The Long March from Wong to Woo: Asians in Hollywood

On International Women's Day in 1994, I was honored at the Directors Guild of America by becoming the youngest recipient of the Women in Film Achievement Award. Stevie Wonder, my hero, congratulated me, and CNN Entertainment asked how I felt. Cool. Hey, I was on global television! But after struggling for two decades in Hollywood, my film work had just begun. When I was a teenager struggling for work as an actress, Asian American Screen Actors Guild members took up only two pages in the Academy Players listing of what was then called the "Orientals" category. Ouch! Conjures up images of conniving little Fu Man Chus who do your shirts with extra starch. Nowadays our glossy photos fill up dozens of pages in the Academy book. We are now "Asian Pacific." Ugh. Sounds like one of those railroads our Chinese forebears died building in pursuit of the American Dream. Why can't we simply be who we are? Why do we have to be categorized at all?

Flashback to 1928: Anna May Wong explains her reason for leaving Hollywood -"I was tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that on the screen the Chinese are nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain -murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilization so many times older than that of the West? We have our rigid code of behavior, of honor. Why do they never show those on the screen?" Jumpcut to 1995: John Woo, Hong Kong's leading director, comments on his first Hollywood film - "I feel honored, grateful and excited to work in Hollywood...It's a great joy to receive such wonderful support, so that I can bring my creativity a step higher when supported by good crews and productions. It has been a great learning experience for me. It also fulfilled my dream of combining East and West and making a good film."

Seventy-five years lurk between the debut of Anna May Wong as an extra in the silent The Red Lantern (1919) and John Woo. During those seventy-five years, Hollywood's perception of the Asian seemed to have been derived directly from the nineteenth-century frontier view of Chinese as a subhuman species suitable for building levees, laying railroad track, doing laundry, or being dangled from trees by those ridiculous pigtails. Moviegoers were fed erotic images of the China Doll as concubine, supple in cheongsam attire, secret danger cocked in her eyes, graceful as a snow leopard. But look out! There's a dagger up her silk sleeve. Asian males fared no better, being either Ming the Merciless, the Mad Malaysian run amok, Fu Manchu, or Charlie Chan spouting those fortune-cookie one-liners. Throughout the 1930s, Hollywood dabbled from time to time with Asian locales, but an Asian never got a leading role. Stars of European descent were entrusted with the plum parts, their eyelids hiked up so tightly it is a wonder they could find their marks on the sound stage floors. Typically, when MGM cast for The Good Earth, one of the most successful films of the decade, the leading Chinese roles went to Paul Muni and Luise Rainer. With typical grace, the studio asked Anna May Wong to drive over to Culver City to test for the role of Lotus, an especially loathsome concubine. A furious Anna May told them, with her Oxonian accent, what they could do with that lotus of theirs. The 1940s presented Hollywood with major casting problems. The villains of that era were the terrible Nips. But the American authorities had herded all the West Coast Japanese into detention camps. Who would play the Bad Guys? No problem. All Asians look alike. We'll use Chinese and Koreans. Thus, Philip Ahn, Richard Loo, and other non-Japanese were up to their samurai swords in work. It was Yellow Peril Time - babies on bayonets, John Wayne storming beachheads - and few Asian actors needed to collect unemployment benefits in those heady days.

An outright assault on stereotyping had to wait until 1960, when Ray Stark cast an honest to goodness, mostly Asian girl in the title role in The World of Suzie Wong, an East-West love story caressingly photographed in Hong Kong. Nancy Kwan, who played a Chinese prostitute, was actually permitted on screen to let a clear-cut American lad (William Holden, no less) love and cherish her, overlook the fact that she made her daily biscuits by flat-backing, and see in her only that gauzy, abiding goodness of the loving Asian mistress, willing prey to the tall, shining white knight. Sentimental? Of course. Racist? You bet. Outdated? Like the horse and buggy. But sentimental, racist, and outdated as it was, Suzie Wong was a breakthrough film in the long march from Wong to Woo. In 1928, British censors had removed a scene in one of Anna May's films in which she kissed an Englishman. The authorities argued that such a thing could not have occurred in real life. Bruce Lee would be similarly affronted when, in spite of his awesome martial arts expertise and the indisputable genetic fact that he was Chinese, DNA from a German grandfather notwithstanding, Warner Bros. rejected him for the leading role in Kung Fu, a TV series based on Bruce's idea. Instead, the role went to an American actor, David Carradine. Rubbing salt into the wound, Warner Bros. initially broadcast the show only once a month, explaining, "The American public won't sit for a Chinaman appearing in their living rooms every week."

