PBS's Racial Problem

Courtesy of Robert S. Birchard Collection / PBS From "yellowface" performers to the oppressive role of the "Number One Son," Chinese-American history is rich with unique racial conundrums. So why is Hollywood Chinese, the documentary that premiered this week on PBS, too polite to bite into them?

At the opening of Hollywood Chinese, which premiered this week on PBS, film historian Stephen Gong states the thesis of an entertaining and somewhat informative documentary that, given its chosen constraints, is a good start.

“Films are about image-making,” Gong says, “and, at our peril sometimes, we misread and we mistake the images we put up for realities that we create. This is not small term. It’s entertainment industry on one hand, but it’s the way that our hopes and our aspirations and our expectations of one another are played out on that screen.”

Important historical, cultural, and aesthetic facts are either melted down or lost in a production that seems hemmed in and only about half as good as it could be.

That is only partially true. The other part has a consistency that the documentary alludes to often but does not live up to with thorough thinking and deeply provocative but accurate judgments. The blue steel fact is that part of the eventual freedom afforded any minority or immigrant population in America is to see its image take a place on the automated assembly line of the caricature and begin its very own journey through the dehumanizing head and body mask imposed by the menacing or buffoonish cartoon. At an unpredictable pace, that vulgar drawing becomes a stereotype—perhaps even a stock character. The image is finally lifted beyond its iron mask through what we might call the inevitable national alchemy. We do not know when, but we should know that every group is destined to be seen as human in American terms and that it will help define how fundamental but elastic those terms actually are as they contribute to our natural history.

This process leads ethnic groups beyond cardboard exotica and into the mysterious world of contractions and disappointments distinguished by inspirations that we understand as the condition of full humanity. As ease muscles itself into that arena, middle-class life becomes the salvation and the state of mind or class in which the adventures, the romance, and the joy brought by defeating great trouble do not obtain. The supposed heaven of dullness is soon met with rebellion as predictable as things were at the very beginning. That’s American life for you!

For Asians, the first stage of that evolution came in the form of yellowface, a term used to describe another obligatory version of blackface. At its worst, yellowface was exclusively demeaning and a perversion of the universal love of masking, which allows performers to express themselves, or their artistry, in the guise of someone else. At its best, as in 1937’s The Good Earth, we see the latter version of yellowface, where artistic levels of film are sought in the vocabulary of the time and white audiences were introduced to Asian humanity in an epic frame. There were other stations of the aesthetic cross along the way, but they were largely detective tales, war movies, and small parts as coolies of one sort or another.

The Chinese did not again achieve identification in epic terms until Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club was skillfully transformed into a shooting script and released in 1993. What happened until 1937 and why it took almost 60 years to extend upon the groundwork laid by The Good Earth is an intriguing piece of Americana that Hollywood Chinese succeeds at telling more through its well-chosen and well-edited talking heads than through any overall conception of cultural clarity.

Important historical, cultural, and aesthetic facts are either melted down or lost in a production that seems hemmed in and only about half as good as it could be. The show settles for telling us a very old story of ethnic exclusion that should not be forgotten. But those facts alone do not make this tale of bigotry and its consequences especially new. Missing is the bite a few deeper thoughts would have provided.

When the well-known Asian actor James Hong says of the narrow cinematic depictions of Asians, “The writers didn’t know how to write another role for the person who was an average citizen who was Asian American,” he is clearly correct. But the real question is why Asians came to America in the first place if they were not just seeking the money that they could send home to their families.