Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance (review)

Hye Sueng Chung has written the first book examining American film and television’s treatment of Koreans, using the marginalized career of Hollywood actor Philip Ahn (1905–1978) to trace the United States’ fraught relationships with North Korea, South Korea, and Korean ethnicity over the course of five decades. As Chung rightly points out in her introduction, Asian American film studies have heretofore focused almost exclusively on Japanese and Chinese American stars (for example, Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong) and on a small “handful of canonized motion-picture texts” (for example, Broken Blossoms and Flower Drum Song) (xv). In Hollywood Asian, Chung sets out to probe “neglected yet significant films,” imagining an alternative cinematic canon with a Korean American star at its center. Philip Ahn’s greatest recognition comes from the legacy of his father, celebrated Korean independence leader Tosan An Ch’ang-ho, who came to America in 1902 with his wife, thereby “becoming the first married couple from Korea to enter the United States” (5). To fans of American popular culture, Ahn is best known for a string of racist bit parts in World War II anti-Japanese propaganda films and later for his long-running stint as Master Kan on the 1970s television series Kung Fu. In the ambivalent space between Ahn’s diasporic identity as the eldest son of arguably Korea’s greatest national hero and Ahn’s mainstream identity as—at best—the sage but emasculated father-figure to David Carradine in yellowface, Chung finds her challenge to reclaim this understudied activist and performer for Asian American studies.

Chung’s recuperation of Ahn for Asian American critical discourse is indeed a challenge. Not only did Ahn unapologetically make a career out of minor Holly-wood roles that amounted to little more than racist caricatures of Asian Americans from every conceivable ethnicity (Chung’s list of these performed ethnicities include Japanese, Chinese, East Indian, Vietnamese, Burmese, Eskimo, Hawaiian, and his “self-representations” as Korean [189]), he also embraced the model minority myth by denying the impact of institutional racism on his own life and foreshadowed the surprising political conservatism of various segments of contemporary Asian America by “consistently support[ing] U.S. wars and national policies” (184). In order to render visible Ahn’s significance for American film studies and Asian American media studies, Chung constructs a transnational methodology that should be a model for arts and humanities scholarship in the twenty-first century. She reorients Hollywood texts within a global political economy in order to demonstrate the impact of East-West diplomatic relations on popular culture’s production and distribution. Chung also uses this transnational methodology to reveal how South Koreans interpreted Ahn’s films in counterhegemonic ways and how Ahn’s positioning within the Korean colonial diaspora infused a particular type of agency in his cross-ethnic performances onscreen. Admitting that “the perspective of a Korean colonial diaspora . . . does not always coincide with the politics of Asian America,” Chung explains that Ahn saw his wartime portrayal of monstrous “Jap” soldiers—an employment opportunity created by the internment of Japanese American actors in concentration camps—as doubly patriotic because such performed stereotypes supported both the U.S. war effort against the Axis and the Korean independence movement (11, 27).

Chung writes herself into Hollywood Asian at various points, describing her formative viewing of Ahn’s Hollywood films while growing up in South Korea (she immigrated to the United States in her late twenties). Indeed, Chung’s admitted orientation toward “Korean identity politics” and her avowed “reverence” for Tosan hold great sway over the course of Hollywood Asian (33). Her scholarly attempts to reconcile the revered status of Tosan in North and South Korea with the abjected status of his eldest son in the United States often result in implausible lines of argumentation, such as when she argues for the resemblance between Ahn’s role...