This racial rejection by Hollywood, Bruce told me, made him furious. It impelled him to leave the United States and return to Hong Kong, where, in two dizzying years, he became an international legend. The week before he died we spoke. He was filming Game of Death and had just left the hospital after stunt injuries sustained on the set. He was as feisty as ever. His new film, Enter the Dragon, produced by Warner Bros., was due to open in the U.S. "Just watch, I'll outgross Steve McQueen and James Coburn," he declared. They were both Bruce's students and each had told him that he could never reach their star status because he was Chinese. Part of his plan to prove them wrong involved another pupil, the Oscar- winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, who proved to be a staunch Lee ally. Silliphant wrote a special part for Bruce in the ABC-TV show, Longstreet. After the show's two-hour pilot episode, "The Way of the Intercepting Fist," Bruce got more fan mail than James Franciscus, the leading man. That episode was shown to Raymond Chow in Hong Kong. The rest, as they say, is history.

Before Bruce left for his final destiny in Hong Kong, he and Silliphant collaborated on a script with James Coburn entitled The Silent Flute. In it, Bruce was to play several roles similar to but more authentic than Carradine's TV zen-chop-socky character. Warner Bros. sent the trio to India on a reconnaissance mission to see what could be done with the company's blocked rupees. Coburn was treated like a star in India while Bruce, whom everyone assumed was a lowly assistant, got what he referred to as "the broom closet." He was so bitter about the stereotyping that he made me promise him that I would never agree to play the Hollywood game - being cast as the Chinese whore or the helpless Oriental who gets raped and killed. He was clairvoyant about that. Years later, I turned down exactly such a part in Brian De Palma's Viet Nam film, Casualties of War. No problem, they cast a Thai girl for the part. They were shooting Thailand for Viet Nam anyway. Bruce swore to me he'd never wear a braid and play the coolie. We made a pact to take on Hollywood! We didn't know what we were up against. His road would take him back home to Hong Kong and mine, two decades later, would lead me to Viet Nam.

As the 1980s unspooled, Hollywood began to replace their nasty Asian types with more benign stereotypes - Asians seen through flickering foregrounds of candlelit, burnished temples - the old sound of one-hand- clapping routine, with Zen the buzzword. These images were balanced, yin and yang style, by the Asian martial artists who demonstrated that any monk trained in wushu could easily mop up an alley full of street toughs in, say, Hoboken, or even East St. Louis.

The long decades of demonizing Asians also spawned new stereotypes. Asian actors in minor roles were often a tad brighter than their sluggish coworkers. Got a part for the forensic expert in a police film? How about a systems analyst? That all fits in with the honor-roll images from Berkeley and Harvard. Study another set of statistics and we get another variation on the Other: Asian gang members. The Japanese were still catching hell in films like Black Rain and Rising Sun. And in Robocop III the long-enduring Mako got to play the ever-mysterious CEO of an octopuslike Tokyo conglomerate. Even after fifty-two years, the people who brought Americans Pearl Harbor were not to be trusted, especially when they're holding the mortgage on the Hollywood studio bungalow. But other forces were in play as well. The flow of Asian immigrants to the United States had given birth to a rising chorus of Asian American voices. These new writers included Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Carlos Bulosan, and Bharati Mukherjee. Adding another dimension to this movement were the new translated works of Vietnamese writers from Hanoi. In 1987 I discovered and interviewed Duong Thu Huong, the lady cadre, political prisoner, and beloved writer of socialist Viet Nam. Paradise of the Blind, her novel about postwar Viet Nam, was published by William Morrow. Bao Ninh, another Hanoi writer, had his masterpiece, The Sorrow of War, become a bestseller in England. Ninh writes, in a much needed corrective, of how Vietnamese war veterans also have nightmarish, compelling images.

