Supplemental post 1--Hollywood Chinese

Last summer I visited the Arthur Dong collection entitled “Hollywood Chinese” at the Chinese American Museum in downtown LA. Being Chinese American and very interested in the film industry I thought it would be the perfect way to see how people from my own heritage have evolved in Hollywood, especially since we are under represented.
During my visit I felt a mixture of pride and shock. We display so proudly posters from the films where Chinese Americans actually appeared in Hollywood, and Asians were not just portrayed by White actors. But for the first several decades that Chinese Americans were in film, they usually played stereotypical “dragon lady” type roles, or servants. While I recognize the big step it was to have actual Asians in films at all, the roles were painfully stereotypical and even seemed offensive to me. The men were portrayed as crafty and untrustworthy, and the women were so subservient. And yet, there was almost an entire floor celebrating the clichéd view of Asian Americans.
The other major part of the exhibit celebrated one of the most famous Asian American female actresses, Nancy Kwan. As one of the major sex icons of the 1960s, she is best known for her performances in The World of Suzie Wong and Flower Drum Song. She was actually at the event I attended at the museum and looked great. My mom told me that growing up she always wanted to be as beautiful and talented as Nancy Kwan, and that she was a huge cultural role model for young Asian American women who didn’t have anyone else to look up to in the media. But, interestingly, Kwan is not even one hundred percent Asian. I think that Kwan was able to reach such mainstream popularity is because, although clearly she is of Asian decent, she does not have the same look as other Asian women. The fact that she is half white really made her accessible to wider, white audiences. It was very interesting to me that one of the major icons of Chinese film culture is not actually full Chinese, and yet only she was able to bridge the huge gap between offensive and tolerable depictions of Asian Americans in film.