Transnational Legitimization of an Actor: The Life and Career of Soon-Tek Oh

He is the voice of the father in the Disney animation film Mulan (1998). He is Sensei in the Hollywood hit film Beverly Hills Ninja (1997). He is Lieutenant Hip in the 007 film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). These examples may trigger memories of Soon-Tek Oh in the minds of many Americans.² Some would vaguely remember him as the "oriental" actor whose face often gets confused with those of other Asian and Asian American actors, such as Mako and James Hong. Theatre aficionados may remember him for his award-winning role in Stephen Sondheim's musical Pacific Overtures in the 1970s, but more Americans will know him as the quintessential "oriental" man in Hollywood. This is not the legacy Soon-Tek Oh wanted. He would prefer to be remembered as an artist, an actor who played Hamlet, Romeo, and Osvald Alving; who founded theatre companies; who promoted cultural awareness for Korean Americans; and who taught youths with all of his integrity. He wanted to be a "great actor," who transcended all markings, especially racial ones, and who was recognized for his talent as an artist. He has sought what I describe in this essay as "legitimization" as a respected actor at every crucial point in his life.³

Soon-Tek Oh was the first Korean actor to appear in American mainstream theatre, film, or television.⁴ He left Korea for Hollywood in 1959 as a young man, seeking to learn the craft of filmmaking. For over thirty years, Oh played multiple roles as an actor and in real life, as what David Palumbo-Liu describes as an "active agent" who participates in "the constitution of what 'America' was and is at any given moment" (2). He literally represented and embodied Asian images as a performer on screen and stage. His body was the canvas on which modern America projected its conceptualizations of Asia and Asian America.⁵ But, away from Hollywood and Broadway, Oh actively occupied and navigated other multiple cultural spaces. In the space defined as "Asian American theatre," Oh voiced his resistance to Hollywood's racism, and in the space of the Korean American community, he promoted a particular form of ethnocentric cultural nationalism. Later in his life, he returned to Korea as a professor to teach western styles of acting. His decision to return to his "homeland," as I discuss in this essay, was a way of talking back to Hollywood and mainstream America; hence, it was more of an act of gaining leverage for his sociocultural redefinition than a permanent move for personal resettlement. He crossed various boundaries, balancing his bio-ethnic identity and social worth, on the one hand, with the desires to dislodge and exceed such fixity, on the other.

Indeed, Soon-Tek Oh was as versatile in real life as he was on stage and screen; he often subverted established cultural paradigms by straddling multiple cultural spaces. To use Aihwa Ong's term, he has been a "flexible citizen" without aligning himself with the "cosmopolitan" entrepreneurs of global capitalism, however implicated he may be in such forces and their cultural effects. He has both resisted and taken advantage of essentialism and homogenization, as an "ethnic" actor and a transnational subject. In this essay, I tell the story of Soon-Tek Oh's multifaceted life and career, not merely as an individual passage, but also as an emergent pattern of life and action, indicative of potential or actual possibilities of human agency in our present moment in history. Oh's career provides a complex case study for examining how an Asian actor's body has been marked in the topology of Hollywood's global hegemony. Moreover, the case study further illuminates a shift within Asian American studies towards transnational inquiries. As noted by Inderpal Grewal, Akhil Gupta, and Aihwa Ong, "Transnational media, markets, and migration are altering the constitution of subjects by changing how nations are imagined, citizenship is experienced, and identities are formed" (661). Soon-Tek Oh, as a transnational subject, has certainly gone through many changes by...