his money. When she phones Sam a few days later, Sam refuses to see her again.

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laborers.180 To a certain degree, Sam’s journey to Europe reverses the narrative of the poor European (or in this case, Chinese) immigrant who sets out for America in hopes of finding a better life and economic improvement. Sam seeks poverty to experience an ‘honest’ life, which, as Marchetti correctly notices, is a common narrative for male protagonists in Hollywood films. Sam’s identity, however, is marked as open and negotiable, a point of the film demonstrated in a short dialogue with Eileen (Mildred Van Dorn), his father’s Irish American secretary. Eileen has been a good friend of Sam’s since childhood. When Sam leaves his father, she jokes about his foolish decision to leave without any money. “I’m sure this is an Irishman’s trick!” she jests. “Oh, Sam, you’d make a noble mick! You’re so fine and foolish and impractical!” Then she hands him a Catholic scapular to bring him good luck, noting that she does not know if her religion is better than his but that “it won’t do any harm to mix them.” More than merely a comic remark, this short scene refers to Sam’s hybridity and also his capability to overcome racial boundaries and become a different person. Curiously, the film never depicts Sam working lower class jobs but instead jumps to a point in the narrative where we see him residing rather luxuriously in Monte Carlo under employment by playwright Bathurst (Claude King). For Marchetti, this ellipsis highlights the claim that “a great deal of the narrative revolves around proving to Sam and to the audience that he is a member of the elect, destined to be rich, and inherently unable to fall from his elevated class standing.”181 While his class status indeed appears solidified again, Sam’s stay in Europe has clearly affected his rela­tionship to his Chinese identity. The first scene in Monte Carlo shows Sam sitting on a beautiful terrace by the sea while he talks to Bathurst. As the audience has learned from a letter he had written to his father, Bathurst is in search of someone with knowledge about the Chinese for his new play. Sam thanks him for giving him the opportunity to work with him and become a friend. As he states, “It’s the first friendship that was ever just given to me. Even on the boat where I was peeling potatoes, before you found me, the crew couldn’t forget that I was Chinese.” Now, as we learn, Sam feels a lot more accepted. In addi­tion to his restora­tion to a higher class, he can use his Chinese background for a good cause. In Europe, Sam adopts the posi­tion of an Orientalist expert and thereby reconnects to his racial identity. Bathurst even men­tions he did not notice “any of the ladies running away from you!” When Sam attempts to thank him for t­ aking care of him, Bathurst refuses to take any responsibility for Sam’s acceptance and

180 Marchetti, “‘They Worship Money,’” 81. 181 Ibid., 82.

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well-­being and instead states: “It’s just because you’re yourself, boy!” This remark can be read as a comment on both Sam’s class status and his coming to terms with his Chineseness. Sam’s enthusiasm comes to an abrupt end when his new girlfriend Allana finds out about his Chinese background, which eventually leads to an unsettling display of racial hatred. This is even more surprising because Allana and Sam have a conversa­tion about racial prejudice shortly before their first kiss. Here Allana confesses she had been engaged to an East Indian before and that she would “marry any man” she is in love with: “darling, you could have six wives, be a murderer, thief, beggar – it wouldn’t make any difference.” Before Sam can tell Allana about his secret, she seals his lips with a kiss. As the audience soon learns, however, Sam’s Chineseness does make a difference and ultimately demonstrates that, in Allana’s logic, an interracial rela­tionship with an Asian man is a crime worse than murder. Taking popular discourse into account, this train of thought was indeed not uncommon.182 Allana’s outrage against Sam marks the film’s most crucial and shocking scene. The audience sees Sam waiting in a hotel café when Allana appears and confronts him. She still wears the riding outfit and crop she wore when her father told her about Sam. Sam rises to greet her, but Allana stands in front of him and shouts: “You cur! You liar! You cheat! You dirty, rotten Chinaman!” Then she takes her crop and whips Sam furiously. A reverse shot shows that Sam’s cheek is ­bleeding, but he stoically endures the punishment until Allana turns away and leaves. This scene marks the point where Sam decides to quit acting as an American and become Chinese. It is also telling in regard to the film’s portrayal of gender and race. Allana’s outburst can be read as the most extreme expression of the sexually liberal and self-­conscious ‘New Woman’ lifestyle that the film hints at with her character earlier. From this point on, the film works towards her re-­inscrip­tion into normative, white womanhood inclined toward the patriarchal order. In the end, this development leads her to the representa­tion as a reformed, ‘tamed’ woman ready to marry Sam. On the other hand, Sam endures Allana’s punishment silently, connecting him to no­tions of effeminate, masochistic, Oriental masculinity.183 The film hints at 182 This reality becomes apparent in a long article about the film in the Los Angeles Times. The author justifies Sam’s change of race at the film’s end as the only possible solu­tion: “­Considering the attitude of the majority of Americans toward the Oriental races, […] the film could not have ended tastefully any other way.” Whitney Williams, “Barthelmess at His Best in ‘Son of the Gods,’” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 1930. 183 Not coincidently, one of the most influential filmic depic­tions of this form of masculinity was Barthelmess’ own role as a Chinese merchant in Broken Blossoms (1919). See Lan Dong, “Cinematic Representa­tion of the Yellow Peril: D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms,” in Color,

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this theme earlier when Sam reacts in an overtly shy manner to Allana’s advances, making even her father suspicious. Here Allana tells her concerned father that it is she who “rushes” Sam instead of the other way around, and he observes: “Well, that’s out of the ordinary. What’s the matter with him?” In fact, Sam’s passivity during the whipping can be read as part of his racial transforma­tion. At this point, he actively chooses to become Chinese, a decision which could also result from the Oriental gender identity that manifests most apparently in this scene. As Marchetti observes, Sam refeminizes Allana “by embodying both of the usually mutually exclusive attributes that Hollywood ascribed to Asian males: sadistic perversion or total impotence and emascula­tion.”184 Paradoxically, it is his Orien­ tal masculinity that changes Allana in the end. Sam’s connec­tion to his Chinese identity reaches a new level when he hears about his dying father and returns to New York to pay his last respects. The subsequent transforma­tion into a ‘real’ Chinese marks one of the crucial developments in the film. Similar to the concept of ‘race-­consciousness’ discussed above, racial hatred makes Sam all the more conscious of his alleged Chinese ancestry. The round Oriental door he steps through visualizes his approaching transforma­ tion and now func­tions as a threshold to a different identity. As he closes the door after him, the camera and the audience are left behind. When he returns, he is changed, displaying a strong determina­tion to start a different life. Talking to Eileen, he remarks: “I hoped to be an American. I tried to become one. But there are forces too great opposing it. I have discovered voids between the races too deep to span.” Sam has realized that his cultural assimila­tion will never break down the racial boundaries that prevent him from becoming a white American. His renuncia­tion of his efforts to become American is motivated mainly by his experience with racial discrimina­tion and disillusionment with the promise of equality. “I’m not of your race, Eileen,” he continues. “And I no longer wish to be. In it I found only treachery and contempt. […] I am Chinese, Eileen. And from now on I shall live as one.” The scenes that follow show Sam in Chinese clothes in his office or reading Chinese philosophy in his father’s decorated apartment. It becomes apparent that – contrary to the transforma­tion in East Is West, where we witness a Chinese ‘becoming American’ – Son of the Gods shows a character that until then Hair, and Bone: Race in the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Linden Lewis and Glyne Griffith, with Elizabeth Crespo-­Kebler (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008), 122 – 146; Susan Koshy, “American Na­tionhood as Eugenic Romance,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cul­ tural Studies 12, no. 1 (2001): 50 – 78. 184 Marchetti, “‘They Worship Money,’” 86.

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has more or less passed as a white man ‘becoming Chinese.’ Sam firmly believes in reconnecting to his racial essence, but as the film’s ending reveals, this outward transforma­tion and his new race consciousness are the actual masquerade, not his efforts to blend in with white people. As a response to white racism, he now stops extending credits to white firms, which, as his associate reports, has disastrous consequences for Sam’s business. Addi­tionally, Sam’s emo­tional health seems problematic. He refuses to hear Allana’s apology when she calls him in his office, and as his assistant Moy (King Hoo Chang) remarks, he appears sad and bitter. It soon becomes clear that Sam’s transforma­tion and disregard for white Ame­ ri­ca affect his class status. In fact, his act of ‘becoming Chinese’ very quickly brings him in contact with lower class entertainments that construct Oriental masculinities through stereotypical concepts of ‘deviant sexualities’ and an alleged desire for white women. Moy tries to cheer Sam up: “[Y]ou like dance? You like white arms?” A cut to a large dance hall filled with dancing couples follows this exchange. We see Moy emerging from the crowd, heading to a ticket counter. He buys a ticket and approaches one of the many white women sitting at the bar. He asks her for a dance, hands her the ticket and walks her to the dance floor. It becomes apparent that Moy regularly frequents a “taxi dance hall” and, as the following tracking shot along the dance floor reveals, the place is almost exclusively filled with Chinese men who dance with white women. At the end of the long shot, we see Sam sitting alone at a table above the dance floor. When one of the taxi dancers approaches him, we learn he does not dance and instead merely watches the people. Allana’s father, who pays Sam a visit at the place, later reveals to Allana that Sam is not even a “decent Chinaman,” because he frequents “an Oriental taxi dance hall, where white women dance with – oh, the reputa­tion of the place is bad enough, but it’s nothing compared to the place itself. It’s vile, disgraceful, degrading!”185 The dance hall scene illuminates two important elements. First, it shows the film’s allegedly anti-­racist message undermined once again by its depic­tion of lower-­class Chinese American men. Moy offers an example of the male Chinese 185 The promo­tional material advertised this scene as a sensa­tional look into the Oriental lower-­ class underworld. A text in the press book emphasizes the scene’s authenticity: “Into the strange byways of Los Angeles’ underworld went scouts for First Na­tional Pictures and corraled [sic] sheiks and taxi-­dancers for one of the important sequences of “Son of the Gods” […]. The result was breath-­taking in its authenticity and realism. Sallow-­skinned, greased-­haired young chaps, hard-­boiled girls, weird ways, strange manners—all these were transplanted onto a set and filmed and recorded in the dance hall scene […].” Press book for Son of the Gods (New York: First Na­tional and Vitaphone, 1930), 8. Copyright Collec­tion, Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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inability to have ‘normal’ rela­tions with women. Instead, they are prone to practices of quasi-­prostitu­tion and thus to deviant sexuality. Addi­tionally, the film reproduces the stereotype that Chinese men desire white women, an impression further reinforced by the observa­tion that at no point do any Chinese American females emerge as possible partners for Sam or Moy. Second, it hints at Sam’s fall from grace, but in fact he remains a spectator. He even seems to look down at the dancing couples in disgust, but he literally has no other place to go. As a Chinese, he accompanies his assistant but remains an outsider to the latter’s forms of entertainment. The scene consequently only serves to visualize his hybridity and, in this case, his non-­belonging. He cannot be a Chinese in the same way that he cannot be white. Significantly, the very last scenes of the film uphold Sam’s hybridity. When Eileen’s uncle reveals that Sam was a foundling in San Francisco’s Chinatown and was taken care of by Lee Ying and his wife, Sam reacts almost with indifference. “Why should I be glad to find out that the parents who cast me aside were white? Why should I be glad to find out that I’m not the son of that man to whom I owe everything? […] Just because he’s Chinese? Everything fine that ever happened to me has been through him.”

To Eileen’s surprise he even asks her and her uncle not to tell anyone about his whiteness, as he is “happy and proud” to remain Lee Ying’s son. Unlike films like East Is West and A Tale of Two Worlds, the revela­tion of whiteness does not mark the end of the narrative. In the last scene, when Allana visits Sam to finally confess her love regardless of his race, Sam takes her to the room where his father died. He shows her the Buddhist shrine and portraits of his parents before he tells her that he was picked up in a slum as a foundling of unknown white parents. In this way, he introduces her to the ancestry he now accepts as his own. The film, therefore, depicts the possibilities for changing a person’s racial identity and becoming white or Chinese, respectively. Throughout the narrative and even in the end, Sam accepts his Chinese identity and gradually shifts from his status as an upper-­class white college boy to a wealthy Chinese merchant. His class status, clothing, and participa­tion in a typically white college life make his Americaniza­tion possible; however, as the two major racial hatred scenes – the trip with his college friends and the whipping scene – show, he is reduced to the status of Chineseness as soon as ‘knowledge’ about his true identity becomes public. Others then perceive revela­tions of his racial essence as a form of betrayal and trespass that exposes his racial masquerade, which in this case is his ‘white mask’ or his missing Oriental features. Sam’s return to his Chinese identity in the second half of the film illustrates a form of race consciousness, in the sociological sense,

Conclusion  |

that also misleads him into social isola­tion. In the end, he finds a solu­tion partly by accepting his own hybridity and partly by disregarding racial biologism. Of course the film whitens Sam in the end to avoid cultural taboos, which re-­erects racial boundaries, but it also undermines its own adherence to conven­tion through the narrative twist of Sam recognizing his cultural socializa­tion as Chinese over his biological whiteness. The film thus achieves an almost subversive conclusion that leaves him as a hybrid Americanized Chinese rescued by Allana’s uncondi­ tional ‘true’ love and ultimate disregard for his racial status. In sum, the film in all its ambivalence shows the performative and non-­essentialist quality of race and the possibilities and limits of becoming American. It visualizes a new place for Chinese Americans in American culture that was beginning to emerge, but was still highly contested and, ultimately, connected to class.

3.3 Conclusion The preceding chapter revolved around the various ways U. S. mainstream society reacted to the lasting presence of Chinese Americans and their increased visibility in the political and cultural spheres. Mo­tion pictures, as I have argued, massively discussed the cultural significance of Chinese Americans and the degree to which they fitted into contemporary concepts of Americanness. The films discussed in this chapter found a specific visual language to express these much-­debated topics and make them intelligible for their audiences. Perhaps it is here, in this chapter, that mo­tion pictures’ historical significance for cultural processes becomes most apparent – as a medium that not only takes up topics, but also actively engages in discourse, highlights cultural shifts and fric­tions, and, not least, produces m ­ eaning for broad audiences in its very own way. From this perspective, film-­historical curiosities like the ‘Chinese flapper’ or the ‘becoming white’ of Chinese charac­ ters are more than plot devices; they are attempts to find a visual form for the complex transforma­tions taking place in the 1920s and 1930s. The first sec­tion of this chapter traced the diversifica­tion of film representa­ tions of Chinese Americans and its rela­tion to the increasing visibility of the native-­born genera­tions. As I outlined, the 1920s were a decisive decade for the forma­tion of Chinese American identities. This was reflected in an intensifying political awareness of the native-­born genera­tions, who made use of their civil rights. On a cultural level, many members of these genera­tions embraced an American lifestyle and shaped their own hybrid identities. In popular culture, these shifts were understood as a genera­tional conflict, epitomized by the phenomenon of the ‘Chinese flapper.’ Accordingly, the films discussed in this

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sec­tion showed the appearance of new visual representa­tions of Chinese Americans. Old San Francisco (1927) portrayed the Chinese villain who passes as white and placed him within a network of differing racial identities. His true Oriental essence is suppressed and symbolized by his incarcerated brother. It is also contrasted with the Chinatown tong members, who themselves masquerade as submissive, stereotypical Chinese. The film clearly demonstrated that race is an effect of performativity. This is also the case in The Hatchet Man (1932), which shows the struggle of different genera­tions in negotiating their Chinese and American identities. Significantly, both films in the end contain racial ambigui­ ties and affirm their characters’ Oriental essence. The second sec­tion connected mo­tion pictures to the sociological discourse of the so-­called ‘Oriental problem.’ The sociologists of the Chicago School as well as other contemporaries were concerned with the ques­tions of assimila­tion of Chinese Americans into U. S. society. While these discourses aimed at understanding the potentials and limits of the so-­called melting pot, they need to be seen in their own productivity for creating Orientalist binaries. Investigating immigra­tion from a racial perspective ultimately helped to create Chinese Ameri­ cans as Orientals. Mo­tion pictures that showed characters passing as white or Chinese, as I argue, articulated these discourses and visualized the hybridity of race. By placing characters within a social context that supposedly contradicted their racial identity, mo­tion pictures negotiated both the constructedness and the boundaries of racial concepts. Films like East Is West (1930) and Son of the Gods (1930) explicitly depicted the possibilities as well as the dangers of passing as a white or Chinese in different scenarios. The revela­tion that the Chinese characters in both films are white after having grown up in the belief of being Chinese pointed to race as a cultural construct. The films, however, also indicated that such a ‘transforma­tion’ is only possible on screen, as they ultimately always refer to the impossibility of crossing the racial line. Only Son of the Gods leaves possibilities for ambivalence and hybridity by letting the white character accept his Chinese cultural heritage. All the films men­tioned in this chapter show an impressive openness to h­ ybridi­ty and at least partially mark race as a cultural construct. In doing so, they attest to a time period when race played a crucial role for ques­tions of immigra­tion and Americaniza­tion. In a political and cultural climate that linked assimila­tion to racial categories, these films projected scenarios of racial transforma­tion and the ‘becoming white’ of Chinese Americans. Like the large discursive field of socio­ logy and assimila­tion, mo­tion pictures investigated the possibilities of assimila­ tion but ended by consolidating the idea of an uncrossable racial divide, which was firmly rooted in American Orientalist discourse.

4 Illegal Immigrants and Alien Subjects

The passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 introduced a new phase in U. S. immigra­tion policy and raised the ques­tion of how to prevent ‘undesirable’ immigrants from entering the territory of the United States. The Exclusion Act and its successors initiated administrative controls at the ports of entry for Chinese immigrants, most significantly on the West Coast. More importantly, the exclusion laws highlighted the importance of the land borders along Canada and Mexico that until the late nineteenth century were hardly more than lines on a map. The safeguarding of these vast land borders became crucial for the enforcement of the laws and the goal of keeping Chinese out of the U. S. na­tion state. While the decades that followed the Exclusion Act saw the erec­tion of a growing and increasingly specified dispositif of controls and surveillance, the guarding of the border remained a difficult task. As late as 1920, the Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigra­tion described the problems of enforcing the immigra­tion laws along the U. S.-Mexico border as follows: “It is only necessary to consult a physical map of the territory paralleling the interna­tional border from the Pacific to the Gulf to perceive the tremendous possibilities for illicit traffic of aliens. From the Pacific to El Paso the boundary is an imaginary line marked off by monuments; from El Paso to the Gulf the Rio Grande constitutes a natural but ever-­changing line of demarca­tion between the two Republics.”1

The excerpt points to the difficulties of preventing immigrants from crossing the U. S.-Mexico border, given that the territorial line constitutes almost 2,000 miles of harsh and inhospitable land that is almost impossible to keep under constant surveillance. By using the term “imaginary line,” the report also points to two central concerns in this chapter. The first is the significance of the border as both territorial space and as a concept that gained importance in the light of heightened U. S. na­tionalism. From the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, the lines that separated the United States from Canada in the North and Mexico in the South evolved from arbitrary, permeable and, indeed, invisible territorial



1 U. S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigra­tion to the Secretary of Labor (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 440.

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demarca­tions to patrolled, fenced, and monitored boundaries with the goal of closing off the na­tion from the illegitimate traffic of people and goods. The border served increasingly to distinguish the U. S. na­tion from its outside, as a protective barrier against external forces. Second, the concept of the “imaginary line” demonstrates how the border refers to identity as well as space. By excluding immigrant groups, the borders in the north and in the south produced dichotomies of ‘us and them’ and ‘inside and outside’ – both at the borders themselves and throughout U. S. society. The exclusion laws, in fact, produced a whole new category of immigrant. Through the act of crossing the border illegally, immigrants became so-­called illegal aliens. As Estelle T. Lau observes, “[a] surprising consequence of creating a category of illegal immigrants and then vigorously enforcing their entry was the crea­tion itself of the illegal immigrant.”2 This appears trivial only at first glance: a crucial effect of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its enforcement at the borders was its produc­tion of knowledge about illegal aliens. Until the 1920s, when the United States started to extend restric­tions for European immigra­tion, the concept of the illegal alien was inextricably linked to Chinese in general, in turn marking every Chinese immigrant as a potential alien. Thus, even the Chinese already living within the U. S. constituted the first popula­tion group required to own a certificate of identifica­tion that confirmed their status of legal residence in the country. Immigrants who could not produce identifica­tion documents during controls were automatically defined as illegal. The ‘imaginary line’ between legal Chinese immigrant and illegal alien was therefore not limited to the borders themselves – they became a na­tionwide concern. This chapter will deal with both the spatial and the racial aspects of the U. S.-­ Mexico border to show how mo­tion pictures produced a specific visibility of Chinese immigrants as illegal alien subjects. It will draw on the growing scholarship that focuses on the cultural significance of immigra­tion law and its enforcement at the border for concepts of American na­tionalism and racial Othering. As Erika Lee has pointed out, the Chinese Exclusion Act marked the United States’ transforma­tion into a “gatekeeping na­tion.”3 The act of closing the gate for immigrants is inextricably connected to ideas of America’s racial composi­tion and its demarca­tion from supposedly alien and undesired races. Similarly, Mae M. Ngai has asserted that the 1924 Immigra­tion Act brought forth a fundamental remapping

2 Estelle T. Lau, Paper Families: Identity, Immigra­tion Administra­tion, and Chinese Exclusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3 – 4. 3 Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigra­tion During the Exclusion Era, 1882 – 1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 6.

Illegal Immigrants and Alien Subjects  |

of the na­tion in two ways: “First, it drew a new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference. Second, and in a different register, it articulated a new sense of territoriality, which was marked by unprecedented awareness and state surveillance of the na­tion’s contiguous land borders.”4 Both aspects of race and space, as well as their interplay, will be scrutinized in this chapter. Visibility is of central importance to both patrolling the border and identifying illegal immigrants. In regards to the former, immigra­tion administra­tion and the establishment of the Border Patrol in 1924 formed elements of an increasingly powerful surveillance dispositif. This included the patrolling of the border itself, by either horse, car, or, later on, airplane. Enforcing the exclusion laws at the border became a thoroughly technological form of state surveillance that aimed to make illegal immigra­tion and its movements visible. Space became a crucial cate­ gory because surveillance turned the invisible line of the border into a patrolled, ­measured, and fenced entity. As Benedict Anderson remarks, territorial limita­tion is a constituent element for na­tionalist imagina­tions.5 Visualiza­tions of the border thus became a signifier for the line that distinguished the ‘imagined community’ from its external Other. In regards to immigra­tion control, visual inspec­tion of incoming immigrants and the use of photography to identify individuals formed the basis for a new visibility of immigrant subjects. Photographs of immigrants formed visual categoriza­tions that blended in with other visual representa­tions of Chinese in American culture, but Chinese also used visual expecta­tions of white immigrant officers to subvert documenta­tion procedures. The history of Chinese immigra­tion is by extension the history of the immigrants’ visibility. Mo­tion pictures, as I argue, were a fundamental element of this visibility in the early twentieth century. Countless films between the 1910s and the 1930s deal directly or indirectly with illegal Chinese immigra­tion and ‘alien smuggling’ across the border. These films must be situated within the visual discourses of surveillance, technology, and the produc­tion of visibility. Most of them belong to the subgenre of ‘border films’ which take place in the U. S.-Mexico borderlands and follow the conven­tions of the early western. In these, the protagonists are Border Patrolmen who hunt smuggling gangs. Other films depict techniques for smuggling Chinese into the country by boat or plane or by other methods that were even more creative, as we will see. In most of these films, the smuggled Chinese merely serve as extras without much screen time or dialogue, but as I argue, it is exactly

4 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3 – 4. 5 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflec­tions on the Origin and Spread of Na­tio­ nalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 7.

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this depic­tion that bespeaks the way illegal Chinese were perceived in popular culture. Discourses of illegal Chinese immigra­tion constructed migrant subjects as ‘smuggled goods’ – that is, as objects of ruthless smugglers – or as aliens whose status was marked by non-­belonging. The representa­tional mode that highlighted the Americanness of the white, male border officers contrasted them with the Chinese and made them visible as illegal aliens: as racial Other subjects forced to the margins – or rather outside – of U. S. society. However, their presence in film narratives and the creative methods of illegal entry they display – such as passing as Mexican – also demonstrate Chinese immigrants’ agency and protest against the discriminatory laws which are equally part of Chinese immigra­tion history. Following Ngai’s remark about racial and spatial remapping, this chapter is divided into two larger parts. First, I will look at the border as a space that produced territorial and cultural binaries. Here I will lay out the history of the immigra­tion laws and their connec­tion to the emergence of the border. While the U. S.-Cana­dian border also plays an important role, my focus will generally fall on the southern border, as it is by far more dominant in filmic representa­ tions. I will specifically work out the importance of visuality for the technologies of border enforcement and the emergence of modern border surveillance. I will then show how the borderline was represented as a space in different non-­fic­tional and fic­tional texts and how this related to the gendered and racialized depic­tions of both Chinese immigrants and Border Patrolmen in mo­tion pictures like Sky High (1922), ­Riding Speed (1934), Hair-­Trigger Casey (1936), and Border Phan­ tom (1937).6 In the second part of this chapter, I will move away from the border and instead shift the focus to the racial boundary that cut through ‘the middle’ of U. S. society and rendered Chinese Americans as ‘foreigners-­within.’ I will concentrate on the representa­tion of Chinese as illegal aliens, that is, as subjects who de jure had no place within U. S. society and who, after crossing the territorial border, had to face cultural boundaries. Here I analyze a diverse range of films that negotiated alienness, most importantly Shadows (1922), I Cover the Waterfront (1933), Yellow Cargo (1936), and Daughter of the Shanghai (1937).7 The last film 6 Sky High, dir. Lynn Reynolds, perf. Tom Mix, J. Farrell MacDonald, and Eva Novak (United States: Fox Film, 1922); Riding Speed, dir. Jay Wilsey, perf. Jay Wilsey (as Buffalo Bill Jr.), Joile Benet, and Bud Osborne (United States: Victor Adamson, 1934); Hair-­Trigger Casey, dir. Harry Fraser, perf. Jack Perrin, Betty Mack, and Edward Cassidy (United States: Berke-­ Perrin, 1936); Border Phantom, dir. S. Roy Luby, perf. Bob Steele, Harley Wood, and Don Barclay (United States: Republic, 1937). 7 I Cover the Waterfront, dir. James Cruze, perf. Ben Lyon, Claudette Colbert, and Ernest Torrence (United States: United Artists, 1933); Yellow Cargo, dir. Crane Wilbur, perf. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, and Vince Barnett (Grand Na­tional Pictures, 1936); Daughter of Shanghai,

Patrolling Boundaries: Creating the Illegal Chinese Immigrant  |

will serve as an outlook on the ambivalent and transforming identities of Asian Americans in the late 1930s.

4.1 Patrolling Boundaries: Creating the Illegal Chinese Immigrant Beginning in 1875, immigra­tion legisla­tion and restric­tion required new forms of border policing, surveillance, and control that were not connected to military defense or the trade of goods, but to the migra­tion of human beings. For the first time, restric­tions aimed at prohibiting certain immigrants from entering the United States, raising the border’s significance for controlling the influx of ­people. The practical enforcement of the immigra­tion laws constituted the border as a thoroughly controlled space that was, ideally, sealed-­off and turned into a non-­permeable, non-­crossable line; therefore, immigra­tion legisla­tion from the 1875 Page Act to the 1924 Immigra­tion Act and beyond transformed the way the United States imagined itself and its outside, rendering the U. S.-Mexico border a decisive space for the physical and cultural limits of the U. S. na­tion.

Immigra­tion Law and the Emergence of the Border Dispositif

As the first federal law concerning immigra­tion, the Page Act of 1875 was directed against the entry of Asian forced laborers and the “importa­tion of women for the purposes of prostitu­tion.”8 The law, sometimes regarded as a predecessor to the Chinese Exclusion Act, had a crucial gender dimension. It expressed contemporary hostility against Chinese laborers, who were stereotypically imagined as ‘coolies.’ More importantly, it targeted Chinese prostitu­tion on the West Coast and thus reproduced no­tions about Oriental femininity as connected to immoral sexua­ li­ty and prostitu­tion. While the Page Act was little effective in keeping Chinese men out, it func­tioned well in terms of further decreasing the already low rate of female immigra­tion and reinforcing the stereotype that all Chinese women in the U. S. were prostitutes for the decades to follow.9



dir. Robert Florey, perf. Anna May Wong, Charles Bickford, and Philip Ahn (United States: Paramount, 1938). 8 1875 Page Act, Chapter 141, Forty-­Third Congress, Second Sess. (March 3, 1875). 9 Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870 – 1943,” in Entry Denied: Exclu­ sion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882 – 1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 94 – 146; Lee, At America’s Gates, 92 – 100.

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The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first comprehensive law that regu­lated immigra­tion on the basis of race and class. It was directed against the immigra­tion of Chinese laborers and is the outcome of white laborers’ agita­tion in California and general racism towards the supposedly lower Oriental races. A ­ ccordingly, the law exempted members of higher classes like merchants, diplomats, and students, but since distinguishing between the classes proved difficult, it de facto affected all Chinese seeking to enter the country.10 While the year 1882 also saw the passing of the Immigra­tion Act, which barred convicts as well as alleged ‘lunatics’ and ‘idiots,’ it was the Chinese Exclusion Act that had a greater effect on migra­tion and control. While the Chinese Exclusion Act established immigra­tion control, the laws that followed it further elaborated the system of regula­tion and surveillance. As scholars like Lucy E. Salyer have shown, Chinese immigrants opposed exclusion and actively used existing laws and the courts to fight their legal discrimina­tion, making the further course of exclusionist policy the outcome of Chinese activism and responses to it.11 As Salyer states, “Chinese took a leading role in the debate over enforcement of immigra­tion laws.”12 This also meant that many of the subsequent laws aimed at closing the ‘loopholes’ that many Chinese had used to take advantage of. Beginning in 1888, exclusion was reformulated and expanded to include all Chinese, except for the higher, educated classes and travelers. With the passage of the 1892 Geary Act, which extended exclusion for another ten years, all Chinese laborers residing in the United States had to register with immigra­ tion officials and carry certificates of residence. The act thus extended control beyond the border and points of entry. At the same time, authorities restructured and adjusted administra­tion to the laws. The year 1891 saw the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Immigra­tion, supervised by the Commissioner-­General of Immigra­tion. This development underscores the need for specialized enforcement in the face of ongoing illegal immigra­tion. With the Bureau of Immigra­tion, a general framework for the actual enforcement evolved, which also included g­ iving a higher degree of discre­tion to administrative officers.13 10 See Kitty Calavita, “The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and ‘Passing’: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882 – 1910,” Law and Social Inquiry 25 (2000): 1 – 4 0; Adam McKeown, “Ritualiza­tion of Regula­tion: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 377 – 4 03. 11 See Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigra­tion Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995; Lee, At Ameri­ ca’s Gates. 12 Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, xv. 13 See ibid., 32.

