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AAST355: Asian Americans in Film Kiona's Coggle - Coggle Diagram

- - - - 9/02/22 Week 1 May Wong also was typecast in the same roles Hollywood believed fitted Asian actors. She was often cast as the stereotypical “Dragon Lady,” and she was often passed over for lead Asian roles, that in turn went to white actresses. Wong could not play these roles because they often had a white male lead, and anti-miscegenation laws forbid interracial relationship not only in the real world but also on film, so she had to take supporting roles. Wong even went abroad for better film roles because she was tired of the stereotypical, degrading and limiting roles Hollywood gatekeepers forced her to play. In addition, many white actors in old Hollywood played Asian characters in “yellow face,” displaying gross stereotypes of Asians. These portrayals of Asians displayed to America and the world only created a negative representation of the Asian community and denied them positive and multidimensional representation in film as was, and still is afforded, to non-Asian actors. These stereotypes and limitations for Asian actors demonstrate how film as an institution sets and maintains a racial order in America and the rest of the Western world. The above-mentioned actors were constrained to these roles that were very degrading to them; they weren’t allowed to expand past these false images until they created their own companies, or made films abroad, and still over all they were never really respected for their contribution in film, as their white counterparts.
- - - - 9/15/22 Gina Marchetti: Romance and the Yellow Peril
        In this article Marchetti points out that “Hollywood’s depiction of Asia has been inextricably linked to the threat of the so-called ‘yellow peril’” (2). She writes that this “yellow peril” discourse that the Hollywood institution and outside institutions displayed to the public consists of the so-called “sexual availability” of the Asian female, and the Asian male who threatens white women purity. The article claims that these are symbols that represent the overall description/definition of “yellow peril,” which is the fear of the East dominating the West, destroying Western values. Marchetti also points out that Hollywood silent films also approached the subject of the tragic interracial love affair. These points made in the article relate to the films The Toll of the Sea and The Cheat. The former deals with a doomed interracial love affair: Lotus Flower’s white American husband abandons her, she gives away her child to him and his new wife, and possibly commits suicide. In the latter, Haka is violent towards Edith, a white woman, attempting to rape her. Both films show Western attitudes toward the East. Lotus Flower is depicted as a tragic, infantile character, and Haka is depicted as a predator. It seems that Hollywood created these sort of films from the irrational fears and xenophobia America and the West have historically harbored towards Asian people, and perhaps both films are the result of these absurd fears.