All of these writers provide Hollywood with a vision of the Asian and Asian American experience that rips apart the old images. Their truth, held up like a crucifix before the Dracula of Hollywood, compels the studios to face the fact that Asian hearts are not so different, that Asian eyes shed tears despite the slant of their eyelids. Responding to these simple truths, American audiences have flocked to The Joy Luck Club, a film with real-life Asians daringly playing real-life characters with not a Shirley MacLaine, Myrna Loy, or Katharine Hepburn in the cast. The film's existence is due mainly to Executive Producer Oliver Stone's willingness to take a risk. The film is directed by Wayne Wang, an Asian American who began his career in 1982 with an honest little film, Chan is Missing, shot on the streets of San Francisco for a handful of change with a dedicated Asian American cast and crew.

Have the times caught up? I can't say. The big blockbuster of last year was Forrest Gump. What does Gump say about his experiences in Nam? "We were lookin' for some guy named Charlie." The audiences thought that was hilarious. I cringed. Was this to be our legacy? Three million Indochinese dead. The nation of Viet Nam ravished, fit now only to be the butt of a Hollywood joke? I think Steve McQueen, shot and dying in a Chinese courtyard in Robert Wise's The Sand Pebbles, gave a more honest answer - "What am I doing here?"

John Woo, with all the heat he generated in Hollywood after several successful Hong Kong action films, might ask the same question. Recently he stated, "The system here is very complicated and involved. There are a lot of power struggles and politics. I feel that sometimes I waste so much time and energy on meaningless rules of the game. Politics, meetings, and the ego problems of a lot of people make me confused. This affects my creative mood and depresses me...I believe many American directors go through the same thing."

Yes, indeed we do. My own film, From Hollywood to Hanoi,(Indochina Film Arts Foundation) made withblood, sweat, and tears over six years, was screened for the U.S. Congress in 1994 in celebration of President Clinton's decision to lift the twenty- year trade embargo against Viet Nam. This was the first American film shot in Viet Nam for Viet Nam to play in theaters. It has won major festival awards and pleased audiences enough that they have funded the prints and 35mm blow-up. I have taken the film on the college circuit from East Coast Harvard to West Coast Stanford. I've shown it in art centers as far north as Minneapolis and as far south as New Orleans. But no Hollywood studio has been willing to take it on for distribution. Distributing has been like waging war. You take a hill at a time. You go bunker by bunker. I had no choice, but I don't recommend it.

Part of the problem, of course, is that I chose to make a documentary. Unless your topic is baseball or basketball, the studios aren't usually interested. Do I have regrets about my choices? A few. Not enough hours in each day. A wrecked personal life. But I enjoy the freedom of retaining all rights to my work. We are free to play it for audiences throughout the world. I have seen my film reunite families, help change government policies, and stir the passionate but still rigid Vietnamese community. The film even succeeded in making my parents proud of their daughter, the Woman Warrior armed with a camera. Sometimes I've felt like giving up, but I believe Bruce would have been proud of me for keeping my vow with him.

Now it's time to make another one. It's called Rice Dreams. I'm writing it, living it, and workshopping it. Before that, I'm heading out to China Beach in Central Viet Nam to shoot my summer musical comedy film, Bingo Beach, as the first Vietnamese-American coproduction. In the meantime, I dream of Anna May. I wish I had met her. Most of all, I wish I had her to cast. A teenage Anna May and Leonard DiCaprio on a kitchen table. Anna May and Spike Lee rapping! Tom Cruise and Anna get married in Hawaii. Thelma and Anna May. The possibilities are endless. The long march isn't complete, but maybe we do see the hint of light at the end of the Hollywood tunnel. Thank you, Anna May Wong! Best of luck, John Woo!