Patrolling Boundaries: Creating the Illegal Chinese Immigrant  |

The next major development in Chinese exclusion was the Immigra­tion Act of 1917, which constituted the so-­called Asiatic Barred Zone and introduced a literacy test for aspiring immigrants. Whereas Chinese had been excluded since 1882, Japanese immigra­tion was restricted by the so-­called Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907, which placed regula­tion of emigra­tion under Japan’s responsibility. With the erec­tion of the geographical area defined as the Asiatic Barred Zone, exclusion was extended to large parts of Asia, including India, China, Japan, and the Pacific Islands; thus, the 1917 act expanded and solidified the exclusionist policy towards Orientals that had emerged in the 1880s. The so-­called Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigra­tion Act of 1924 defined strict immigra­tion quotas and aimed at maintaining the status quo of the popula­tion’s racial composi­tion. These acts, however, were mainly directed at European immigra­tion and did not affect Asians, who were still excluded on grounds of the Asiatic Barred Zone. One of the most significant aspects of the 1924 Immigra­tion Act was the crea­ tion of the Border Patrol. With the specific task of guarding the land border and a federal grant of one million dollars, the Border Patrol became an innate part of the U. S. immigra­tion dispositif.14 The fact that the United States closed its doors to a growing group of immigrants from all over the world made it necessary to expand the system that controlled and documented entry into the country. Moreover, the installment of a special task force to patrol the land borders to Canada and Mexico showed the importance of the borderline itself. With the 1924 act, the border became even more contested than before, and its defense against illegal border crossers became a na­tional priority. The Border Patrol was the last development in the crea­tion of a border dispositif that by 1924 could draw from a 42-year legacy of excluding Chinese.

A History of the U. S.-Mexico Border

The Chinese exclusion had an important impact on all ports of entry for immigrants, whether they were land or sea routes. For the seaports of the West Coast, the Immigra­tion Sta­tion on Angel Island in the bay of San Francisco became the most important institu­tion for immigra­tion control. Created in 1910 and often referred to as ‘Ellis Island of the West,’ it was in fact very different from

14 See Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U. S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 32 – 36.

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its counterpart in New York.15 Instead of merely acting as a processing sta­tion for European immigrants like Ellis Island, Angel Island’s significance is closely connected to Chinese exclusion. It became the symbol for long deten­tions and deporta­tions of ‘undesirable’ Asian immigrants.16 For many Chinese, the land borders in the north and south promised better chances of entering the United States. The sheer vastness of the borderlines offered many possibilities for border-­ crossing and, from the perspective of immigra­tion inspectors, posed a difficult task to maintain as closed boundaries. While the route via the Canadian border was an important op­tion for ­entering the United States, it was the border shared with Mexico that gained in popu­larity with Chinese immigrants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and came to hold a more prominent place within popular concep­tions. As ­Patrick Ettinger asserts, the southern border’s popularity in attempted c­ rossings can be traced to Canada’s willingness to cooperate with the United States in enforcing Chinese exclusion.17 In fact, Canada’s own policy towards Asian immigrants followed a similar exclusionist course to that of the United States.18 In 1903, for example, Canada started to impose a $500 head tax on every Chinese arriving at its seaports, which complicated smuggling opera­tions and made them less profitable.19 Kornel Chang, who studied U. S.-Canadian coopera­tion against Asian immigra­tion, concludes that “[t]he mutual opposi­tion to Asian migra­tion 15 Mary Bamford, Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West (Chicago: Woman’s American B ­ aptist Home Mission Society, 1917). 16 See Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Robert Eric Barde, Immigra­tion at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island (Westport: Praeger, 2008); Roger Daniels, “No Lamps Were Lit for Them: Angel Island and the Historiography of Asian American Immigra­tion,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, no. 1 (1997): 3 – 18; Him Mark Lai, “Island of Immortals: Chinese Immigrants and the Angel Island Immigra­tion Sta­tion,” California History 57, no. 1 (1978): 88 – 103. 17 Patrick Ettinger, “‘We Sometimes Wonder What They Will Spring on Us Next’: Immigrants and Border Enforcement in the American West, 1882 – 1930,” Western Historical Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2006): 159 – 181, 170; see also Patrick Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigra­tion, 1882 – 1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 76 – 84. 18 On Canada’s exclusionist policy, see Patricia E. Roy, A White Man’s Province: British Colum­ bia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858 – 1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989); Patricia E. Roy, The Oriental Ques­tion: Consolidating a White Man’s Province, 1914 – 1941 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004); Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885 – 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 19 Ettinger, “‘We Sometimes Wonder,’” 170.

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wove Canada and the United States together into an Anglo-­American alliance in defense of a ‘white man’s country.’”20 While the United States enforced restric­ tions along the border with Mexico unilaterally, Chang describes the northern border apparatus as based on a “transna­tional white solidarity” which effectively helped to erect the northern border as a social reality; however, from this pers­ pective, the border’s significance was less to divide the two na­tions than to join forces against Asian immigra­tion. Consequently, the process of border forma­tion was “primarily concerned with defining an outer limit against the encroachment of an Asia-­Pacific world.”21 The situa­tion at the U. S.-Mexico border was almost completely different. The Mexican government actively encouraged Chinese immigra­tion to ­Mexico. Accordingly, the Sino-­Mexican treaty of commerce signed in 1899 permitted migra­tion between the two countries.22 As Ettinger concludes: “Increasing immigra­tion restric­tions, a rebounding American economy in the late 1890s, and U. S.-Canadian coopera­tion on immigra­tion provide the context for understanding the Mexican border’s continued permeability between 1895 and 1910.”23 The political turmoil during the Mexican Revolu­tion, starting in 1910 and continuing throughout World War I, further complicated the situa­tion at the border. During the 1920s and 1930s, anti-­Chinese sentiment in Mexico and especially Sonora increased dramatically, resulting in the Chinese facing discrimina­tion, violence, and deporta­tions.24 To understand the border’s significance for both immigrants and the U. S. immigra­tion inspectors, it is helpful to look at the history of the border itself. The U. S.-Mexico border as we know it today goes back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that ended the war with Mexico and resulted in massive expansion of U. S. territory in the West, including the area that later became the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The treaty

20 Kornel Chang, “Enforcing Transna­tional White Solidarity: Asian Migra­tion and the Forma­ tion of the U. S.-Canadian Boundary,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2008): 671 – 696, 672. 21 Chang, “Enforcing,” 693. Chang, however, also takes into account the manifold ways through which immigrants, smugglers, and capitalistic interests contested the border. In this regard, the northern border also showed parallels to its southern counterpart. 22 Ettinger, Imaginary Lines, 99. 23 Ibid., 93. 24 See Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migra­tion, Localism, and Exclusion in the U. S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); for a transna­tional study on Chinese immigra­tion during exclusion, see Elliott Young, Alien ­Na­tion: Chinese Migra­tion in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

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determined that the eastern part of the new borderline followed the Rio Grande, whereas in the west it remained largely independent from natural features. Instead, the western half leading to the Pacific followed a straight line, which the Gadsen Treaty of 1853 further straightened and detached from the riverbed of the Gila River. As historian Rachel St. John concludes, the “western half of the b­ oundary line created an entirely new space in the west,”25 which is to say that it gave m ­ eaning and significance to a space that before 1848 had no meaning at all – at least for settlers of European descent. Largely comprised of dry deserts and mountains, the territory of the border was scarcely inhabited, and in the years following 1848, officials needed to erect monuments and other markers to make the border visible in the landscape.26 Until the late nineteenth century, the border remained contested while the greater region of the borderlands became an important area for commerce and agriculture. Filibusters who invaded northern Mexico to pursue their plans for independent, military expansion repeatedly attacked the border’s validity. More­ over, the local native popula­tion, the Apaches most importantly, recognized neither U. S. nor Mexican state sovereignty nor the border that delineated them.27 Their form of protest included regular raids on both sides of the border. Despite these difficulties, the borderland region saw an economic and agricultural uplift as more and more settlers arrived in the region and the expansion of the transna­ tional railroad facilitated commerce.28 Transborder communities like Nogales became an important economic center for trade and commerce. At the same time, the border became more and more of a political and social reality. Before the United States restricted immigra­tion, the practice of policing the border focused largely on controlling trade and customs. As a consequence, the border line running through Nogales, for example, turned into a cleared strip of land that cut the city into a U. S. and a Mexican half. With the outbreak of the Mexican Revolu­tion in 1910 and United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917, the border gained military significance. The Mexican Revolu­tion led to the increased presence of U. S. soldiers at the border, assigned there to secure the boundary and fight the smuggling of weapons and stolen goods.29 The progression of the Mexican revolu­tion made the demarca­tion 25 Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U. S.-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2. 26 See St. John, Line in the Sand, 23 – 38. 27 See ibid., 50 – 62. 28 See ibid., 63 – 89. 29 See ibid., 123.

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of the boundary line through monuments important for keeping the conflict on Mexican territory and averting transborder attacks.30 Raids on the American side of the border, however, and in particular Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa’s attack on the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, heightened its military fortifica­tion and brought the United States to the edge of a war with Mexico. When the United States entered the World War in 1917, fears of enemy agents crossing the borders – fueled by the famous Zimmermann telegram – led to an addi­tional military presence at the border.31 Harsh controls and the erec­tion of fences throughout Nogales and other borderland areas increased the impermea­ bility of the borderline. As Rachel St. John observes, the border was no longer an imaginary line at the end of World War I. Instead, “the fences would remain as permanent, physical barriers between border communities and unavoidable markers of difference.”32 4.1.1 Visibility at the Border: Territory, Surveillance, and the Illegal Chinese Immigrant

Visibility played a crucial role in the identifica­tion of illegal immigra­tion as well as the materializa­tion of the border. The Bureau of Immigra­tion relied on surveillance to secure the borderline and to detect illegal immigrants and smuggling routes, but it also used visual technology like photography to identify Chinese immigrants during inspec­tion. The enforcement of the immigra­tion law, therefore, led to the forma­tion of an increasingly specialized and powerful border disposi­ tif of inspec­tion, surveillance, and administra­tion. This dispositif was at its very core based on visuality: it aimed at making immigrants visible. Visibility played a crucial role in the detec­tion of border crossers, for this involved knowledge of the border territory and control of it through ever more advanced technologies such as airplanes, which enabled control from a bird’s eye perspective. As I argue, imagery as a technology of visualiza­tion – aiming at ‘making-­visible’ both the border and its trespassers – was central to the emergence of the border dispositif and inseparably linked to the representa­tion of Chinese as illegal subjects.

30 See ibid. 31 On January 16, 1917, German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret telegram to Mexico that proposed an alliance between the German Empire and Mexico. The message was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence and subsequently influenced the United States’ stance on entering World War I. 32 St. John, Line in the Sand, 146.

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Visualiza­tions of the borderline itself reached a new significance and were ­increasing­ly disseminated in popular culture during the early twentieth century. As Claire F. Fox emphasizes, the Mexican Revolu­tion and the accompanying border conflicts took place during a time when new visual media like mo­tion pictures, newsreels, and picture postcards gained importance.33 In fact, as Fox asserts, the “mass media coverage of the Mexican Revolu­tion provided the first photographic images, not only of Mexico and Mexicans but also of newly-­acquired U. S. territory.”34 Fox focuses especially on picture postcards produced during the mid-1910s, most of which commonly depict landscapes or border towns like Nogales. As Fox shows, these postcards aimed at making the borderline visible – even when the photo itself did not show any demarca­tions of the boundary itself. Apart from markers like the riverbeds of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and the obelisk monuments, some of these cards displayed lines drawn directly on the photo negatives by hand. These postcards explained the border to their recipients by drawing a line where, in reality, the border was invisible and abstract. Often these cards had explanatory texts written on them to distinguish the American from the Mexican side. Addi­tionally, some cards posi­tioned na­tional ‘types’ on each side of the line. Whereas the U. S. side often depicted a farmer or soldier, a burro or prostitute represented the Mexican side. Fox notes that “[p]eople and objects are portrayed in opposi­tional or complementary rela­tionships to one another, but the landscape and spatial proximity that metonymically unites the subjects is suppressed by the prominence accorded to the borderline itself.”35 The depic­tion of the border is thus fundamentally connected to the construc­tion of a decidedly American identity and the opposi­tion to its outward Other. Identifica­tion with the white, male American who protects the border territory against intruders is crucial for the identifica­tion of the border itself. Visuality also played an important role in identifica­tion processes. Border authorities were the first to use photography as a technology of immigra­tion control for the identifica­tion of Chinese immigrants. The phenomenon was partially based on common assump­tions that all Chinese looked alike and that every Chinese was a potential illegal immigrant.36 The use of photography produced racialized knowledge about immigrant subjects by identifying bodily markers. In turn, these photographs also produced conven­tions and knowledge about the 33 See Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U. S.-Mexico Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 34 Ibid., 70. 35 Ibid., 78. 36 See Anna Pegler-­Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U. S. Immigra­tion Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 34.

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appearance of different classes of Chinese, differentiating between workers and merchants by their clothes and appearance. The connec­tions between visuality, immigra­tion, and the border have not gained much scholarly atten­tion. An illuminating excep­tion is Anna Pegler-­Gordon’s study about the visual culture of immigra­tion policy.37 Investigating the significance of photographic identity documenta­tion and visual medical inspec­tions at the border, she concludes that, “[s]ince its beginnings, the history of U. S. immigra­tion policy has been the history of making immigrants visible.”38 Photography as a supposed­ly neutral technology of documenta­tion, she argues, forced immigrants into a system of visual regula­tion and reproduced the racial categoriza­tions that formed the basis of exclusionist immigra­tion laws.39 Chinese played a central role in the emergence of the visual regula­tion practices: “Chinese exclusion was central to the development of general immigra­tion policy and […] visuality was a key component of immigra­tion restric­tion.”40 These connec­tions, therefore, must be understood in their interrelatedness and together formed the visual dispositif of border surveillance. The use of photography brought forth a visual knowledge of Chinese immigra­tion and offered different strategies for dealing with it. Beginning in 1893, photographs were included on the registra­tion documents of Chinese laborers in the United States, and by 1909, photographic documenta­tion was required of almost all Chinese living in the United States.41 While Chinese could not avert the introduc­tion of photographic identifica­tion, which was previously used solely for criminals, they developed strategies to use them to their own benefit. One tactic was to use the photos as a medium of self-­representa­tion. Until the photographs were standardized in the 1920s, Chinese could produce their own photographs: these would highlight their respecta­ bility and class through fine clothing and luxurious arrangements. This strategy was especially relevant for Chinese women required to prove their moral standards or, ideally, their married status. Some Chinese men instead stressed their Americanness by wearing Western suits and displaying their degree of ‘assimila­tion.’42 A different form of subversion arose after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, when the Immigra­ tion Records Building burned down and most of the Chinese files were destroyed. Subsequently, the practice of faking photographs and certificates became even more popular than before. So-­called ‘paper sons’ were immigrants who posed as sons of 37 Pegler-­Gordon, In Sight of America. 38 Ibid., 1. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Ibid., 10. 41 Ibid., 24. 42 Ibid., 42 – 65.

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Chinese merchants already living in the United States, legally allowing them to follow their alleged fathers into the U.S; thus, whenever a Chinese claimed he fathered a son in China, this created a slot for someone to take up a corresponding identity for entrance into the U. S.43 In a similar way, Chinese leaving the United States without planning to come back could obtain return certificates and sell their identity to an aspiring immigrant in China. These immigrants received coaching before arrival, as the immigra­tion inspectors were known to conduct long and detailed interviews to confirm the familial connec­tion.44 After the loss of the records in 1906, immigrants claiming to be a returning U. S.-born Chinese American had better chances to get into the country. Pegler-­Gordon emphasizes that the paper-­son system involved the use of fake photographs and certificates and thereby subverted the alleged objec­ tivi­ty that had led to the medium’s introduc­tion in the first place. As Kitty Calavita and others have argued, the inspectors’ reliance on visual markers of race, class, and identity signaled an opportunity for Chinese to actively play with the inspectors’ expecta­tions and disguise themselves accordingly.45 On the U. S.-Mexico border, photographic identifica­tion of Chinese immigrants had an addi­tional racial dimension. By 1907 the most important border ports at El Paso, Tucson and San Diego started to make use of photography for the documenta­tion of excluded immigrants. As Pegler-­Gordon asserts, the visual knowledge about Chinese immigrants was needed to thwart the common practice of Chinese disguising themselves as Mexicans to cross the border. Methods included cutting off queues, dressing in Western clothes and learning a few words of Spanish.46 In 1907, immigra­tion inspector Marcus Braun found photographs of Chinese posing as Mexicans in a photo studio in Mexico City and used these pictures to demonstrate that it was not always easy to distinguish a Chinese from a Mexican (see fig. 54).47 The successful passing of Chinese as Mexicans, in fact, contradicted common no­tions that all Chinese looked alike and “that all Chinese looked clearly different from non-­Chinese immigrants,”48 generally making inspectors regard them as easy to identify as Other. 43 See also Calavita, “Paradoxes of Race,” 27. 44 See Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transna­tionalism and Migra­ tion between the United States and South China, 1882 – 1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 74 – 87; Lau, Paper Families, 36 – 47. 45 See Calavita, “Paradoxes of Race,” 34. Lucy E. Salyer emphasizes how increasing documenta­ tion was always accompanied by new possibilities to circumvent exclusion. See Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 61. 46 See Pegler-­Gordon, In Sight of America, 178. 47 See Lee, At America’s Gates, 162. 48 Pegler-­Gordon, In Sight of America, 178.

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Figure 54  “Exhibit J,” Marcus Braun, “Report, First Detail to Mexico” (February 1907), File 52320/1, Records of the Immigra­tion and Naturaliza­ tion Service, Record Group 85, Na­tional Archives and Records Administra­tion. Scan courtesy of Elliott Young, originally appearing in his book Alien Na­tion: Chinese Migra­tion in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

The photographs given in Braun’s report are portraits of Chinese men, and most of them depict them in Western suits. One picture shows a man posing next to a desk, a choice which, along with the clothing, aimed at countering contemporary ideas about the appearance of Chinese laborers and at instead producing an impression of social standing and educa­tion. The hairstyle of these men also contrasted with the typical visual marker of the Chinese queue. The photographs accentuated the men’s apparently Western facial features and aimed at concealing racialized bodily markers like the eyes. Taken together, these pictures circumvented contemporary ideas that the racial identity of a person was self-­evident and essentially detec­ table through bodily features. The search for visual evidence of a person’s race which photography was supposed to facilitate grew blurry through the Chinese appropria­tion of the technology. Given that Chinese immigrants also learned a few Spanish sentences, racial passing – as Braun’s report emphasized – became a large concern for border controls. Erika Lee has highlighted how Chinese learned to use the contact zones at the U. S. borders to trade “their own racial uniforms

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[…] for others that would allow them to blend into particular regional and racial landscapes.”49 She points to the development that Chinese disguised themselves as Mexicans and Natives along the southwestern border, as Natives in the north, and even used blackface to gain entry to New Orleans and other southern states. Conclusively, while visuality played an important role for enforcing the exclusion laws and border control, it also opened ways of evading exclusion by using visual markers to pass as non-­Chinese. Chinese strategies of passing highlight how immigrants had to cross racial boundaries as well as territorial ones to gain entry. Chinese ultimately aimed at becoming invisible – or indistinguishable – in the face of a border dispositif that intended to make both the boundary and illegal immigrants visible. This dynamic of (in)visibility became a central aspect in mo­tion pictures, as we will see.

Chinese Passing and Border Surveillance in ‘Sky High’ (1922)

The 1922 silent film Sky High is a telling example for the visuality of (in)visibility. Produced by Fox Films and directed by Lynn Reynolds, it featured Tom Mix as immigra­tion officer Tom Newbury, who investigates a smuggling ring in southern Arizona conspiring to bring a large group of Chinese over the border. Newbury’s undercover investiga­tions lead him to the Grand Canyon, where the gang hides the Chinese before continuing on their way to California. When Newbury steals away from the smugglers in order to report to the immigra­tion office, he meets a woman named Estelle Halloway (Eva Novak) who lost her group during a sightseeing tour. Newbury tries to help her and sets up a camp, but ultimately they are captured by the head of the smuggling ring, ‘Bullet’ Bates (Sid Jordan). With the help of Estelle, Newbury manages to escape and returns by airplane to rescue her and capture the gang. Estelle’s guardian, Jim Frazer ( J. Farrell MacDonald), is revealed to be the employer of the smuggling ring, so Newbury suggests he will take care of Estelle while Frazer is in prison. The happy ending thus implies both a promo­tion for Newbury as the new chief deputy at the border and a marital engagement with Estelle. The choice of Mix in the lead role illuminates how both the border region and the immigra­tion agents were imagined in popular culture. Along with William S. Hart, Tom Mix was one of the first actors to become linked to the early western genre. He was one of the most popular actors of the 1920s and claimed to have

49 Lee, At America’s Gates, 162.

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appeared in more than 370 films.50 His career, which included the crea­tion of an image that closely resembled his cowboy roles, laid the groundwork for western stars following his footsteps later, most importantly John Wayne.51 Spectacular stunts, for which Mix allegedly never used a double, characterized his films. In Sky High these included riding, climbing, swimming, fist fighting, and jumping from airplanes. By casting Mix, the film transfers his cowboy image onto the charac­ter of the border agent, rendering the immigra­tion inspectors masculine and adventurous – albeit modernized – heroes of the New West. The film almost exclusively takes place in the deserted regions of southern Arizona and situates the scenic landscape of the Grand Canyon within its border-­ smuggling narrative. Accordingly, the film opens with a geopolitical introduc­ tion to its setting: “Along the Border of Southern Arizona … silent for years after early struggles … now alive once more with mystery, intrigue – and smugglers …” The Grand Canyon is of course not directly connected to the U. S.-Mexico border. In Sky High, the canyon mostly serves as a scenic backdrop for the narrative and Mix’s spectacular stunts. The film’s promo­tion accordingly highlighted the ­promise of seeing “One of the World’s Wonders” and witnessing Tom Mix perform dangerous stunts inside the canyon.52 As the press book emphasized, the terrain corresponded perfectly with Tom Mix’s image: “The selec­tion of Mix to pit his daring against the wildness of Grand Canyon [sic], which so nearly matches his own turbulent spirit, was peculiarly appropriate.”53 In this regard, the Grand Canyon as space combines two interrelated discourses of the American West. First, it serves to reproduce no­tions of the frontier myth and white masculinity. The canyon and the surrounding area of southern Arizona signify the wilderness of the American West, a territory waiting to be conquered by the American westward movement. Since Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closure of the frontier in 1893, the myth of westward expansion as fundamentally connected to U. S. na­tional character was heavily reproduced in popular culture, especially in mo­tion pictures of the western genre.54 Tom Mix’s 50 See William E. Tydeman III, “Tom Mix: King of the Hollywood Cowboys,” in Back in the Saddle: Essays on Western Film and Television Actors, ed. Gary A. Yoggy ( Jefferson: M ­ cFarland, 1998), 25 – 42, 34. The Internet Movie Database lists 283 films starring Tom Mix. See http:// www.imdb.com/name/nm0594291, accessed April 18, 2016. 51 See Tydeman, “Tom Mix,” 25. 52 Press book for Sky High (n. p.: William Fox, 1922), 3. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 53 Ibid. 54 See Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (1920; repr., Mineola: Dover, 2010), 1 – 38. On the frontier

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adventurous character can consequently be read as a re-­actualiza­tion of white, American masculinity mastering the uncivilized wilderness. Second, as Anne Farrar Hyde has pointed out, towards the end of the nineteenth century, representa­tions of the American West also shifted from depic­tions of wilderness to depic­tions of scenic monumentalism.55 The West was increasingly understood as a space of impressive natural beauty, which in turn corresponded to the superiority of the American na­tio­nal character. In her analysis of filmic travelogues about the West, Jennifer Lynn Peterson asserts that “[t]he West and its representa­tion had become an important part of a larger U. S. na­tionalistic project, its scenic grandeur supposed­ly reflecting the glory of the people who territorialized it.”56 In this sense, one might read the Grand Canyon in Sky High as a decisively American landscape, as a na­tional monument. It symbolizes American westward expansion and na­tional grandeur, but at the same time it recurs to the no­tion that this na­tion’s superiority was contested by pointing to illegal Chinese immigra­tion. The film’s use of the Grand Canyon as the backdrop for the smuggling of Chinese immigrants into the country therefore underscores the idea of illegitimate intrusion. Chinese are clearly marked as a disturbance within the na­tionalistically marked space. Within the narrative, the canyon serves as a hideout for a group of Chinese who have just crossed the border and are waiting for the smugglers to take them to California. As the audience learns, they have put up camp in the canyon along the riverbed to avoid detec­tion. While the canyon does not correspond to the border itself, its vastness and depth serve as a means to elude the gaze of the border control.57 As a signifier for American grandeur, the canyon’s

myth in general and its connec­tion to early western films, see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Na­tion: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992); Scott Simmon, The Inven­tion of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-­Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 55 See Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and Na­tional Culture, 1820 – 1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). 56 Jennifer Lynn Peterson, “‘The Na­tion’s First Playground’: Travel Films and the American West, 1895 – 1920, in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 79 – 98, 83. 57 Sky High explicitly plays with the three-­dimensionality of the canyon. The film’s spatial logic renders the bottom of the canyon – where the Chinese camp is – the most dangerous and lawless level. This becomes obvious when Newbury, working undercover for the smugglers, sneaks away from the camp. When he meets the disoriented Estelle, he sets up a camp at mid-­ level, where they are safe at first. Later, when the smugglers detect them, Newbury escapes by climbing down again, where he is eventually overpowered by the Chinese and taken captive. The surface level, then, marks the territory where Newbury (and the law) has the upper hand. Note how this spatial structure parallels the spatial concep­tions of Chinatown’s underground.

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Figure 55 (left)  Newbury (Tom Mix) stopping the smugglers. Screenshot from Sky High (Fox, 1922). Figure 56 (right)  Revealing the Chinese immigrants. Screenshot from Sky High (Fox, 1922).

three-­dimensional terrain also offers the possibility of misuse as a hideout. The canyon itself marks a great division running through the American West, which the Chinese use to cross the na­tion’s border. Therefore, it served as a natural and na­tionally coded boundary – the last obstacle before reaching the American inland and successfully entering the country. Significantly, the film’s opening scenes, which serve to introduce Newbury as the main character, also introduce the audience to the practices of illegal Chinese immigra­tion. We see Tom Newbury, described as playing “a lone hand in guarding Uncle Sam’s border line,” mounted on his horse (see fig. 55). He stops an approaching car on a deserted road and commands the white driver to have his passengers step out of the car to “enjoy one of America’s beauty spots.” The driver is unwilling at first and argues that the desert dust makes it the wrong place for the ladies to stand outside, but Newbury has his gun pointed at him. When the four female passengers clothed in upper class evening dresses step out, ­Newbury dismounts from his horse and removes their clothes, revealing them to be disguised Chinese men who now curse at the driver (see fig. 56). Rapidly changing intertitles depict different Chinese letters to visualize this detail. Newbury laughs at this, pushes the Chinese back into the car and throws his lasso around the driver’s neck so he can escort the car to El Paso. While this scene clearly has a comedic undertone to it, it also corresponds to discourses of race and illegal immigra­tion on several levels. First, it portrays the practice of passing as a strategy for crossing the border. The failed attempt to disguise themselves as white, upper class females shows how Chinese immigrants used fake identities and cultural markers like clothes to make it over the border undetected. In fact, the Chinese in this scene have to cross racial, class, and gender boundaries in order to cross the territorial line into the United States, which highlights how the border always delimits na­tional and cultural concepts.

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The practice of passing and the performative play with identity mark a form of agency on one level, but a closer look shows how the film subverts this agency and uses it to make fun of Chinese Otherness. This objective would account for why the Chinese in the film are dressed in drag, which does not correspond to common reports of racial passing on the border. Instead, the superfluous female disguise only increases the comic effect. The joke exploits no­tions of Chinese effeminate masculinity and reproduces them at the same time; an effect emphasized by the passiveness of the Chinese and the tantrum they throw after their identity is revealed. Standing before Newbury in female clothes, their anger fit resembles depic­tions of female hysteria. Consequently, the film acknowledges the ­strategy of passing as a form of empowerment, but instantly subverts it through its ­humorous depic­tion.58 Second, the scene marks Newbury as an heroic, white immigra­tion inspector by contrasting his cowboy masculinity with the technological advancement of the smuggling ring. Wearing a cowboy hat and a remarkably white shirt while carrying a gun and riding a horse, he conveys a straightforward form of masculinity deeply rooted in the culture of the American West and its filmic portrayal. He can stop the smuggler even though the driver could have driven away as fast as possible to escape deten­tion. The smuggler, on the other hand, passively sits behind the wheel and does nothing to avoid the immigrants’ accusa­tions or even his own arrest. The scene suggests that, in the Arizona border wilderness, masculine prowess outwits technology. Newbury, however, gives the smuggler credit. “You birds are getting so smart,” he exclaims. “I’ll have to go to night school to keep up with you!” This remark is of course not to be taken seriously, as Newbury’s character suggests, on the contrary, that the American West requires a different sort of intelligence unrelated to school educa­tion. Instead, the whole scene shows how the border func­tions as a space for technological competi­tion and as the site of a constant game of cat-­and-­mouse with border agents having to keep up with ever-­changing border-­crossing strategies. Indeed, as Sky High and the border discourse discussed later in this chapter demonstrate, state-­of-­the-­art technology becomes increasingly important for enabling border surveillance and making illegal immigrants visible.

58 This scene has a significant counterpart later in the film, when Estelle and Newbury hide from the smugglers in the canyon. Newbury steals food and clothing for Estelle from the smugglers. This includes a Chinese dress, which Estelle instantly puts on. In contrast to the opening scene, this form of racial cross-­dressing is tolerated and seems to intensify Newbury’s interest in Estelle (or rather, her exotic sexualiza­tion). Addi­tionally, this scene can also be read as a ‘becoming Chinese’ of Estelle, as a consequence of descending into the space occupied by the Chinese immigrants at the bottom of the canyon (see footnote above).

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Technological advancement and visibility become decisive factors during Newbury’s pursuit of the smugglers towards the climax of the film. After the smugglers discover that Newbury is an undercover agent, they follow him to the camp he has set up for Estelle. He tries to escape but is outnumbered by the gang members and the Chinese who help catching him; however, he later manages to flee with the help of Estelle, whom the gang has taken as a hostage. Newbury heads off to the next village, where he alerts the sheriff and takes a passenger seat in an airplane. The following scenes consist of long shots that show the airplane flying against the backdrop of the Grand Canyon, where, as the intertitle announces, “no man has ever dared fly before.” The plane allows Newbury a bird’s eye view of the canyon, which is necessary, as it turns out, because the smuggling gang has left its camp. In long shots, the film audience follows Newbury’s gaze in his examina­tion of the canyon territory below. A few moments later, the convoy appears, unable to escape detec­tion. After Newbury sees the convoy, the plane continues searching for the separate group of gang leaders who have Estelle. In several shot reverse shots we first see Newbury’s bird’s eye view followed by shots of the smugglers and Estelle looking up to the sky, the former watching Newbury with anxiety, the latter in hopes of rescue. This leads to a spectacular stunt that shows Newbury climbing down a rope attached to the plane and jumping into the Colorado River. The airplane allows Newbury to catch the smugglers and the immigrants and introduces a new visuality and visibility in the battle against illegal immigra­tion. First, it reverses the technological imbalance of the film’s beginning. Whereas the first scenes depict Newbury on horseback and contrast his cowboy image to that of the smugglers’ car and their evolving border crossing strategies, the film’s climax shows that the border patrol has the upper hand in the end. Second, the plane enables Newbury to search, or ‘scan,’ the canyon’s territory for the smuggling gang. It offers a new perspective for the observing gaze: a bird’s-­eye view that ultimately offers no chance of hiding. Third, the airplane is connected to the film’s spatial structure of the canyon. Until the climax, the canyon exists as a three-­dimensional space whose surface level signifies successful control and whose depth forms a secret ‘underground’ space that enables the smuggling of Chinese. With the use of the plane, however, the angle of perspective makes a 90-degree vertical turn. Looking down from above flattens the three-­dimensional space. It is impossible to hide in the deep creeks, trails, and riverbeds from the observing gaze above. Instead, the canyon’s territory is laid out like a map that can be easily controlled and policed. The gaze from the airplane creates a different knowledge of the canyon’s space that makes it easier to control and renders the immigrants visible – like spots on a map. In this way, the film reproduces the larger discourses of border control that formed the visual dispositif of surveillance and visibility.

