Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

The ‘‘white man’s burden’’ (the title of an 1899 poem by
Rudyard Kipling, subtitled ‘‘The United States’’) justifies
imperial domination under the guise of uplift, but is then
faced with a dilemma of integration and assimilation. In
Gayatri C. Spivak’s formulation, the white man’s burden
is specifically inflected as ‘‘white men saving brown
women from brown men’’ (287), thus allowing for
simultaneously repressing Asian masculinity and celebrating
Asian femininity.
Rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances, such as
shifting attitudes toward US colonialism in Asia, produced
complex and contradictory representations.
Shifting US relations with China offer another example:
in the 1920s and 1930s Hollywood depicted Chinese
as despots or warlords, most famously in the figure
of Fu Manchu. As China developed into an ally, the
Charlie Chan figure gained ascendance, but when the
Communists came to power in 1949, Hollywood shifted
its attention back to Japan and Korea, where US military
presence was bringing Americans into closer contact with
Asia.
Fu Manchu, created by Sax Rohmer (1883–1959)
(Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) in the 1910s, is the prototypical
despot bent on world domination. Fu
Manchu’s criminal successes are dependent not just on
his position as king of a criminal underworld, but also on
his tremendous intellect and scientific genius. Fu
Manchu is simultaneously ascetic and sexually threatening,
which is to say that his Scotland Yard foes suppose
his deviance to extend to misogyny even as he seems
repulsed by virile masculinity. In seeming polar opposition
to Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan represents law and
order. Created by Earl Derr Biggers (1884–1933), the
Chinese detective from Honolulu was portrayed by
Warner Oland (1879–1938) in a popular series of films
produced by Fox from 1931 to 1942. Upon Oland’s
death in 1938 the role was taken over by Sidney Toler
(1874–1947), and when Fox ended production Toler
continued to play Chan in a series produced at
Monogram starting in 1944. Upon Toler’s death,
Roland Winters (1904–1989) took on the role until the
Monogram series ended in 1949. (In total, Fox made
twenty-seven films, Monogram made seventeen.)
Accompanied by his ‘‘Number One Son’’ (played with
all-American vim by Keye Luke [1904-1991]), who did
much of his legwork, Chan traveled the globe, and his
reputation as a brilliant detective preceded him and
typically won over racist skeptics. Chan is perhaps best
known for his aphorisms, witty sayings that have been
derided by his detractors as ‘‘fortune-cookie philosophy.’’
Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan are seeming opposites,
but both were known for their keen intellects and
weak bodies (both men delegated strenuous activity to
Asian American Cinema
their children—Fu Manchu to his vamp daughter, Chan
to his eldest son). Another curious point of similarity is
their paradoxical sexuality: Fu simultaneously asexual and
predatory, Chan seemingly shy but blessed with dozens
of children. In Hollywood films, such paradoxes were
typical for Asian masculinity. The ‘‘chink’’ in Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms (1919), played by Richard Barthelmess
(1895–1963), is a noble figure in large part due to his
refusal to act on the sexual desires that inspire his devotion;
General Yen (Nils Asther) in The Bitter Tea of
General Yen (1933) commits suicide and thus spares the
missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) the need to resolve her
own anxieties about miscegenation.
The situation for Asian femininity was somewhat
different. The roles accorded to Asian and Asian
American women in the studio era were of course constrained
by Hollywood conceptions of gender. Career
women, regardless of race, were portrayed as homewreckers
or dragon ladies of a sort. Nevertheless, US attitudes
toward miscegenation cannot be discounted when considering
cinematic depictions of gender. Romantic relationships
between Asian women and white men were far
more prevalent than those between Asian men and white
women, in accordance with US perceptions about cultural
difference and assimilation (men posed a threat of
ineradicable foreignness while women had the potential
for absorption into US culture). In the years following
World War II, when US gender roles were being redefined
in large part due to the legacy of Rosie the Riveter,
the popular representation of working women during the
period, the perceived traditionalism of Asian cultures (an
orientalist perception) marked Asian women as domestically
oriented and subservient. Concurrently, the US
occupation of Japan and Okinawa following World
War II, and US involvement in the war in Korea
(1950–1953), were responsible for significant numbers
of interracial marriages (between US servicemen and
foreign nationals) as well as, perhaps, an association of
Asian women with prostitution. In the 1957 film
Sayonara, Marlon Brando (1924–2004) portrayed an
Air Force officer stationed in occupied Japan who falls
in love with a Japanese woman (Miiko Taka) after much
soul-searching. The film’s message of racial tolerance is
put in service of a conservative affirmation of the sexist
ideology of romantic love. The apotheosis of romantic
melodrama in this mode was The World of Suzie
Wong (1960), adapted from a Broadway play that was
in turn adapted from a best-selling novel by Richard
Mason (1919–1997). An American expatriate (William
Holden) falls in love with a Hong Kong prostitute
(Nancy Kwan) and (again, after much soul-searching)
asks her to follow him (presumably, back home to the
United States). While Sayonara’s heroine was a woman of
some social standing, Suzie Wong transmitted the notion
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 125