Misreading the Chinese Character: Images of the Chinese in Euroamerican Drama to 1925 (review)

This comprehensive critical study of the depiction of the Chinese "other" in Euroamerican drama until 1925 is the much-needed companion to Dave Williams' earlier publication of playscripts in the anthology The Chinese Other: 1850-1925. Together, these two books provide an extremely valuable contribution to both early American theater studies and Asian American studies. In my review of Williams' anthology of plays (see the Spring 2000 issue of Asian Theatre Journal, pp. 135-138), I noted that the introduction was "regrettably thin"; in Misreading the Chinese Character, Williams has provided the detailed scholarship necessary to context-ualize the plays in The Chinese Other. Although another reviewer faults Williams for "demoniz[ing] and ridicul[ing] nineteenth-century thinkers and writers on the subject of race by holding them up to the standards of the 1990s" (see John Steven Paul in the Spring 2001 Asian Theatre Journal, pp. 117-119), I believe this criticism is too harsh—Williams is not reinscribing the tactics (demoni-zation and ridicule) of those he critiques, but rather lamenting the absence of any sense of "equality and common humanity" (p. 203) in Euroamerican dramatic depictions of the Chinese both in America and in their own homeland. His assessment of the proliferation of various stereotypes in the plays is grounded in thorough analysis of the society and the individual writers that produced them, and is less judgmental in tone than James Moy's study, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in Ame-rica, for example.

To this reviewer, Williams seems on shaky ground only when he repeatedly implies that the "true nature" (p. 143) of China or the Chinese can be depicted "accurately" (p. 182) or "as it actually was" (p. 25); this notion that an authentic China/Chineseness can somehow be represented is a claim that his own citation of Edward Said challenges. However, Williams does a splendid job of working through the social, cultural, religious, artistic, and economic factors that contributed to images that emerged on stage (and/or in dramatic text) during several phases of America's complicated relationship with China during the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His ability to condense vast research material into cohesive categories temporally and thematically makes his rich range of analysis manageable for readers with varying levels of sophistication; his work is satisfying to the specialist in theater, sinology, or Asian American studies, but also wholly accessible to the newcomer in any or all of these disciplines.

The underlying commonality Williams finds in the variations of the Chinese stereotype is the "strategy" of keeping a safe "distance" between the Euroamerican self and the Chinese other, emphasizing essentialized difference through a range of tactics in order to "maintain a race-based separation from the Chinese" (back of book jacket). The tactics include humor, demonization, and idealization, but the strategy of maintaining distance is the goal of all three. Williams identifies a Euroamerican discomfort when confronted with the Chinese other that is manifested in both the presence and absenceof that other onstage. He is surprised, for instance, that Chinese characters and stories did not appear on stage during the heyday of melodrama, when dramatic events like the Terranova affair (involving an Italian sailor who was eventually tried and executed by the Chinese for accidentally killing a fruit peddler near his boat) that are ripe for dramatization actually occurred. Furthermore, after the commercially successful 1767 American debut of The Orphan of China(the first Euroamerican play to portray Chinese), subsequent images did not appear in plays until the period of the First Opium War (1839-1842).

After his chapter on The Orphan of China, Williams includes a chapter with a historical and cultural background of the period leading up to and including the "Opium War plays" (which he also nicknames "X in China" plays because almost all of the titles follow that formula ( The Irishman in China, The Yankee...