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Sky High articulated a public awareness of illegal Chinese immigra­tion and the need for masculine border agents and surveillance technology to control the territory. As we will see in the following sec­tions, the concep­tion of the border as contested territory in need of brave, adventurous, and decisively American agents to defend the boundary was widespread in popular culture. 4.1.2 “Constant Warfare”: Fighting Illegal Chinese Immigra­tion

It is no coincidence that Sky High presents the work of immigra­tion control as a quest for adventurous agents who rely on airplanes to police the boundary. The open space of the U. S.-Mexico border seemed to require a monitoring visual dispositif of control. As indicated by the immigra­tion inspector in charge of the Los Angeles district (which included Southern California and Arizona) in the 1923 Annual Report, the organiza­tion was in need of new technology so officials could keep up with the smugglers: “The almost limitless number of landing fields, natural and artificial, make it impossible to defend against this airplane smuggling without swift pursuit planes manned by the Government’s own officers. After money and men have been supplied to defend against automobile and boat smuggling, the acquisi­tion of defense scout planes will have to be considered. The practical answer to all this, of course, is that a border patrol, a coast guard, and airplane equipment should be organized and financed, the whole to be directed by a single Government agency […].”59

The passage of the 1924 Immigra­tion Act and the forma­tion of the Border Patrol only one year later fulfilled most of these requests. It is also no coincidence that Sky High featured sensa­tional stunts and airplane scenes performed by an actor whose cowboy image was especially directed at a younger audience. The narrative of the adventurous agent chasing illegal aliens and investigating outlaw smuggling rings belonged to a widely disseminated theme used by newspaper reports and especially widespread in juvenile literature.60 Descrip­tions of the Border Patrol’s work in accord with western genre conven­tions invoked

59 U. S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigra­tion to the Secretary of Labor (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1923), 20. 60 Gary D. Keller has pointed to the historical origins of border representa­tions in film which go back to the dime novels of the 1870s. See Gary D. Keller, “Running the United States-­ Mexican Border: 1909 through the Present,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 25, no. 1, article 5 (2001): 1 – 28.

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a common tactic for appealing to audiences. It helped raise awareness for the ­increasing­ly closed and defended U. S. border within a larger public consciousness. The narrative structure of these tales allowed for simple dichotomies of good and bad. Moreover, the early western film romanticized and popularized the frontier myth along the lines of na­tionalism, gender, and race. As Richard Abel has emphasized in regard to the genre’s early years, “the frontier became an imaginary space for testing and renewing the ‘virility’ of the race and its ‘fighting spirit.’”61 In the early twentieth century western films, he concludes, fears of undesirable immigrant and racial mixing were “projected” onto the na­tion’s outer boundary via the western genre. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that the figura­tion of the cowboy as the archetypical expression of white manhood was transferred to the Border Patrol agent in the 1920s – a decade whose exclusionist immigra­tion policy culminated in the 1924 Immigra­tion Act. Following these thoughts, I argue that border films, news reports, and novels also operated on two addi­tional levels. First, by situating the narrative at the southern border, these media stipulated a specific knowledge of it and the illusion that it was constantly ‘under attack’ by illegal aliens. They imagined the outer limits of the na­tion as the site of battles against intruders, which in turn supported ideas of a need for increased control and ‘defense.’ Second, characters based on oversimplified dichotomies filled this political geography: the overtly American border agent defending the na­tion’s boundary contrasted with un-­American enemies like criminal smugglers and alien Chinese immigrants. The focus on the Border Patrol enabled a positive identifica­ tion with the brave men who guard the na­tion’s outer limits and allowed for narrative binaries of good versus evil. Significantly, one could easily identify the smugglers as the villains in these narratives, while Chinese immigrants hold a more ambivalent posi­tion as illegal aliens and victims of the organized, exploitative smuggling rings. With the Border Patrol at the U. S. Border: Newspapers and Magazines

Illegal immigra­tion and the dangerous task of the border patrol gained public atten­tion in the early twentieth century. Newspaper coverage played a crucial role for this awareness of the na­tion’s boundary.62 While newspaper stories 61 Richard Abel, “‘Our Country’/Whose Country? The ‘Americanisa­tion’ Project of Early Westerns,” in Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western, ed. Edward Buscombe and Roberta E. Pearson (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 77 – 95, 81. 62 Benedict Anderson emphasizes the importance of newspapers for the imagina­tions of the na­tion. Newspapers, he argues, establish specific links between coincidental global events and

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during the first two decades regularly reported ongoing attempts at illegal Chinese immigra­tion, the debate intensified in the 1920s and 1930s with the passage of the Immigra­tion Act. It is impossible to evaluate how many Chinese crossed the border into the U. S. illegally, but it is safe to say the drastic image conveyed in public media was highly exaggerated. Drawing from different official sources, Erika Lee has estimated that 17,300 Chinese gained illegal entry along the land borders to Canada and Mexico between 1882 and 1920; however, the topic was widely discussed in popular discourses.63 Soon newspapers intensively covered the fight against increasingly professionalized smuggling rings in documentary and semi-­documentary articles and features. As one 1934 article stated, “[t]he records of the immigra­tion service contain enough […] material to make a hundred novels.”64 These articles described the struggle of a constantly understaffed Border Patrol against smugglers equipped with the newest forms of transporta­tion as a form of “constant warfare” against external forces and a never-­ending battle of wits between the two groups.65 The ‘na­tional gaze’ of the U. S. public correspondingly shifted to its outer limits, where a few brave men patrolled a territorial boundary, and continually re-­erected the line that delimited the racial, gender, and class identity of the na­tion from undesirable, excluded Others. For many, the boundary marked a space that required heightened atten­tion in the age of a na­tion defining itself more and more in opposi­tion to whoever was not allowed to pass its gates. Newspaper and magazine coverage helped to give a mainstream audience an impression of the activities at the border and often attempted first-­hand accounts in order to involve the readers more. These articles presented statistics and tasks of the Border Patrol and its predecessors, as well as delivering stories and anecdotes that ultimately blurred the boundaries between journalism and semi-­documentary narra­tion. As the claim above shows, the events at the border offered material for novels, and often the narratives of articles, novels, and mo­tion pictures drew from the same reservoir of ‘border stories’ that helped to reproduce the border as an imaginary space.

structure them along a temporal axis. Moreover, their daily-­repeated consump­tion resembles a “mass ceremony” that constitutes the community of their readership. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33 – 36. 63 See Lee, At America’s Gates, 151. 64 Robert Talley, “War on Alien Smugglers Is Beset by Perils,” Washington Post, November 18, 1934. 65 “Constant Warfare With Aliens Trying to Crash America’s Gates,” Daily Boston Globe, December 15, 1935.

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In the 1910s, news publica­tions started to feature sensa­tionalistic smuggling articles.66 During this period, the coverage concentrated on both the northern and southwestern border. Many papers and magazines also published long features that gave an overview of the peculiar situa­tion on the border.67 Sometimes the authors wrote these articles as first-­hand accounts or as fic­tionalized stories.68 In 1910 the Detroit Free Press published one of the early feature articles about Chinese border crossing methods and how immigra­tion inspectors tried to apprehend them. The article “Smuggling Chinks Across the Border” promises in its sub-­headline to describe to its readers “How the Wily Celestials Break in at Weak Points in Spite of the Utmost Vigilance of Inspectors and Guards.”69 The article opens by stating there is an “interna­tional syndicate” that “smuggles” Chinese into the country and that immigra­tion informants openly confirm “tens of thousands” of Chinese succeed in crossing the border each year; furthermore, five thousand Chinese are supposedly awaiting their passage from Jamaica at the time of the article’s publica­tion. This first paragraph clearly serves to give the readers a shocking overview of illegal Chinese immigra­tion’s extent. It then continues by explaining the different routes that are available to Chinese, which include transporta­tion by boat, train, car, and barrel. The article suggests Chinese immigrants use every imaginable strategy to cross the border. Most of the time, they risk their health or even theirs lives. “Not long ago a smuggler put a Chinaman in the ice chamber of a refrigerator [train; B. S.] car in Canada. A month later in cleaning the car in St. Louis, the frozen body of the Chinaman was found.” The article also gives its readers two visual impressions of border crossing ­methods. One strategy included arranged barrels that allowed Chinese to float along the Rio Grande until they reached a landing place on the American side. The corresponding photograph shows how two men on a boat – probably immigra­tion 66 See, for example, “Chinese Swarm In,” New York Times, February 16, 1910; “Chinese Come Here in Sealed Box Cars,” New York Times, October 22, 1911; “Na­tion-­Wide Scheme to Smuggle Chinese,” New York Times, November 27, 1911; “Many Chinese Smuggled In,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1912; “Steal in from China,” Washington Post, September 25, 1913; “Contraband Awheel,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1913; “Mexico Attracts Many Celestials,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 19, 1913; “Chinese Smuggling Plot Frustrated,” Daily Boston Globe, March 15, 1914; “Seek Chinese Smuggling Gang,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1915. 67 See “Putting ‘Chinks’ Over Line,” Washington Post, January 22, 1911; “The Smuggler Chinee is Peculiar,” Washington Post, May 21, 1911. 68 See R. MacKay, “Because He Guided Pagans,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 1910; L. Clifford Fox, “Pursuing the Smuggler,” Overland Monthly, June 1913. 69 William Atherton Du Puy, “Smuggling Chinks Across the Border,” Detroit Free Press, May 15, 1910.

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inspectors – approach a Chinese hidden inside a floating barrel. A second picture shows a strategy not explicitly men­tioned in the text. It depicts two inspectors standing in front of a horse carriage with a Chinese in the middle. The cap­tion reads: “A Chinaman Disguised as a Mexican, Arrested at El Paso”. The alleged immigrant wears a simple white shirt with suspenders, whereas the inspectors pose in full uniform. It is unclear whether the man’s apparel counts as a typical Mexican outfit, but it certainly contrast with common depic­tions of Chinese during the 1910s. For contemporary viewers, it must have been surprising to see a Chinese changing his outward appearance to pass as a Mexican. The pose the two inspectors beside the man adopt demonstrates that they want to display their success in ‘hunting’ illegal immigrants and their skill at seeing through their racial disguise. The article also directly connects the large number of illegal immigrants to the Chinese already present in the U. S., marking all Chinese as potential threats to the na­tion. The article identifies an immensely rich “boss smuggler” as the head of all opera­tions: “In New York City’s Chinatown there is a certain educated, Americanized Chinaman who poses as a great philanthropist and who takes an acute interest in all his countrymen coming into this country. […] [The secret agents of the Immigra­tion Bureau; B. S.] believe that he gets a piece of money for practically every Chinaman who is passed illegally over the border and that he it is [sic] who always knows the government’s most vulnerable point and directs the big campaign.”70

This grotesque statement is nothing short of a conspiracy theory that sees an almighty Chinese in absolute control. The article even emphasizes the smuggling boss’s outward appearance as “Americanized,” paralleling the immigrants’ Mexican disguise with the ringleader’s disguise as American. Both forms, the article suggests, bespeak Chinese two-­facedness and secrecy. The article’s asser­tion that in the end all Chinese inside the U. S. are guilty of illegal immigra­tion reinforces this impression. It concludes: “Practically all of the Chinamen living in this country make of themselves instruments for the evasion of the law and gain admission for others from their native land by claiming them as their sons, daughters or wives.”71 The article characterizes illegal immigra­tion as a consequence of a Chinese American presence in general and outlines it as a fundamental instability of identity that allows Chinese to cross the border by taking up the identity of someone else. Here, the border becomes the site of both territorial border patrol and patrols to secure lines of racial and ‘na­tional’ identity.

70 Ibid. 71 Ibid.

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The introduc­tion of the quota system, the Immigra­tion Act of 1924, and the founding of the Border Patrol elicited a heightened interest in the border and initiated a new style of reporting about illegal immigra­tion. The 1920s and 1930s saw an ongoing journalistic interest in the efforts of the patrolmen, not least because the officers enabled a more personalized coverage that offered a higher degree of identifica­tion for readers. Newspaper features and magazine articles could now promise their readers a first-­hand account of what it was like at the border. Often these articles represented the perspective of a patrolman: a historic form of ‘imbedded journalism’ written directly on the ‘front line.’ The narrative style changed significantly because reporters could now tell heroic anecdotes of brave men and distinguish more clearly between good and evil. Whereas earlier articles focused more on single incidents, the 1920s and 1930s saw their basic narrative change into the broad battle between the Border Patrol men and large, well-­organized smuggling rings mostly operating along the Mexican border. Newspaper coverage and magazine features – often informed by annual reports from the Bureau of Immigra­tion – created awareness within the mainstream public that the “bootlegging” of aliens had “assumed the propor­tions of an interna­tional business more dangerous and also more profitable than either liquor or narcotics smuggling.”72 A 1924 article in the Independent, for example, begins with a prosaic descrip­tion of a nightly scene at the border where an immigra­tion officer rides his horse in the moonlight along the Rio Grande.73 He comes across a Mexican smuggler guiding three men to the American side. When the border guard tries to disarm the Mexican, a cloud darkens the moonlight, giving the “treacherous assassin” the chance to shoot the guard. The introductory paragraphs are followed by a short conclusion: “Thus the red stain of murder marks the trail of the new smuggler, who has been dubbed ‘the alien bootlegger.’”74 The author then continues by outlining the consequences of illegal border crossings to his readers. Referring to statements from Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, he points out that 100,000 aliens have entered the country: “Revolu­tionary radicals of such dangerous precedents and character that they could not otherwise secure entrance here. Idiots, criminals, diseased, Chinese bondslaves, are in the motley horde now free and mingling in the daily life of American ­cities.”75 Ignoring the reality that Chinese exclusion disregarded both class and mental disposi­ tion, he illustrates how illegal Chinese immigrants were considered no different 72 Arthur Sears Henning, “Border Patrol Stifling Alien Bootlegging,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 21, 1924. 73 Samuel Taylor Moore, “Smuggled Aliens,” Independent, May 24, 1924, 273. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid.

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from other ‘undesirable’ and allegedly perilous immigrant groups. A 1929 Sun article opens in a similar way, dealing – at least as far as the sub-­headline claims – with the southwestern Border Patrol’s “Life of Thrills and Danger.”76 It describes the border as a lonely, dangerous, and “desolate stretch of arid land” where every road could harbor a “desperate smuggler with his cargo of aliens willing to shoot it out, or, if pressed, equally willing to slaughter his human contraband.”77 Both articles set the stage for their frontier-­like depic­tions of the border wilderness by referring to technological advancement in the smuggling business. “The smugglers are progressive. They have adopted the airplane. The records show that at least 200 Chinese were successfully smuggled into the United States by airplane and landed far inland while immigra­tion guards impotently watched the bird machines and their contraband cargoes fly overhead.”78

Here, the Border Patrol appears as a company of guards whose cowboy masculinity, outwitted by the ever-­improving strategies and technology of smugglers, is under threat; however, the image of a few brave men fighting on a frontline comprising thousands of miles alone helps to portray the Border Patrol as heroic even when outmaneuvered.79 The image of the Border Patrol and illegal immigrants shifted again in the 1930s when depic­tions characterized them as more experienced and their efforts as more successful. The language of border surveillance, indeed, became even more militarized, portraying the patrol as in the midst of an ongoing war, specifically as, as one headline described it, in a state of “Constant Warfare With Aliens Trying to Crash America’s Gates.”80 Old cowboy mythology became more and more entwined with military discipline and effectiveness.81 Popular images in filmic representa­tions clearly influenced the coverage in the 1930s, as we will see below. The enemy of these narratives is not clearly defined and most often included both the smugglers and the immigrants. The introduc­tion of a feature published in the Los Angeles Times points to the re-­actualized representa­tion of the Border Patrol:

76 Anthony Wayne, “In Pursuit of Human Contraband,” Sun (Baltimore), July 21, 1929. 77 Ibid. 78 Moore, “Smuggled Aliens,” 274. 79 See also John C. Rhinehart, “Bootlegging of Humans Proves Colorful but Risky Profession,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1927. 80 “Constant Warfare With Aliens Trying to Crash America’s Gates,” Daily Boston Globe, December 15, 1935. 81 See also Talley, “War on Alien Smugglers.”

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“DID you know that Uncle Sam has his own gang of ‘gunmen’? – a bunch of hard-­riding, straight-­ shooting buckaroos who live and usually die, weapons in hand, in accord with the tradi­tions of the old West? […] Made up of ex-­soldiers, rangers, cowboys, flyers and adventurers who have known the far-­flung frontiers of the earth, it is the duty of the border patrol to guard our northern and southern boundaries against the continuous onslaughts of raiders, smugglers and other criminals of every descrip­tion.”82

An enumera­tion of the men who died while on duty further emphasized the masculine heroism of the Border Patrol in this article. The author lists several incidents between 1928 and 1930 and gives the names of six men who died. Corresponding to the tone of the article’s introduc­tion, these men are honored like fallen soldiers. In regard to illegal Chinese immigrants at the Mexican border, coverage in the 1930s kept circulating common tactics of border crossing and several specific anecdotes that shed light on the portrayal of Chinese as illegal aliens. Different publica­tions disseminated and reproduced these anecdotes. I want to focus on two of these stories briefly. The first one tells how Agent Jeff D. Milton, a former cowboy, comes across a “Chink runner” in company of four Chinese men while patrolling a canyon near the Mexican border.83 The men are sitting around a campfire, and Milton, who is on patrol alone, decides on a surprise attack. Jumping into the scene, “[he] sent the Mexican sprawling with a blow of his right fist while he scooped up the pigtails of the startled Chinese with his left hand. Holding the four terrified Orientals in leash by means of their long queues, he covered the Mexican with his gun and marched the quintet off to jail.”84

While this story is certainly exaggerated for entertainment reasons, it sums up the rela­tion between Border Patrol, Chinese, and smugglers in popular discourse. Here the Chinese are portrayed as contraband the smuggler tries to sneak over the border. Even more importantly – and in addi­tion to their descrip­tion as terrified and passive –, they are captured through the seizing of their queues, which serves as a racial marker. While the queue was a typical visual marker of Chinese Otherness around 1900, it is highly unlikely that Chinese immigrants were still 82 Bradford Fields, “The Border Patrol,” Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1932. 83 Talley, “War on Alien Smugglers.” The story is repeated in “Constant Warfare” and James N. Miller, “Outwitting Alien Smugglers,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1936. 84 Talley, “War on Alien Smugglers.”

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wearing it in the 1930s.85 Rather, they serve to mark the men as stereotypically Chinese and fundamentally Other. The queue consequently enables the agent to keep the Chinese ‘on a leash’ and prevent them from entering the country. Apart from constituting a highly derogatory descrip­tion and evoking an almost animal-­like status of the Chinese, it also offers a rather fitting image of how the rela­tion between Border Patrol and illegal Chinese was commonly imagined in popular culture. The second anecdote points to the way the borderline itself was imagined. It involves a hotel proprietor from Nogales, Sonora, called Ung Ham, who was ­allegedly responsible for bringing 3,687 Chinese over the border before being caught in 1932.86 Even though government agents knew about his business, they could not arrest him because Ung Ham was always careful to stay on the Mexican side of the border. From his side of the fence, he “jeered” the agents and “flung taunts at them across the border.”87 In the end, the agents outsmarted Ham by taking advantage of his near-­sightedness. The author quotes a border agent named MacCormack, who explains the story’s turning point: “‘[O]ne night Ung Ham was near-­sightedly searching for the fence and when he reached it he was already within the jurisdic­tion of the Federal Court at Tucson, Ariz. For somebody had slipped out there early in the evening and moved the fence 30 feet back onto U. S. soil.’”88

The Border Patrol so made use of the border’s arbitrariness and disconnected it from its material manifesta­tion as a fence to lure Ung Ham into its jurisdic­ tion. The story emphasized the agents’ intelligence in fighting illegal Chinese immigra­tion. At the same time, it reinforced both the legal significance of the borderline and the de facto insignificance of the fence itself. Ultimately, it constructed the implica­tion that once an illegal Chinese or smuggler trespassed onto U. S. territory, he would have to face the consequences. This story appeared in several articles. The San Francisco Chronicle published a twelve-­part series about ‘alien smuggling’ in 1938 and almost all of these short stories are situated along

85 The queue was abolished after the 1911 revolu­tion; however, the author states that the story happened “not so long ago.” Ibid. 86 Ibid.; see also “Constant Warfare”; C. S. van Dresser, “Smuggler Outwitted At Own Game,” San Francisco Chronicle, Magazine Sec­tion, September 18, 1938. A marginally different version can be found in Courtney Ryley Cooper, “Two-­Legged Money,” Saturday Evening Post, May 25, 1935, 82. 87 Talley, “War on Alien Smugglers.” 88 Ibid.

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the Mexican border.89 Five of them deal with Chinese immigrants, and the last installment tells the story of Ung Ham. A sensa­tionalist short story titled “How Agent X Broke Up the Biggest Chinese Dope Ring,” published by the same author, C. S. van Dresser, in one of the same issues, demonstrates the degree to which this topic spawned fic­tional accounts.90 In fact, smuggling stories were so popular at that time that they could even be found in magazines like Travel and the Saturday Evening Post.91 Coverage of the Border Patrol culminated in Mary Kidder Rak’s 1938 book Border Patrol, one of the first comprehensive publica­tions on the institu­ tion.92 Rather than a concise history of the Border Patrol, Rak’s book is more a collec­tion of anecdotes that she collected from personal interviews; therefore, it stands as emblematic for the blurred line between facts and fic­tionaliza­ tion that surrounded reports about the agency in the 1930s.93 Here the story of Ung Ham was published as a longer prosaic version that clearly aimed at entertaining its readers.94 Moreover, the book presents several photographs to give its readers a visual impression of the Border Patrol’s territory. One of these photographs depicts the border fence as it cuts through seemingly

89 See C. S. van Dresser, “Alien Smuggler Works Double Racket,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 12, 1938; van Dresser, “Bravado of Mexican Bandit Is Fatal,” San Francisco C ­ hronicle, June 19, 1938; van Dresser, “Teashop Used as Blind by Smugglers,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1938; van Dresser, “Uniformed Men Face Death Bravely,” San Francisco Chroni­ cle, July 10, 1938; van Dresser, “Smugglers Use Miami for Base,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 17, 1938; van Dresser, “Dupe Turns Informer On His Boss,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 24, 1938; van Dresser, “Alien Victims Die of Starva­tion,” August 7, 1938; van Dresser, “Woman Aids Alien Smuggling Band,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1938; van Dresser, “Dramatic End for This Aristocrat,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 1938; van Dresser, “Smugglers Fail to Escape by Plane,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 4, 1938; van Dresser, “Plot Hatched In Cuba Is Foiled,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 1938; van Dresser, “Smuggler Outwitted At Own Game,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 1938. 90 C. S. van Dresser, “How Agent X Broke Up the Biggest Chinese Dope Ring,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 1938. 91 See Andrew R. Boone, “Fighting the Smugglers on Our Borders,” Travel, September 1936, 30; Hal G. Evarts, “The Border Jumpers,” Saturday Evening Post, November 5, 12, and 19, 1927. 92 Mary Kidder Rak, Border Patrol (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938). 93 Rak also published a second book on the Border Patrol. See Mary Kidder Rak, They Guard the Gates: The Way of Life on the American Borders, The Way of Life Series, ed. Eric Bender (Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1941). 94 Rak, Border Patrol, 135 – 142. Rak also men­tions a second case involving a moved fence leading a Chinese smuggler on U. S. territory. See ibid. 119 – 127.

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Figure 57 (left)  “In sparsely settled districts, barbed wire and occasional patrol suffice. Aliens entering must find a settlement, lest they starve.” Mary Kidder Rak, Border Patrol (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), 59. Figure 58 (right)  “A ‘team’ of Patrol Inspectors, each knowing that his pal will not ‘leave him in a tight.’” Rak, Border Patrol, 59.

endless, deserted terrain (see fig. 57). The barbed wire fence itself appears rather low and does not give the impression that it poses a serious obstacle, but as the accompanying text explains, it suffices to hold back immigrants in uninhabited regions because here the dangers of climate and starva­tion keep them away. Another photograph shows two mounted Border Patrol officers as they ride in the direc­tion of the camera along a sandy path through the desert (see fig. 58). The text exalts the team spirit that reassures each of them that their partner will help out if they get into trouble. More important, however, is another detail: there is a straight dotted line drawn into the photograph that appears to signify the borderline. It cuts from the middle of the bottom to the horizon in the upper half and the perspective of the picture suggests the two men are about to cross that line. Taken together, both photographs sum up the contemporary visual representa­ tion of the border and refer to the visual language of the postcards men­tioned earlier in this chapter. They display the two most significant strategies for making the border visible. The first connects it with the fence in the desert whereas the second literally draws a line in the sand. Even if the border itself is invisible or immaterial, the presence of the Border Patrol in the second photo compensates for the fence’s absence as a visible marker and as a protective measure against immigrants. Both pictures display the inten­tion to visualize the boundary line itself. The latter photo further connects the border to the Patrol by presenting them as personable, brave, and reliable men.

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Boys’ Fun: Illegal Chinese Immigra­tion in Juvenile Fic­tion

In 1939, young men interested in becoming part of the Border Patrol could prepare themselves by reading a brochure that outlined qualifica­tions for the job.95 It opened with a reprinted lecture from 1934 by I. F. Wixon, Deputy Commissioner of Immigra­tion and Naturaliza­tion.96 Beginning with an anecdote about patrolmen who heroically stopped a gang of smugglers by driving their cars directly in front of an accelerating plane, Wixon uses the story to point out the “courage, brave­r y, and resourcefulness” of the Border Patrol.97 He then continues with a short history of the institu­tion, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act. Returning to the present, he asserts, “[t]hese early invasions were mild as compared with the determined army of aliens, who, after the passage of our restrictive laws, […] sought the ‘back door’ route.”98 Military terms heavily inform Wixon’s language, underscoring no­tions of the boundary as front line. The ideal patrolman, according to Wixon, was required to combine “the attributes of an expert woodsman or plainsman, a veteran soldier, an accomplished diplomat, and an astute secret service operator.”99 As Alexandra Minna Stern pointed out, the masculine ideal of the Border Patrol oscillated between two historically informed concepts that she refers to as “primitive masculinity and disciplined militarism.”100 On the one hand, primitive masculinity refers to tradi­tional Western ideals surrounding the mounted Texas Ranger who takes the law in his own hands and, as an agent of the American West’s coloniza­tion, gains masculinity on the frontier. Following Gail Bederman, Stern understands the romanticiza­tion of primitive masculinity as a reflex to effeminiza­ tion anxieties triggered by moderniza­tion.101 On the other hand, the military impetus of the Border Patrol can be seen as both a consequence of World War I and

95 Border Patrolman, Arco Civil Service Series (New York: Arco, 1939). Library of Congress. 96 Reprinted from I. F. Wixon, “The Mission of the Border Patrol,” U. S. Department of Labor, Immigra­tion and Naturaliza­tion Service, Lecture 7, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1934. 97 Border Patrolman, 3. 98 Ibid. (italics added). 99 Ibid., 5. 100 Alexandra Minna Stern, “Na­tionalism on the Line: Masculinity, Race, and the Crea­tion of the U. S. Border Patrol, 1910 – 1940,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U. S.-Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 299 – 323, 314. 101 Stern, “Na­tionalism on the Line,” 312; see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civiliza­tion: A Cul­ tural History of Gender and Race, 1880 – 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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the socio-­cultural impact of the 1920s and the Great Depression. Defending the border ultimately became a way to imagine it as a new front line against external forces. The border thus evolved into the site for defending masculine ideals and a na­tional community whose patriarchal founda­tions were eroded through economic crisis and early female political emancipa­tion.102 Defending the na­tion against the external threat of Chinese immigra­tion, however, also constituted an important element within strategies of re-­masculiniza­tion. How the image of the militarized Border Patrolman circulated in popular culture and how it addressed especially the young men the document above helped to recruit shows in the genre of juvenile literature. Out of the many popular series that depicted young boys solving mysterious cases, many included at least one episode located along the U. S.-Mexico border or otherwise dealing with illegal immigra­tion.103 Furthermore, avia­tion stories of heroic pilots became immensely popular within the genre. Airplanes started stirring public imagina­tion on a massive scale in the 1910s, and around the same time, avia­tion stories came to form a growing genre within juvenile literature. While the genre emerged after the Wright brothers’ flights had gained publicity in the late 1900s, the ‘golden era’ of avia­tion stories spanned from 1927 to 1932.104 This heightened popularity lead to the publica­tion of countless book series, sparked by the much-­publicized first non-­stop flight to Europe by Charles Lindbergh in May 1927. In the late 1920s, book series portraying adventures of pilots who explored the United States and helped fight criminals and enemies grew widespread. Significantly, a large number of these series contained at least one episode where the pilot assists the Border Patrol. These included the popular Russ Farrell and Rex Lee series by Thomson Burtis and Henry H. Arnold’s Bill Bruce series.105 Both authors, like the titular protagonists, were experienced military pilots, which also highlights how avia­tion 102 Stern, “Na­tionalism on the Line,” 315 – 317. 103 See for example Gerald Breckenridge, The Radio Boys with the Border Patrol (New York: A. L. Burt, 1924); Breckenridge, The Radio Boys on Secret Service Duty (New York: A. L. Burt, 1922; Willard F. Baker, The Boy Ranchers on Roaring River: Or, Diamond X and the Chinese Smugglers (New York: Cupples & Leon, 1926). 104 This periodiza­tion is suggested in David K. Vaughan, “The Possibilities of Flight: The Golden Age of American Avia­tion Series Books, 1927 – 1932,” in Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Pri­ vate Eyes: Dime Novels, Series Books, and Paperbacks, ed. Larry E. Sullivan and Lydia Cushman Schurman (New York: Haworth, 1996), 133 – 146. 105 Thomson Burtis, Russ Farrell: Border Patrolman (Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1927); Thomson Burtis, Rex Lee on the Border Patrol (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1928); Henry H. Arnold, Bill Bruce on Border Patrol, New York: A. L. Burt 1928. The Russ Farrell stories were even adapted for the screen as a two-­reel series titled Russ Farrell – Aviator by Educa­ tional Pictures in 1928. See the advertisement sec­tion in Mo­tion Picture News, July 7, 1928.

