Asians and Asian descendents in America have experienced a long, turbulent history, the documentation of which has been nearly eclipsed by the much more blatant oppression of other minority groups. As a result, mainstream Americans know very little about Asian people, culture, and the uneasy place Asians have in American society. What little information that does reach mainstream ears is radiated by mass-consumed media, and film is a deeply influential staple of American culture. The portrayal of Asians in film has been insensitive at best, damaging and insidious at its worst. Rampant stereotyping of both people and culture is just the skin of a long American tradition of suppression and domination.

The claim that Asians have been (and to some extent, still are) suppressed and marginalized in American society begs the question of who is doing the suppressing and why. In other words, what is the "mainstream?" Much of the argument surrounding the portrayal of Asians in cinema has centered primarily on American patriarchal society and Western imperialism. While some issues are not directly connected as such, one could draw a link to this long standing attitude in American culture. In this model of American culture, the upper-middle class "white Anglo-Saxon Protestant" has been held as the primary and favored constituent of society, while all others--minority, working-class, homosexual--is considered deviant. It is no exaggeration to assert that most places of power in America are held by white men, and that they are also behind the camera lenses of Hollywood.

The Western attitude towards the East has always been one of opposites. While the West perceived itself as dominating, progressive, strong, and rational, the East has been portrayed as submissive, backward, weak, and irrational. In this way, the West has given itself the role of the male, and assigned the East the traditional female, and so the West has taken it upon itself to assert itself over the weak, feminine East. Historical events such as those that led to the Opium War between Britain and China, and the forced opening of Japan's trade channels by the Americans are just part of a long imperialist history of the West over the East. Because of the East's innate traits as "submissive" and "backwards," the West validates its actions by stating that the East seeks out domination by the West and its associated modernization and westernization.

Concurrent with this urge to dominate is a fear of racial subversion. While America seeks to modernize and influence Asian cultures, the influx of immigrants has always sparked fears of the spoilage of white American purity. Asian cultures and habits were seen as decadent and degenerate, and are simultaneously exoticized while demonized. The greatest fear lies in interracial romance, which implies the loss of racial and cultural purity. The white man has vigorously defended the upstanding white woman against the hordes of sexually aggressive Asian men because to lose white women to foreign races is to lose the core of white American purity. Jun Xing writes that "there is ample evidence to support the argument that sexual practice has been used repeatedly to enforce hierarchies of gender, race, and class in Hollywood industry."¹ This argument brings up many issues, particularly the contradictions within the representation of Asian men, the fact that Hollywood exoticized these taboo interracial romances, and that while whites socially castrated Asian men, they took the East--and its women--at will. In fact, the attitude of white America towards Asians can be characterized by one contradiction after another.

Contradiction exists in portrayals of Asian women, men, lands, culture, and placement in American society. The Asian woman is seen as submissive, deferential, and exotic, always willing to please her dominating white male, who is often "saving" her from her backwards and degenerate culture. This popular "China Doll/Lotus Blossom" image is embodied in the popular Madame Butterfly archetype and its silver-screen variations. But the Asian woman has also earned the "Dragon Lady" reputation: scheming, subversive, sexually adept and driven. Similarly, the Asian male is given a split personality, either being a humble, asexual, and equally submissive and feminized, or a sexually aggressive, plotting, villainous gangster. China, Japan, Vietnam, and other Asian countries are also feminized as exotic, rich with treasure and allure, but also dark, underground, and a sandtrap for Westerners. Culture is associated with selfless honor, modesty, and passivity, but also decadence, power madness, and opulence. Finally, Asian Americans are faced with the identity crisis of being quickly assimilable people who keep quiet, yet perpetual foreigners whose awkwardness deny them fully equal treatment; the double edged sword of being the "model minority." The Western ideal of the "melting pot" has been applied to the East, which, despite some similarities in appearances, is extremely diverse, and has forced its collective representation in the media as "Asia" or the "East." This, despite the tension between nations such as Japan and China, a rivalry which predates the founding of this country.

How is it that such disparate connotations be associated to every facet of Asian life? Indeed, the extremism that pervades Asian representation in film is difficult to deal with. The method of suppressing a social movement or agenda by pitting its extremes against each other has been used against the civil rights and feminist movements. Media representation of women in the 1960s and 70s featured women who were sexually objectified, docile, and deferential to male authority set against opposing characters who were physically unappealing, brash, and independent (often as extreme as lesbian man-haters bent on the destruction of the family structure). Similarly, there has been little moderate portrayals for Asians. Instead, most Asian characters are either extremely feminine or masculine or both; most attention is focused on the character's ethnicity and its associated imagery. In discussing the power of the film industry in defining roles to perpetuate imagery, Gina Marchetti writes,

...the image Hollywood creates of race and ethnicity points to something more fundamentally pernicious about the relationship between American society and the mass media. Hollywood has the power to define difference, to reinforce boundaries, to reproduce an ideology which maintains a certain status quo. Although organized protests always exist as a last resort, the means to challenge Hollywood's hegemony over the representation of race and ethnicity remain elusive. Alternative media exist, but appear marginal and far-removed from a popular audience. Access to the industry also exists, but entrance demands a tacit agreement to assimilate, at least to a certain degree, with the dominant culture.²

The purpose of this project is to to give an abbreviated overview of these genres and images, and to look at some of the key examples that illustrate them. The scope of our topics is limited to East Asian representations (typically termed Orientalist), and is roughly divided into two sections: images of Asians in the West, and Westerners in Asia. While there is definite overlap between the two categories, such as the "stock" characters, the distinction is meant to illustrate how the attitude that America has on Asians works here and abroad. A third section, Asian American Filmmaking is meant as a sort of coda, to show the distinction between mainstream film and these largely independent ventures; some of these are purely works of art by Asian Americans, others are reactions to the long standing misrepresentations of the Asian in cinema.

complete bibliography

1. Jun Xing, Asian America Through the Lens: History, representations, and Identity (Altamira Press, 1998), 69.
2. Lester D. Friedman, Unspeakable Images, Ethnicity and the American Cinema (Chicago; University of Illinois Press), 278.