Chinese Culture in Cinema

Chinese culture – or rather, Chinese culture seen through a Western veneer, or Orientalism – has long been a source of fascination, comedy and fear in Western cinema. We look back on how some of these portrayals have evolved over the past half century – and how Western film and television see China now.  

Like the golliwog and the Red Indian, “Asian” characters – often played by Caucasian actors – have long been used by mainstream studios to drum up a few laughs for the audience – mainstream cinema being marketed to an audience perceived overwhelmingly to be white. While this problem undoubtedly persists today, it has become more insidious since the days of outright racism, when Asian stereotypes were openly celebrated in film.  Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s – playing Mr Yunioshi,  a Japanese landlord alternately  enamoured of and furious at Audrey Hepburn’s character – is a one-dimensional character intended to draw a few laughs from the audience in all his “Japaneseness”. As well as his eccentric “Asian” mannerisms and bouts of fury, what shines through is that it’s unthinkable that a man portrayed as “Eastern” could win the affections of a Caucasian woman. As author Jen Yamato has written, “In the middle of an otherwise lovely film it [the portrayal of Mr Yunioshi] became one of the more cutting examples of institutionalized racism in Hollywood.” In 2009, the film was re-issued by Paramount Pictures with a documentary entitled “Mr Yunioshi: An Asian Perspective”, taking stock of the criticism leveled at it since the early 1990s.

Where Mr Yunioshi is an example of the laughable Asian, Fu Manchu, the hero from the popular TV series and films, epitomizes the evil criminal Chinese genius trope that was so popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Like Mr Yunioshi before him, Fu Manchu was played by a Caucasian actor in yellowface, Glen Gordon and Christopher Lee. The character also spawned the famous “Fu Manchu” moustache, which the character of Pai Mei sported in Quentin Tarantino’s epic Kill Bill 2. Pai Mei, like Fu Manchu, represents yet another Asian stereotype in Western film: the mystical, mysterious Eastern sage. Another Kill Bill character, the Japanese swordmaker Hattori Hanzo, is cast in almost the same light as Master Pai Mei – a man whose very Asianness connects him to mystical powers and talents.

Portrayals of Chinese women in film

There are also tropes surrounding Chinese women in Western cinema and television: like men, they have tended to be portrayed in broad generalizations. Where Asian men have largely been portrayed as lacking in sexuality – the ascetic martial arts master, the villain, the mystic, the nerd – Eastern Asian women have often been typecast as either the dangerous “Dragon Lady”, the martial arts star au feminin, or the “Oriental siren” sex worker (remember the line “Me love you long time?” from 1980s movie Full Metal Jacket?).

In the 1920s, Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong played a series of Dragon Ladies (Ms Wong later hopped across the pond to Europe in the hope of a wider range of roles).  The Chinese-American actress Lucy Liu also incarnated the Dragon Lady in both Kill Bill, as the “Queen of the Underworld” O-Ren Ishii , and in the TV series Ally McBeal as lawyer Ling Woo. On this topic, Ms Liu has stated: “I wish people wouldn't just see me as the Asian girl who beats everyone up, or the Asian girl with no emotion. People see Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock in a romantic comedy, but not me.”

Stereotypes

The animated film Kung Fu Panda also reinforces these tropes, even as it slyly pokes fun at them. All the stereotypical “Chinese” elements are present in the film: It is set in ancient China, playing into the “mysterious China” idea. The main character, Po, is a panda whose life’s dream is to be a kung fu master. The characters live in a village where life centers around a noodle shop. Dragons and fireworks are conspicuous in the film. We even have a “Dragon Lady”, the fierce “Tigress” character who is the leader of the Furious Five. As one critic said: “overall, the film trades into a facile commodification of Asian culture.”

Although the all-out, no-holds-barred racism surrounding China and the idea of anything East Asian that was prevalent in Western media in previous decades has mostly disappeared, racist portrayals still occasionally slip under the radar. In 2013, Spanish television channel Telecinco was taken to task by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its skit on Chinese restaurants in Spain, where the punchline was the untrustworthy meat products used in the restaurant. Spain is home to approximately 100,000 Chinese immigrants; it’s striking that the Chinese community, and China in general, continues to be either conspicuously absent from mainstream media or typecast in very particular ways.

More broadly, in the USA, Asian-American actors continue to be pigeonholed. ABC’s new sitcom “Fresh off the Boat”, which will air in fall 2014, is intended as an “Asian-American family comedy”. At salon.com, Asian-American critic Kevin Wong said: “[T]he show should not exclusively and incessantly be about Asian issues. That will start to feel objectifying... Asian Americans are not fixated on their heritage to the exclusion of everything else, forever ‘trapped between two worlds.’ Instead, the show should portray well-rounded characters, with concerns and conflicts that are universal to all families.”

The West has a long way to go in its portrayal of China or, more generally, “the East”, as anything Asian is still so often lumped together into an exotic mishmash thick with stereotypes. All too often, Western actors of Asian descent are typecast into the roles of the perpetual foreigner, the trusty sidekick, the dangerous vamp or the nerd. If it wants to stop othering Chinese culture and pigeonholing Asian American actors, Hollywood would do well to open its eyes and ears to the suggestions of the community that has experienced this

Source: echinacities.com