I was walking in the city and noticed a number of Asian men walking with attractive white women... lucky bastards :)
That wasn't possible 50 - 100 years ago - because of Australia's pro-white policy. In 1918 Australia led the way in vetoing Japan's demand for racial equality clause - this despite Japan being on the side of the allies; Japanese warships had helped to escort Aussie troops to the Western theatre.
So when people talk about the good old days... yeah its bullshit.
That wasn't possible 50 - 100 years ago - because of Australia's pro-white policy. In 1918 Australia led the way in vetoing Japan's demand for racial equality clause - this despite Japan being on the side of the allies; Japanese warships had helped to escort Aussie troops to the Western theatre.
So when people talk about the good old days... yeah its bullshit.
"Anna May Wong portrayed by Ruth Harriet Louise."
The Forgotten Story Of Classic Hollywood’s First Asian-American Star
Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong was a trailblazer despite the openly racist industry in which she worked. Remembering her story and contemplating how much things have changed.
By Anne Helen Petersen posted on Oct. 1, 2014, at 2:08 a.m. BuzzFeed News Features Writer.
The following is a bonus chapter from Anne Helen Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema. You can read previous instalments — on everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Marlon Brando.
In a December 1933 issue of New Movie Magazine, society reporter Grace Kingsley described her visit to screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s famed costume party, where the who’s who of Hollywood showed up dressed, as the year’s theme dictated, as other Hollywood stars. The actress Fay Wray described the scene to Kingsley, cooing over each of her friend’s excellent costumes (“There’s Jack Gilbert as Lionel Barrymore in Rasputin!”) but really losing it when she sees “a little Chinese lady dancing about.”
But that lady wasn't Chinese: She was the (white) comedienne Polly Moran. “I'm Anna May Wong!” she said, running over and brandishing her hands. “And my fingernails cost me a dollar and a half!”
As the picture that accompanied the article shows, Moran was decked out in full yellow-face — including make-up to darken her skin, a wig, Chinese-style dress, and approximations of Wong’s signature long, pointed nails. In the picture, she makes a face intended to simulate a “Chinese” expression, and if you look closely, you can see that her eyes are taped up in an exaggeration of the Asian facial structure.
Moran, and whoever dressed her, would be familiar with this make-up technique (often achieved by using fish skin as an adhesive) because so many non-Asian women had been made up to play the role of Asian women. These were leading roles that could've been (but were seldom) given to classic Hollywood’s first and only Chinese-American star.
Anna May Wong, like other Hollywood actors of colour, was not allowed in society, and would not have been invited to Stewart’s party. She couldn't hang out with the very stars who exorcised and imitated her. In classic Hollywood, not only was it OK to act Asian, it was celebrated. And even though Stewart’s soiree was just a party, the behaviours modelled there bespoke the dominant understandings of Hollywood and America at large: White people can play at other races, and other races can play at very little.
Anna May Wong never scandalized Hollywood with her string of fiancés, like Clara Bow, or an outré sex philosophy, like Mae West. Ultimately, the scandal of her career had little to do with her, or her actions — it’s the way that Hollywood, and the audience that powered it, remained so hideously stubborn about the roles a woman like her could play, both on and off the screen. Wong was a silent-film demi-star, a European phenomenon, a cultural ambassador, and a curiosity, the de facto embodiment of China, Asia, and the “Orient” at large for millions. She didn't choose that role, but it became hers, and she laboured, subtly, cleverly, persistently, to challenge what Americans thought an Asian or Asian-American should or could be — a challenge that persists today.
Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles, just off Flower Street on the outskirts of Chinatown. Fan-magazine renderings of Wong’s childhood didn't shy from evoking the discrimination she faced, especially in her integrated elementary school. One boy would stick needles into her every day, to which she responded by simply wearing a thicker and thicker coat. A group of boys pulled her long braids, shoving her off the side walk and yelling, “Chink, Chink, Chinamen. Chink, Chink, Chinamen.” Sometimes the profile would admit that such children were of “lesser parents,” but the anecdotes were framed as a simple trial of childhood: no different than a white star getting teased as a child for an embarrassing name or pair of glasses.
