The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [108]
Many inhabitants of the nation’s Chinatowns chafed whenever the tourists came around. For one thing, they hated being gawked at like zoo animals, and they had expressed their anger long before Chinese capitalists embraced tourism during the depression. “Every day and all year round there are special sightseeing motor cars decorated with Japanese paper lanterns bearing a huge signboard in front standing right in the midst of the business center of New York City and with a couple of people walking around shouting desperately, ‘Chinatown, O, Chinatown, one dollar down to see Chinatown,’ ” S. J. Benjamin Cheng, a Columbia University student, wrote in a letter to the New York Times. “What do you think that a Chinese or any red-blooded human will feel when he passes by such a car and hears such shouting?”
They were also exasperated by myths that a subterranean community thrived under the city streets. “I never saw an underground tunnel,” one Chinese man insisted. “Just mah-jongg rooms in the basements.” In Los Angeles, residents denied the existence of tunnels, though they recalled that the Chinese district used to have alleys with ceilings so that chickens could be raised there. Some resentful Chinese threatened to beat up white tourists, and did occasionally resort to violence. “We hated them!” declared Lung Chin in New York Chinatown. “Because the sightseers, they would come around, they would always be talking bad stories about China.” He seethed when he heard falsehoods about opium dens and slave girls; the Chinese, he said, were in the United States to “make a living, not to capture white girls for slavery.” And he admitted, “We would have fights with them. How many times I go up there, I say, ‘That’s a lie!’ and then I hit them.”25
Projecting a false image of their community to mainstream whites may have earned the Chinese a certain amount of money, but the prostitution of their heritage was an extravagant price to pay. The guides cultivated fear and suspicion among white tourists, whose brief glimpses of Chinatown may have been their only contact with Chinese Americans during the exclusion era. We will never know how many people walked away certain that the Chinese could never assimilate. Nor will we know how many Chinese Americans endured racial discrimination and a hostile job market in the United States as a direct consequence of the myths fostered by Chinatown tourism and spread through white communities by tourists who “saw it all firsthand.” Worst of all, some of these negative images were perpetuated on the silver screen, where they reached a mass audience far beyond the numbers of tourists who actually came and spent money in Chinatown.
Stereotyping minorities was nothing new to Hollywood. Since the dawn of film, the movie industry had made them the butt of cruel jokes, and Chinese Americans had played their part. In an 1894 silent film, Chinese Laundry Scene, a Chinese character entertains white audiences by eluding an Irish cop. In The Terrible Kids, a 1906 film, a group of mischievous boys attack a Chinese man and yank his queue. But soon a different, more sinister image appeared. In 1908, D. W. Griffith released The Fatal Hour, in which the Chinese villain Pong Lee, aided by cleaver-wielding Chinese thugs, kidnaps and enslaves innocent white girls.
By the 1920s, as Chinatown tourism grew more popular, Fu Manchu made his debut in Saturday afternoon matinees. Writing under the pen name Sax Rohmer, Arthur Sarsfield Ward had introduced the diabolical Fu Manchu in a series of pulp fiction thrillers, describing the character as “the great and evil man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule... whose existence was a menace to the entire white race.” The Fu Manchu created by Rohmer/Ward was not only a genius, but a beast: “The green eyes gleamed upon me vividly like