The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong's Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Era

Camera Obscura

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 159-191

  Wang, Yiman ^a  

^a HAVERFORD COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950515023     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: 15291510     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-20-3_60-159     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Anthony Chan, Perpetually Cool (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2003)
2. Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
3. Elizabeth Wong, "China Doll" ("The Imagined Life of an American Actress"), November 1996, unpublished manuscript represented by Jason Fogelson, William Morris Agency, 1325 Ave. of the Americas, New York, NY 10019
4. Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane, Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio, and Television Work ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004)
5. Anna May Wong - Frosted Yellow Willows: Her Life, Times, and Legend, a documentary film produced and directed by Elaine Mae Woo, narrated by Nancy Kwan, www.anna-may-wong.com/home.htm. The film is scheduled for release in 2005
6. Diane Negra, Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1
7. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999). Other prominent works theorizing the importance of masquerade and performativity include Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985)
8. and Mary Ann Doane's The Desire to Desire: Women's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). The emphasis on masquerade in the Western context constitutes a disturbing contrast with the wishful conviction in the mimetic quality of the non-Western context. Rey Chow sees the mimetic compulsion in reading non-Western works as a manifestation of Western identity politics, which she criticizes in terms of "coercive mimeticism."
9. See Chow, "Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem," Boundary 2 25, no. 3 (1998): 1 - 24
10. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 1978), excerpts reprinted in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrismen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 132 - 33, 146
11. John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776 - 1882 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), xxiii, quoted in Timothy Tseng, "Beyond Orientalism and Assimilation: The Asian American as Historical Subject," in Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, ed. Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez (Saint Louis, MO: Chalice, 2003), 66
12. Tseng, "Beyond Orientalism and Assimilation," 67
13. For an important in-depth discussion of the yellow peril in Hollywood, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
14. Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (New York: Random House, 1998), 35
15. See Wong's autobiography, "The True Life Story of a Chinese Girl," Pictures, parts 1 and 2, August and September 1926. I have not been able to access the August and September issues of Pictures. However, part 2 of Wong's writing is available online at www.spankingart.com/ Books/MemberArea/ Autoby/wong.htm (accessed 2 August 2005)
16. Rob Wanger, "A Chinese Girl Goes 'Home,' " Rob Wagner's Script, 10 January 1936, 23
17. Philip Leibfried, "Anna May Wong," The Silents Majority (1995), available at www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/Guest/Wong.htm (accessed 21 March 2001). Leibfried's article is no longer available online. However, his other writings on Wong are easily accessible. See, for example, Leibfried and Lane, Anna May Wong
18. Rob Wagner, quoted in Karen Janis Leong, "The China Mystique: Mayling Soong Chiang, Pearl S. Buck, and Anna May Wong in the American Imagination" (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1999), 143; italics added
19. "Tale of Orient Told in Picture Form," San Francisco Chronicle, 12 February 1926
20. Tim Bergfelder, "Negotiating Exoticism: Hollywood, Film Europe, and Cultural Reception of Anna May Wong," in "Film Europe" and "Film America": Cinema, Commerce, and Cultural Exchange 1920 - 1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 302 - 24, 318
21. "Berlin Praises Miss Wong," Variety, 14 November 1928, 26
22. Bergfelder, "Negotiating Exoticism," 319
23. Marjory Collier, "East Meets West in Anna May Wong," Picturegoer, May 1930, 26, quoted in Bergfelder, "Negotiating Exoticism," 319
24. Ali Hubert, Hollywood, Legende und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1930; reprinted Heidelberg: Das Wanderhorn, 1988), 106 - 7, quoted in Bergfelder, "Negotiating Exoticism," 318 - 19; my emphases
25. Liangyou, November 1929, 20
26. Lucy Fischer, Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 11 - 20
27. Mark Winokur, "Improbably Ethnic Hero: William Powell and the Transformation of Ethnic Hollywood," Cinema Journal 12 (1987): 5 - 22, 13 - 14
28. Greg M. Smith, "Silencing the New Woman: Ethnic and Social Mobility in the Melodramas in Norma Talmadge," Journal of Film and Video 48 (1996): 7
29. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 13
30. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 112
31. James Wong Howe, an early Chinese American cinematographer active in Hollywood, called these yellowface actors "adhesive tape actors." See Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 325
32. Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29 (1988): 45. Importantly, the "white" here should not be understood as a self-evident biological term; rather it designates a sociocultural construct, the specific intention and extension of which have been constantly redefined in accordance with the ideological needs at particular historical moments. Thus not all white-looking actors enjoy the same degree of freedom in racial masquerade
33. Leibfried, "Anna May Wong."
34. Fischer, Designing Women, 232
35. Louis Leung, "East Meets West," Hollywood Magazine, June 1938, 55, quoted in Leong, "The China Mystique," 387
36. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 31 - 33, 49 - 51
37. Knight, Disintegrating the Musical, 175
38. Butler, Gender Trouble, 136
39. Leong, "The China Mystique," 159 - 60
40. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian American: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 100
41. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), 20
42. See Dinitia Smith, "Face Values: The Sexual and Racial Obsessions of David Henry Hwang," New York, 11 January 1993, 40 - 45
43. Quoted in Brian D. Johnson, "A Director's Obsession," Maclean's, 13 September 1993, 38 - 41
44. Ien Ang, "On Not Speaking Chinese: Postmodern Ethnicity and the Politics of Diaspora," in Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 561, my emphasis
45. Wong, "True Life Story."
46. Anna May Wong, "Anna May Wong Recalls Shanghai's Enthusiastic Reception on First Visit," New York Herald-Tribune, 31 May 1936
47. In a 1931 interview, she stated, "My face has changed because my mind has changed. I look like the people of the West except in some moments of despair and stress, then I fall back on the Oriental philosophy, which is not to resist." Quoted in Neil Okrent, "Right Place, Wrong Time: Why Hollywood's First Asian Star, Anna May Wong, Died a Thousand Movie Deaths," Los Angeles Magazine, May 1990, 96