Profiles also laboured to reconcile an identity that was at once wholly Chinese yet also American. She worked in a Chinese laundry, but that laundry wasn't in Chinatown. Her parents forced her to go to Chinese school after American school, but she skipped it to go to the movies. She had a Chinese name (Wong Liu Tsong) that meant “Frosted Yellow Willows,” but she opted for the Americanized Anna May Wong. Her parents were sceptical of the moving image — her mother purportedly believed that cameras could steal a bit of the soul — but Wong eschewed Old World superstition. She was, in many ways, a classic child of immigrants, incorporating the behaviours, beliefs, and vernacular of her homeland with the heritage of home.
As Wong grew, she became increasingly fascinated with the Hollywood pictures that would film in Chinatown, which, in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s, studios would regularly use as a visual substitute for China — a conflation that made it even more difficult for Americans to understand that Chinese-Americans were a distinct culture from the Chinese.
To make Chinatown seem like the bustling streets of China, directors needed Chinese faces — which is how Wong first appeared, as an extra in Alla Nazimova’s The Red Lantern at the age of 14. She had asked for her father’s permission, but he was reluctant: As one profile explained, “Of course, many Chinese girls had played extra, but there are many Chinese girls who are not nice.” It was only after her father made sure that other “honourable” Chinese extras, all male, would guard her that he agreed to let her participate.
Over the next two years, Wong appeared in bit parts in various films, still attending school, before quitting in 1921 to focus full-time on her career. She was immediately cast in her first leading role in The Toll of the Sea, a non-operatic take on Madame Butterfly that blew up the screen for two very simple reasons: It had Techni-colour (two-strip, which meant only tones of reds and greens, but no matter, COLOUR, that was sick), and Wong was actually a decent actress.
Wong’s acting was subtle and unmannered; her eyebrow game was on point. She had a piercing stare that made you feel as if she saw the very best and very worst things about you, and her signature blunt-cut bangs made her face seem at once exquisitely, perfectly symmetrical. Given the quilt work of exotic roles she’d played on the silent screen, audiences expected her to speak with a broken, accented, or otherwise un-American English. But her tone was refined, cool, cultured, like a slap in the face to anyone who’d assumed otherwise.
Her early success, like that of Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa, can at least partially be attributed to the global market for silent films. Yet to truly understand Anna May Wong’s unique place in Hollywood — and the particular type of racist role available to her — you have to understand both the rampant fetishsation of the “Orient” by the West and the place of Chinese-Americans in California in the early 20th century.
In very broad terms, “Oriental-ism” refers to the overarching tendency of the “Occident,” or the Western world, to fetishise and exorcise the “Orient” (“The East,” or civilizations and cultures spanning the Asian continent). Scholar Graham Huggan defines exoticism as an experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement” — and that’s exactly what Westerners wanted: a taste of “difference,” usually in the form of an evocative song, poem, or painting, without the actual immersive and possibly challenging experience thereof.
Mediated through the lens of Oriental-ism, members of distinct Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures are grouped together into one vast sultry and quasi-backward “Orient,” replete with heathens, pungent spices, snake charmers, mysticism, and all sorts of other offensively stereotypical renderings. For the Occident to rectify its position as potent, masculine, and dominant, it had to figure the Orient as diffuse, feminized, and passive. It’s bullshit, but it pervaded everything from political speeches to children’s bedtime stories. Think Madame Butterfly, think the entire oeuvre of Rudyard Kipling, think “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” think Aladdin.
When Anna May Wong rose to stardom in the 1920's, the “great” empires of the West were in decline — but that simply made it all the more important to shore up the ideas and attitudes that were under threat. Which explains why every. single. article. I found about Anna May Wong somehow manages to sexualise and exorcise her while also placing her — her upbringing, her family, her heritage — in diametric opposition to “American” and Western practices.
