East is West and West is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America

Introduction

Introduction billy: Oh, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it later. But look at her. Isn’t she sweet? mrs. benson: She certainly is. But what are we going to do with her? billy: She can live here in the house with us? ming toy: I stay here in this house? east is west In the 1930 film East Is West, international businessman Billy Benson brings a Chinese sing-song girl, Ming Toy, into his parental home. While abroad in China, Benson had urged his Chinese American friend Lo Sang Kee to buy Ming Toy from a notorious Chinese American gangster in order to protect her. Kee originally agrees to keep Ming Toy at his house in San Francisco’s Chinatown. However, she starts to become a problem —the Chinatown missionaries believe that she is a prostitute because of the way she behaves. Ming Toy unabashedly flirts with men on the street as she sits on Kee’s balcony. The film’s crisis begins with the question of Ming Toy’s presence in the Benson home and spirals downward from there. Will Ming Toy’s living in the Benson home compromise the racial and moral integrity of the white American family? Most troubling is Billy Benson’s budding romance with Ming Toy, which raises the question of whether white racial purity can be preserved: will the American family of the future be interracial? Having stirred up all these fears, the film seems to put them to rest at the end. In the bizarre final plot twist of East Is West, Ming Toy is not Chinese after all but white. It turns out that she was adopted as a young child by a Chinese family after her missionary parents died in China. 2 / introduction While through this plot device the film seems to eradicate fears of miscegenation, its unique racial drama actually presents a subversive commentary on white women’s sexuality, particularly their autonomy. This suggestion of the sexual autonomy of the white female, of her capacity to indulge in “wild” sexual behavior typically associated only with the exotic Oriental female, was an equally, if not more, anxiety-provoking idea than that of a Chinese prostitute in the white American home. The film implies that since a white woman can so convincingly appear “Asian,” then perhaps the gulf that seemingly separates them is not so great after all. The female behavior associated with Asian women may actually be shared by all women, regardless of race. East Is West reveals how rapidly the distance between East and West may contract to a dangerous proximity in two ways. First, the Asian Other easily passes through the United States’ national borders and can threaten to actually change not just the racial composition of the nation but also white gender and sexual norms. She can penetrate the white domestic space and might indeed lure the white American male into a forbidden interracial tryst that would pollute the white race. And second, even after she is revealed to be white herself, “Ming Toy” still is a threatening female in the sense that she has displayed, seemingly effortlessly, the sexual behavior associated with Asian women. The film, in a strong sense, represents the radical possibilities of East and West merging and in doing so exposes the possibility that the greatest threat to the nation and the home may be not necessarily the foreign Other but something that resides within the nation already as a constituent part of its assumed white racial identity. Hence the inspiration for the title of my book comes from this 1930 Hollywood film, a film initially barred from commercial release in the United States by the Motion Picture Production Code because of its depiction of Chinese-white miscegenation. Yet, as I argue in a detailed analysis of the film in chapter 1, I believe that a more subtle, unconscious motive for its censorship might have been that it presented white and Chinese female introduction / 3 sexual identity as similar in essential ways. This instance of cinematic censorship was only part of a larger system of control and surveillance of not just Asian women but also white women, a mechanism put in place to contain the threat of modern female sexuality. Social and legal surveillance and control over Asian immigrant women and white women between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were primarily rationalized as protecting...