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had become increasingly important during and after World War I.106 Some of these stories, like Russ Farrell, had been published in magazines like American Boy and targeted a young, male audience.107 For this audience, these series conveyed social morals and contemporary issues and promoted specifically modern concepts of masculinity. As Fred Erisman argues, “the pilot figures become potent role models, offering a model of manhood for a technological age. They are physically fit, mentally agile, technologically knowledgeable, and unflinchingly honest – persons whose attributes equip them to deal capably with the forces of nature, technology, and society.”108

Erisman asserts that this concept carried from early avia­tion into the second half of the century’s space age. In Henry H. Arnold’s Bill Bruce on Border Patrol, published in 1928, the border becomes the ultimate loca­tion for the former military pilot to defend the na­tion against illegal Chinese immigrants. The book is the fourth novel of the series, which comprises six titles in total. The titles move chronologically from Bill Bruce’s first experiences in avia­tion during the early flights of Wilbur Wright in the late 1900s to Bruce’s enlistment in the Army’s Air Service during World War I, where he even takes part in the air battles over France.109 The fourth book then sends him to the U. S.-Mexico border as a member of the 9th Observa­tion Squadron. The narrative takes place shortly after the end of World War I. A comparison between Bruce’s first patrol along the border and his unsurpassably more exciting wartime missions makes the way the war has shaped his charac­ter obvious. The narrator explains: “The war had given all of the pilots a taste of continuous excitement […]. But peace flying was entirely different. From the time the plane left the airdrome until it landed there was nothing to do but look for something that was never there.”110 Having sighted no trace of smugglers during his flight, Bruce exclaims a few lines later: “I crave excitement, […] I would

106 See Vaughan, “Possibilities of Flight,” 140. 107 Thomson Burtis also published stories in McClure’s. See, for example, Thomson Burtis, “The Sky Sheriff,” McClure’s, April 1923, 38; Thomson Burtis, “Fliers’ Luck,” McClure’s, August 1923, 51. 108 Fred Erisman, Boys’ Books, Boys’ Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2006), xvi. 109 See Erisman, Boys’ Books, 91 – 94. Bruce’s former adventures are also recapitulated in Arnold, Bill Bruce, 3 – 7. 110 Arnold, Bill Bruce, 115.

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like to take a Spad and go up after a Hun.”111 As the story unfolds, Bruce learns the border does indeed offer exciting adventures not unlike those of the front line, and instead of Germans he can chase smugglers and Chinese immigrants. The book gives its readers first-­hand descrip­tions of Bruce’s patrol flights and the border area as well as techniques for smuggling Chinese. The reader soon learns that the main task of his assignment is to help catch a man called Andrajo, who smuggles Chinese, “dope,” and liquor into the country.112 When Bruce sets out to undertake his patrol, he gives a detailed account of the territory that marks the border between Calexico and Yuma. As it is important for the pilots to remain on the U. S. side of the border, Bruce has to orient himself using landmarks. At first, he passes over uninhabited desert hills that remind him of the Sahara. Then the border emerges visibly before him: “Bill saw the border long before he reached it. […] The United States’ territory seemed to be much greener than the Mexican.”113 A remark about the cattle on the U. S. side grazing the grass, making it appear greener than the longer, dried grass on the Mexican side, explains this detail. Apart from the reference to this ‘natural’ demarca­tion, the image of the U. S. as the land where the grass is quite literally greener is striking. Addi­tionally, Bruce’s flight demonstrates the advantages of avia­tion in the deserted border region. After seeing the territory with his own eyes from the airplane, Bruce realizes that “it would be extremely easy to pick up any band of smugglers trying to get across the border. They would stand out against the white sand like ink spots on paper.”114 This passage, like the whole narrative, recalls the representa­tion of the observing gaze and avia­tion in Sky High. The airplane allows the territory to lie flat like a map below the Border Patrol’s gaze, and maps generally imply knowledge and power over space. With the progression of the narrative, the reader witnesses three nearly successful attempts at smuggling Chinese over the border, highlighting different strategies and collectively warning of manifold threats to border security. ­During the first attempt, Bruce is sta­tioned at the border gate in Calexico to assist the understaffed patrol. The officers order him to look out for Chinese hidden in automobiles or disguised as Mexicans.115 When Bruce arrives at the gate, the text emphasizes the contrast between the calmness of Calexico and its counterpart on the other side of the border. It describes Mexicali as brightly illuminated, offering saloons, 111 Ibid., 116. 112 Ibid., 104. 113 Ibid., 110. 114 Ibid., 110. 115 See ibid., 123.

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nightclubs, gambling halls and “other places which provide amusements.”116 The Mexican side thus serves as a sinful opposite to the respectable life of the American town, the border once more representing cultural and moral dichotomies. When Bruce and his men later stop a car that passes the gate, Bruce becomes suspicious and soon realizes the car’s body is longer on the outside than its inside would suggest. After some failed attempts, Bruce and his men manage to open the secret compartment where they find four hidden Chinese. The narrator emphasizes the men’s surprise by referring to the remarkable physical condi­tion the Chinese show: “The space was hardly large enough to hold one compressed American, yet four Chinos had been removed. […] It was almost unbelievable.”117 In addi­tion to both the characters’ and the narrator’s references to the Chinese as “Chinos,” “Chinamen,” and even “Yellow Peril,” this passage also reinforces no­tions of inferior Chinese bodily physique and the Chinese willingness to endure extreme hardships to enter the country.118 This was a strategy often reported about in contemporary newspapers, as we have witnessed above; thus, the passage once more demonstrates the interrela­tion between fact and fic­tion. The smugglers’ second attempt follows a similar strategy but makes use of a freight train instead of a car. Again, Bill Bruce needs a little time to investigate the train for potential hiding places. It is then revealed that the Chinese are hidden inside the ice compartments used to cool the refrigerator cars. “They pulled the half frozen oriental out of the ice storage space,” the text reads. “The poor Chink was stiff with cold. […] He was more dead than alive.”119 The third attempt introduces the novel’s climactic end and gives Bruce the chance to use his flying skills. In order to find the smuggling gang and their leader Andrajo, Bruce and the other patrolmen conduct a plan to optimize their air surveillance. Bruce finally discovers a large convoy, easily visible from above like he had predicted, moving through the desert. He lands the plane undetected and continues his investiga­tions on foot. As he observes the smuggler’s group, he notices some of the Chinese are wearing Mexican clothing: “Some of them looked as if they had just stepped out of a street in China, while others could hardly be recognized from their Mexican escort.”120 This passage thus refers to the practice of passing as Mexican. Later, Bruce flies his plane over the gang and receives an order to drop flares illuminating the area so the Border Patrol can make their 116 Ibid., 125. 117 Ibid., 139. 118 Ibid., 138 – 140; at one point, Bill Bruce is ordered to “tie up the ‘Yellow Peril.’” Ibid., 140. 119 Ibid., 149 – 150. 120 Ibid., 215.

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attack. In this way, the airplanes serve as a means of making the gang visible even during nighttime. While the flares brightly illuminate the valley, Bruce sees other planes dropping bombs and opening heavy machine-­g un fire on the ground. The gang and the Chinese are caught in the end, but Andrajo manages to escape the machine-­g un fire into the night – which enables the continua­tion of the series. In sum, the book stands as an example for the way juvenile literature portrayed duty on the border as a wartime scenario and emphasized the specific importance of modern avia­tion technology to enable border surveillance. While the smugglers employ different strategies for bringing Chinese over the border, the story’s hero – having just returned from the wartime battlefields – outsmarts and outshoots the criminals that threaten the borders solidifica­tion in a very literal form of warfare. Duty on the border, here, appears as an adventure that turns men into virile and smart Americans.

‘Smuggled Goods’: The Border and Illegal Immigra­tion in ‘Riding Speed’ (1934), ‘Hair-­Trigger Casey’ (1936), and ‘Border Phantom’ (1937)

The extensive genre of the border film articulates the fascina­tion with the U. S.-­ Mexico border and the heroic adventures of the men who patrolled it. Of the large number of films, many revolved directly or indirectly around the theme of Chinese smuggling.121 As with most films from the border smuggling genre, the 1934 picture Riding Speed offers a typical B-movie depic­tion of a Border Patrol officer’s investiga­tions. Its main cast features Jay Wilsey as inspector Steve Funney. Wilsey, who also directed the film, is credited as Buffalo Bill Jr., the pseudonym under which he was known as a western actor during the 1920s.122 Wilsey was unrelated to William F. Cody, the ‘real’ Buffalo Bill, but the reference reveals the connec­tions between 121 Apart from the films analyzed here, see, for example, On the Border, dir. William McGann, perf. Rin-­Tin-­Tin, Armida, and John B. Litel (United States: Warner Bros., 1930); Shadows of the Orient, dir. Burt Lynnwood, perf. Esther Ralston, Regis Toomey, J. Farrell MacDonald (United States: Monogram, 1937). Unfortunately, a large number of border westerns that explicitly depict Chinese smuggling are considered lost. See, for example, The Cyclone, dir. Cliff Smith, perf. Tom Mix, Colleen More, and Henry Herbert (United States: Fox Film, 1920); It Happened Out West, dir. unknown, perf. Franklyn Farnum and Virginia Lee (United States: W. M. Smith, 1923). 122 Wilsey had starred in a western dealing with Chinese smuggling which is considered lost before. See Roarin’ Broncs, dir. Richard Thorpe, perf. Jay Wilsey (as Buffalo Bill Jr.), Ann McKay, and Harry Todd (United States: Ac­tion Pictures, 1927).

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the border film and the broader western genre. It also illustrates how film itself can be read as a modern stage for the frontier myth, one that catered for modern audiences and had its predecessors in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The film’s plot and imagery illuminate contemporary depic­tions of the Border Patrol and border space during the 1930s. The main protagonist, Steve Funney (Buffalo Bill Jr./Jay Wilsey), investigates a smuggling ring and works undercover at the ranch of John Vale (Lafayette McKee). Vale, however, knows about Funney’s real objective and has helped the Border Patrol before. Funney meets Vale’s daughter Gypsy ( Joile Benet) after she was involved in a car accident in the desert. Gypsy Vale is characterized as a cheeky young woman who teases Funney, but of course the two become the film’s romantic couple in the end. The ranch’s foreman, Bill Dirky (Bud Osborne), acts as the head of the smuggling ring and grows suspicious of Funney. In the final shootout, Funney succeeds in catching Dirky and the rest of his gang, who hide inside a shelter with a group of smuggled Chinese. The film opens with a dedica­tion to the U. S. Border Patrol, “whose duty takes them into frequent danger along the Arizona-­Mexican border.” The first scene depicts Funney chasing two men on horseback in the middle of the Arizona desert. The men ride in the direc­tion of the camera and out of the picture while Funney comes to a halt. He looks to a small sign at his left indicating the U. S.-Mexico border. Although he is obliged to stop at the border and cannot catch the men, he finds visible satisfac­tion in the act of driving the criminals out of the country. This opening scene illustrates several elements contained in the filmic construc­ tion of the border. First, it establishes Funney as the heroic patrolman who defends the na­tion’s ‘back door’ against intruders and criminals. His outward appearance and the upper hand he gains over the two other men display his cowboy masculinity. Second, the small sign that indicates the border shows its open, arbitrary essence. There are no traces of fortifica­tion, such as a fence, which would keep the outlaws from crossing. Instead, the line exists as a political reality produced via two words – “U. S.-Mexico” –; produced, that is, through a performative speech act. This image of the border draws on the same mode of visual representa­tion articulated in the border postcards and photographs men­tioned above. Furthermore, while the sign acts as the manifesta­tion of the border, its func­tion as the only visible marker signifies the sheer openness of the territory, which in turn proves the fundamental necessity for mounted guards to secure it. Third, the mise-­en-­scène beautifully reinforces the dichotomy of the border. The camera is posi­tioned just behind the line on the Mexican side, looking at the iconic

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Arizona desert landscape. It visualizes the escape of the two men, later revealed to be part of the smuggling gang, by them leaving the frame and moving behind the ­camera’s field of view. The audience never sees the Mexican side in this scene because the film omits a corresponding shot-­reverse shot to follow Funney’s gaze as he watches the men disappear.123 The audience’s gaze, always directed at the inside, overlooks the United States – the na­tion that needs to be defended against the outside. The strange invisibility of the Mexican side enables a portrayal of the Arizona landscape as a decisively American space. This perspective is accordingly reversed later in the film when the smugglers bring Chinese into the U. S. While Funney successfully reveals smuggling acti­ vities taking place at Vale’s ranch, he cannot stop the gang’s opera­tion. The smugglers meet with the ranch’s foreman Dirky at the border to guard the covered horse wagon in which they transport the Chinese. The shot depicting the border ­crossing shows the wagon approaching the border from the Mexican side. The camera is posi­tioned exactly at the border, so it can follow the wagon’s course on the road in a pan shot from right to left that stops at the sign already shown in the ­opening scene. Several scenes that show the smuggling group with the Mexican side in the background follow, and the audience watches as they move towards the camera from right to left, instead of left to right as in the beginning. The reversal of perspective underscores the ‘invasive’ character of the Chinese immigrants. The audience now sees the smugglers approaching the camera and, by extension, the audience’s viewing posi­tion. One sees the Chinese hiding under the covering several times, waiting to arrive in the United States. By then, Funney has pursued the men so that they have to abandon the wagon and continue off the road on foot. They take shelter inside a vacant house, a maneuver which leads to the final shootout. With the help of Vale and one of his farmworkers, Funney succeeds in catching the Chinese, Dirky, and his men. The depic­tion of the Chinese themselves – or rather the fact that they are hardly depicted at all – follows contemporary representa­tions of Chinese immigrants as a smuggled commodity. As Erika Lee has hinted, Chinese immigrants were regularly referred to as “smuggled” or “imported.”124 She emphasizes the importance of the underlying images that these terms convey: “The connec­tions made between smuggled goods such as liquor and drugs and Chinese migrants also portrayed the Chinese as contraband commodities that did not belong in the United States.”125

123 Instead, there is only the shot-­reverse shot of Funney looking at the border sign. 124 Lee, At America’s Gates, 149. 125 Ibid.

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The terminology of ‘smuggled Chinese’ is indeed still used today.126 The concept of smuggling in regard to immigra­tion grew closely tied to Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century, whereas popular discourses labeled other groups differently.127 In the light of increased smuggling activities during Prohibi­tion and beyond, people often degraded Chinese to mere commodities. The long history of racial knowledge that categorized Chinese as inferior, indistinguishable from one another, and devoid of individuality informed this objectifica­tion. Moreover, the idea of smuggling Chinese linked directly to ­bodily concepts of them as beings accustomed to a lower standard of living who could squeeze into small hideouts and endure extreme hardships. The image of Chinese squeezing into narrow hideouts indeed constitutes a recurring visual theme of most smuggling movies. They are depicted as hidden like contraband goods in secret compartments of airplanes in Shadows of the Orient (1937) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937), in wagons in Riding Speed (1934), in barrels in Border Phantom (1937), and locked up in crowded cells of ships in The Non-­ Stop-­Flight (1926).128 In contemporary newspaper reports, illegal Chinese immigrants appear as a special threat because their eagerness to enter into the country corresponded to their physical ability to hide in the strangest places. Unlike with other immigrants, this capability allowed them to enter the country like other commodities and contraband, or, as one newspaper stated, “like cigarettes and silk stockings.”129 Their object-­like status as smuggled goods related to their ability to endure otherwise inhuman transport condi­tions: “[t]he Chinaman will endure any hardship, however painful, to enter this ‘promised land,’ where people are ‘easy picking’ and laundry bills are fat,” and he “cheerfully allows himself to be crated in boxes or nailed in casks”130 From this perspective Chinese ‘stowaways’ traveled as comfortably using manifold channels of commercial trade like freight trains as they would with normal

126 See, for example, the uncritical use of the term in Ko-­lin Chin’s study of contemporary illegal Chinese immigra­tion, Ko-­lin Chin, Smuggled Chinese: Clandestine Immigra­tion to the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). For a more analytical perspective on the emerging scholarly field of ‘human smuggling,’ see David Kyle and Rey Koslowski, eds., Global Human Smuggling: Comparative Perspectives, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 127 Lee gives the examples of ‘wetbacks’ and ‘fence jumpers’ as terms for Mexican immigrants. See Lee, At America’s Gates, 149. 128 The Non-­Stop Flight, dir. Emory Johnson, perf. Knute Erickson, Jim Wang, and Cecil Ogden (United States: Emory Johnson, 1926). 129 “Wily Smugglers of Chinese,” Washington Post, September 1, 1912. 130 Ibid.

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vehicles of human transporta­tion, a belief which in turn multiplied possibilities for illegal immigra­tion and bloated public fears of omnipresent illegal Chinese. Their gradual ‘subhuman’ status as smuggled commodities made Chinese the “best customers”131 for smugglers, as the smugglers did not have to treat their ‘goods’ with special respect. Accordingly, reports about illegal immigra­tion were filled with sensa­tionalist stories about various Chinese attempts to remain undetected. Two films, Hair-­Trigger Casey (1936) and Border Phantom (1937), illustrate both the objectifica­tion and the racializa­tion these depic­tions produced. While the plot of the 1936 film Hair-­Trigger Casey again follows rather formulaic conven­tions, its depic­tion of Chinese smuggling sheds light on the mechanisms of race at the border. The film, directed by Harry Fraser for Berke-­Perrin Produc­tions, features Jack Perrin as Army Captain Jim Casey, who is sta­tioned in a town somewhere near Mexico. Together with his brother, he owns a ranch at the border. After an incident at the ranch that leaves one of his men killed, Casey starts to investigate. Teaming up with the Border Patrol, he finally finds out that his foreman Karney (Ed Cassidy) secretly manages a smuggling ring that brings Chinese over the border. Casey catches Karney but cannot prevent the smuggler from escaping a few moments later. In the end, a man named Victor Wong (Lee Fix) kills the fugitive Karney with a hatchet as a punishment for stealing money from the Chinese immigrants. The film contains much riding and shooting as well as “plenty of he-­man dialogue” from Casey, as one review put it.132 Casey’s masculine opposi­tion to the Chinese smuggling ring serves as the main angle for the film’s promo­tion, as two pictures from the press book show (see figs. 59 – 60). The first picture depicts a stereotypical Chinese with a queue attacking a white man with a knife – a scene that in this form is at no point shown within the film itself; nevertheless, it focuses on the dangerousness of the Chinese, which eventually leads to Karney’s murder in the film’s climax. The second picture focuses on Casey as he heroically defends himself (and his country) against a group of aggressors, most of whom are clearly marked as Chinese.133 Again, this constitutes a heavy exaggera­tion of the actual depic­tions in the film, but it demonstrates that the producers wanted to appeal to audiences by emphasizing the issue of illegal Chinese immigra­tion.

131 The complete passage reads: “The Chinese are the best customers of the alien bootleggers. They are the most persistent in trying to enter the country illegally and will pay fancy prices to reach the golden land. They will endure all sorts of hardships and will even do their own bootlegging.” Rhinehart, “Bootlegging of Humans.” 132 “Review of ‘Hair-­Trigger Casey,’” Mo­tion Picture Daily, February 19, 1936, 9. 133 See press book for Hair-­Trigger Casey (New York: M. Rosenberg, 1936). William K. Everson Collec­tion, Department of Cinema Studies, New York University.

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Figures 59 and 60  Advertisements. Press book for Hair-­Trigger Casey (New York: M. Rosenberg, 1936), 3, 4. Courtesy of the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University.

The depic­tion of Chinese in the film actually points in two direc­tions. Significantly, Hair-­Trigger Casey features scenes at the border as well as in a Chinese quarter of the border town, where Casey is sta­tioned. Before the narrative moves to the border, Casey and a friend decide to go to Chinatown for dinner. Prior to leaving, Casey admits that the food is not good there, but that it will do. Casey’s African American servant, “Snowflake” (Fred Toones, also known as Snowflake), adds that he dislikes the district because it is “too dark.”134 The next scene opens in Chinatown, filled with drunken men walking down the street. Then we see Karney talking to Victor Wong in a dark corner. Wong, who apparently hires Karney for smuggling opera­tions, accuses Karney of stealing money from his “countrymen.” After Wong threatens Karney with his hatchet, a fight breaks out which Casey and his friend stop when they appear. This short Chinatown scene establishes the district – and its inhabitants – along the conven­tional lines of Oriental Otherness; however, it is central to the understanding of the narrative twist at the end

134 Snowflake, however, is not allowed to join them. I will focus a little more on the heavily racist characteriza­tion of Snowflake further down.

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and contrasts with – or rather, complements – the characteriza­tions of the illegal Chinese at the end of the narrative. The image of Victor Wong as a dangerous hatchet man counterbalances that of the Chinese as passive victims and the smuggled contraband of gangsters. Later in the film, the audience witnesses Karney entering a deserted cabin near the border. He opens a secret hatch to the cellar, where he hides three Chinese. When he seizes the men and yanks them up, it becomes apparent that they are handcuffed. Karney says he needs more money from them, which leads to discussions and visi­ ble protests from the Chinese, but Karney threatens them with a knife and starts searching them for money. When he sees Casey approaching the cabin, Karney shoves the Chinese back in the cellar, where they remain locked up until the film’s finale. The depic­tion of the Chinese hidden away and ‘stored’ in a cellar reinforces no­tions of Chinese immigrants as smuggled goods. They remain locked inside the cellar the entire film, and Casey needs to save them from suffoca­tion in the end. Their passivity and their func­tion within the narrative render them commodities of illegal trade, but – and this detail is important – Wong’s slaying of Karney in an act of vigilant justice ultimately circumvents their characteriza­tion as victims. Notwithstanding Karney’s role as the film’s main villain, the narrative technique of linking the ‘illegal aliens’ with the Chinatown ‘hatchet man’ conflates no­tions of Chinese criminality and illegality and endows the Chinese with essential racial characteristics. It suggests that, if these men were permitted to enter the country successfully, they would merely become new members of the criminal Chinatown underworld and, in consequence, remain outside U. S. mainstream society. Hair-­Trigger Casey’s construc­tion of the border as racialized space includes two more elements that are interrelated with concep­tions of Chinese Otherness, but which I can only discuss briefly here. The first one is the characteriza­tion of Casey’s foreman Karney, who offers a contrast to Casey’s white masculine posi­ tion. While Karney is in the cabin to conduct his smuggling plans, he dresses and acts like a Mexican. With the use of clothing and a fake Mexican accent, he even succeeds in misleading Casey; thus, for his illegal business of ‘importing’ Chinese, he passes as a Mexican and, according to popular ideas, takes up a lower racial identity to cover his opera­tions. This racial disguise is even more accentua­ ted when Casey captures Karney and discovers his masquerade. Shocked to find his foreman under the disguise, Casey experiences a long flashback to his service during World War I. The audience learns that the two men fought together on the frontline and that, during heavy combat, Casey saved Karney’s life by pulling him from the battlefield. While this scene again connects the border to military activity and underscores Casey’s heroic masculinity, it shows Karney’s ‘fall from grace’ as someone who not only deceives the man who saved his life but also

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achieves this by ‘becoming Mexican.’ It demonstrates once more that the border marks a space of racial and gender boundaries as well as territorial transgression and so erects boundaries to the outside of hegemonic concepts of U. S. society. The second element is the figure of the African American servant ‘Snowflake,’ who sheds light on racist stereotypes and racial interrela­tions during the 1930s. Snowflake’s role basically func­tions as comic relief without any influence on the narrative.135 Snowflake, portrayed as childish, jumpy, and superstitious, is most often shown speaking to himself, providing naïve comments about what is happening around him. He thus refers to the racist tradi­tion of minstrelsy adopted by African American actors in the 1920s and 1930s.136 In the film’s beginning, he states that he dislikes Chinatown because it is “too dark,” which can be read as antipathy against Chinese Americans. The inclusion of a childlike African American in the film hints at the racial rela­tions between whites, Blacks, and Chinese Americans. The construc­tion of Chinese immigrants as a threat because they were seen as new slaves (that is, ‘coolies’) who would show solidarity with African Americans against white supremacy formed a widespread idea of Yellow Peril discourse.137 His role as a passive and ‘tamed’ African American in constant need of his white master Casey contrasts sharply with those of the Chinese as an ongoing and external threat to the U. S. racial landscape. A significant gender twist to the border smuggling film genre emerges in Republic Picture’s Border Phantom (1937), starring Bob Steele as travelling cowboy Larry O’Day. Looking for a job near the border, he and his clumsy partner Lucky Smith (Don Barclay) become involved in the investiga­tions of a murder case. After the murder of an entomologist professor who had camped in an old hacienda near the border, his niece, Barbara Hartwell (Harley Wood), is wrongfully arrested for the crime. Later it is revealed that a Chinese smuggling ring uses the h ­ acienda as an opera­tion site. In this way, the basic story follows the usual narrative conven­tions

135 Fred ‘Snowflake’ Toones appears to be a heavily understudied actor. According to the Internet Movie Database, he played in over 200 films between 1928 and 1951 and was often reduced to roles as shoeshine man or porter. The fact that he is credited under his off-­screen name and thus plays ‘himself ’ bespeaks contemporary discriminatory practices in Hollywood. See the chapter “A White Range” in Philip R. Loy, Westerns and American Culture, 1930 – 1955 ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2001), 184 – 213. For an insightful analysis of African American actors in westerns of the 1930s and a perspective on African American audiences, see Michael ­Johnson, “Cowboys, Cooks, and Comics: African American Characters in Westerns of the 1930s,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 3 (2005): 225 – 235. 136 See Johnson, “Cowboys, Cooks, and Comics,” 225. 137 See, for example, Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asian American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 31 – 63.

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of the other films. Oddly enough, the producers tried to promote the film by emphasizing its educa­tional value: “The screen as an educa­tional medium is becoming more and more appreciated, and curiously enough, the wild and wooly ’western’ is accepted as one of the foremost instructors in early American history. […] The children in the highly appreciative audience [of Border Phantom; B. S] probably learned more of early California life in one short hour of entertainment than they would learn in dozens of text books.”138

While the western film surely had a large impact on perpetuating the frontier myth, Border Phantom’s educa­tional merit lay mainly in its construc­tion of the border as a permeable space of Chinese ‘invasion’ and proving ground for virile, white masculinities. The smuggling in Border Phantom differs from other depic­tions by focusing exclusively on female Chinese. Chan Lee (Miki Morita), who uses the hacienda and a pig farm to bring “Chinese picture brides” into the U. S., acts as the head of the smuggling opera­tion. Lee’s associate, the pig farmer Obed Young (Karl Hackett), uses his carriage for the transporta­tion and hides the women in barrels before bringing them to Lee at the hacienda. Significantly, actor Miki Morita, who plays Chan Lee, is Japanese American and the phenomenon of the so-­called picture brides originated mainly as a Japanese and Korean practice of the early twentieth century. It involved the practice of arranged marriages between Japanese men already living in the U. S. and women from Japan they usually had only seen in photographs before they met.139 By portraying both the practice and the opera­tion’s leader as Chinese, the film exposes either the producers’ ignorance about the topic or, as I argue, the persistence of discourses linking illegal Asian immigra­tion almost exclusively to Chinese people, ultimately conflating all people from East Asia to a mass of indistinguishable Orientals in popular discourse. In the case of Border Phantom, this illegality is also linked to the gendered discourses of Chinese exclusion laws. It refers to the discourses of female Chinese immigra­tion that, since the Page Act of 1875, constructed them as potential prostitutes. While the Japanese ‘picture-­bride’ marriages were unrelated to prostitu­tion

138 Press book for Border Phantom (n. p.: Republic, 1937), 3. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 139 Arranged marriages were common in Japanese culture. On the history of picture brides, see Paul R. Spickard, Japanese Americans: The Forma­tion and Transforma­tions of an Ethnic Group, rev. ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 107 – 109.

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and not unusual in Japanese culture, the practice contributed to white ideas of Oriental Otherness and, by transferring it to Chinese, fitted stereotypes of Chinese men ‘importing’ prostitutes illegally. In the film, the smugglers’ references to the women as “pork” and “soybeans” as a code when outsiders are present accentuates the object-­like status of the women. The exotic sexualiza­tion of the women Chan Lee hides in his basement becomes apparent in a short scene at the end of the film. After O’Day and the sheriff have apprehended the criminals, the scene serves as an ‘end joke’ for comic relief. When the Chinese women are lead out of the cellar for deporta­tion, O’Day’s partner Lucky Smith attempts to leave with them secretly. When the sheriff grabs him by the collar to stop him, Smith asks, “Sheriff, can I be deported, too? I think I like it in China.” This joke draws on no­tions of the passivity and sexual availability of female Chinese. It is the fantasy of the Oriental harem that makes Smith so fond of China. In this regard, the border in the film marks a space of gender transgression. The ‘picture brides’ are brought over it in barrels, making the mode of transporta­ tion resemble the smuggling of other goods like liquor and, thus, adding to their objectifica­tion. After their arrival at the hacienda, Chan Lee hides them in the basement to match them with a Chinese American man. This ‘import’ is even reversed later in the film when Barbara Hartwell, at this point a fugitive and falsely accused of murdering her uncle, ends up in Lee’s basement after falling from her horse. Surrounded by Lee and the Chinese women, Lee explains his business to her and then, hearing of her unfortunate situa­tion, offers to smuggle her out of the United States over the border. Fearing prison, Hartwell agrees and is soon assisted into a barrel. A large part of the film’s climax then consists of O’Day ­riding furiously to chase the caravan that hides Hartwell in order to stop it before it crosses the border; thus, the criminal Oriental character Lee is responsible for both smuggling aliens into the country and diminishing white womanhood inside the United States (under the pretense of doing her a favor). Of course, O’Day as the white masculine hero manages to rescue her in the middle of the deserted border territory. The ending of the film in turn underscores Chan Lee’s emascula­tion. Surrounded by O’Day and the local police force and accused of murder, he tries to escape his fate by secretly poisoning himself, which O’Day prevents at the last moment. Poison, as the stereotypical weapon of choice for effeminate, villainous Fu Manchu-­type Chinese, stands in stark contrast to the pistol-­swinging cowboy-­ masculinity of border types like O’Day and in this scene marks an unmanly, ‘easy way out.’ While the border in Border Phantom always signifies gender transgression, the ending restores white masculinity and saves white womanhood by stopping immoral female immigra­tion and capturing the effeminate Oriental villain. At the end, the gender boundary is successfully patrolled and re-­erected.

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4.2 Foreigners-­Within: Chinese American Aliens In March 1915, when World War I had not yet reached the United States and feature films were still in the process of becoming the standard form for mo­tion pictures, the Edison Company released a short film called The Mission of Mr. Foo.140 The film tells the story of Mr. Foo (Carlton King), a wealthy Chinese ‘mandarin’ who meets a young woman named Florence (Gladys Hulette). Florence teaches Chinese children in a mission school in Washington, DC. Foo shows affec­tion for Florence, but when he gives her an old Chinese necklace, Florence’s father, a “man high in official circles” (Bigelow Cooper), becomes suspicious. He shows the necklace to the Chinese ambassador, Tu Sing (T. Tamamoto), who identifies Foo as a soldier of the old Empire and enemy of the new Republic. The ambassador starts spying on Foo and it is soon revealed that Foo gathers Chinese rebels in Chinatown. In the end, the ambassador confronts Foo, averts his plans, and hands him poison, giving Foo the chance of dying an honorable death, which Foo accepts. While the film is interesting on many levels, it stands as an illuminating example of popular concep­tions about Chinese as alien and Other. From a spatial pers­pective, these concep­tions express themselves visibly in the film’s depic­tion of Mr. Foo’s secret room where he gathers his followers. The producers used a rather spectacular stage device that enabled them to move walls and turn a whole room around its vertical axis. The first time this device is shown, we see Foo on a street approaching a brick wall. After saying a secret passcode, the wall moves to the side and a window appears. Foo then steps to the side and enters the ­building while the wall moves back again. Further complicating this device, we later see Foo standing in an ornamented room in front of a Buddha statue while talking to his followers, who are kneeling in front of him. They are w ­ earing Western suits. Then the whole room moves around its vertical axis, so that the brick wall with the window appears in front of the camera again. A Chinese man behind the window pulls a lever, making the walls move again. This time, a Chinese store appears in the frame. Foo’s followers, now in Chinese working class clothes and in greater number than in the shot before, enter the store from the left and leave through the door in the back. Finally, the brick wall appears

140 The Mission of Mr. Foo, dir. John H. Collins, perf. Carlton S. King, Bigelow Cooper, and T. Tamamoto (United States: Edison, 1915). Curiously, the film is not listed in the American Film Institute catalog; however, both the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art in New York hold copies. Several trade journals also men­tion it. See, for example, “Advertisement for ‘The Mission of Mr. Foo,’” Moving Picture World, March 6, 1915, 1408; “The Mission of Mr. Foo,” Motography, March 13, 1915, 417.