“Anna May Wong symbolizes the eternal paradox of her ancient race,” wrote one fan magazine. “She reminds us of cruel and intricate intrigues, and, at the same time, of crooned Chinese lullabies. She brings to the screen the rare comprehension and the mysterious colours of her ivory-skinned race.” That sort of rhetoric — directed to an almost entirely white audience — that’s Oriental-ism. That Wong was American, however, complicated the normal Orientalist discourses: She forced magazines to perform a lot of tricky rhetorical manoeuvring where they acknowledged that she was somehow, magically, almost inconceivably, at once American and Chinese.
Wong was also opposite of what many had come to associate with Chinese-Americans, which, at least in the late 19th and early 20th century, comprised a subculture that was conceived of as being segregated, unknowable, and almost entirely male. The reasons for that reputation were complicated: When Chinese laborers first came to America in the mid-19th century, men traveled to make money, while women mostly stayed at home. With the passage of the Page Law in 1875, Chinese women with even a hint of “immoral character or suspect virtue” were banned from entering the United States, which resulted in even more gender imbalance.
Because Chinese lived in these nearly all-male configurations that didn't match with American understandings of what community should look like, it was easy to further stigmatize and exclude them, both socially and legally. See, for example, the 1882 passage of the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which prevented Chinese from entering the U.S. based on claims that as a people, the Chinese were immoral, unhealthy, and posed distinct threats to the American way of life and labour force (rhetoric that may sound familiar to anyone following contemporary immigration debates).
That was the environment of systemic racism in which Wong was operating in the early ‘20s, when her turn in the Technicolour Turn of the Sea was such a novelty that all of Hollywood saw it — including Douglas Fairbanks, then-ruling King of Hollywood, like Tom Cruise meets Brad Pitt only with a swashbuckling moustache. Fairbanks needed a dastardly “Mongol slave” for his production of The Thief of Baghdad, and immediately wanted Wong for the part.
What do these two roles have in common? In one, Wong plays a Chinese “Lotus Flower” who falls for a white man who loves her but can’t possibly be with her; in the other she plays “the scheming handmaiden” who tries to prevent the love between the handsome, swashbuckling lead and his princess (the daughter of a caliph who is unaccountably white). So: a victim who can’t have love, or evil temptress who prevents a white woman from having love — these are the two roles that Wong would play again and again, with slight variations for ethnic specificity, time period, and plot, over the next two decades. A victim or a villain, with very little, in most cases, in terms of character development, ethnic specificity, or anything else to suggest that the depth, charisma, or worth of white counterparts.
Wong’s roles may have been shit, but the fan magazines loved her, unlike black actors, who were either relegated to even more demeaning bit parts and/or ghettoised in black films shown only in black theatres for black audiences. For various complicated reasons that have a lot to do with American racial history and the way that Oriental-ism actually weirdly celebrates the people and civilizations it fetishises, it was OK for the fan mags to profile her, run pictures of her, and generally acquaint American audiences with her — but not put her on the cover.
To prove that she was Chinese:
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 Kiang. Her deep brown eyes, while the slant is not pronounced, are typically Oriental.
But oh, wait, she’s totally American:
Improbable as this sounds, it is absolutely true. Anna May Wong, among Americans, is so thoroughly one of us that her Oriental background drops completely away.
No, seriously, guys, she’s Chinese:
She is as Chinese as kumquats and the lotus. … She is of centuries ago and yet of today. … Animation scarcely ever ruffles the tranquillity of her round face.
NO, SERIOUSLY, SHE’S AMERICAN:
Anna May Wong has never even been to China, and you might just as well know it right now. Moreover, she has seen NY’s Chinatown only from a taxi-cab, and she doesn't wear a mandarin coat … her English is faultless. Her conversation consists of scintillating chatter that any flapper might envy. Her sense of humour is thoroughly American. She didn't eat rice when she and I lunched together, and she distinctly impressed it upon the waiter to bring her coffee, not tea.
