By Arthur Dong
(Director of Hollywood Chinese; special from the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival) Click HERE for MPM's review of the film. For the past decade, my work has covered America's destructive war against homosexuality in a trilogy of films that focused on murders of gay men, conservative Christians and the military's policy governing gay service members. Hollywood Chinese was a much-needed break from this tense period of reportage. It was also an opportunity to delve back into my affection for the Hollywood film. The movie theaters in my hometown of San Francisco were both my childhood playgrounds and my first film schools. Since I can remember, my parents took all of us kids to the local Chinatown movie houses as a weekend treat to see Chinese-language imports from overseas. This was no passive activity restricted to sitting still with eyes glued on the big screen. When bored with the melodrama that was onscreen, we'd find other kids and chase each other up and down the aisles, or hang out in the lounges, or climb around the upper stalls. This was totally acceptable - we didn't have day care centers in Chinatown back then. Despite the playtime, however, I did develop a roster of favorite Chinese movie stars and took in hundreds of hours of Chinese storytelling and imagery. When old enough, I eventually ventured outside Chinatown and haunted the now-defunct revival houses that programmed Hollywood classics. Hollywood was another world. I was equally captivated with Jean Harlow, The Apu Trilogy and, of course, Citizen Kane. The experience of looking at images shot decades before I was born was fascinating. I actually had plans to become a film historian, and, even though the filmmaking bug hit me, my passion for the archaeology of film has only deepened through the years. During those early years of watching Hollywood fare, and after having been weaned on Chinese films that featured real Chinese people, it was a curiosity whenever there was a Chinese character - whether played by a Chinese or other Asian - in a Hollywood movie. Actually, Flower Drum Song was the first English-language film I ever saw in a theater and it was, coincidentally, at a Chinatown neighborhood movie house. This was a special event for the community and the theater was packed with all sorts of Chinese folks - old, young, those in-between, Toishan-speaking, English-speaking, bilingual - and there was a buzz in the air. What a treat to gather together and see Chinese characters, even if they weren't all played by Chinese people, in a widescreen Hollywood musical. Two hours and thirteen minutes later, we'd pour out of the dark theater and there we were: "Grant Avenue! Where is that?
San Francisco, that's where's that! California, U.S.A.!"* It was a kind of surreal virtual experience: Art imitates life, and vice versa. And then there was The Good Earth. It was something else to watch Luise Rainer and Paul Muni portray Chinese peasants in yellow-face, leading a cast of thousands of real-life Chinese extras and bit players, not to mention millions of locusts. I don't recall if I was delighted or offended, but, if anything, I was intrigued. And, oh, the set design was pretty authentic and the camera work gorgeous. It was, and still is, a great piece of classic Hollywood moviemaking. Then came the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, ethnic pride. Flower Drum Song and The Good Earth's kow-towing, pidgin-speaking caricatures were rejected alongside Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. Songs like "Chop Suey" became an embarrassment for politicized Asian Americans. It didn't matter that Flower Drum Song was based on a book written by a Chinese American; it was, in the end, a white man's concoction. As for The Good Earth, well, it was based on a book written by Pearl S. Buck, the daughter of a missionary in China, and that fact alone carries a lot of political baggage. I think it's only fair, though, to point out that the novel won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize and was resurrected to the 2004 bestseller list when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. For many of its original readers, the novel challenged Western racism and helped prepare Americans of the 1930s to see Chinese as allies in the coming war with Japan. In any case, despite the discomfort of it all for some, for me, Flower Drum Song and The Good Earth exploded with a revolutionary imagination of a long-misrepresented people. To witness it today is to appreciate it both as cultural relic, with a bit of not-so-innocent transgression. But because of the debates over identity politics that began to swell in the counter-revolutionary 1960s, and even to present-day, some of my fondest memories in a movie theater were, and still are, targets of social and cultural critiques. With Hollywood Chinese, I take a lifelong affection for film and combine it with a quest to understand the complexities of cinema. It's my journey into the world of Hollywood moviemaking, to discover how stories and images of the Chinese fit within an entertainment industry that mixes art with commerce, a universal art form that affects the way we see each other and ourselves. I didn't set out to produce a definitive encyclopedic treatment of the topic, but rather a trip through Hollywood as seen through the lens of legends like Nancy Kwan, who broke racial barriers with her star-making turns in The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Flower Drum Song (1961).
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