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again, leaving only Foo standing in front of it on the open street. This complicated (and largely illogical) arrangement serves to visualize Foo’s secret gatherings behind moveable walls in the middle of Chinatown. It is unclear if the moving set is supposed to simulate a tracking shot – that is, the movement of the camera itself – as it opera­tes in stage-­theater performances, or if it is indeed the room that is meant to turn. Either way, the movement is connected to the transforma­tion of Foo and his followers from Americanized Chinese to stereotypical ‘coolies.’ Moreover, the moving walls func­tion as a hinge, or gate, through which a large number of treacherous Chinese suddenly ‘swarm’ onto the streets. Once opened, the ­moving walls reveal a hidden ‘army’ of men who follow a secret plot in the middle of an American Chinatown. The depic­tion of Chinese in The Mission of Mr. Foo follows specific conven­ tions that render them an alien presence on U. S. territory. Some of these traits have been discussed in other chapters of this study, such as the representa­tion of Chinatown or the desire of the Chinese villain for the white, religious female character, but the main trait I want to focus on is the way Chinese are presented as an uncontrollable secret society and how this is linked to immigra­tion discourses of the ‘illegal alien’ that grew increasingly powerful in the 1910s and 1920s. On a general level, the Chinese in the film are portrayed as politically and culturally tied to China. Their presence in the U. S. is merely a form of exile that they use to plan a rebellion in their country of birth. The Chinese ambassador and his ­servant stand as excep­tions and oppose the plans to re-­erect the old Chinese empire, but the political struggle between modernism and anti-­ modernism portrays China as an unstable country whose political future is uncertain. Moreover, the externaliza­tion of the conflict onto U. S. territory reinforces the ­no­tion of Chinese taking advantage of the U. S. through immigra­tion without ever planning to ‘assimilate’ into its society. Instead, the Chinese here are mere sojour­ners whose fate lies in China. After all, the ambassador’s presence in the U. S. is also mainly job-­related and impermanent. This no­tion is class-­related as well, as the rebels streaming into the streets of Washington’s Chinatown act under the cover of a de-­individualized mass of Chinese ­workers. The Chinese inside the United States appear as a threat and are as perilous as other groups of ‘unde­sirable,’ excluded immigrants like anarchists, socialists, prostitutes, convicts, and other criminals. In The Mission of Mr. Foo, we can indeed witness how fears of Chinese criminal ‘hordes’ demanding entry at the na­tion’s borders and operating from inside U. S. territory, in the midst of white mainstream society, ­increasingly inform Yellow Peril discourses. The Chinese, here, appear as alien in both meanings of the term: as foreigners-­within and as non-­citizens who ‘invade’ and undermine the United States.

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The concept of the ‘illegal alien’ is inextricably linked to the increasingly exclusionist immigra­tion policy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While concepts of the ‘illegal alien’ or ‘illegal immigrant’ are more prominent than ever in early twenty-­first century political discourse, scholars have pointed out that their genealogy goes back to the beginning of the last century.141 In her study Impossible Subjects, Mae M. Ngai has shown that the illegal alien is indeed a modern inven­tion and closely connected to discourses of U. S. na­tional identity in the early twentieth century. Taking the 1924 Immigra­tion Act as the focal point of her analysis, she argues that U. S. immigra­tion policy was “deeply implicated in the development of twentieth-­century American ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and the na­tion-­state.”142 While acknowledging earlier laws regarding Asian exclusion, Ngai sees the 1924 act as the first comprehensive immigra­tion law and as a fundamental articula­tion of how observers defined the U. S. na­tion via the desired composi­tion of its popula­tion. The starting point for Ngai and other scholars is the observa­tion that the exclusion laws and accompanying legisla­tion that prohibited naturaliza­tion for certain immigrant groups created a new and contradictory category of immigrant. The ‘illegal alien,’ as a person who de facto resides in the U. S. but de jure has no access to the status of a U. S. citizen, was a genuinely new phenomenon.143 As Ngai asserts, “[i]mmigra­tion restric­tion produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the na­tion was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility. […] The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.”144

Ngai identifies this refusal of citizenship as the second important obstacle for immigrants. In addi­tion to the territorial boundary immigrants have to cross, they also face a juridical boundary once they are in the country. For Ngai, this interior boundary is equally important and socially significant: “It is here […] that we might 141 For a theoretical introduc­tion, see Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom, “Introduc­tion – Immigrant ‘Illegality’: Construc­tions and Critiques,” in Constructing Immigrant ‘­Illegality’: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1 – 33. See also Young, Alien Na­tion, 1 – 18. 142 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3. 143 This does not encompass the history of African American exclusion from citizenship, which is a completely different field. The Fourteenth Amendment, however, which granted African Americans the right to citizenship, also guaranteed basic rights for aliens. Yet, the extent of these rights for aliens is a fundamental debate within political and legal theory. See ibid., 6. 144 Ibid., 4 – 5 (italics in the original); see also ibid., 57 – 58.

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paradoxically locate the outermost point of exclusion from na­tional membership.”145 This line, however, is not historically fixed but as arbitrary as the territorial boundary and the product of changing immigra­tion laws. These shifts between legal and illegal status shed light on “how the na­tion has imagined and constructed itself over time.”146 Immigra­tion restric­tion laws created the illegal alien and connected it to racial difference, spawning a racial remapping of U. S. society. Ngai argues that the 1920s saw the consolida­tion of racial categories in political discourse and marked Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians as ineligible for naturaliza­tion, solidifying “the legal boundaries of the ‘white race.’”147 While the U. S.-born immigrant offspring were legally U. S. citizens by birth, the political discourse that marked certain racial groups as ineligible for citizenship perpetuated no­tions of racial difference and had repercussions for the whole immigrant community. Focusing on the Mexican and Asian experience, Ngai uses the term “alien citizens” to characterize their status, describing them as “Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United States with formal U. S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the na­tion.”148 Consequently, by excluding immigrant groups, immigra­tion laws conflated alienness with racialized concep­tions that directly affected people living in the country legally. As Lisa Lowe argues, U. S. exclusionist legisla­tion forms an important element of the “apparatus of racializa­tion.”149 She explains that juridi­ cal classifica­tions of ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ ‘citizen’ and ‘noncitizen’ are the modes “through which the liberal state discriminates, surveys, and produces immigrant identities.” Immigra­tion restric­tion and particularly Asian exclusion, she argues, have ultimately produced the non-­whiteness of the ‘illegal alien.’150 The act of immigra­tion – legal or illegal – does not end with stepping over the territorial border but initiates ongoing legal, political, and cultural processes of racializa­tion and Othering. To early twentieth-­century advocates of restric­tion, the illegal alien within the na­tion signified the instability of the territorial border. The alien posed a threat because the status of illegality was not visibly evident. In order to find aliens already in the country, the immigra­tion acts were accompanied by measures of compulsory registra­tion and mass deporta­tion.151 As an extension

145 Ibid., 6. 146 Ibid., 6. 147 Ibid., 7. 148 Ibid., 8. 149 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 22 150 Ibid., 19. 151 See Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 62 – 63.

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of the surveillance dispositif at the border, these measures aimed at making aliens visible and controllable. While Ngai traces these processes to historical legal discourses, I want to focus on the percep­tion of the Chinese illegal alien as the most prominent alien in popular percep­tion during the 1920s and 1930s. While many aspects of the ‘illegal alien’ or ‘foreigner-­within’ lead to topics discussed elsewhere in this study, I want to use the concept to look at depic­tions of illegal immigrants not shown directly at the border but inside the U. S. The Border Patrol itself defined their opera­tional area rather broadly and, to a certain degree, without connec­tion to the actual border. In 1925, Congress had authorized the Border Patrol “to arrest any alien who, in [their] presence or view, is entering or attempting to enter the United States in viola­tion of any law, or regula­tions made in pursuance of law, regulating the admission of aliens […].”152 As the Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigra­tion emphasized in 1930, the expression ‘entering the United States’ legally referred to the declara­tion that “an alien is in the act of entering the United States until he reaches his interior destina­tion.”153 Paradoxically, the border grew irrelevant in rela­tion to the pursuit of ‘illegal aliens’ during a time when it manifested and solidified increasingly as a territorial marker. The legal (and racial) boundary of illegality was not bound to territory but existed as a potential threat throughout the na­tion as a whole. In her book about the Border Patrol, Mary Kidder Rak emphasizes that its role was not limited to the na­tion’s exterior boundary. Referring to the patrol’s authority to apprehend immigrants after the act of crossing the line, she states that the task “involves working at some distance back of the Interna­tional Line […].”154 Rather than working on the borderline alone, the patrol controlled an area that included the backcountry several hundred miles inland, such as roads, farms, and cities. Addi­tionally, the Border Patrol worked together with other institu­tions to seek aliens in bigger cities all across the country. This practice became a major field of opera­tion for the Border Patrol in the 1920s and 1930s. As Rak asserts: “To capture an alien who is in the act of crawling through a hole in the fence between Arizona and Mexico is easy compared with apprehending and deporting him after he is hidden in the interior, among others of his

152 Appropria­tions Act of February 27, 1925 (43 Stat. 1049), quoted in U. S. Department of Labor, Annual Report of the Commissioner General of Immigra­tion to the Secretary of Labor (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), 35. 153 Ibid., 36. This defini­tion was taken from a U. S. Supreme Court decision in 1916 in the case of Lew Moy et al. vs. the United States (237 Fed. 50). See Hernández, Migra!, 35; Ngai, Impos­ sible Subjects, 56. 154 Rak, Border Patrol, 17.

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own race who are legally in this country.”155 Rak hints at the danger of losing an alien’s trail once he or she reaches larger cities. The idea that most aliens became invisible once they ‘blended in’ with the rest of the popula­tion – or their racial community – in turn gave way to the idea that aliens could exist in U. S. cities undetected and at all times. The ‘illegal alien’ consequently created vague fears of foreign, dangerous, and undesired immigrants walking among an imagined homogenous, white Anglo-­Saxon popula­tion. After the Immigra­tion Act of 1924, aliens could have almost any racial, political, and na­tional background, but Chinese played a persistent role within discourses of the perilous ‘illegal alien.’ Taking a close look at the newspaper coverage about illegal immigra­tion reveals that these articles usually men­tioned the threat of Chinese reaching a “safety zone”156 once they crossed the border and escaped the gaze of immigra­tion control. As one article put it, once illegal Chinese could “get to Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, or any of the bigger cities, they may lose themselves in the Chinese quarter and get to work as laundry men or some such occupa­tion.”157 The modern metropolis became the space of de-­individualized masses, as was common in early twentieth century discourse, and offered the chance for racial Others to dissolve in their immigrant communities. This no­tion, again, drew from ideas that all Chinese looked alike and could not be identified when appearing within a larger group. A direct connec­tion linked the great number of immigrants ‘waiting’ for their chance at the border to the large immigrant communities in the cities. As one article from 1925 asserted, “[b]order cities [on the Canadian side; B. S.] are filled with Chinamen, all ready and will [sic] to be landed in big Chinese centers, like Boston or New York.”158 The Chinese quarters were presented as a means to receive the masses and render them invisible. “Captures along the border show that Boston’s Chinatown swallows up hundreds of smuggled Chinese every year,”159 stated another piece. The figurative language used to describe this process is indeed striking, as it reinforced ideas of disappearance, dissolu­tion into a larger entity, and acquired invisi­bility that made immigrants untraceable. An article in the Los Angeles Times that describes the dangers of smuggling by airplane admonished: “They [the Chinese; B. S.] could be landed at out-­of-­the-­way points and then easily make their

155 Ibid. 156 “Smuggler Chinee,” Washington Post. 157 Du Puy, “Smuggling Chinks,” (italics added). 158 John J. Donovan, “Smugglers Run Many Chinese Across The Border From Montreal To Boston,” Boston Daily Globe, August 23, 1925. 159 Ibid. (italics added).

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way to some of the larger cities, where they would melt into Chinatown […].”160 The text, ultimately, describes the collapse of both the external territorial and the internal racial boundary. The plane highlights the permeability of the land border and the possibility of detachment from territorial restric­tions by crossing three-­dimensional space. As a consequence, the illegal aliens blur the lines between illegal and legal residents of Chinatown by ‘melting’ into the quarter. Needless to say, the physical metaphor of dissolving and melting, in turn, implies that the receiving community becomes a little more alien and dubious as a whole – which describes exactly how alienness and illegality became markers of Chinese immigrants in general. More and more, popular consciousness perceived Chinese immigra­tion as an interior social problem. It was (and still is) difficult to say how many aliens successfully entered the country each year. The Saturday Evening Post, however, found a drastic way to illustrate the estimated numbers. It enlarges: “Even a conservative percen­ tage would mean enough illegal aliens to fill a metropolitan city of the smaller grade ­annually, and it is this army which the Border Patrol must combat.”161 The image of a whole city inhabited by aliens is a rather extreme analogy and a horror scenario for many readers at this time. It reinforced existing fears, widespread in popular discourse, of undetected aliens flooding into U. S. territory in large numbers. Claims that smuggling ringleaders commonly operated from U. S. Chinatowns and under the cover of unsuspecting merchants added acute emphasis to the theme of Chinese aliens.162 Only two paragraphs further down, the article gave a descrip­tion of a San Francisco merchant trafficking Orientals over the border.163 Ultimately, articles like these reinforced ideas of a Chinese secret society bringing aliens over the border as a form of slow invasion. Measures of registra­tion and control in the Chinese quarters, which resulted in deporta­tions of Chinese who could not present identifica­tion as legal immigrants, offered another way of making aliens visible. These so-­called “clean-­up surveys”164 would separate the legal immigrants from the Chinese aliens. As Ngai has emphasized, the constant threat of detec­tion and deporta­tion was a constitutive element of immigrants’ status as aliens: “The threat [of deporta­tion; B. S.] remains in the temporal and spatial ‘lag’ that exists between the act of unlawful entry and apprehension or deporta­tion.”165 The concept of illegality and alienness, thus, described a continuing process for both the Border Patrol and the immigrants themselves. 160 “Plan Halt of Chinese Smuggling,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1927 (italics added). 161 Cooper, “Two-­Legged Money,” 82. 162 See, for example, du Puy, “Smuggling Chinks Across the Border.” 163 Ibid. 164 Richard Lee Strout, “The Alien at Our Door,” Independent, March 20, 1926, 320 – 322, 322. 165 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 58.

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Chinese aliens’ alleged connec­tion to a modern form of slavery gave the concept yet another dimension of threat. Two factors contributed to this. On the one hand, the up to $2,000 Chinese paid for their passage raised ques­tions of how these aliens settled their debt to the smugglers.166 People frequently assumed Chinese aliens worked in slave-­like condi­tions until they raised enough money to pay back the smugglers. Connected to the racialized no­tion of so-­called ‘coolie’ labor, widespread during the early years of Chinese exclusion, the image of Chinese slavery endured well into the 1920s and 1930s. On the other hand, many believed Chinese smuggling rings had established an “underground railroad”167 into the United States. As the first immigrant group excluded from the United States, Chinese were said to rely on an experienced organiza­tional network. By linking illegal Chinese immigra­tion to the underground railroad that helped African Americans to escape into slavery-­free states or Canada in the nineteenth century, this belief directly associated Chinese with slavery; however, as the Chinese variant allegedly brought workers into the country in support of slave-­labor, this variant was somehow reversed. The imagined Chinese system also differed from the African American one by involving actual railroads, making use of freight trains entering the U. S. from Mexico or Canada. Trains were especially popular in the eastern part of the U. S.-Canadian border, where the ‘Chinese underground railroad’ connected Montreal with Boston and New York.168 In sum, it becomes apparent that popular discourse constructed the ‘illegal alien’ as a racialized and threatening ‘presence’ within U. S. society. Contemporary fears especially circled around the difficulties of ‘detecting’ aliens and of their alleged invisibility. The presence of the ‘illegal alien’ circumvented the contemporary idea of a homogeniza­tion of the U. S. popula­tion. The alien also circumvented the dis­ positif of border surveillance: apart from operating at the border itself, this disposi­ tif now also aimed at making the foreigner-­within visible. Ultimately, the ‘illegal

166 Informa­tion about the costs for gaining entry to the U. S. varies from article to article. In general, prices apparently rose over time from an average of $500 in the 1900s and 1910s to $2000 in the 1930s. See Cooper, “Two-­Legged Money,” 11. 167 Moore, “Smuggled Aliens,” 274. See also “Underground Railway Map,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1911; “Crime’s ‘Tube’ Located,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1913. L ­ awrence Douglas Taylor Hansen has investigated the role of the Chinese Six Companies in the crea­tion of the immigra­tion network. He concludes that while the Chinese Six Companies were not directly involved in smuggling Chinese into the country, they provided a certain organiza­ tional structure. See Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “The Chinese Six Companies of San Francisco and the Smuggling of Chinese Immigrants across the U. S.-Mexico Border, 1882 – 1930,” Journal of the Southwest 48, no. 1 (2006): 37 – 66. 168 Moore, “Smuggled Aliens,” 274; Donovan, “Smugglers Run Many Chinese.”

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alien’ posed a threat through both its status as racial Other and, paradoxically, the fact that the ‘alienness’ was not connected to visible markers distinguishing him or her from other immigrants; in turn, popular discourse expanded Chinese immigrants’ alienness to the Chinese community as a whole.

The Stranded Alien: ‘Shadows’ (1922)

A typical depic­tion of a Chinese as an alien within U. S. culture appears in Tom Forman’s 1922 film Shadows, adapted from the acclaimed short story “Ching Ching Chinaman” by Wilbur Daniel Steele.169 The narrative revolves around an old Chinese man named Yen Sin, played by Lon Chaney in one of his iconic yellowface performances. After a storm at sea, Yen Sin finds himself stranded on the shores of a small New England village, makes a home out of a small houseboat on the village’s seafront, and takes up a job as a laundryman. A plot unfolds around him that involves the newly widowed Sympathy Gibbs (Marguerite De La Motte), who marries the village’s church minister, John Malden (Harrison Ford). When the film’s antagonist, Nate Snow ( John St. Polis), blackmails Malden by forging letters which indicate that Sympathy’s abusive first husband is still alive, the Maldens’ happy marriage is threatened. As Yen Sin approaches death towards the end of the film, however, he succeeds in revealing the blackmail plot and gathers the villagers around his deathbed to solve the conflict. Having resisted Christianiza­tion before, he now turns to the Christian faith after witnessing how Reverend Malden forgives his enemy. Able to die in peace as a Christian, Yen Sin sets off with his houseboat to die on the open sea. In its portrayal of the spiritual and benevolent Chinese, the film follows contemporary film conven­tions but also departs from them in significant ways. Chaney’s supposedly positive portrayal of the wise and good-­hearted Chinese resembles depic­tions like that of Richard Barthelmess in Broken Blossoms (1919) – even insofar as the character leaves for China (and/or death) at the end. Both films feature a Chinese as a co-­protagonist who differs from contemporary villainous depic­tions and personifies a romanticized ‘celestial’ connected to philosophy and premodernity.170 Two significant points, however, set Shadows apart. The first one 169 See Wilbur Daniel Steele, “Ching, Ching, Chinaman,” in The Best Short Stories of 1917: And the Yearbook of the American Short Story, ed. Edward J. O’Brien (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1918), 441 – 4 67. First published in the Pictorial Review, June 1917. 170 Accordingly, the film’s positive recep­tion was to a large part based on appraisals for Chaney’s impersona­tion of a Chinese. See “Review of ‘Shadows,’” Life, January 11, 1923, 26; “Review

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is that Yen Sin is introduced as ‘washed ashore’ more or less involuntarily. His origin remains a mystery throughout the film. The second difference is that he is spatially and culturally no member of a Chinatown community but remains the only Chinese of the village’s popula­tion. He is stranded in the middle of a white, religious society who considers him a curiosity and a ‘heathen,’ while he remains spatially on the village’s outer limits in his houseboat; thus, Yen Sin exists quite literally as an alien immigrant outside the village’s quasi-­society. While the film touches on many social and film-­historical topics, I want to situate it within immigra­tion discourses. In one of the few scholarly analyses of the film, Alice Maurice delivers an impressive theoretical reading of it.171 ­Focusing on its inherent visual language and references to shadow play as mo­tion pictures’ medial predecessor, she argues that it “turns a story about shadows, substance, and racial stereotypes into one about the interdependence of image and audience.”172 ­Maurice’s analysis, however, operates on the film’s immanent level, whereas I want to read it from a socio-­cultural perspective. Religion certainly constitutes an important element of the film that fundamentally underscores Yen Sin’s Otherness. His Buddhism renders him an outsider of the community but also endows him with a moral purity that allows him to expose the community members’ sins. His conversion to Christianity in the film’s finale is a moment of religious reconcilia­tion for the villagers and hints at the United States’ history of missionary imperialism. As I argue, however, the narrative revolves around Yen Sin’s fundamental status as alien and sojourner. While involved in the revela­tion of other people’s intrigues, he is still situated outside of society, isolated. Indeed his role is ‘catalytic:’ he brings forth a narrative development and resolu­tion without being part of the result himself. His conversion, death, and ‘departure’ nullify his appearance and leave the village transformed but, from a racial perspective, as monolithically white as before. Rather than a heavenly interven­tion, Yen Sin serves as the constitutive Other that allows the villagers to recognize their own identities. An underlying theme of the film is its narra­tion of (illegal) Chinese immigra­ tion. When Yen Sin first appears in the film, a heavy storm which left many fisher­ men dead, including Sympathy’s husband, washes him ashore. The only other survivor presumes that Yen Sin was a cook on one of the ships that sank during the storm, but his true origin remains a mystery; thus, Yen Sin’s appearance on of ‘Shadows,’” Photoplay, January 1923, 67; Mae Tinée, “Clever Story and Cast Make Superb Film,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 9, 1923, 17. 171 See Alice Maurice, “What the Shadow Knows: Race, Image, and Meaning in Shadows (1922),” Cinema Journal 47, no. 3 (2008): 66 – 89. 172 Ibid., 67.

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Figure 61  Yen Sin (left, Lon Chaney) and Nate Snow (John St. Polis). Film still from Shadows (B. P. Schulberg, 1922). Courtesy of the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.

U. S. shores is the result of higher forces and an out-­of-­the-­ordinary occurrence for the villagers. The storm which caused him to be washed up at the country’s shore recalls persistent metaphors of immigrant waves and uncontrollable floods characteristic of immigra­tion discourses. Yen Sin’s status becomes apparent when the villagers run to the beach and surround the second survivor, while Yen Sin remains outside the group alone. After hearing that all the other fishermen died in the storm, the gathered villagers kneel down on the beach to pray, but Yen Sin remains standing and, when confronted by Minister Nate Snow, is forced to walk away from the scene (see fig. 61). However, his decision to stay in the village leads him to work as a laundryman, a job stereotypically associated with Chinese immigrants. Moreover, his need to live and work on a houseboat underlines his ambivalent posi­tion within the community. As Maurice correctly asserts, his houseboat “seems more firmly anchored to his ancient culture and customs than to the American shore.”173 He is docked at the rest of the village but at the same time remains on its margins on the water. This arrangement enables him to ‘return home’ in the end of the

173 Ibid., 74.

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film or, as he calls it, “going China-­way.” In an early scene of the film, the town’s children harass Yen Sin, and moments later they and a number of adults grab his basket of laundry and scatter its contents onto the street; nevertheless, he later manages to befriend one of the boys, whom he calls “Mister Bad Boy” (Buddy Messenger). It is striking that nearly all scenes that take place in the village include a gathered crowd that observes and comments on the narrative events, further emphasizing Yen Sin’s rather lonesome life outside the community. The film audience sees the townspeople gathered outside the home of the Malden family, the harbor, or in church, attending mass. In this regard, it is significant that the villagers meet inside Yen Sin’s houseboat at the end of the film. Only in light of his religious conversion at the end do they enter his space. Ultimately, this detail gives the last scene a strong impression of imperialistic missionary work. As much as Yen Sin remains excluded from society, he can connect to other Chinese outside the village. In fact, only through his correspondence with another Chinese laundryman is he able to unveil the true plot behind the blackmail against Malden. Malden is attending a conference in Infield when he receives the first letter from Sympathy’s first husband, who claims that he did not drown in the storm and demands money for not revealing this fact to Sympathy, which would ruin their happy marriage. At this point, the audience does not know that the true author of the letter is Nate Snow, who is at the conference with Malden. Yen Sin, however, had advised Malden to see his friend Sam Low (uncredited actor) for his laundry service during his stay in Infield. In his stereotypical Pidgin English he states: “Mista Minista go to Sam Low Laundry—Infield. He my flen’— washee velly fine, too.” Sam Low realizes that something is wrong when he meets Malden and follows him, watching him deposit the money requested by the blackmailer. Only later in the film, when the villagers gather around Yen Sin’s death bed and listen to his revela­tions, is it explained to the audience how Yen Sin learned the true identity of the blackmailer. The final scenes reveal that Yen Sin is part of a secret communica­tion network between Chinese immigrants. He secretly marks the laundry of his customers to identify it, writing down short descrip­tions of his customers on the collars of their shirts. “Chinaman never know people’s name so he give people name they mean to him,” Yen Sin explains. Through these marks, he had also contacted the Infield laundryman Sam Low, asking him to take care of Malden. Sam Low, obviously used to this mode of communica­tion, wrote back to Yen Sin and told him about the true nature of the blackmailing. With both Malden and the blackmailer Nate Snow gathered around his death bed, Yen Sin can make Snow confess his misdoing in public. This communica­tion channel between Yen Sin and Sam Low is remarkable. It contradicts his status of social

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Figure 62  Yen Sin pointing at Snow/the camera. Screenshot from Shadows (B. P. Schulberg, 1922).

exclusion as the only non-­white, non-­Christian immigrant in the village and instead suggests that Yen Sin is connected to virtually every Chinese in the U. S. immigrant community. While, of course, the purpose of this network serves a positive aim – the confession of sin and re-­installment of the married couple –, it hints at the possibilities of hidden immigrant networks unknown to white mainstream society. This episode addi­tionally puts Yen Sin in an extremely powerful posi­tion wherein he deviates significantly from his peaceful characteriza­tion. The shot in which he forces Snow to confess draws visually from contemporary Yellow Peril imagery. Yen Sin suddenly reveals a darker side, his face distorted in anger and his long, bony fingers pointed accusingly at Snow – and the audience. He points in the direc­ tion of the camera, merging Snow’s gaze with that of the audience (see fig. 62). Yen Sin, therefore, suddenly appears in a powerful and erratic posi­tion, but Snow’s confession and, ultimately, Yen Sin’s own Christianiza­tion serve to contain his dominance. For him, Snow’s confession and Malden’s reac­tion to his friend’s betrayal constitute a test of Christian morality and forgiveness. When Malden demonstrates a willingness to forgive his former friend’s misdoings, Yen Sin recognizes Christianity’s virtues and ceases to oppose his conversion. The final scenes, then, show him alone in his houseboat, praying. With the last of his energy, he manages to stand up, leave the room, and remove the tows of his boat. To the bystanders on the shore, he announces: “Mista Yen Sin go China-­way pletty quick.” Here, China represents both the territorial entity of his homeland and, in a metaphorical sense, death and afterlife. Significantly, he does not speak of Christian heaven. He is still inextricably linked to his homeland and, by extension, unconnected to the villagers watching him leave. Ultimately, he appears as a sojourner in the United States, returning to his homeland after his ‘job’ is done and remaining an alien outsider throughout.

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Covering Illegal Immigra­tion: ‘I Cover the Waterfront’ (1933) and ‘Yellow Cargo’ (1936)

Representa­tions of alien Chinese shifted significantly in the 1930s, when the media publicized more on the topic of illegal immigra­tion. Depic­tions moved away from portrayals of premodern Chinese as either overtly spiritual or lower-­class ­workers connected to urban vices. This development touches on other fields of filmic depic­ tion as well and resonates throughout this study, but it is striking that, apart from the border films, illegal Chinese immigra­tion to larger cities away from the border becomes a feature for a number of films. It is also no coincidence that these films focus regularly on journalists who investigate illegal immigra­tion. As we have already seen, journalism in the late 1920s and early 1930s played an important role in directing public atten­tion towards the topic of illegal aliens, and journalists were, to a certain degree, the interior’s equivalent to the border cowboy. Even more compelling, the films portrayed journalism as a similarly gendered profession, requiring similar traits of masculine smartness, toughness, and strength of will. As the articles discussed above illustrated, journalists aimed at taking their readers to the ‘front line’ of illegal immigra­tion, and, in a number of films, they served to reveal hidden smuggling rings. In the films discussed here, one can see how newspaper journalism and mo­tion pictures formed two sides of the same coin – that is, a visual disposi­ tif which produced knowledge of illegal immigrants and aimed at making them visible in their coverage, in cultural discourses, and for the larger political agenda. The 1933 film I Cover the Waterfront, directed by James Cruze, portrays an ambitious reporter who faces opposi­tion from both his boss and the police in his pursuit of a smuggling gang. A veteran ‘waterfront’ reporter, H. Joseph ‘Joe’ Miller (Ben Lyon), accuses fisherman Eli Kirk (Ernest Torrence) of bringing Chinese immigrants into the country by boat. In order to prove his theory, Miller starts going out with Kirk’s daughter Julie Kirk (Claudette Colbert) and eventually falls in love with her. Towards the end of the film, his success in exposing Julie’s father as a criminal establishes him as a reporter but also leaves him without his newfound lover. Kirk, however, succeeds in escaping the police, and when Miller goes after him, both end up severely wounded. Realizing his daughter’s love for Miller, Kirk sacrifices his own life to save Miller’s, which reunites the couple and leads to the happy ending. In its portrayal of alcohol, sex, and violence, the film has a distinctively pre-­code character and is loosely based on the successful book of the same name by Max Miller, published in 1932.174 174 See Max Miller, I Cover the Waterfront (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1932); for comments on the adapta­tion, see, for example, “Last Torrence Film Masterly Bit of Acting,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1933.