NEVER MIND, SHE’S TOTALLY CHINESE:
You can see how Wong would grow weary, both of this treatment in her publicity and the relative dearth of roles, especially complex ones, available to her. She was also understandably pissed that when an Asian role did come along, directors found an actor of basically any other ethnicity — Latino, Eastern European, Irish — to cast as the Asian character.
Read More: http://www.buzzfeed.com/
The Forgotten Story Of Classic Hollywood’s First Asian-American Star
Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong was a trailblazer despite the openly racist industry in which she worked. Remembering her story and contemplating how much things have changed.
By Anne Helen Petersen posted on Oct. 1, 2014, at 2:08 a.m. BuzzFeed News Features Writer.
The following is a bonus chapter from Anne Helen Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema. You can read previous instalments — on everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Marlon Brando.
In a December 1933 issue of New Movie Magazine, society reporter Grace Kingsley described her visit to screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s famed costume party, where the who’s who of Hollywood showed up dressed, as the year’s theme dictated, as other Hollywood stars. The actress Fay Wray described the scene to Kingsley, cooing over each of her friend’s excellent costumes (“There’s Jack Gilbert as Lionel Barrymore in Rasputin!”) but really losing it when she sees “a little Chinese lady dancing about.”
But that lady wasn't Chinese: She was the (white) comedienne Polly Moran. “I'm Anna May Wong!” she said, running over and brandishing her hands. “And my fingernails cost me a dollar and a half!”
As the picture that accompanied the article shows, Moran was decked out in full yellow-face — including make-up to darken her skin, a wig, Chinese-style dress, and approximations of Wong’s signature long, pointed nails. In the picture, she makes a face intended to simulate a “Chinese” expression, and if you look closely, you can see that her eyes are taped up in an exaggeration of the Asian facial structure.
Moran, and whoever dressed her, would be familiar with this make-up technique (often achieved by using fish skin as an adhesive) because so many non-Asian women had been made up to play the role of Asian women. These were leading roles that could've been (but were seldom) given to classic Hollywood’s first and only Chinese-American star.
Anna May Wong, like other Hollywood actors of colour, was not allowed in society, and would not have been invited to Stewart’s party. She couldn't hang out with the very stars who exorcised and imitated her. In classic Hollywood, not only was it OK to act Asian, it was celebrated. And even though Stewart’s soiree was just a party, the behaviours modelled there bespoke the dominant understandings of Hollywood and America at large: White people can play at other races, and other races can play at very little.
Anna May Wong never scandalized Hollywood with her string of fiancés, like Clara Bow, or an outré sex philosophy, like Mae West. Ultimately, the scandal of her career had little to do with her, or her actions — it’s the way that Hollywood, and the audience that powered it, remained so hideously stubborn about the roles a woman like her could play, both on and off the screen. Wong was a silent-film demi-star, a European phenomenon, a cultural ambassador, and a curiosity, the de facto embodiment of China, Asia, and the “Orient” at large for millions. She didn't choose that role, but it became hers, and she laboured, subtly, cleverly, persistently, to challenge what Americans thought an Asian or Asian-American should or could be — a challenge that persists today.
Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles, just off Flower Street on the outskirts of Chinatown. Fan-magazine renderings of Wong’s childhood didn't shy from evoking the discrimination she faced, especially in her integrated elementary school. One boy would stick needles into her every day, to which she responded by simply wearing a thicker and thicker coat. A group of boys pulled her long braids, shoving her off the side walk and yelling, “Chink, Chink, Chinamen. Chink, Chink, Chinamen.” Sometimes the profile would admit that such children were of “lesser parents,” but the anecdotes were framed as a simple trial of childhood: no different than a white star getting teased as a child for an embarrassing name or pair of glasses.
