Asian Americans and film

Significance: Asian characters have been included in films from the earliest days of American film history. The evolution of how Asians and Asian Americans have been, and continue to be, portrayed may be linked to a constellation of social, historical, and cultural factors.

Anti-Asian sentiments, buttressed by exclusionary legislations in the nineteenth century, resulted in stereotypical images that would permeate not only film but also literature and popular culture for much of the next century. In more recent times, American military engagements in Asia as well as challenges to US global economic supremacy by Japan, Korea, and other nations of Asia have likewise shaped the cinematic characterizations of Asians and Asian Americans.

Cinematic representations of Asians are also rooted in European theater and opera. By the seventeenth century, enthusiasm for chinoiserie made itself felt in theatrical and operatic productions. Dramas and operas with Asian themes were produced in France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands; Asiatic figures such as Tamerlane, Ch’ung-cheng, an emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and Aurangzeb the Mogul emperor were popular figures in several plays by Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Joost van den Vondel. Voltaire’s enthusiasm for the newly discovered wonders of Asia also resulted in Ophelin de la chine, a play about a Chinese orphan that had its American performance in 1767. The transference of representations back and forth across the Atlantic, coupled with the arrival of Asians in America, cumulatively evolved into a collection of cinematic human typologies. These typologies became formulas for the later “oriental” stereotypes in film.

Representations and Stereotypes

In the silent film era, the roles of Asians were dominated primarily by white actors of both sexes in “yellow face,” a practice derived from earlier theatrical and operatic traditions. In D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), Richard Barthelmess played a Chinese laundryman who rescues an abused girl portrayed by Lillian Gish. The year before, Norma Talmadge was cast as a Chinese girl who is loved and abandoned by an American in The Forbidden City. During the silent era of film, several actors, including Lon Chaney, Nils Asther, Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, E. A. Warren, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff, became specialists in assuming Asian identities for their cinematic roles. Likewise, actresses such as Alla Asimova, Sylvia Sidney, Sigrid Gurie, Myrna Loy, and Gale Sondergaard were all considered sufficiently “exotic” in appearance to be cast on a regular basis as Asian women of one nationality or another.

Actors such as Warner Oland, however, were not simply identified with Asian roles; they also developed characterizations that became standard Asian stereotypes. One of Oland’s earliest roles was that of Okada, a Japanese potato baron in the 1922 film Pride of Palomar, directed by Frank Borzage. His other roles as Chinese villains included the title role in The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1930. His other “oriental” credits included Mandarin’s Gold (1919), East Is West (1922), Old San Francisco (1928), Daughter of the Dragon (1931), in which he again played the evil Dr. Fu Manchu,Shanghai Express, opposite Marlene Dietrich, in 1933, and Shanghai in 1935.

Characters such as the evil Dr. Fu Manchu or Ming the Merciless in the popular Flash Gordon series established the stereotype of the ruthless Asian whose sole aim was to take over the Western world. This stereotype and its corollary notion of plots involving potential Asian world domination would continue into the 1960s and beyond. The theme of the “yellow peril” can be observed in the James Bond film Dr. No (1962). By the 1980s and 1990s, when Asian actors would be used in this particular characterization, the meglomaniacal Asian continued in films such as The Year of the Dragon (1985) and Rising Sun (1993).

Films depicting Asians as possessing violent propensities or as members of Asian secret societies have also been a standard theme in Hollywood movies. From the silent era on, Asians are routinely depicted as purveyors of opium, drugs, and sex. From War of the Tongs (1917) through Chinatown Nights (1929), The Hatchet Man (1932), and The Year of the Dragon (1985), Chinatowns or Asian milieus are consistently depicted as murky backdrops for crime, vice, and violence. Martial arts movies such as Enter the Dragon (1973), The Big Brawl (1980), Enter the Ninja (1982), Revenge of the Ninja (1983), and The Protector (1985) are all contextualized against the backdrop of Asian crime, vice, and violence. In these contexts, Asian men have for decades been portrayed as power-hungry, cruel, and lustful. In every instance, the object of their desires is a white woman who fights to retain her honor.

The stereotype of the Asian rapist had its early beginnings in silent films. One of the more sensational moments of film history may be seen in the 1915 film The Cheat, in which Sessue Hayakawa tears the gown off the shoulder of a white woman who refuses his advances and then brands her with a branding iron. Likewise, in films as varied as Mr. Foo (1914), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), Old San Francisco (1927), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), Daughter of the Dragon (1931), and the the Fu Manchu and Flash Gordon movies (the latter featuring Ming the Merciless), Asian villains are depicted as rapists who delight in sadistic methods of torture.

The Hollywood tradition of the Asian villain has historically been matched with that of the “Dragon Lady” stereotype. In the silent era, Anna May Wong, née Wong Liu Tsong, became the first Chinese American actor to achieve international recognition for her portrayals of menacing “oriental vamps.” She was first cast in the 1919 film The Red Lantern, which featured a cast of more than five hundred Chinese in supernumerary roles. Wong went on to the leading role of a Chinese woman who is deserted by her American lover in the first silent color movie, The Toll of the Sea, in 1922. In the next few years, she would star in films that ultimately cast her in the role of the mysterious and sinister counterpart to the male Asian villain. From the silent Thief of Baghdad (1924) through films such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), and Java Head (1934), Wong affected the remote yet seductive demeanor that suggested not only “the mysterious Orient” but also her characters’ innate cruelty and deviousness.

These characterizations seldom represented Asians and Asian Americans as fully developed characters. Nevertheless, they came to be accepted by both the viewing public and filmmakers as realistic representations.

The evil villain had its counterpart in the Asiatic buffoon. This stereotype, identified usually by his ineptitude, had been a stock character in light theatricals and operas long before the advent of cinema. During the silent era, films such as Chinese Rubbernecks (1903), The Yellow Peril (1908), and What Ho the Cook (1921) depicted Asians as buffoons. Chinese Rubbernecks featured a slapstick chase scene through a Chinese laundry. In The Yellow Peril, a Chinese servant manages to disrupt a home and is subsequently thrown out a window, beaten up by a policeman, and finally set on fire. The comic Asian with quaint aphorisms and peculiar mannerisms also found expression in the proliferation of films featuring cinematic Asian detectives from Hollywood studios from the 1920s into the 1950s. The earliest movie featuring an Asian detective was the silent film The Adventures of Boe Kung (1912), featuring what was billed as “the Chinese Sherlock Holmes.” Other films featuring Asian detectives included the 1926 film House without a Key, with George Kuwa in the lead role, The Chinese Parrot (1928), starring Kamiyana Shojin, and Behind That Curtain (1929), with E. L. Park. In 1929, the silent film The Peacock Fan, starring Lucien Prival and Dorothy Dwan, dealt with the murder of a wealthy magnate. The detective who solved the crime was an “inscrutable” Chinese named Dr. Chang.

This genre did not become popular, however, until non-Asian actors were cast in the lead roles as Asian detectives. The best known of these was undoubtedly Charlie Chan, who was portrayed by a series of actors including Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, Roland Winters, Carol Naish, and Peter Ustinov. In their heyday from 1931 to 1941, the Charlie Chan films were produced by Twentieth Century-Fox. Monogram films also produced five films with Boris Karloff in the role of the Chinese detective James Lee Wong. Based on the character created by Hugh Wiley, the stories in the Wong series first appeared in Collier’s magazine; the films included Mr. Wong (1938), Mr. Wong in Chinatown (1939), The Mystery of Mr. Wong (1939), The Fatal Hour (1940), and Doomed to Die (1949). Mr. Wong, as played by Boris Karloff with taped eyes, was portrayed as a gentleman and a scholar educated at Oxford University and the University of Heidelberg. He was also represented as an authority on “Oriental” art and literature. In another of the Wong films, The Phantom of Chinatown (1941), a Chinese American actor, Keye Luke, was cast as Wong, becoming one of the few actors of Asian descent to play a lead Asian character.

From the 1930s into the 1950s, more than fifty Charlie Chan movies were made. Warner Oland, the first of the three non-Asian actors to play Chan, made sixteen Chan movies before his death in 1938. Sidney Toler then played the role for the next three years. Toler starred in eleven Charlie Chan movies before his own death in 1947; he was replaced by Roland Winters. In all the Charlie Chan adventures, Chan’s urbane if stilted “Chinese” ways were usually contrasted with the manners of highly excitable Irish police captain Flannery or of Chan’s wide-eyed African American butler, played by Mantland Moreland. In addition, eight Mr. Moto films, based on the character featuring the Japanese spy/detective created by John P. Marquand, were produced between 1937 and 1939. The first seven films featured Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto; the last, made in 1965, featured Henry Silva as the Japanese detective.

Although the practice of making up a white actor to look "Asian" has fallen out of favor in the twenty-first century, white actors are often cast as characters originally written as Asian, a practice commonly known as whitewashing. The issue garnered widespread media attention in 2010 with the release of The Last Airbender, a live-action film based on an animated series in which the majority of the characters were Asian; the film starred three white actors as the heroes and an Asian Indian actor as the main antagonist. Despite growing awareness of whitewashing, the problem has persisted; prominent examples include Tilda Swinton as the originally Tibetan "Ancient One" in the superhero film Doctor Strange (2016) and Scarlett Johansson as the Japanese Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell (2017), a live-action adaptation of a popular anime franchise. A related issue is the trend of having white leads in films set in Asia or revolving around Asian culture, as in the action film The Great Wall (2016), starring Matt Damon, and the Netflix superhero series Iron Fist (2017), starring Finn Jones. Both practices have been heavily criticized by Asian American actors, including Margaret Cho, George Takei, Daniel Dae Kim, Constance Wu, and Aziz Ansari.

Asian American Contributions to the Film Industry

Although non-Asian actors have long been used to play lead Asian characters in Hollywood films, Asians themselves have worked behind the scenes or as supernumeraries in film from the earliest days of the film history. The 1914 film The Chinese Lily, for example, boasted an all-Chinese cast. One of the pioneers of the silent film era was Leong But-jung, who was also known as James B. Leong. Leong began the Wah Ming Motion Picture Company, which was financed by Chinese American businesses. The intent of this company was to produce films with Chinese themes using all-Chinese casts. Leong and another Chinese American, Moon Kwan, were also involved in the D. W. Griffith film Broken Blossoms (1919). Moon served as the film’s technical director, while Leong worked as Griffith’s assistant director. Another Chinese American, James Wang, served as the technical director for the 1919 film Red Lantern, with its cast of hundreds of Chinese American extras.

As leading figures, the two Asian American actors who gained the widest attention in the early history of film were Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa. Wong’s film career spanned more than thirty years; Hayakawa’s career, which began in silent films in 1914 with his appearance in Wrath of the Gods, extended into the era of sound with roles in Tokyo Joe (1949) and The Bridge over the River Kwai (1957). Few today, however, remember Hayakawa’s wife, Tsuru Aoki, who starred in several films including The Courageous Coward (1919). Aoki had both a film and a theater career and was known as an actor and director.

Several other Asian American actors have also had unusually long careers by virtue of their versatility in a range of supporting roles. Keye Luke, who began his acting career in the 1930s in films such as The Painted Veil (1934), starring Greta Garbo, continued his acting career into the television era, during which he achieved renewed popularity for his role in the 1970s Kung Fu series. Other Asian American actors such as Philip Ahn, James Shigeta, Nobu McCarthy, Beulah Kwoh (later Beulah Quo), James Soo, Mako, and Victor Sen Young have all enjoyed varied degrees of public visibility through their long careers.

The 1980s and 1990s may be characterized as the decades when Asian American actors came into increasing prominence. Actors from Asia such as Joan Chen, Jackie Chan, and Ming Na-wen, along with Asian Americans such as Russell Wong, Jason Scott Lee, and the late Brandon Lee, achieved levels of stardom that had not been possible in earlier times. Recent decades have also seen attempts to portray Asians as fully developed characters. The success of films such as The Joy Luck Club (1993), as well as the international recognition of films directed by Asian-born directors such as Wayne Wang, Ang Lee (Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, 1994), Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, 1987; Raise the Red Lantern, 1991), Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, 1993), and Hung Tran Ahn (Scent of Green Papaya, 1993), have offered the viewing public a much broader and more complex perspective on Asians in North America and abroad.

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