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The role of journalism and Miller’s efforts to investigate the case without help from the police is indeed significant. Many reviews have focused on the ques­tion of authenticity in the film’s portrayal of journalism. Miller, in fact, has a peculiar and controversial method of investiga­tion that regularly leads to arguments with his chief editor and the police, who do not believe his accusa­tions until he delivers proofs. While the Washington Post called the film “one of the most thrilling and realistic newspaper stories to come to light,” others debunked its heroic depic­tions of the outlaw journalist as a film myth.175 Scholars dedicated to the portrayal of journalists in mo­tion pictures have emphasized that these figures hold an ambivalent posi­tion between idealism and truth-­seeking resolve on the one hand and corrup­tion and immorality on the other. Following Matthew C. Ehr­lich’s thoughts, this ambiguity is what makes these characteriza­tions historically and culturally significant.176 A closer look at I Cover the Waterfront reveals that the film contrasts Miller’s positive portrayal with the one of his companion McCoy (Hobart Cavanaugh), a reporter from Detroit who is constantly drunk and whose character delivers a few comedy moments but has no purpose within the main narrative. Instead, Miller embodies the hard-­boiled daredevil capable of outsmarting the smugglers and triumphing over the police’s incapacity and his boss’s mistrust. His unorthodox and rebellious attitude, indeed, makes him a Border Patrol equivalent and ideal male hero defending the na­tion against illegal aliens. There are two major scenes in I Cover the Waterfront that describe the smuggling of Chinese immigrants and point to the peculiar posi­tion of the Chinese alien. The first one serves to show the audience that Eli Kirk is indeed the smuggler Miller accuses him of being. We see Kirk with his friend Ortegus (Maurice Black) on a fishing boat on the open sea. On the floor behind them lies a Chinese man with his hands and feet bound. Kirk explains that he received 700 dollars for the man’s passage and confesses to Ortegus: “You know, they ain’t bad folks. And somebody’s got to do the washing.” Then he seizes one of the large fish lying next to him and steps on it, revealing a bottle of liquor hidden inside its mouth; thus, the audience learns that Kirk is smuggling both Chinese and alcohol into the 175 W. A. Whitney, “Review of ‘I Cover the Waterfront,’” Washington Post, June 10, 1933. The New York Times criticized the film’s “Hollywood concep­tion of the manners in which another reporter berates his city editor” and Miller as “one of those newspaper geniuses to be found only in mo­tion pictures.” Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen,” New York Times, May 18, 1933. Similarly, the Chicago Daily Tribune suggested that “script writers really should have a year’s practical newspaper experience. They’d be surprised!” “Last Torrence Film,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1933. 176 See Matthew C. Ehr­lich, Journalism in the Movies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 1 – 19.

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U. S. This technique of hiding contraband foreshadows the climactic smuggling scene later in the film. The scene continues with a coast-­g uard ship appearing on the horizon, which prompts Kirk to tie the Chinese man with an anchor chain. His men haul the Chinese over the railing and wait for Kirk’s signal to drop him in the water and obliterate any evidence of his business. When the coast guard continues to approach, Kirk gives the signal and explains that the Chinese “knows he’s got to take a chance to get in the States,” signaling that, in his view, it is not within his responsibility that Chinese risk their lives in order to enter the country. While this scene reinforces the immoral character of the smugglers and must have been shocking to contemporary audiences, the practice of letting Chinese immigrants drown to prevent detec­tion was common according to newspaper reports.177 ­Allegedly, smugglers unleashed this cruelty only on Chinese immigrants, as they were said to pay on arrival rather than before their passage, making smugglers avoid the risk of both getting caught and not receiving any money. The Chinese in I Cover the Water­ front are literally reduced to objects that can be disposed of like other contraband. The second scene depicts how Miller exposes Kirk’s smuggling activities by showing the police where the aliens are hidden. Returning to the harbor with his boat, Kirk finds Miller and the police waiting for him. Miller has informed the police about the fisherman’s dubious hunting trip for sharks. The officers search the boat for illegal Chinese but cannot find any evidence of smuggling. Miller, however, sees one of the fish stuffed with liquor and concludes that the Chinese are similarly hidden inside the giant sharks on the boat’s deck. When the police are about to let Kirk go, Miller takes a knife and cuts open one of the sharks, revealing a Chinese hidden inside its body.178 The advertisements for the film utilized graphic illustra­tions for this scene, accompanied by a short text that highlights the journalistic investiga­tions shown in it (see fig. 63). Purporting to ‘quote’ Miller, it proclaims: “I’ve seen chinamen smuggled into the country in the bellies of sharks – and seen the poor devils thrown overboard – and drowned – ALIVE – to destroy evidence.” After the shark scene, the film then cuts to the following day’s headlines, which summarize the events just witnessed, further emphasizing the journalistic dimension (see fig. 64).

177 See Cooper, “Two-­Legged Money,” 10; Miller, “Outwitting Alien Smugglers.” 178 The biblical reference to Jonah and the whale did not go unnoticed by the producers; thus, before Miller cuts open the shark’s body, he asks Kirk if he knows the story. It is also a suggested angle for the film’s promo­tion in the press book, which proclaimed “modern Jonah version adds dramatic touch to filming of ‘I Cover the Waterfront.’ Press book for I Cover the Waterfront (Washington, DC: United Artists, 1933), 7. Copyright Collec­tion, Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Figure 63 (left)  Advertisement. Press book for I Cover the Waterfront (Washington, DC: United Artists, 1933), 5. Courtesy of the Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Figure 64 (right)  Headlines. Screenshot from I Cover the Waterfront (United Artists, 1933).

The shark scene points to two important elements. First, it shows the specific posi­tion of illegal Chinese immigra­tion in U. S. journalism. Miller’s ambi­tion to uncover the smuggling ring surpasses the investiga­tions of the police, who appear rather clueless compared to Kirk. The audience of the film is in turn taken to the front lines of the fight against illegal immigra­tion. In this regard, the filmic narrative parallels the narratives of newspaper features on illegal aliens. In fact, the depic­tion of headlines resembling contemporary newspaper articles creates a unique interrela­tion between the fic­tional filmic narrative and factual newspaper coverage, for it assigns the film the role of authenticating journalistic coverage and vice versa.179 Second, the Chinese immigrants hold both an objectified and an animal-­like posi­tion. The immigrants are brought over the border in the same manner as the bottles of liquor – only on a larger scale. The absurdity of transporting people inside sharks also connects Chinese immigrants to no­tions of serving as ‘prey’ for other animals – and criminal smugglers. It furthermore takes common assump­tions of Chinese being willing to endure extreme hardships to another level. Here, Chinese aliens appear as ultimately foreign people, and the strangeness of their methods for entering the U. S. evokes their racial Otherness.

179 This is further reinforced by the fact that Joe Miller’s character is based on ex-­journalist Max Miller, who authored the book the film is adapted from.

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A similar approach to the theme of illegal Chinese immigra­tion was c­ hosen in Yellow Cargo from 1936. Directed by Crane Wilbur for Grand Na­tional Pictures, it composed the first of four so-­called ‘G-man’ films starring Conrad Nagel and Eleanor Hunt.180 Nagel plays Allan O’Connor, an agent sent to Los Angeles by the Bureau of Immigra­tion to investigate a smuggling ring. In Los Angeles, he meets newspaper reporter Bobbie Reynolds (Eleanor Hunt), who mistakes him for a Broadway actor. Using his cover as an actor, O’Connor infiltrates a fake film produc­tion company supposedly working on a film that involves a great number of extras dressed as Chinese. While shooting on an island near the coast, the produc­tion team exchanges the white actors for Chinese immigrants and returns to Los Angeles with them, where they go unnoticed by the police. Allan succeeds in sneaking onto the set, but Bobbie and her photographer Speedy ‘Bulb’ Callahan (Vince Barnett) are caught by the smugglers. A car chase ensues, but ultimately Allan catches the smugglers and rescues the two. Bobbie reveals that she is also an undercover agent w ­ orking for the Department of Justice before she and Allan drive away together as the film’s romantic couple. The film was fairly well received for one of the B-category, which composed an integral part of the double feature trend in 1930s cinema. Variety attested to Yellow Cargo as featuring “a plot that has a certain amount of freshness and pretty good entertainment pull.”181 Other reviews also acknowledged the film’s innovative story, crediting it as a solid produc­tion for a low budget film.182 Arguably, the film profited from the star legacy of Conrad Nagel, who had been a popular actor since the silent era and whose image fit the G-man characteristics and intelligence in his role as Allan O’Connor. The promo­tional material for the film focused strongly on both the G-man appeal on the one hand and the romantic one on the other. One of the advertisements for the film combines them strikingly (see fig. 65). Its visual language shows Conrad Nagel protecting Eleanor Hunt against a surrounding group of stereotypically sketched Chinese. It is thus the secret agent who protects the white female against Chinese aliens – not at the border but within the mainland United States.

180 According to the Internet Movie Database, the film was re-­released under the title Sinful Cargo in 1947, which is the version I was able to view for my study. The archival press book I use, however, is from the original release. The other titles of the series are Navy Spy (1937), The Gold Racket (1937), and Bank Alarm (1937). 181 “Review of ‘Yellow Cargo,’” Variety, November 18, 1936, 29. 182 See, for example, “Review of ‘Yellow Cargo,’” Mo­tion Picture Daily, June 4, 1936, 12; “Review of ‘Yellow Cargo,’” Film Daily, June 6, 1936, 7.

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Figure 65  Film poster. Press book for Yellow Cargo (n. p.: Grand Na­tional Pictures, 1936), 5. Courtesy of the Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

In its depic­tion of illegal immigra­tion happening in the midst of Hollywood, Yellow Cargo visualizes the omnipresent danger of illegal aliens within U. S. metropolises. In one of the early scenes, the audience witnesses how one of the smugglers transports Chinese over the Mexican border in the back of a large hearse. This first rather ‘tradi­ tional’ smuggling attempt does not work out as planned, and the criminals have to knock out a police officer who wants to have a look at their cargo. Both the police officer and the audience see several Chinese lying under the sheets in the hearse’s back, disguised as alleged victims of a mining accident. While the border seems to be under surveillance, the smugglers’ strategy of using the Los Angeles coast for their business proves more successful. In the Los Angeles harbor, they fill a boat with white extras in Chinese clothes and yellowface makeup before heading for a shoot on an island near the coast. The film team then pretends to have an argument about the script and cancels the shooting, giving all actors a ticket for the ferry (see fig. 66). In the evening, the smugglers return to the dock with their boat, making the police officer think the Chinese men are still the actors they left with in the morning. Undisturbed by immigra­tion control, they bring the Chinese into large

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Figure 66  Scene on the film set. Screenshot from Yellow Cargo (Condor, 1936).

buses and disappear. O’Connor infiltrates the second shooting by posing as one of the actors and stays behind when the smugglers play the same trick. Ironically, O’Connor then mingles with the group of Chinese aliens and, wearing yellowface, aims at passing as one of them, but on their arrival the smugglers realize there is an addi­tional Chinese man when one of the immigrants points at O’Connor to reveal him as white. Confronting the smugglers, O’Conner takes a bullet and is unable to follow the gang. Yellow Cargo highlights the importance of mo­tion pictures within discourses of illegal immigra­tion in an almost self-­reflective, metacritical perspective. Not only do the fake film producers in the movie exploit the common use of yellowface in Holly­wood to disguise the aliens they bring to Los Angeles; they also turn white actors into ‘real’ Chinese. The film also offers an ironic take on the medium’s own effect on public percep­tions of Chinese within U. S. popular culture. On a metalevel, Yellow Cargo exposes the structural mechanisms of cinema that make Chinese immigrants visible to the mainstream public. The medium’s own productive role in ­constructing racialized knowledge and visibility manifests itself in Yellow Cargo through the motif of the film produc­tion physically bringing Chinese ‘coolies’ into the country.183 Significantly, the film ridicules the use of yellowface while at the same time marking the authentic Chinese shown in the film as illegal aliens. The scenes that show both O’Connor and Bobbie’s clumsy photographer ‘Bulb’ in yellowface on the boat and on set serve as a comedic element and, to a certain degree, illustrate the absurdity of using white actors in allegedly Chinese makeup. At one point,

183 This self-­reflexivity shows also in the fact that Yellow Cargo’s director, Wilbur Crane, plays one of the producers in the film.

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O’Connor even asks the producers why they would not use Chinese instead, reite­ rating an accusa­tion that could be targeted at the film industry in general. But the strange effect of the makeup also underscores the film’s portrayal of Chinese aliens as Other. The bodily markers reinforce the no­tion that the Chinese brought into the country are ultimately illegal immigrants and foreigners. Ironically, the Chinese men have to pass as white actors passing as Chinese, making them conform to yellowface conven­tions of clothing and facial features. Further underscoring the alienness of Chinese, the film never shows any Chinese Americans. Instead, it features a scene where Bobbie, who acts as a journalist, sets out to report the arrival of the ‘Chinese revolu­tionary general’ (uncredited actor), who is in the United States for a state visit. Bobbie does a short interview with him, but the absence of an interpreter thwarts communica­tion. It remains unclear why this scene is included in the movie at all, except as a reference to the political turmoil between Na­tionalists and Communists in China. Within the narrative, the scene leads to the fake film producers, who leave from the same harbor a few minutes later. In the end, the unnamed general and his entourage are the only Chinese shown besides the illegal immigrants; thus, Chinese are marked as either visiting representatives of their country or as aliens, as either non-­American foreigners or immigrant law-­breakers.

Reversed Perspectives: Chinese Americans Fighting Smugglers in ‘Daughter of Shanghai’ (1937)

In 1937, Paramount Pictures released a remarkable film that offered a completely new perspective on portrayals of illegal immigra­tion and even of Chinese Ameri­ cans in general. Daughter of Shanghai, directed by Robert Florey for Paramount Pictures, marks a departure from film conven­tions on many levels. It features popular Chinese American actress Anna May Wong and Korean American actor Philip Ahn as protagonists pursuing a smuggling ring. Wong plays Lan Ying Lin, daughter of a wealthy Chinese merchant in San Francisco’s Chinatown. When her father refuses to employ illegal Chinese immigrants brought in by the smuggling ring, he is murdered in front of her eyes. On the same day, she is introduced to Kim Lee (Philip Ahn), a G-man from Washington investigating the smuggling ring, known for its frequent, cruel practice of dropping immigrants from planes above the open water to avoid detec­tion. Lan Ying, however, decides to find the people behind her father’s murder on her own and travels to a tropical island off the Central American coast, where the smugglers operate a nightclub that func­tions as a base for their opera­tions. She works as

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an exotic dancer so she can get closer to the club’s boss, Otto Hartman (Charles Bickford). Here she meets G-man Kim Lee again, who has infiltrated the ring by disguising himself as a sailor, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to obtain evidence, the two are caught. They manage to escape and find themselves in the U. S. again, where they learn that a friend and regular customer of Lan Ying’s father, Mrs. Hunt (Cecil Cunningham), is the head of the ring. With the help of the police, the investigators catch Mrs. Hunt and her associates, and the film ends with Kim Lee proposing to Lan Ying. For the first time in a mo­tion picture, Chinese Americans actively trail the criminal ac­tions of a white smuggling ring – with a female boss. The coupling of the first ever Asian American G-man, Kim Lee, and the smart, Americanized Lan Ying presented a novelty in filmic depic­tion. In her reading of the film, Hye Seung Chung has argued that the artistic freedom of the B-movie genre during the 1930s and 1940s, where producers could experiment more, accounted in part for this departure.184 Several other addi­tional elements influenced the produc­tion of the film, such as both actors’ specific careers. As Chung argues, the film seeks to emulate the popularity of Chinese detective films like the 1930s’ Charlie Chan series and the increasing sympathy in the U. S. for Chinese culture before and during the Sino-­Japanese war. This context also led to the decision to cast Korean Ameri­can actor Philip Ahn as a Chinese American and even introduce him as such in promo­tional material. As a consequence, the film holds an ambivalent posi­tion between pro-­exclusionist discourse and positive portrayal of Asian Americans. As Chung asserts, the film “captures the rebound of yellowphilia’s predilec­tion for good, likable Orientals against the backdrop of yellowphobia erected against illegal immigrants.”185 In the film’s beginning, for instance, Lan Ying has previously never heard of illegal immigra­tion, which is symptomatic of this ambivalence. Moreover, at no point does the film give an explana­tion for why Chinese need to enter the country illegally, thereby concealing the U. S. exclusionist policy as the reason for the desolate situa­tion of the immigrants shown in the film. Instead, the promo­ tional material emphasized the scandalous percep­tions of illegal immigra­tion

184 See Hye Seung Chung, “Between Yellowphilia and Yellowphobia: Ethnic Stardom and the (Dis)Orientalized Romantic Couple in ‘Daughter of Shanghai’ and ‘King of Chinatown,’” in East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture, ed. Shilpa Davé et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 154 – 182. See also Chung’s book on Philip Ahn, Hye Seung Chung, Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-­Ethnic Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 185 Chung, “Yellowphilia,” 158.

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similar to the way contemporary newspaper coverage would. One poster for the film featured shocking facts: “Did you know that thousands of aliens are smuggled annually into the U. S. A.? Did you know that blackmailers bleed them to the tune of $1,000,000 a year? Did you know that 100,000 of these illegal entrants are subjects for Relief ? Did you know that 3,500,000 more have taken the jobs of American citizens?”186

This rhetoric parallels contemporary coverage, as we have already seen, and is also evident in the film’s opening scenes. The first thing the audience sees are several newspaper headlines flying onto the screen: “Foreign Horde Floods U. S.,” “Human Cargo Payoff Totals Millions,” and “Uncover Coast Smuggling Ring.” A scene that shows an airborne smuggling plane follows. When the pilots realize a federal plane is following them, they pull a lever and drop the load of immigrants over the open sea. Consequently, while the film offers a rare example of Chinese Americans as being positively portrayed, leading protagonists, it still builds on anti-­alien sentiment. It distinguishes between Chinese already present in the U. S., depicted as thoroughly Americanized, and Chinese immigrants outside the country, used in the film to erect the scenario of an external threat. The protagonists’ racial and immigrant identity remains ambivalent as well, connecting them to the film’s theme of illegal immigra­tion. While Chung reads a specific scene in the film to point to the actor’s hybrid identity both on and off the screen, I want to demonstrate how Kim Lee and Lan Ying actually ‘become’ Chinese aliens later on. During Lan Ying’s employment as a dancer in the tropic dance hall, she performs under the stage name ‘Daughter of Shanghai.’187 Dressed in Oriental garments, she performs exotic dances in front of the audience and so conforms to Orientalist expecta­tions for the audience both in the film and in the theater. The Americanized Lan Ying is thus ‘re-­orientalized’ and gives a performance that scholar Yiman Wang has termed “yellow yellowface.”188 Analyzing 186 According to Chung, the story that formed the basis for the script was inspired by a news­ paper article in the Los Angeles Times about a smuggling ring operating similarly to the one in the film. See Chung, “Yellowphilia,” 156. 187 On a metalevel, the fact that the film uses Lan Ying’s stage name for its title shows how Orien­ talist discourse persisted when it came to catching the audience’s atten­tion. Chung shortly men­tions that the film’s original title was ‘Across the River,’ but the producers wanted a more Orientalist one. See ibid., 168. 188 Yiman Wang, “The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong’s Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Era,” Camera Obscura 60 (2005): 159 – 191.

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Wong’s frequent appearances as an exotic dancer throughout her career, Wang interprets these dances as a challenge to Orientalist conven­tions and a strate­g y that “denaturalized the category of the Asian by mimicking and highlighting the process of producing stereotypical Asian images.”189 Chung’s reading goes in a similar direc­tion. She describes the moment in the film when Lan Ying stands on the stage and suddenly sees Kim Lee disguised as a sailor in the audience before her, working undercover for the smuggling ring, as a “gaze of recogni­tion.”190 This gaze both encompasses the intra-­filmic recogni­tion of Kim Lee and Lan Ying – who have not seen each other since the murder and who investigate the same case independently, in different disguises – and parallels the potential gaze of Asian American audiences in the theater, who can decode the “cross-­ethnic masque­ rade of Oriental actors”191 like Korean American Philip Ahn’s impersona­tion of a Chinese American. By exposing their own masquerade within the narrative and to the audience, both Ahn and Wong gain a posi­tion of agency within the visual limits of mo­tion picture representa­tion. The re-­orientaliza­tion of the two protagonists goes even further, as I argue, and is tied to the process of ‘becoming aliens’ themselves in the progression of the film. After Kim Lee and Lan Ying are reunited, they meet secretly to discuss their plans. Kim Lee advises her to leave the island by taking the next outbound ship, which also forms part of the smuggler’s next opera­tion and will carry a number of immigrants to the U. S. coast. In order to escape, Lan Ying disguises herself as a male Chinese worker to mingle with the rest of the immigrants. She hides her long hair under a Chinese hat and slips into simple clothes. When the smugglers check the immigrants boarding the ship, one of their men grows suspicious of Lan Ying’s androgynous appearance. Fortunately, Kim Lee, who is standing next to her and is still working undercover for the criminal gang, uses his acquired rank within the smuggling ring to avert further trouble and pass her off as the brother of the Chinese on the list whose identity she’s adopted. Within minutes, Lan Ying exchanges her disguise as a sexualized, exotic dancer on stage for that of a Chinese ‘coolie’ soon to be smuggled into the United States. This scene reinforces how immigra­tion and the border are always connected to class, 189 Ibid., 171. 190 Chung, “Yellowphilia,” 170. 191 Ibid., 170 – 172. Chung continues: “The visual and aural incongruities stemming from Ahn’s ­ethnic and linguistic masquerade create an uninten­tional narrative rupture, thereby ­exacerbating spectatorial distance for Chinese-­speaking and Korean-­speaking audiences who are torn between the subversive pleasure of ethnic recogni­tion (‘knowing better’ than the producers and mainstream audiences) and their unsettling aliena­tion from diegesis which distorts and misrepresents their cultural identities.” Ibid., 172.

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race, and gender boundaries: Lan Ying has to pass as a typical male Chinese alien. Indirectly, it expresses the gendered nature of Chinese exclusion, as it was specifically directed against females of allegedly immoral character. Lan Ying consequently exchanges her gender, class status, and her Chinese American identity for that of a stereotypical Chinese, further accentuating the re-­orientaliza­tion that began with her role as a dancer. After the ship’s departure, however, a strand of hair sticking out from under her hat exposes Lan Ying’s disguise. Since she occupies a large room together with the other male immigrants, this provokes a large brawl. Kim Lee and the rest of the smugglers avert the implied rape, but ultimately the fight exposes both Kim Lee’s and Lan Ying’s disguise and leads to them being handcuffed. While at this point of the film the smugglers overpower the Asian American characters, the scenes that follow articulate a significant act of resistance and immigrant agency. Kim Lee and Lan Ying, loaded into the smugglers’ plane, are about to face the same fate as the immigrants in the beginning: being dropped into the open sea to be eaten by sharks. While lying gagged and bound in the back of the small waterplane, Lan Ying succeeds in loosening the rope around her hands to free herself and Kim Lee. When the two smugglers in the front check on them, they act as if they are still bound. When the smugglers pull the lever to open the hatch that releases their ‘cargo,’ Lan Ying clings to Kim Lee, who holds on to the plane with one arm to prevent both from falling out. The camera shows them hanging above the water far below, until finally, the hatch closes again and the smugglers are left to believe the two fell. The scene’s resemblance to the opening of the film literally turns Lan Ying and Kim Lee into smuggled aliens. While their attempt to ‘re-­immigrate’ into the U. S. from the tropical island via the ship may have failed, their situa­tion inside the plane still parallels methods of illegal immigra­tion, so that the preca­rious and life-­threatening situa­tion they find themselves in matches that of the illegal aliens. In this scene, the two protagonists embody the objectified status of aliens as contraband, but unlike other films in this chapter, the audience identifies with the aliens. From this perspective, the refusal to be dropped into the sea articulates the refusal to be objectified like contraband, as passive victims of ruthless smugglers. While the two are in fact U. S. citizens, their journey mirrors the daily difficulties of illegal immigrants. The scene expresses a desire to challenge tradi­ tional depic­tions of illegal immigrants and actively works to give them a place and voice inside U. S. society. The portrayal of Kim Lee along the conven­tional lines of the capable and heroic federal agent who saves both their lives in a spectacular stunt underscores this inten­tion. More generally, the film also breaks with filmic conven­tions of showing Chinese aliens only on the margins of the

Conclusion  |

narrative and excluding them from screen. They not only survive the smugglers’ attempted murder but in the end also succeed in bringing down the gangster ring with the help of the police. The depic­tion of immigrant agency is also apparent in the film’s penultimate scene, where we see the two sitting in the backseat of a car. After a short dialogue, Kim Lee asks Lan Ying if she wants to come to Washington with him and then proposes to her. What follows is a short exchange of ­Cantonese dialogue without any subtitles, marking the last scene that shows the two before the end credits roll. This unprecedented use of Cantonese, which the white audience is unlikely to understand, is as ambivalent as the rest of the film. While it serves as a form of “sonic Orientalism”192 to mark the couple’s Otherness, it also presents an act of resistance to film conven­tions. Against the backdrop of the underlying theme of illegal immigra­tion, the scene literally gives the Asian American gone-­immigrant couple a voice. Daughter of Shanghai, as I argue, indeed offers a departure from filmic conven­tions of illegal Chinese immigra­ tion. Notwithstanding its ambiva­lent posi­tion, the film showcases the first cautious accounts of new forms of representa­tion that were only possible in B-movies of the late 1930s.

4.3 Conclusion The exclusionist policy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to the solidifica­tion of U. S. boundaries. The preceding chapter was concerned the recogni­tion of these boundaries as both territorial and racial. The U. S.-Mexico border became one of the central ‘arenas’ of na­tionalist and immigra­tion discourse. Charged with ideological meaning through the exclusionist political climate, it also very literally manifested as an impermeable and patrolled territorial ­boundary in early decades of the twentieth century. The ‘imaginary line’ that separated the inside from the outside not only manifested on the na­tion’s outer borders, it also constructed Chinese Americans as aliens and ‘foreigners-­within.’ This time period saw a heightened awareness for those immigrants already within the ‘body politic,’ spawning the impetus to reveal supposed aliens and make them visible both in a concrete sense and regarding public debates.

192 Chung, “Yellowphilia,” 174. I depart from Chung’s reading of this scene, which focuses more on the Orientalist effect.

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Mo­tion pictures, as I argued, helped to make these boundaries visible and intelligible for U. S. audiences. They formed a powerful element within the larger visual dispositif of border surveillance and the visualiza­tion of the Chinese as illegal aliens. During a time when ques­tions of who was allowed inside the U. S. na­tion arose, mo­tion pictures contributed to the visual knowledge of the – both abstract and concrete – limits of the American ‘imagined community.’ The chapter therefore provided a new innovative account on how mo­tion pictures contributed to the forma­tion of a white na­tional identity by visualizing solidified and ideologically charged boundaries and by providing a visual language for the exclusion of the Other. The first sec­tion of this chapter revolved around the emergence of the territorial border to Mexico and the visual culture that created illegal Chinese immigrants. Transforming from an initial ‘line in the sand’ to a fenced and patrolled ­boundary, the U. S.-Mexico border’s manifesta­tion was closely linked to the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. The process also involved the aim to make the territory as well as the immigrants that crossed it visible. Mo­tion pictures depicted the ‘constant warfare’ of the Border Patrol, most often in the western genre. These films disseminated knowledge regarding the geographical limits of the United States and helped audiences identify with the men who ‘guarded’ the line against the seemingly relentless attempts of illegal Chinese border crossings. The degree to which the geographical boundary was always also a culturally charged concept became apparent in the fact that illegal immigrants had to cross racial and gender boundaries in order to ‘pass’ the boundary to the United States. Newspaper coverage and juvenile literature of the 1920s and 1930s addi­tionally identified with the border agents and took their readers to the alleged front line. Mo­tion pictures imitated this narrative structure and, most importantly, added a visual quality. The narrative structure of the analyzed films also corresponded to the exclusion of Chinese: mo­tion pictures portrayed Chinese on the margins – as intruders, nameless objects, and smuggled goods. In the second part of this chapter, the focus shifted from the territorial ­boundary to the racial. Following Ngai’s thoughts on the construc­tion of the alien and the forma­tion of impossible subjects, I investigated how mo­tion pictures produced a visuality of the Chinese alien which, ultimately, marked every Chinese Ameri­can as a potentially illegal immigrant. The films discussed in this chapter either underscore the foreignness of Chinese immigrants like the ‘stranded’ alien in Shadows (1922) or articulated the no­tion that Chinese infiltrated U. S. society through their – often spectacular – attempts to enter the country. In a number of films, the press again played an important role. These films portrayed reporters as an inland equivalent to the agents of the Border Patrol,

Conclusion  |

who helped to ‘uncover’ illegal Chinese immigrants in U. S. cities. A departure from these visual conven­tions became apparent in the last film discussed in this chapter, The Daughter of Shanghai (1937). By offering identifica­tion with Asian American protagonists and reversing the perspective to the ‘outside,’ this film highlighted how mo­tion pictures were also able to circumvent visual tradi­tions and hint at cultural shifts. This chapter has demonstrated that mo­tion pictures, as an element of a broader visual dispositif, could negotiate and reproduce a visual culture that directly related to the political agenda of ‘keeping out’ Chinese immigrants and of na­tionalist gatekeeping. Mo­tion pictures, of course, were not directly involved in the surveillance at the border or the exclusionist political processes; rather, they formed an important medium for creating a visual language of exclusion – one that directly appealed to audiences and offered an entertaining mode for understanding politi­ cal processes. Mo­tion pictures’ role was that of media­tion. The visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s produced the illegal alien on a visual level, paralleling U. S. legisla­tion’s crea­tion of the alien on the juridical level.

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5 Conclusion

How did mo­tion pictures construct Chinese Americans as racial Other? This ques­ tion stands at the center of this study. A simple answer would be: by ­depicting Chinese Americans in stereotypical and discriminating ways. This answer, however, reduces and simplifies the historical processes that mo­tion pictures are part of. It also ignores the many levels on which they are informed by – and that they themselves inform – the culture they emerge from. This study has advanced recent scholarship’s argument for moving beyond the identifica­tion of stereotypes and taking into account the discourses that articulate them. In doing so, we shift the focus to the dynamics of power and knowledge, the forma­tion of identities, and the produc­tion of categories like race, gender, and class. In short, it means to look at cultural history and to understand mo­tion pictures as a medium through which societies create meaning of the world. The preceding chapters have demonstrated that mo­tion pictures from the 1910s to the 1930s were in many ways related to discourses of Chinese immigra­tion. The early decades of the twentieth century were a time period when anti-­immigra­ tion debates massively informed concepts of a U. S. na­tional and racial identity. This included discourses that revolved around the presence and exclusion of so-­ called Orientals, whom contemporaries regarded as the Other of Western civiliza­ tion. Within this Orientalist discourse, Chinese Americans comprised the most promi­nent group. While people from China had been excluded since 1882, it was in the 1910s that a wide-­ranging debate about both the exclusion and presence of Orientals began to emerge. This was not confined to the political sphere. As this study argued, various discursive fields interwove with one another in producing contemporary knowledge about ‘the’ Oriental. Diverse fields of know­ ledge, ­ranging from sociology to race theory, from urban tourism in Chinatown to border protec­tion ques­tions, problematized the status of Chinese Americans and Chinese immigra­tion in general. As the period’s most important cultural medium, mo­tion pictures played a crucial role in disseminating this knowledge and giving it a specific visual form. The central thesis of my investiga­tion is that we can better grasp U. S. culture’s negotia­tion of Chinese immigra­tion in the early twentieth century by closely analyzing contemporary films. On a basic level, mo­tion pictures enable us to understand how contemporaries ‘saw’ Chinese Americans. This correla­tion obviously does not imply a direct rela­tion between fic­tional films and a somewhat ‘objective’

Conclusion  |

reality. Instead, mo­tion pictures are embedded in historical discourses and practices of seeing. Accordingly, this study opened a new perspective on mo­tion picture’s significance for the processes of Othering and stereotyping by expanding it along two axes. First, it approached mo­tion pictures on the level of imagery and as a social practice, as an element of visual culture. This visual culture comprises what is seen on screen and also how images are produced, consumed, and circulated, and how these processes informed historical subjects’ ‘ways of seeing.’ Second, it aimed at historicizing mo­tion pictures by tracing how the films func­tioned as a ‘node’ within a network of different discourses. Films need to move within the field of what can be said – and depicted – in order to be intelligible for contemporary audiences. For the films discussed in this study, this meant reproducing a specific visuality of Oriental Otherness. In the preceding chapters, I followed my initial ques­tion into four diverse yet interrelated discursive fields of United States history in the first decades of the twentieth century. The first discursive field concerned the practice of yellowface, which, on a general level, affected all films discussed in this study. This chapter was able to demonstrate that mo­tion pictures were closely linked to scientific discourses of race and the visual culture of racial categoriza­tions. Yellowface referred to a specific visuality of the Oriental body that was informed by scientific race theory. In order to transform white actors and actresses into screen Orientals, makeup artists relied on contemporary knowledge about racialized body features, thereby reproducing century-­old no­tions of racial hierarchy and the ‘yellowness’ of East Asians. This chapter showed that mo­tion pictures disseminated and popularized scientific racial discourse. Similar to race theory, which discursively produced the racial categoriza­tions it initially aimed to investigate, mo­tion pictures produced the Oriental on the screen. This chapter also illustrated the interplay of different ‘images,’ namely those of racial imagery and star images. By investigating the processes ‘behind’ the yellowface masquerade, which shaped how such imagery was produced and consumed, this chapter argued for a historiciza­tion of the yellowface practice within the visual culture it was part of. This study furthermore highlighted how mo­tion pictures themselves must be seen as a practice, as became apparent in the parallels between film consump­tion and tourism regarding Chinatown films. The second discursive field analyzed in this study related to Chinatown as a socially constructed space – a spatial ‘screen’ for the projec­tion of white ideas about Oriental Otherness. In white, mainstream percep­tion, Chinatown had a long history of representing a closed-­off and mysterious space. This led to its touristic appeal to white slummers and tourists. The practice of watching a Chinatown film in a mo­tion picture theater strikingly resembled such a ‘trip to Chinatown’ and was based on the same tourist gaze.

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During this time period, cinema blurred the line between Chinatown on-­site and on-­screen by applying a tourist gaze both from the viewing posi­tion in the theater seats and by creating authenticity effects on the narrative level. In this way, mo­tion pictures contributed to mainstream percep­tions of Chinatown as a space of Oriental Otherness – a percep­tion that Chinese Americans who had businesses in the quarter exploited to attract tourists. At the same time, Chinatown’s inhabitants also aimed to clean up the quarter and move the focus away from old stereotypes of vice and crime. On the screen, however, the myth of the old Chinatown of the early twentieth century survived significantly longer, not least owing to the visual dispositif discussed in this chapter. Mo­tion pictures did not merely rely on fixed stereotypes but also gave room to ambivalence and hybridity. As sociological and popular discourses were concerned with the Americaniza­tion of Chinese Americans and aimed at defining the so-­called ‘Oriental problem,’ mo­tion pictures incorporated these ques­tions and found a visual language to address them. The curious phenomenon of racial passing in the films discussed in chapter 3 related directly to the ques­tions of identity, race, and belonging that occupied both white academics and Chinese Americans. As I argue, these portrayals of passing, like many other phenomena in this study, surfaced at a specific point in time for particular historical reasons. Sociological discourse, as well as the various texts on assimila­tion, reacted to a changing cultural visibility of Chinese American political agency. As academic and pseudo-­scientific discourses, they produced Orientalist and racialized knowledge that, in a Foucauldian way, formed the objects of which they spoke. Ultimately, they helped to contain white fears of blurring racial boundaries by perpetuating an Orientalist logic. Mo­tion pictures in turn played with these boundaries and the performativity of race but refrained from truly crossing the ‘line that cannot be crossed,’ so intensively debated at that time. Lastly, this study underscored mo­tion pictures’ role within the political climate of exclusion and gatekeeping. The visuality of films discussed in chapter 4 helped to form a visual dispositif of border surveillance. As I outlined, visuality played a fundamental role in representing and guarding the U. S.-Mexico border. Immigra­ tion inspectors used photographs for identifica­tion and the border itself became a visual marker for the na­tion’s territorial and cultural limits. Mo­tion pictures of the border western genre in particular must to be read as an articula­tion of exactly these processes of making illegal immigrants visible. They provided the American public with imagery of the na­tion’s limits and the supposed intruders who threatened these limits. During a time of newly fuelled na­tionalism, this imagery served to strengthen the cohesiveness of the ‘imagined community.’ The border became the central arena for conceptualizing the inside and outside of U. S. society.

Conclusion  |

As I also argued, the boundaries were not only confined to ques­tions of territory but also corresponded to racial concepts. Mo­tion pictures confirmed white fears of Chinese Otherness and thus helped to link all Chinese Americans to illegal immigra­tion and the no­tion of alienness. Taken together, the four chapters employed visual culture studies’ approach to visuality and thereby argue that the processes of Othering that marked Chinese Americans as Orientals did not operate on the level of imagery alone. The diffe­ rent fields outlined in this study composed part of the visual culture in which mo­tion pictures carried a specific meaning for their audiences. Filmic Othering involved more than mere discriminatory imagery; mo­tion pictures articulated a fundamental knowledge about Oriental Otherness, created on various levels of society in manifold cultural contexts. All these different fields shaped how mainstream white society understood Chinese Americans – not only what they thought about them but, in a Foucauldian sense, how knowledge itself structured the object of this knowledge. The visuality of mo­tion pictures made these different fields of knowledge comprehensible. As discourses always constitute specific subject posi­tions, the visual discourses discussed in this study rested on the basic divide between the white hegemonic subject and its constituent Oriental Other. This epistemological divide is, after all, at the core of Edward Said’s conceptualiza­tion of Orientalism. Its dichotomy is never clear-­cut or stable; rather, it needs to be reproduced constantly, and stereotypes, as Homi Bhabha reminds us, serve as the means for this reitera­tion and the constant re-­erec­tion of this dichotomy, which is doomed to failure from the outset. Stereotypes, however, are not the origin of the dichotomy; they are its effect. The dichotomy itself lies on the level of discourse. With the approach laid out in the preceding chapters, this study seeks to provide new input for the use of mo­tion pictures as a source for historiography. Following the discursive ‘threads’ that lead in and out of mo­tion pictures into different and seemingly unrelated fields can advance our understanding of how historical subjects relate to the political, social, and cultural processes of their times. In their openness and their content of quick, easily consumable images, mo­tion pictures especially offer historical subjects a variety of levels on which they create m ­ eaning. This crea­tion of meaning is, as cultural studies have taught us, always connected to social hierarchies, ideology, and power dynamics. In mo­tion pictures, these processes are not always visible at first glance; rather, films rely on ‘common knowledge’ on many levels. This is most apparent in representa­tions of categories of social stratifica­tion like race, gender, and class. It is less visible, however, in regard to the many implicit interrela­tions of no­tions that ‘go without saying,’ which form the very founda­tions of commonplace knowledge. The discursive approach to mo­tion pictures – that is, ‘close seeing’ – reveals these manifold

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interconnec­tions to fields that are sometimes very specialized, such as social and natural sciences or border surveillance. The results of this study can also broaden our understanding of later developments in Asian American history. The most prominent example is the emergence of the so-­called Model Minority discourse. Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, contemporary observers began to describe Asian Americans as well assimilated, educated, and hard-­working.1 As a supposedly positive new stereotype, the Model Minority concept stood in stark opposi­tion to the Yellow Peril discourse of some decades before. Scholars have identified several historical developments that contributed to this reversion. Among them are the changing political context of the Cold War and the motive to include Asian Americans in a counter-­narrative against the African American political movement.2 The important point, however, is that the concept of the Model Minority is as discriminating and racializing a stereotype as the Yellow Peril, or, as Gary Okihiro asserts, both in fact “form a seamless continuum.”3 Until present day, mainstream media represents Asian Americans as Other and as deviating from white heteronormative ideals of gender and race.4 The Model Minority stereotype, therefore, proves again that positive ‘counter-­ stereotypes’ cannot counter the cultural and social processes of racializa­tion that produce them. The investiga­tion of the visual discourses surrounding the Model Minority stereotype would be a fascinating project that would contribute to our understanding of visual racial dynamics. As Asian American studies have shown, good stereotypes are not the opposite of bad stereotypes as long as both ultimately refer to Orientalness – however modernized. As long as the various discursive fields continue reproducing a fundamental knowledge of Asian Otherness – and as long as the visual culture these images are part of remains based on racialized identities – positive stereotypes will never bring forth equality.



1 For a recent publica­tion on the transforma­tion from Yellow Peril to Model Minority see Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 2 See, for instance, Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the Yellow Peril,” Howard Journal of Communica­tion 16, no. 2 (2005): 109 – 130; Wu, Color of Success. 3 Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asian American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 141. 4 A current example would be the Korean American character Han Lee in the television comedy series 2 Broke Girls (airing since 2011). Played by Chinese American actor Matthew Moy, the character is constantly ridiculed for his effeminate and stereotypical Asian behavior. Chinese American actress Lucy Liu’s role as Ling Woo in the series Ally McBeal (1997 – 2002), which follows tradi­tional Dragon Lady conven­tions, provides another example.

Filmography

Across the Pacific. Dir. Roy Del Ruth. Perf. Monte Blue, Jane Winton, and Myrna Loy. United States: Warner Bros., 1926. Arrest in Chinatown. United States: Edison Manufacturing, 1897. Bits of Life. Dir. Marshall Neilan. Perf. Wesley Barry, Rockliffe Fellowes, and Lon Chaney. United States: Marshall Neilan, 1921. The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Dir. Frank R. Capra. Perf. Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, and Toshia Mori. United States: Columbia, 1933. Border Phantom. Dir. S. Roy Luby. Perf. Bob Steele, Harley Wood, and Don Barclay. United States: Republic, 1937. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Dir. Blake Edwards. Perf. Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, and Patricia Neal. United States: Jurow-­Shepherd, 1961. Broken Blossoms. Dir. D. W. Griffith. Perf. Lilian Gish and Richard Barthelmess. United States: D. W. Griffith Produc­tions, 1919. Captured in Chinatown. Dir. Elmer Clifton. Perf. Marion Shilling and Charles Delaney. United States: Consolidated Pictures, 1935. Charlie Chan in Paris. Dir. Lewis Seiler. Perf. Warner Oland, Mary Brian, and Thomas Beck. United States: Fox Film, 1935. Chinatown After Dark. Dir. Stuart Paton. Perf. Carmel Meyers, Rex Lease, and Barbara Kent. United States: Ralph M. Like, 1931. Chinatown Charlie. Dir. Charles Hines. Perf. Johnny Hines and Louise Lorraine. United States: First Na­tional, 1928. Chinese Laundry Scene (also known as Robetta and Doreto, No. 2). Dir. William K. L. ­Dickson and William Heise. Perf. Phil Doreto and Robetta. United States: Edison, 1894. Chinatown Nights. Dir. William A. Wellman. Perf. Wallace Beery, Florence Vidor, and Warner Oland. United States: Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929. Chinatown Squad. Dir. Murray Roth. Perf. Lyle Talbot and Valerie Hobson. United States: Universal Pictures, 1935. Chinese Procession. United States: Edison Manufacturing, 1898. The City of Dim Faces. Dir. George Melford. Perf. Sessue Hayakawa and Doris Pawn. United States: Famous Players-­Lasky, 1918. The Curse of Quon Gwon. Dir. Marion E. Wong. Perf. Violet Wong and Harvey Soohoo. United States: Mandarin Film, 1916. The Cyclone. Dir. Cliff Smith. Perf. Tom Mix, Colleen More, and Henry Herbert. United States: Fox Film, 1920.

354

|  Filmography

Daughter of Shanghai. Dir. Robert Florey. Perf. Anna May Wong, Charles Bickford, and Philip Ahn. United States: Paramount, 1938. Daughter of the Dragon. Dir. Lloyd Corrigan. Perf. Anna May Wong and Warner Oland. United States: Paramount, 1931. The Deceived Slumming Party. Dir. D. W. Griffith. Perf. Eddie Dillon and D. W. Griffith. United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1908. The Detectress. Dir. Bruno C. Becker and Gale Henry. Perf. Gale Henry and Milburn Morante. United States: Bull’s Eye, 1919. Dream Street. Dir. D. W. Griffith. Perf. Carol Dempster, Ralph Graves, and Charles Emmett Mack. United States: D. W. Griffith, 1921. East Is West. Dir. Sidney Franklin. Perf. Constance Talmadge, Edward Burns, and Warner Oland. United States: Constance Talmadge, 1922. East Is West. Dir. Monta Bell. Perf. Lupe Vélez, Lew Ayres, and Edward G. Robinson. United States: Universal Pictures, 1930. “East Is West Trailer.” EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 2014. Accessed April 18, 2016. http:// youtu.be/QySm_qotNMs. The Good Earth. Dir. Sidney Franklin. Perf. Paul Muni, Luise Rainer, and Walter ­Connolly. United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1937. Hair-­Trigger Casey. Dir. Harry Fraser. Perf. Jack Perrin, Betty Mack, and Edward Cassidy United States: Berke-­Perrin, 1936. The Hatchet Man. Dir. William A. Wellman. Perf. Edward G. Robinson, Loretta Young, and Leslie Fenton. United States: First Na­tional, 1932. The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers. United States: American ­Mutoscope & Biograph, 1904. Hollywood Chinese (documentary). Dir. Arthur Dong. United States: Deep Focus, 2008. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Dir. Wallace Worsley. Perf. Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller, and Norman Kerry. United States: Universal, 1923. I Cover Chinatown. Dir. Norman Foster. Perf. Norman Foster and Elaine Shepard. United States: Banner Pictures, 1936. I Cover the Waterfront. Dir. James Cruze. Perf. Ben Lyon, Claudette Colbert, and Ernest Torrence. United States: United Artists, 1933. In a Chinese Restaurant. United States: Mutoscope & Biograph, 1900. It Happened Out West. Dir unknown. Perf. Franklyn Farnum and Virginia Lee. United States: W. M. Smith, 1923. Java Head. Dir. George Melford. Perf. Leatrice Joy, Jacqueline Logan, and Albert Roscoe. United States: Famous Players-­Lasky, 1923. The Jazz Singer. Dir. Alan Crosland. Perf. Al Jolson, May MacAvoy, and Warner Oland. United States: Warner Bros. 1928.

Filmography  |

King of Chinatown. Dir. Nick Grinde. Perf. Anna May Wong and Akim Tamiroff. United States: Paramount, 1939. Kung Fu (television series). Creator Ed Spielman. Perf. David Carradine and Keye Luke. United States: Warner Bros., 1972 – 1975. The Law of the Tong. Dir. Lew Collins. Perf. Phyllis Barrington and John Harron. United States: Willis Kent, 1931. Lifting the Lid. United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1905. Limehouse Blues. Dir. Alexander Hall. Perf. George Raft, Jean Parker, and Anna May Wong. United States: Paramount, 1934. Little Caesar. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. Perf. Edward G. Robinson, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Glenda Farrell. United States: First Na­tional, 1931. Lotus Blossom. Dir. Frank Grandon and James B. Leong. Perf. Lady Tsen Mei, Tully ­Marshall, and Noah Beery. United States: Wah Ming, 1921. Madame Butterfly. Dir. Sidney Olcott. Perf. Mary Pickford and Marshall Neilan. United States: Famous Players, 1915. Madame Butterfly. Dir. Marion Gering. Perf. Sylvia Sidney, Cary Grant, and Charlie Ruggles. United States: Paramount, 1932. The Mask of Fu Manchu. Dir. Charles Brabin. Perf. Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, and Karen Morley. United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1932. The Mission of Mr. Foo. Dir. John H. Collins. Perf. Carlton S. King, Bigelow Cooper, and T. Tamamoto. United States: Edison, 1915. Mr. Wu. Dir. William Nigh. Perf. Lon Chaney, Louise Dresser, and Renée Adorée. United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1927. The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu. Dir. Rowland V. Lee. Perf. Warner Oland, Jean Arthus, and Neil Hamilton. United States: Paramount Famous Lasky, 1929. The Mysterious Mr. Wong. Dir. William Nigh. Perf. Bela Lugosi and Wallace Ford. United States: Monogram Pictures, 1934. The Non-­Stop Flight. Dir. Emory Johnson. Perf. Knute Erickson, Jim Wang, and Cecil Ogden United States: Emory Johnson, 1926. Norbit. Dir. Brian Robbins. Perf. Eddie Murphy and Thandie Newton. United States: Dreamworks, 2007. Old San Francisco. Dir. Alan Crosland. Perf. Dolores Costello, Anders Randolph, and Warner Oland. United States: Warner Bros., 1927. On the Border. Dir. William McGann. Perf. Rin-­Tin-­Tin, Armida, and John B. Litel, United States: Warner Bros., 1930. Outside the Law. Dir. Tod Browning. Perf. Priscilla Dean, Ralph Lewis, and E. Alyn ­Warren. United States: Universal, 1920. Phantom of Chinatown. Dir. Phil Rosen. Perf. Keye Luke, Grant Withers, and Lotus Long. United States: Monogram, 1940.

355

356

|  Filmography

The Phantom of the Opera. Dir. Rupert Julian. Perf. Lon Chaney, Mary Philbin, and ­Norman Kerry. United States: Universal, 1925. Reuben [Rube] in an Opium Joint. United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1905. Riding Speed. Dir. Jay Wilsey. Perf. Jay Wilsey (as Buffalo Bill Jr.), Joile Benet, and Bud Osborne. United States: Victor Adamson, 1934. Roarinʼ Broncs. Dir. Richard Thorpe. Perf. Jay Wilsey (as Buffalo Bill Jr.), Ann McKay, and Harry Todd. United States: Ac­tion Pictures, 1927. Scene in Chinatown. United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1903. Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco. Dir. H. J. Lewis (1912). Internet Archive, accessed April 18, 2016. http://archive.org/details/0779_Seeing_Americas_­ Greatest_Chinatown_San_Francisco_Part_I_09_49_35_00, http://archive.org/ details/­Seeing_Americas_Greatest_Chinatown_San_Francisco_Part_II. The Secret of Wu Sin. Dir. Richard Thorpe. Perf. Lois Wilson and Grant Withers. United States: Invincible Pictures, 1932. The Secret Sin. Dir. Frank Reicher. Perf. Blanche Sweet, Hal Clements, and Sessue ­Hayakawa. United States: Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play, 1915. Secrets of Chinatown. Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer. Perf. Raymond Lawrence, Nick Stuart, and Lucile Browne. United States and Canada: Commonwealth, 1935. Shadow of Chinatown. Based on serial of the same name. Dir. Robert S. Hill. Perf. Bela Lugosi, Herman Brix, and Luana Walters. United States: Victory Pictures, 1936. Shadows. Dir. Tom Forman. Perf. Lon Chaney, Marguerite De La Motte, and Harrison Ford United States: B. P. Schulberg, 1922. Shadows of the Orient. Dir. Burt Lynnwood. Perf. Esther Ralston, Regis Toomey, J. Farrell MacDonald. United States: Monogram, 1937. Shanghai Express. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Perf. Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, and Anna May Wong. United States: Paramount, 1932. Shanghai Lady. Dir. John S. Robertson. Perf. Mary Nolan, James Murray, and Lydia ­Yeamans Titus. United States: Universal, 1929. The Shock. Dir. Lambert Hillyer. Perf. Lon Chaney and Virginia Valli. United States: Universal Pictures, 1923. Sky High. Dir. Lynn Reynolds. Perf. Tom Mix, J. Farrell MacDonald, and Eva Novak. United States: Fox Film, 1922. Smuggled into America. United States: S. Lubin, 1907. The Son-­Daughter. Dir. Clarence Brown. Perf. Helen Hayes and Ramon Novarro. United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1932. Son of the Gods. Dir. Frank Lloyd. Perf. Richard Barthelmess and Constance Bennett. United States: First Na­tional, 1930. A Tale of Two Worlds. Dir. Frank Lloyd. Perf. J. Frank Glendon, Leatrice Joy, and Wallace Beery. United States: Goldwyn Pictures, 1921.

Filmography  |

The Thief of Bagdad. Dir. Raoul Walsh. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Snitz Edwards, and Charles Belcher. United States: Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, 1924. The Thin Man. Dir. W. S. Van Dyke. Perf. William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Maureen O’Sullivan. United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1934. The Tong Man. Dir. William Worthington. Perf. Sessue Hayakawa and Helen Jerome Eddy. United States: Haworth Pictures, 1919. Where East Is East. Dir. Tod Browning. Perf. Lon Chaney, Lupe Vélez, and Estelle Taylor. United States: Metro-­Goldwyn-­Mayer, 1929. The Willow Tree. Dir. Henry Otto. Perf. Viola Dana, Edward Connelly, and Pell Trenton. United States: Screen Classics, 1920. Yellow Cargo. Dir. Crane Wilbur. Perf. Conrad Nagel, Eleanor Hunt, and Vince Barnett. United States: Grand Na­tional Pictures, 1936. The Yellow Peril. Dir. Wallace McCutcheon Perf. D. W. Griffith and Anthony O’Sullivan. United States: American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1908.

357

Archives

Academy of Mo­tion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles. Mo­tion Picture Associa­tion of America (MPAA), Produc­tion Code Administra­ tion Records. Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Chinatown Postcard Collec­tion, ca. 1900–ca. 1980 Chinese in California Collec­tion (ca. 1851 – 1963). Pamphlets on Japanese Exclusion Collec­tion. California Historical Society Archive, San Francisco. Chinese Historical Society of America, Daniel K. E. Ching Collec­tion, San Francisco. Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Chinese Historical Society of America Reference Files (ca. 1900 – 1950). Him Mark Lai Papers (1778–[ongoing]). Judy Yung Research Files. George Eastman House, Mo­tion Picture Stills, Posters and Paper Collec­tion, Rochester, NY. Library of Congress, Copyright Collec­tion, Mo­tion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Washington, DC. New York Public Library. Manuscripts and Archives Division. Arthur Bonner Papers. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. New York University, Department of Cinema Studies, William K. Everson Collec­tion. Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley.

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“Hole Where Chinatown was.” New York Times, April 21, 1906. Holland, Cecil. “Orientals Made to Order.” American Cinematographer, December 1932, 16. “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.” Life, December 22, 1941, 81 – 82. “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.” Time, December 22, 1941, 33. Janis, Elsie. “Marvelous MYRNA!” New Movie Magazine, November 1934, 34. Kessler, D. E. “An Evening in Chinatown.” Overland Monthly, May 1907. Kingsley, Grace. “Oriental Maid Suffers Again.” Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1927. “Last Torrence Film Masterly Bit of Acting.” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 5, 1933. Lenn, Ernest. “Chinatown – Then and Now.” Article series. San Francisco News, August 21 – 26, 1933. —. “‘Welcome, Stranger!’” San Francisco News, October 10, 1934. Lewis, Oscar. “A Transplanted Sec­tion of the Orient.” Overland Monthly, July 1917. “Lon Chaney’s Make-­Up,” Photoplay, March 1922, 43. “Lon Chaney in ‘Mr. Wu’ at Columbia.” Washington Post, June 5, 1927. Loy, Myrna. “My Mother.” Picture Play Magazine, July 1935, 12. MacKay, R. “Because He Guided Pagans.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 2, 1910. “Many Chinese Smuggled In.” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1912. Meehan, Leo. “Oriental Idea in Films.” Mo­tion Picture Herald, December 17, 1932, 23. “Mexico Attracts Many Celestials.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 19, 1913. Miller, James N. “Outwitting Alien Smugglers.” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1936. “The Mission of Mr. Foo.” Motography, March 13, 1915, 417. Moore, Samuel Taylor. “Smuggled Aliens.” Independent, May 24, 1924, 273. “‘Moving On.’” New-­York Tribune, April 9, 1906. “Myrna Loy Had Sex But Movies Guessed It Wrong.” Life, October 11, 1937, 46 – 50. “Myrna Loy’s Hand Carved Career.” Hollywood, February 1937, 27. “Na­tion-­Wide Scheme to Smuggle Chinese.” New York Times, November 27, 1911. “New Concession Shows Evils of Drug Habit.” San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 1915. North, Jeanne. “No More Chinese, Myrna?” Photoplay, April 1933, 53. “Odds and Ends in Story of Disaster on Coast.” Evening Telegram (Salt Lake City) April 21, 1906. “Paid Hop-­Heads to Pose.” Variety, October 24, 1913, 17. Peak, Mayme Ober. “Oland Needs No Makeup To Become Charlie Chan.” Daily Boston Globe, December 8, 1935. —. “Warner Oland Was Always Charlie Chan On The Lot.” Daily Boston Globe, August 14, 1938. “Pictures and People,” Mo­tion Picture News, September 25, 1926, 1159. “Plan Halt of Chinese Smuggling.” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1927. “Plans for Los Angeles’ New China City Completed.” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1938. “Putting ‘Chinks’ Over Line.” Washington Post, January 22, 1911.

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Index

Subjects A Across the Pacific 90 advertising  107, 127n69, 146, 164, 184, 189, 226, 230, 281, 335, 337 African Americans  46, 48 – 49, 55 – 56, 100, 141n86, 202, 210 – 211, 229, 239, 247, 315, 317, 322n143, 327, 352 agency  17, 22 – 23, 30, 138n83, 146, 170, 174, 181, 190, 193, 197, 276, 292, 294, 303, 343 – 345, 350 Ah Sin (play) 46 airplane, 275, 283, 288 – 289, 293 – 294, 300, 306, 308, 310, 313, 325 – 326, 340, 342, 344 alcohol  186, 188, 216, 232, 234, 299, 308, 312, 319, 333 – 336 alienness  15, 37 – 38, 104, 110, 112, 114, 122 – 123, 128, 138, 140 – 142, 147, 157, 167, 180, 202, 209, 213, 219, 224, 239, 253, 276, 320 – 321, 323, 326, 328 – 329, 332 – 334, 340, 351 aliens  See illegal immigrants American Federation of Labor (AFL) 114 – 115 Americanization  16, 18, 20 – 21, 23, 34, 37, 103, 125, 135, 148, 150, 195 – 229, 232 – 236, 241, 243 – 256, 270 – 272, 298, 321, 341 – 342, 350 Angel Island  279 – 280 anthropology  60 – 62, 66, 68, 244 apparatus  See dispositif Arizona  281, 288 – 289, 292, 294, 311 – 312, 324 Arrest in Chinatown 108n5 Asiatic Barred Zone  279

assimilation  33, 37, 195 – 198, 200, 207, 221n74, 224, 235 – 251, 256, 258, 260, 263, 268, 272, 285, 350 audience  10, 16, 18 – 19, 21 – 22, 27, 30, 32 – 33, 35, 37 – 38, 41, 43 – 51, 57, 59, 63, 66, 74, 77, 80 – 82, 86, 98, 100, 105 – 110, 116 – 117, 128132, 138 – 140, 152, 154, 156 – 158, 160 – 165, 169 – 183, 187 – 191, 207, 211 – 212, 225, 228, 231, 254 – 256, 263, 266 – 268, 271, 290 – 296, 307, 311 – 312, 314, 316, 317n135, 318, 329, 331 – 332, 334 – 336, 338, 342 – 347, 349, 351 authenticity  37, 47 – 48, 56 – 57, 71, 94, 140, 146, 150, 153 – 156, 158, 169, 176, 178 – 179, 181, 184, 187, 190, 192, 229, 269n185, 334, 350 B B-movies  35, 39, 310, 337, 341, 345 bachelor society paradigm  137, 204 The Barbary Coast (novel) 118 becoming  21, 25, 43, 90, 155, 180, 195, 198, 215, 228, 234 – 235, 250 – 252, 259 – 260, 268 – 272, 288, 292n58, 317, 343 belonging  197, 221, 223, 234, 248, 263, 265, 270, 276, 350 Berke-Perrin Productions  314 Bible  117, 199 Bits of Life  82 – 83 The Bitter Tea of General Yen 139 blackface  42 – 43, 46, 51 – 58, 105, 208 – 209, 288 body  19 – 20, 23, 25 – 26, 32, 36, 41 – 43, 50, 55, 58, 62 – 68, 71, 76, 82, 88, 92, 104 – 105, 162, 199, 208, 210, 223, 241 – 244, 249 – 250, 345, 349

388

|  Index

border  16 – 17, 33 – 34, 37, 141, 273 – 319, 321, 323 – 327, 333, 336, 338, 343, 345 – 348, 350, 352; U.S.-Mexico border  21, 35, 37, 273 – 319, 321, 323 – 327, 338, 345 – 348; U.S.Canada border  273, 276, 279 – 281, 296, 321, 327 Border Patrol  275 – 276, 279, 293 – 311, 314, 324, 326, 334, 346 Border Phantom  276, 310, 313 – 314, 317 – 319 Boston  325, 327 Boxer Rebellion  176 – 177 Breakfast at Tiffany’s 52 Broken Blossoms  15, 50, 261, 267n183, 328 Buddha  107, 195, 232 – 233, 257, 320 Buddhism 329 Bureau of Immigration  278, 283, 299, 337 C Calexico 308 California  11n10, 47, 96, 128, 134, 209, 246 – 247, 278, 281, 288, 290, 294, 318 camera  101, 110, 116, 129 – 130, 137, 139, 142 – 143, 149, 150n111, 152, 154, 158, 160 – 163, 165, 178 – 180, 187, 190 – 191, 228, 231, 234, 256n171, 268, 304, 311 – 312, 320 – 322, 332, 342, 344 Canada  273, 279 – 281, 296 – 297, 327 Captured in Chinatown 166n151 caricatures  47, 51, 258 Caucasian (racial concept) 60, 67, 69, 210, 220, 238 ceremony  161 – 162, 182 Charlie Chan (character) 14 – 15, 34, 39, 53, 55n56, 79 – 80, 103, 341 Charlie Chan in Paris 103 Chicago  248, 325 Chicago School of Sociology  37, 236, 239 – 244, 248, 272

children  85, 120, 137, 142, 160 – 161, 199, 201, 204 – 205, 220, 242, 244, 250, 318, 320, 331 China  10 – 11, 23, 41, 45, 48, 76, 80, 85, 100 – 101, 111, 124, 127, 133, 147 – 148, 175 – 177, 180 – 182, 195, 199, 203 – 204, 206, 213, 220, 222 – 225, 230 – 231, 234 – 236, 245, 248, 252, 254 – 255, 259, 279, 286, 309, 319, 321, 328, 331 – 332, 340, 348 China City Los Angeles  9, 10, 192 – 194 Chinatown  9 – 10, 16, 21, 34 – 37, 39, 90, 100 – 102, 107 – 194, 195 – 196, 203 – 204, 207 – 211, 214 – 215, 220, 222, 225 – 227, 229 – 230, 233, 235 – 236, 244 – 245, 248, 252, 254 – 257, 270, 272, 315 – 317, 320 – 321, 326, 340, 348 – 350; Boston  325; Los Angeles  9, 101, 107, 111, 159, 192 – 194; New York  107, 111, 113, 119 – 120, 133, 167, 298; San Francisco  107, 110 – 111, 113 – 115, 117 – 118, 120 – 138, 140, 142 – 150, 157 – 165, 178 – 183, 204, 207 – 211, 214, 225, 230, 233, 244 – 245, 252, 256 – 257, 270, 340; Washington, DC  321 Chinatown After Dark  236, 251 Chinatown Charlie 166n151 Chinatown Nights  111, 139, 150, 183 – 187, 190 – 191 Chinatown Squad 156n135 Chinese American (newspaper) 202 Chinese American Citizens Alliance (CACA) 203 Chinese Cultural Society of America  206 Chinese Digest (publication) 206, 223 Chinese Equal Rights League  203 Chinese Exclusion Act  11 – 12, 22, 115, 202 – 203, 273 – 274, 277 – 278, 305 Chinese Laundry Scene 49 Chinese Lullaby  177, 254, 255n169 The Chinese Must Go (play) 47 Chinese Procession 108n5

Index  |

Chinese Six Companies  203, 327n167 Chinese theater  162, 188, 214 Ching Ching Chinaman 328 chinoiserie 45 chop suey  93, 125, 144 – 145, 252, 258 Christianity  117, 207 – 208, 210, 212, 220, 222, 241, 249, 255, 328 – 329, 332 cinema (motion picture theater) 9, 19, 33, 36, 42, 49, 107 – 110, 129, 139, 152, 156, 158, 160, 163, 165 – 166, 168, 177 – 179, 182 – 183, 187, 192, 200 – 201, 228, 253, 339, 343, 349 – 350 citizenship  10n5, 13, 17, 196, 202 – 204, 210, 322 – 323 The City of Dim Faces  167 – 168 civil rights  25n55, 196n2, 201 – 203, 206, 271 class  13, 19, 31, 38, 45, 47 – 49, 54 – 55, 81, 97 – 98, 113, 116, 138, 140 – 141, 167, 171, 178 – 181, 184, 186, 188 – 189, 192, 217 – 219, 228, 234, 236, 247, 252, 254, 259 – 260, 262 – 271, 278, 285 – 286, 291, 296, 299, 320 – 321, 333, 343 – 344, 348, 351 clothes  47 – 48, 94 – 96, 120, 129, 138, 146, 149, 159, 162, 171, 180, 195, 199, 208, 211 – 212, 214, 221, 230, 232 – 235, 243 – 244, 258, 260,

D dance  89, 222, 231 – 234, 257, 264, 269, 341 – 344 Daughter of Shanghai  313, 340 – 345, 347 Daughter of the Dragon  39, 57n62 death  26, 39n2, 81, 96, 100, 103, 124, 171, 174, 176, 180, 207, 261, 320, 328 – 332 The Deceived Slumming Party  50, 108n5 decoration  107, 116, 144, 145, 170, 173, 177 – 178, 244, 268 deportation  190, 225, 232, 235, 252, 257, 280 – 281, 319, 323 – 326 desert  282, 291, 304, 308 – 312 detective  14, 34, 39, 53, 79, 97, 103, 341 The Detectress 166n151 devil’s kitchen  130 – 138 dispositif  24, 29, 32 – 34, 37, 108, 110, 139, 150, 152 – 156, 158, 165, 187, 190, 192, 273, 275, 277 – 285, 288, 293 – 294, 323 – 324, 327, 333, 346 – 347, 350 dragon  145, 175, 195, 230 Dragon Lady (stereotype) 14, 53, 91, 212, 352n4 Dream Street 107

264, 268, 270, 285 – 287, 291 – 292, 309, 316, 320, 338, 340, 342 – 343 colonialism  10n6, 14 – 15, 54 – 55, 264 Condor Productions  339 contraband  300 – 301, 312 – 313, 316, 335, 344 ‘coolie’  15, 114, 277, 317, 321, 327, 339, 343 costume  21, 41, 46, 48, 75, 81, 87, 116, 175, 177, 188, 227, 243, 254 cowboy  289, 292 – 295, 300 – 301, 311, 317, 319, 333 cultural studies  15, 28, 30, 351 curio shops  10, 48, 146, 169, 174, 181 The Curse of Quon Gwon 99 The Cyclone 310n121

E earthquake  115 – 121, 125, 128, 131, 133, 142 – 143, 163, 207, 285 East Coast  48, 111, 238 East is West (1922) 197n3, 251 East is West (1930) 236, 251 – 261, 268, 270, 272 East is West (play) 177, 197, 236, 252 Edison Manufacturing Company  49 education  100, 204 – 205, 219, 222, 278, 298, 352 El Paso  273, 286, 291, 298 eugenics  237 – 239, 242, 245 – 246 eurocentrism  10n6, 19, 60, 76, 247, 255 Europe  11, 69, 99 – 100, 208, 224, 237 – 239, 247, 265 – 266, 282, 306,

389

390

|  Index

European Americans  38, 111 – 112, 196, 201, 203 exclusion  11 – 13, 17, 38, 47, 114, 196, 201 – 203, 228, 234, 238, 247, 278 – 280, 285, 288, 299, 322 – 323, 327, 332, 344 – 348, 350 exoticism  10, 86, 126, 140, 146, 148, 166, 191, 212, 215, 219, 255 F family  41, 85, 87, 89, 93, 96, 128, 134 – 135, 176, 180, 204 – 205, 207, 217 – 218, 232, 252, 254, 259, 331 femininity  14, 55n56, 77, 87, 97 – 98, 181, 200, 216 – 218, 224, 231.232, 253 – 255, 259, 277 film business  42, 54, 81, 89, 99, 101, 103 film history  20, 51, 99, 102 First National Pictures  195, 224, 260, 269n185 flapper  16, 86 – 89, 175n175, 197, 199, 213 – 224, 227, 231 – 235, 257 – 258, 271 food  116, 142, 145 – 146, 162, 250, 315 Fox Films  288 freak show  44, 82 Fresno 221 frontier  46, 208, 240, 246, 289, 295, 300 – 301, 305, 311, 318 Fu Manchu (character)  14, 34, 53, 55n56, 57, 57n62, 63, 65, 74, 79, 88, 91, 92, 100 – 101, 106, 182, 319 G gambling  10, 122, 124 – 125, 135, 140 – 142, 162, 171, 174, 180, 225, 309 gangster  16, 34, 116, 166, 186 – 188, 225, 228 – 229, 253 – 254, 257 gaze  14, 29, 31, 33, 76, 109, 120 – 125, 129 – 130, 135, 139, 143, 154, 159, 162 – 163, 169, 172, 174 – 176, 192, 207, 210, 231, 249, 256n171, 290, 293, 296, 308, 312, 325, 332, 343; tourist

gaze, 37, 109 – 110, 140, 150 – 153, 156 – 157, 159 – 160, 165, 169, 173, 176, 178, 183, 187, 190, 192, 349 Geary Act  203, 278 gender  13 – 15, 19, 31, 38, 49, 81, 87, 91 – 92, 98, 126, 179, 181, 186, 189, 192, 197, 213, 216 – 219, 221, 223 – 225, 257 – 258, 260, 265, 268, 276 – 277, 291, 295 – 296, 317 – 319, 333, 344, 348, 351 – 352 Gentlemen’s Agreement  279 G-man  337, 340 – 341 Goldwyn Pictures  176 gong  100, 107 The Good Earth  9, 39, 41 Grand Canyon  288 – 290, 293 greasepaint  41, 65, 69, 72 – 75, 97 – 98 Great Depression  228, 253, 262, 306 guidebooks  66 – 67, 69, 70, 73, 85, 146 – 148 guide (tourism)  See tourist guide H Hair-Trigger Casey  276, 314 – 317 harem  129, 319 hatchet man  16, 127, 158, 169 – 172, 195, 316 The Hatchet Man  39, 76, 195 – 197, 224 – 235, 257, 272 Haworth Pictures  172 – 173 Hays Code  98, 253 Heathen Chinee (stereotype)  15, 45, 47, 202, 207, 210, 329 The Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers 50 heterotopia, 110n11 Hollywood  9, 39 – 42, 44, 52, 57, 76, 89, 92 – 97, 99, 101, 103, 106, 140, 195, 200, 206, 216, 223, 266, 268, 317n135, 338 The Hunchback of Notre Dame 81 hybridity  16, 37, 135, 195, 197, 205, 219 – 224, 235, 256 – 261, 266, 270 – 272, 342, 350

Index  |

I I Cover Chinatown 166n151 I Cover the Waterfront  276, 333 – 336 illegal immigrants  15 – 17, 33, 35, 37, 196, 202, 215, 273 – 276, 278, 283 – 284, 288, 291 – 295, 298 – 302, 304 – 306, 316, 319 – 328, 333 – 347, 350 – 351 Immigration Act (1924)  11, 239, 274, 277 – 279, 294 – 296, 299, 322, 325 import  230, 254, 319 In a Chinese Restaurant 108n5 invasion  114 – 115, 247, 305, 318, 326 Irish immigrants  46 – 49, 208 – 209, 229, 247, 266 It Happened Out West 310n121 J Japan  80, 127, 222, 279, 318 Japanese immigrants  10, 11, 104, 169, 221, 239, 247 – 250, 279, 318, 323 Java Head 76 jazz  195, 214 – 216, 225, 229, 232 – 234, 254, 257 The Jazz Singer 209 Jewish immigrants  209, 237 Jim Crow (stereotype)  45 John Chinaman (stereotype)  45 – 47, 55n56, 105, 202 Johnson-Reed Act  See Immigration Act (1924) Joss house  124, 142, 160, 183 journalism  296, 299, 333 – 336, 340 juvenile literature  35, 294, 305 – 310, 346 K King of Chinatown 166n151 Kung Fu (television series)  52

L labyrinth  123n52, 128, 130 – 131, 134, 148 language  25, 27, 29, 33, 36, 46, 50, 65, 70, 104, 114, 118, 122, 149, 155, 162, 168 – 169, 218, 228, 251, 253, 271, 300, 304 – 305, 325, 329, 337, 346 – 347, 350 laundries  48, 112, 313 laundryman (stereotype)  10, 50, 100, 325, 328, 330 – 331 The Law of the Tong 166n151 legislation  12, 171, 201 – 202, 249, 277, 322, 323, 347 Lifting the Lid 108n5 Limehouse Blues 78 liquor  See alcohol Little Caesar 225 lobby (cinema theater)  107 – 108, 177, 193 Los Angeles  9, 101, 107, 159, 192 – 194, 199, 214, 294, 325, 337 – 339, Lotus Blossom 99 Lotus Blossom (stereotype)  14, 53, 57, 86, 92 M Madame Butterfly (1915) 50 Madame Butterfly (1932) 39 makeup  21, 35 – 36, 40 – 43, 46 – 48, 50, 57 – 58, 63 – 88, 105 – 106, 175, 195, 227, 232, 251, 261, 338 – 340, 349 marriage  85, 97, 106, 182, 217, 222, 232 – 234, 241 – 242, 259, 285, 318, 328, 331 – 332 masculinity  10, 55n56, 87, 98, 186, 234, 258, 265, 267 – 269, 289 – 294, 300 – 301, 305 – 307, 311, 314, 316, 318 – 319, 333 The Mask of Fu Manchu  39, 53, 57, 91 – 92, 100 – 101 masquerade  20, 41, 43, 51, 57, 80 – 81, 87, 103, 105, 208 – 211, 227, 243, 269 – 272, 316, 343, 349 melting pot  37, 196, 208, 237, 239, 272

391

392

|  Index

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)  9, 41, 63, 83, 91, 95 metropolis  48, 107, 112, 189, 191, 234, 325, 338 Mexican Americans  221, 238, 245, 323 Mexican Revolution  281 – 284 Mexico  273, 279 – 284, 296, 314, 324, 327, 346 minstrelsy  46, 48, 54 – 55, 317 miscegenation  51, 168, 179, 197, 242 The Mission of Mr. Foo  320 – 321 missionaries  241, 243, 249, 252, 329, 331 model minority (concept)  15, 205n29, 352 modernity  31, 149, 167, 170, 196, 214, 229, 255 Mongolian (racial concept)  59 – 63, 105, 121, 212 Motion Picture Makeup Artists’ Association (MPMAA)  63, 73 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA)  253 motion picture theater  See cinema movie theater  See cinema Mr. Moto (character)  53 Mr. Wong (character)  53, 79n116, 103 Mr. Wu  67, 82 – 88, 92, 103n194 murder  46, 57, 122, 126, 169, 175 – 178, 225,

N nationalism  17 – 18, 37, 113, 238, 273 – 274, 295, 350 Native Sons of the Golden State (NSGS) 203 nativism  11 – 12, 17, 69, 196, 203, 236 – 239, 251 naturalization  202, 305, 322 – 323 New Orleans  288 New Woman  87n142, 175n175, 186, 189, 216, 257, 259, 267 New York  48, 83, 107, 109, 111, 113, 117, 119 – 120, 127, 133, 167, 177 – 178, 220, 225, 232, 234, 257, 260 – 261, 264, 268, 280, 298, 325, 327 newspaper  35, 92, 102, 122, 133, 162 – 163, 202 – 203, 206, 214, 222, 294 – 296, 299, 309, 313, 325, 333 – 337, 342, 346 nightclub  265, 309, 340 Nogales  282 – 284, 302 The Non-Stop Flight 313 Norbit 52 nostalgia  56, 118, 126, 133, 138

233, 267, 299, 314, 317, 319, 340, 343, 345 museum (dime museum)  44 – 45 The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu  57, 74 The Mysterious Mr. Wong 166n151 mysteriousness  10, 76, 79, 109 – 110, 122, 124, 131, 133, 135, 157 – 158, 162, 183, 186, 192, 211, 226, 306 myth  85, 118, 122 – 124, 126, 132 – 133, 139 – 140, 147 – 148, 163, 183, 191 – 192, 205, 207 – 208, 217, 289 – 290, 295, 300, 311, 318, 334, 350

Oakland 111 objectification  87, 92, 157, 170, 215, 258, 313 – 314, 319, 336, 344 Old San Francisco  100, 110, 128 – 132, 197, 207 – 212, 258, 272 On the Border 310n121 opium  10, 51, 83, 102, 115n30, 118, 121 – 129, 134, 138, 140 – 144, 146 – 147, 157 – 158, 164, 168 – 169, 171 – 176, 183, 189, 206, 225, 235 Orient  13, 39, 41, 55, 59, 76, 84n136, 129, 139, 142, 147 – 148, 159, 181, 183 – 187, 194 – 196, 199, 247, 255, 264 Orientalism  12 – 13, 44 – 45, 181 – 182, 225, 245, 251

O

Index  |

Orientalness  12 – 13, 16, 18, 41, 81, 89, 92, 107, 124, 135, 138, 148, 171, 175, 191, 193, 208, 210 – 212, 227, 236, 241, 265, 352 The Orphan of China (play)  44, 46 Otherness  15 – 16, 21, 34, 36, 47, 58 – 59, 63, 83, 88, 105, 112, 120, 123, 127, 131, 135, 142, 165, 175, 191 – 192, 208, 214 – 215, 219, 225, 228, 243, 247, 249, 260, 292, 301, 316, 319, 329, 336, 345, 349 – 352 Outside the Law 82 P Page Act, 277  318 Panama-California International Exposition 127 Panama-Pacific International Exposition  126 paper sons  285 – 286 Paramount Pictures  9, 139, 184, 340 passing  128, 196 – 197, 207 – 212, 236, 251, 261, 272, 276, 286 – 288, 291 – 292, 309, 316, 339 – 340, 350 Pearl Harbor  104 peephole  130, 171, 182 Peking 177 performativity  19 – 20, 74, 155 – 156, 197, 236, 250 – 251, 271 – 272, 292, 311, 350 Phantom of Chinatown 103 photography  20, 22, 45, 65 – 66, 71 – 72, 76, 83, 87, 94, 99, 102, 104, 108 – 109, 133 – 142, 151, 165, 199, 227, 275, 283 – 287, 297, 303 – 304, 311, 318, 337, 339, 350 Photoplay  40, 76 – 78, 83, 92, 97, 198, 201 physiognomy  43, 65 – 67 picture bride  318 – 319 Pidgin English  46, 100, 103, 254, 331 poison  182, 319 – 320 police  49, 91, 114, 120 – 121, 130, 139, 156 – 157, 170, 174 – 176, 179 – 180, 189 – 191, 261, 293, 319, 333 – 341, 345

postcard  22, 107, 133, 135, 142 – 144, 149, 284, 304, 311 poster  35, 183, 185, 226, 259, 261 – 262, 342 power  15 – 16, 23 – 34, 38, 51 – 52, 54, 56, 76, 92, 105, 112, 147, 151, 154, 156, 211, 217, 239, 258, 292, 308, 348, 351 premodernity  56, 126, 141, 147, 173, 195, 259, 328, 333 press book  178, 183 – 187, 269n185, 289, 314, 335n178, 337n180 Progressive Era  113, 133, 237 prohibition 313 promotional material  35, 80, 107 – 108, 185, 259, 269, 318, 337, 341 prostitution  10, 116, 121, 127, 137, 140 – 141, 189, 235, 242, 256 – 257, 270, 277, 284, 318 – 319, 321 psychoanalysis  108, 117 public health  110, 113 – 115, 142 Q queue (hair)  47, 120, 129, 159, 230, 286 – 287, 301 – 302, 314 R rape  207 – 208, 344 religion  162, 207, 210, 212, 220, 222, 241, 257, 266, 321, 329, 331 restaurant (Chinese)  48, 107, 112, 116, 142 – 146, 160, 258 Reuben [Rube] in an Opium Joint 108n5 Riding Speed  276, 310 – 313 Rio Grande  273, 282, 284, 297, 299 Roarin’ Broncs 310n122 rubberneck bus  152, 158 – 159, 186 – 187, 190 rural area  112, 115 – 177, 234

393

394

|  Index

S San Diego  127, 286 San Francisco  47, 107, 109 – 111, 113 – 133, 140, 142 – 144, 148 – 149, 158 – 164, 175, 178, 195, 203 – 204, 207 – 214, 220, 222, 225, 230, 244, 252, 254 – 258, 261, 270, 279, 285, 326, 340 Scene in Chinatown 108n5 scientific race theory  18, 36, 42, 58 – 63, 66 – 69, 105, 210, 238, 349 Seattle 111 second-generation Chinese Americans  37, 199 – 236, 248, 250 The Secret of Wu Sin 106n166 The Secret Sin  167 – 168 Secrets of Chinatown 166n151 Seeing America’s Greatest Chinatown: San Francisco  160 – 163 sexuality  15 – 16, 25, 31, 48, 51, 56, 86, 91 – 92, 98, 163, 186, 188 – 189, 216 – 219, 231 – 235, 241 – 242, 251, 253, 256 – 257, 264, 269 – 270, 277, 292n58, 319, 333 Shadow of Chinatown 166n151 Shadows  82, 276, 328 – 332, 346 Shadows of the Orient  310n121, 313 Shanghai Express 39 Shanghai Lady 74 The Shock  110, 115 – 117, 131 Sino-Japanese war  22, 341 siren (character type)  43, 89 – 90, 95 – 98, 106, 139 skin color  48, 58 – 73, 79, 104, 248, 262 Sky High  276, 288 – 294, 308 slave girl  122, 125, 129 – 131, 134, 136 – 137, 162, 180, 220, 235, 252 – 253 slavery  299, 317, 327 slumming  37, 48, 127, 141, 156, 167 – 168, 179, 190, 192, 349 Smuggled into America 50

smuggling  16, 37, 171, 174, 275 – 276, 280 – 283, 288 – 303, 307 – 319, 325, 327, 333 – 346 sociology  17, 35, 80, 145, 153, 196, 198, 236 – 237, 239 – 243, 270, 272, 348, 350 sojourner (concept)  48, 196, 201, 213, 219, 329, 332 The Son-Daughter  39 – 41, 53 Son of the Gods  74, 198, 236, 260 – 272 stereotype  14 – 16, 22, 34, 36 – 37, 42 – 50, 53 – 58, 67, 70, 74, 76, 88, 97, 99, 101, 105, 110, 113, 118, 126, 134, 140, 146, 154, 170, 202, 206 – 207, 212 – 213, 217, 219, 226, 247, 257, 270, 277, 317, 319, 329, 348 – 352 subjectivity  25 – 27, 30 – 32, 141, 167 – 168, 173 Supreme Court  202, 210 T Takao Ozawa v. United States  210 A Tale of Two Worlds  107, 111, 176 – 183, 187, 197, 236, 251, 258, 270 theater  35, 41 – 42, 44 – 50, 58, 72, 74, 84, 142, 158, 162, 188, 243, 254, 321 The Thief of Bagdad 198 The Thin Man  89, 94 – 95, 97 tongs  122, 125, 139 – 141, 145, 169, 171 – 176, 180, 183, 188 – 191, 195, 211 – 212, 225 – 227, 230, 233 – 235, 272 The Tong Man  111, 167 – 176, 181 torture  57, 78, 91, 117, 182 tourist guide  123, 159, 163, 178, 180, 187 tourists  9, 123, 134 – 135, 139, 141 – 148, 152 – 161, 164, 167, 173 – 174, 178 – 182, 187, 190 – 193, 349 – 350 train  117, 297, 309, 313, 327 Tucson  286, 302

Index  |

U ‘Underground Chinatown’  126 – 127, 132, 163 underground passages  110, 120 – 128, 130 – 131, 140, 148, 183, 189, 192 underground railroad  327 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind  202, 210 Universal Pictures  252 – 253, 259 urbanity  10, 33, 45 – 48, 108 – 115, 117, 119, 128, 132, 141, 143, 161, 167, 186, 189, 213 – 214, 234, 255, 333, 348 V vaudeville  45, 48 – 50, 105 vice  10, 36 – 37, 110, 113, 115 – 116, 118, 123, 129, 132, 138, 140, 142, 145 – 147, 150, 156 – 157, 165, 172, 176, 180, 183, 192, 257, 333, 350 villain  10, 14, 51, 53, 57, 79, 86, 88, 92 – 93, 98, 101, 106, 180, 182, 212 – 213, 260, 272, 295, 316, 319, 321, 328 visibility  17, 22, 30 – 33, 37, 45, 82, 103, 108, 124, 165, 170, 180, 192, 196, 203, 207, 210, 271, 274 – 275, 283, 288, 293, 312, 327, 339, 350 visual culture  16, 30 – 32, 105, 191, 193, 285, 346 – 347, 349, 351 – 352 visual history  20 visual culture studies  24, 28 – 33, 351 visuality  16, 20, 22 – 24, 28 – 32, 36 – 37, 42, 76, 87 – 88, 107 – 110, 133, 139, 144, 150, 152, 156, 163, 165, 169 – 170, 175, 190, 192, 276, 283 – 285, 288, 293, 346, 349 – 351 Vitaphone 260 voice  35, 47, 186 – 187, 228, 344 – 345 voyeurism  108, 129 – 130, 169

W West Coast  11, 45, 111, 119, 238, 241, 273, 277, 279 western (film genre)  275, 288 – 289, 294 – 295, 310 – 311, 318, 346, 350 Where East is East  74 white slavery  51, 127, 129 – 130, 134, 146, 179, 185 whiteness  19, 42 – 43, 58, 60, 80, 98 – 99, 105 – 106, 181, 209 – 212, 238 – 239, 241, 250, 260, 262 – 263, 270 – 271, 323 wigs  47, 58, 69 The Willow Tree 78 world exposition  44 World War I  82, 213, 237, 281 – 283, 305, 307, 316, 320 World War II  22, 54, 104 Y Yellow Cargo  276, 333, 337 – 340 The Yellow Peril 50 Yellow Peril discourse  11 – 12, 14 – 15, 22, 39, 88, 91, 101, 115, 121, 126, 209, 212 – 213, 238, 242, 309, 317, 321, 332, 352 yellowface  16, 20, 34, 39 – 106, 195, 209, 251, 261, 328, 338 – 340, 342, 349 yellowness  59 – 61, 64 – 65, 86, 349 Yuma 308 Z Zip Coon (stereotype)  45

395

396

|  Index

Names A Abdullah, Achmed  224 Abe, Yutaka (also known as Jack Abbe)  181 Adorée, Renée  85 – 86 Ahn, Philip  42, 340 – 341, 343 Anderson, Benedict  275, 295n62 Arnold, Henry H.  306 – 307 Asbury, Herbert  118 Ayres, Lew  252 B Barclay, Don  317 Barthelmess, Richard  42, 45, 74 – 75, 80, 260 – 261, 328 Barthes, Roland  31, 123 Beery, Wallace  177, 184 Belasco, David  84n136, 224 Benet, Joile  311 Bennett, Constance  261 Bhabha, Homi K.  55 – 56, 351 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich  59 – 61 Bogardus, Emory S.  246 – 247 Bowers, Robert Hood  177, 255 Braun, Marcus  286 – 287 Buffalo Bill Jr.  See Wilsey, Jay Burtis, Thomson  306 Butler, Judith  20, 63, 155 C Cage, Nicolas  57n62 Carradine, David  52 Cassidy, Ed  314 Chalmers, Helena  69 Chaney, Lon  42, 67, 81 – 88, 98 – 99, 106, 115, 328 Chang, King Hoo  269 Chen, Shehong  213

Cody, William F. (also known as Buffalo Bill) 310 Colbert, Claudette  333 Confucius  125, 211 Cooper, Bigelow  320 Costello, Dolores  128, 207 Cunningham, Cecil  341 D Dana, Viola  78 Davis, J. Merle  241 De la Motte, Marguerite  328 Digges, Dudley  230 Dobie, Charles  124 – 126 Dyer, Richard  18, 80 E Eddy, Helen Jerome  169 F Factor, Max  72 – 73 Fairbanks, Douglas  198 Feng, Peter X  15 Fenton, Leslie  225 Fix, Lee  314 Florey, Robert  340 Foo, Lee Tung  49 Foo, Wong Chin  202 Forbes, Ralph  85 Ford, Harrison  328 Forman, Tom  328, Foucault, Michel  24 – 27, 31 – 33, 63, 108n8, 110n11, 150, 217 Fraser, Harry  314 Frederici, Blanche  235 Fujita, Toyo  169 Fuller, Karla Rae  53 – 54, 57 Fung, Willie  100, 102

Index  |

G Genghis Khan  12, 91, 100 Genthe, Arnold  133, 135 – 138, 142 Gledon, Frank J.  177 Grant, Madison  242, 245 Griffith, D. W.  15, 50, 107, 261 Grimm, Henry  47 Gubbins, Tom  101 – 103 Gulick, Sidney  241 Gunning, Tom  168

King, Carlton  320 Kipling, Rudyard  198, 220 Komai, Tetsu  254 Kuo, Karen  252 – 253

I

L Leach, John  47 Lee, Anthony W.  133 Lee, Bruce  2 Lee, Chan  102 Lee, Christopher  57n62 Lee, Erika  274, 287, 294, 312 Lee, Robert G.  15, 55, 58 Leichner, Ludwig  72 Leong, James B.  99 Lewis, H. J.  111, 140, 156 – 165, 189, 191 Lewis, Oscar  147 Lindbergh, Charles  306 Linnaeus, Carl  59 Lloyd, Frank  107, 176, 260 Louie, May  102 Lowe, Lisa  323 Loy, Myrna  42 – 43, 89 – 99, 106 Luke, Keye  53n48, 103

Irwin, Will  133 – 135, 138

Lyon, Ben  333

J Jan, Flora Belle  221 – 223 Jones, Dorothy B.  109 Jorae, Wendy Rouse  204 – 205 Jordan, Sid  288 Joy, Leatrice  76, 176 – 177 Juarado, Elena  102

M MacCannell, Dean  153 – 155, 178 Marchetti, Gina  15, 51, 262 – 263, 265 – 266, 268 Mayer, Ruth  169 – 170 Mayo, Christine  116 McKee, Lafayette  311 Mei, Lady Tsen  49, 99 Meltmar, Wray  73 Metz, Christian  169 Miller, Max  333 Ming, Ng  102 Mitchell, W. J. T.  28 – 30

H Hall, Stuart  30, 198n4 Ham, Ung  302 – 303 Harte, Bret  45 – 47 Hayakawa, Sessue  42, 167 – 169, 172 – 173 Hayes, Helen  40, 53 Higham, John  237 – 238 Holland, Cecil  63 – 66 Hulette, Gladys  320 Hunt, Eleanor  337 Hymer, John B.  177, 236, 252

K Kamiyama, Sôjin  102, 129, 211 Karloff, Boris  53, 57 – 58, 63 – 65, 91, 103 Kearney, Denis  47 Keevak, Michael  59 – 60

397

398

|  Index

Mix, Tom  288 – 289 Moon, Krystyn R.  46, 48 Mori, Toshia  230 Morita, Miki  318 Mulvey, Laura  31, 152n118 Muni, Paul  41 Murphy, Eddie  52 N Nagel, Conrad  337 Ngai, Mae M.  274, 276, 322 – 324, 326, 346 Norris, Frank  133 – 134 Novak, Eva  288 O Oland, Warner  42 – 43, 57, 74, 79 – 80, 103, 128, 184, 207, 210n44 Ornitz, Samuel  139, 184, Orth, Samuel P.  247 Osborne, Bud  311 P Page, Amanda  209 – 210, 212 Palmer, Albert W.  249 – 251 Paoshi, Ching  157 Park, Robert E.  37, 221n74, 240, 243, 248 Parrott, Ursula  257 Parsloe, Charles T.  46 – 47 Parsons, Charles S.  66 – 67 Paul, Gerhard  20 Perrin, Jack  314 Pickford, Mary  50 Powell, William  97 Puntke, William  9 Purdy, Helen  147 R Raft, George  78 Rainer, Luise  41

Rak, Mary Kidder  303, 324 – 325 Rambova, Natacha  89 Randolf, Anders  74 Riis, Jacob  133 Robbins, Marc  169 Robinson, Edward G.  195, 224 – 227, 252 – 254 Rodgers, Walter L.  73 Rodriguez, Robert  57n62 Rogin, Michael  208 – 210, 212 Rohmer, Sax  57, 91 Rooney, Mickey  52 Rothafel, S. L.  177 S Said, Edward  12, 181, 351 Salyer, Lucy E.  278 Schmitz, Eugene, E.  118 Schwerin, Arthur H.  58, 67 – 69 Shah, Nayan  113 Shipman, Samuel  177, 252 Sidney, Silvia  40, 79n114 SooHoo, Peter  193 Sook, Choy  102 St. Polis, John  328 Stanfield, Peter  166, 229 Starrett, Charles  91 Steele, Bob  317 Steele, Wilbur Daniel  328 Stellman, Louis  133n76 Sterling, Christine  193, 9 Stoddard, Lothrop  242, 245 – 246 Stone, Lewis  91 Strenkovsky, Serge  67 T Tajima, Renee  14 Takaki, Ronald  140 Talbot, Winthrop  246

Index  |

Tamamoto, T.  320 Taylor, Estelle  74 Tchen, John Kuo Wei  44, 135 Titus, Lydia Yeamans  74 Toones, Fred ‘Snowflake’  100, 315, 317n135 Torrence, Ernest  333 Turner, Frederick Jackson  208, 289 Twain, Mark  46 – 47 U Urry, John  150 – 153 V Valentino, Rudolph  89 Valli, Virginia  116 Van Dorn, Mildred  266 Velez, Lupe  253 Vidor, Florence  184 Villa, Francisco ‘Pancho’  283 Voltaire 44 Von Boyle, Ackland  47 W Wang, Jim  102 Wang, Yiman  342 Warren, E. Alyn  176, 252, 261 Washington, Booker T.  240 Westmore, Perc  76 Wilbur, Crane  337 Wilsey, Jay  310 – 311 Wilson, Robert  124 Wixon, I. F.  305 Wong, Anna May  41 – 42, 51 – 52, 83, 99, 102, 129 – 130, 198 – 200, 212, 340, 343 Wong, Eugene Franklin  51 Wong, Lew Ying (Lulu)  102 Wong, Marion  99 – 100 Wong, Mary  102 Wood, Harley  317

Wright, Wilbur  306 – 307 Wu, Ching Chao  248 Y Young, Loretta  76 – 77, 195, 224 – 225, 227 Yu, Henry  241 – 243 Yung, Judy  214, 221 – 223

399

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