Profiles also laboured to reconcile an identity that was at once wholly Chinese yet also American. She worked in a Chinese laundry, but that laundry wasn't in Chinatown. Her parents forced her to go to Chinese school after American school, but she skipped it to go to the movies. She had a Chinese name (Wong Liu Tsong) that meant “Frosted Yellow Willows,” but she opted for the Americanized Anna May Wong. Her parents were sceptical of the moving image — her mother purportedly believed that cameras could steal a bit of the soul — but Wong eschewed Old World superstition. She was, in many ways, a classic child of immigrants, incorporating the behaviours, beliefs, and vernacular of her homeland with the heritage of home.
As Wong grew, she became increasingly fascinated with the Hollywood pictures that would film in Chinatown, which, in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s, studios would regularly use as a visual substitute for China — a conflation that made it even more difficult for Americans to understand that Chinese-Americans were a distinct culture from the Chinese.
To make Chinatown seem like the bustling streets of China, directors needed Chinese faces — which is how Wong first appeared, as an extra in Alla Nazimova’s The Red Lantern at the age of 14. She had asked for her father’s permission, but he was reluctant: As one profile explained, “Of course, many Chinese girls had played extra, but there are many Chinese girls who are not nice.” It was only after her father made sure that other “honourable” Chinese extras, all male, would guard her that he agreed to let her participate.
Over the next two years, Wong appeared in bit parts in various films, still attending school, before quitting in 1921 to focus full-time on her career. She was immediately cast in her first leading role in The Toll of the Sea, a non-operatic take on Madame Butterfly that blew up the screen for two very simple reasons: It had Techni-colour (two-strip, which meant only tones of reds and greens, but no matter, COLOUR, that was sick), and Wong was actually a decent actress.
Wong’s acting was subtle and unmannered; her eyebrow game was on point. She had a piercing stare that made you feel as if she saw the very best and very worst things about you, and her signature blunt-cut bangs made her face seem at once exquisitely, perfectly symmetrical. Given the quilt work of exotic roles she’d played on the silent screen, audiences expected her to speak with a broken, accented, or otherwise un-American English. But her tone was refined, cool, cultured, like a slap in the face to anyone who’d assumed otherwise.
Her early success, like that of Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa, can at least partially be attributed to the global market for silent films. Yet to truly understand Anna May Wong’s unique place in Hollywood — and the particular type of racist role available to her — you have to understand both the rampant fetishsation of the “Orient” by the West and the place of Chinese-Americans in California in the early 20th century.
In very broad terms, “Oriental-ism” refers to the overarching tendency of the “Occident,” or the Western world, to fetishise and exorcise the “Orient” (“The East,” or civilizations and cultures spanning the Asian continent). Scholar Graham Huggan defines exoticism as an experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement” — and that’s exactly what Westerners wanted: a taste of “difference,” usually in the form of an evocative song, poem, or painting, without the actual immersive and possibly challenging experience thereof.
Mediated through the lens of Oriental-ism, members of distinct Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures are grouped together into one vast sultry and quasi-backward “Orient,” replete with heathens, pungent spices, snake charmers, mysticism, and all sorts of other offensively stereotypical renderings. For the Occident to rectify its position as potent, masculine, and dominant, it had to figure the Orient as diffuse, feminized, and passive. It’s bullshit, but it pervaded everything from political speeches to children’s bedtime stories. Think Madame Butterfly, think the entire oeuvre of Rudyard Kipling, think “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” think Aladdin.
When Anna May Wong rose to stardom in the 1920's, the “great” empires of the West were in decline — but that simply made it all the more important to shore up the ideas and attitudes that were under threat. Which explains why every. single. article. I found about Anna May Wong somehow manages to sexualise and exorcise her while also placing her — her upbringing, her family, her heritage — in diametric opposition to “American” and Western practices.
“Anna May Wong symbolizes the eternal paradox of her ancient race,” wrote one fan magazine. “She reminds us of cruel and intricate intrigues, and, at the same time, of crooned Chinese lullabies. She brings to the screen the rare comprehension and the mysterious colours of her ivory-skinned race.” That sort of rhetoric — directed to an almost entirely white audience — that’s Oriental-ism. That Wong was American, however, complicated the normal Orientalist discourses: She forced magazines to perform a lot of tricky rhetorical manoeuvring where they acknowledged that she was somehow, magically, almost inconceivably, at once American and Chinese.
