Hollywood Chinese (review)

With Hollywood Chinese, award-winning director Arthur Dong has provided a detailed investigation of the relationship between Chinese American culture and Hollywood film. Throughout the documentary, Dong balances an interest in Hollywood’s depictions of Chinese American characters with a critical analysis of how Chinese Americans’ self-representations have both challenged and perpetuated dominant stereotypes. Dong’s interviews with directors like Wayne Wang and Ang Lee, actors like Joan Chen, Nancy Kwan, Christopher Lee, and Luise Rainer, and writers like Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang laud these individuals’ accomplishments while challenging the potentially regressive aspects of their works. This is a film that refuses to sugarcoat or oversimplify what is a complex history, and it is to be commended for its willingness to see Hollywood movies as a site where artistic expression, commercial pressures, ethnic identities, and socio-cultural norms intersect.

The documentary’s scope is remarkably expansive, especially given its 89-minute running time. Movies and filmmakers from every era of Hollywood history are discussed, and the major debates surrounding the representation of Chinese Americans are confronted. Among other questions, the film debates where the line between historical accuracy and artistic license should be drawn, if stereotypical representations can be progressive and if progressive representations can be stereotypical, what the relationship between Chinese ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is in Hollywood movies, and why Hollywood has become fascinated with Chinese actors, directors, and action film aesthetics in recent years. By interviewing both Chinese American actors and Caucasian actors who have played Chinese characters, the film is particularly adept at simulating debates over the morals and ethics of ethnic representation on the one hand and the economic imperatives of being a working actor in an industry often dominated by box office revenues and stereotypes on the other. Other compelling discussions center on martial artistry and Hollywood’s troubling tendency to cast Chinese actors in Japanese roles and Japanese actors in Chinese roles. Hollywood’s inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Japanese and Chinese demonstrates an obvious degree of ignorance, which Dong’s film works to address.

Hollywood Chinese is both entertaining and highly informative, and this makes it an excellent choice for a class on ethnic representations. Throughout the documentary, film archivist Stephen Gong offers a critical perspective that encourages viewers to interrogate the relationship between filmic representations of Chinese Americans and their influence on a mass audience’s understanding of Chinese peoples and cultures. Gong is careful to outline the complexities of this situation, resisting the idea that cinematic representations are easily categorized as positive or negative while forwarding a perspective that sees the relationship between film and culture as complex and multifaceted.

Because Gong is so good, one wonders about the absence of Peter X. Feng, who is perhaps the world’s most noted film scholar on Asian Americans (broadly defined) and the movies. Including Feng and simulating conversations between he and Gong would have worked to flesh out the critical debates surrounding Chinese Americans and Hollywood in a more detailed fashion. Given that Feng teaches on the east coast, ensuring his participation in a documentary shot mainly (if not entirely) on the west coast may have been cost prohibitive, but if Hollywood Chinese is to be screened in a class, Feng’s writing may provide a nice complement. It is also worth noting that Dong never outlines the relationship between Taiwan and mainland China nor does he discuss how ethnicity generally has functioned in Hollywood movies. Neither of these issues undermines the overall value or importance of Hollywood Chinese. Instead, they represent an opportunity to use what is a skillfully told, detailed documentary as a springboard for further discussion. Introducing the tension between China and Taiwan would allow viewers to gain a greater understanding of the diversity that exists within Chinese American populations and discussing Hollywood’s propensity for linking ethnic or racial difference with crime may allow students/viewers of other ethnic backgrounds to feel a more personal connection to the Chinese American community. Ultimately, such...