The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [109]
The Fu Manchu character had its female counterparts. Films depicted Chinese women either as victims, fragile China dolls, compliant and sexually available to white men, or villainesses, dragon ladies, cunning and dangerous seductresses. Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American—indeed, the first Asian American—movie star, built her entire career on such roles, playing a series of stock, one-dimensional characters, such as the evil daughter of Fu Manchu.
By the 1930s, during the heyday of Chinatown tourism, cinema had matured into America’s most popular form of entertainment. The introduction of sound led to Hollywood’s golden age, when people entered cavernous theaters to forget, if only temporarily, their depression-era woes, to lose themselves in the glamour of the screen. The images of the Chinese they saw on the screen did not reflect reality, but instead the taboo sexual desires or hidden anxieties of white audiences about a people they did not fully understand. The demonization, or oversexualization, of Chinese characters in films was akin to the presentation by lazy novelists and filmmakers of Italian Americans as preponderantly Mafia henchmen, personae created to resonate with the criminal stereotypes widely accepted by the general public even though the overwhelming majority of Italian Americans were and are law-abiding citizens.
During the depression, white audiences embraced Charlie Chan, a character who combined the contradictory stereotypes of Chinese mystic and Chinese buffoon. Between 1925 and 1932, six Charlie Chan detective novels, written by Earl Derr Biggers, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in serial form and spawned forty-eight films. Chan was a brilliant, rotund Chinese detective who, while not evil, exuded, like Fu Manchu, an aura of Oriental inscrutability. As played by Caucasian actors, most famously Swedish-born Warner Oland, he had a face resembling an ancient Chinese mask, with half-closed eyes and a cryptic smile. He personified the wise old Confucian sage, dropping proverbs faster than his antagonists could drop clues. Yet his demeanor lent itself, inevitably, to ridicule. His words of wisdom sounded like fortune cookie messages, and his personality could be reduced to Chinese menu offerings: a white police sergeant in Charlie Chan at the Opera (1937) refers to Chan as “egg foo yung” and tells him, “You’re all right. Just like chop suey. A mystery, but a swell dish.”
Because the best dramatic roles went to whites, it was difficult for Chinese American actors to depict their people as genuine human beings. The whites’ practice of adopting yellowface in Hollywood not only robbed ethnic performers of starring roles but also promoted Chinese caricatures. Smothered in heavy makeup and wearing prosthetic masks, many white actors—including top stars such as John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn—had no qualms about slanting their eyes and speaking with a fake accent. While some were delighted to assume exotic personae to expand their artistic range, it was often forgotten that Chinese American actors were being deprived of similar opportunities, and not just because no one would have seriously entertained the notion of a Chinese actor’s donning whiteface to play a Caucasian.
At the pinnacle of her career, Anna May Wong failed to land the starring role of O’Lan in The Good Earth, a movie based on the novel by Pearl Buck, and one of few films that depicted China favorably to American audiences. The role went to Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for her performance. When the studio offered Wong the part of Lotus, the wicked concubine, she protested: “You’re asking me—with my Chinese blood—to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture, featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters.” Heartbroken by the snub, the Los Angeles-born Wong left