Wong was also opposite of what many had come to associate with Chinese-Americans, which, at least in the late 19th and early 20th century, comprised a subculture that was conceived of as being segregated, unknowable, and almost entirely male. The reasons for that reputation were complicated: When Chinese laborers first came to America in the mid-19th century, men traveled to make money, while women mostly stayed at home. With the passage of the Page Law in 1875, Chinese women with even a hint of “immoral character or suspect virtue” were banned from entering the United States, which resulted in even more gender imbalance.
Because Chinese lived in these nearly all-male configurations that didn't match with American understandings of what community should look like, it was easy to further stigmatize and exclude them, both socially and legally. See, for example, the 1882 passage of the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which prevented Chinese from entering the U.S. based on claims that as a people, the Chinese were immoral, unhealthy, and posed distinct threats to the American way of life and labour force (rhetoric that may sound familiar to anyone following contemporary immigration debates).
That was the environment of systemic racism in which Wong was operating in the early ‘20s, when her turn in the Technicolour Turn of the Sea was such a novelty that all of Hollywood saw it — including Douglas Fairbanks, then-ruling King of Hollywood, like Tom Cruise meets Brad Pitt only with a swashbuckling moustache. Fairbanks needed a dastardly “Mongol slave” for his production of The Thief of Baghdad, and immediately wanted Wong for the part.
What do these two roles have in common? In one, Wong plays a Chinese “Lotus Flower” who falls for a white man who loves her but can’t possibly be with her; in the other she plays “the scheming handmaiden” who tries to prevent the love between the handsome, swashbuckling lead and his princess (the daughter of a caliph who is unaccountably white). So: a victim who can’t have love, or evil temptress who prevents a white woman from having love — these are the two roles that Wong would play again and again, with slight variations for ethnic specificity, time period, and plot, over the next two decades. A victim or a villain, with very little, in most cases, in terms of character development, ethnic specificity, or anything else to suggest that the depth, charisma, or worth of white counterparts.
Wong’s roles may have been shit, but the fan magazines loved her, unlike black actors, who were either relegated to even more demeaning bit parts and/or ghettoised in black films shown only in black theatres for black audiences. For various complicated reasons that have a lot to do with American racial history and the way that Oriental-ism actually weirdly celebrates the people and civilizations it fetishises, it was OK for the fan mags to profile her, run pictures of her, and generally acquaint American audiences with her — but not put her on the cover.
To prove that she was Chinese:
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 Kiang. Her deep brown eyes, while the slant is not pronounced, are typically Oriental.
But oh, wait, she’s totally American:
Improbable as this sounds, it is absolutely true. Anna May Wong, among Americans, is so thoroughly one of us that her Oriental background drops completely away.
No, seriously, guys, she’s Chinese:
She is as Chinese as kumquats and the lotus. … She is of centuries ago and yet of today. … Animation scarcely ever ruffles the tranquillity of her round face.
NO, SERIOUSLY, SHE’S AMERICAN:
Anna May Wong has never even been to China, and you might just as well know it right now. Moreover, she has seen NY’s Chinatown only from a taxi-cab, and she doesn't wear a mandarin coat … her English is faultless. Her conversation consists of scintillating chatter that any flapper might envy. Her sense of humour is thoroughly American. She didn't eat rice when she and I lunched together, and she distinctly impressed it upon the waiter to bring her coffee, not tea.
NEVER MIND, SHE’S TOTALLY CHINESE:
You can see how Wong would grow weary, both of this treatment in her publicity and the relative dearth of roles, especially complex ones, available to her. She was also understandably pissed that when an Asian role did come along, directors found an actor of basically any other ethnicity — Latino, Eastern European, Irish — to cast as the Asian character.
Read More: http://www.buzzfeed.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment