Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s (review)

Krystyn R. Moon's compact study, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s–1920s, is a recent addition to an expanding body of work that examines the emergence, popularization, and lamentable persistence of Asian stereotypes in American performing and literary arts. In this reworking of her doctoral thesis in history from Johns Hopkins University, Moon follows the leads of Elaine Kim's groundbreaking Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings in Their Social Context (1984), James Moy's Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (1994), Josephine Lee's Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (1998), Dave Williams' Misreading the Chinese Character: Images of the Chinese in Euroamerican Drama to 1925 (2000), Robert G. Lee's Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (2000), and John Kuo Wei Tchen's New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (2001), to cite a number of worthy precedents.

America's film industry popularized images of Chinese arch-villains, Confucius-quoting nebbishes, dagger-nailed "Dragon Ladies," and sexually available "Lotus Blossoms." Such troubling images have even appeared in contemporary rap music—Bloodhound Gang's odious Yellow Fever (2000) is a case in point. As Moy and Tchen demonstrated, these images did not spontaneously appear with moving pictures in the early twentieth century, but descended from images deeply rooted in American popular culture. Moon sets the record straight by identifying the roles American theatre artists and musicians played in creating what would become enduring, ugly images of Chinese.

Yellowface is divided into six chronologically organized chapters in which Moon investigates the initial stirrings, consolidation, and popularization of images of Chinese people. She starts with fundamental assumptions held by Western Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, that "nasal, guttural, groaning and hideous" Chinese singing was akin to the "caterwauling [of a] tom cat" (p. 13) (a popularly accepted attitude held by no less an authority than the French composer Hector Berlioz [p. 64]). Moon travels through nineteenth-century sheet music, stage spectacles, and minstrelsy to twentieth-century Tin Pan Alley and ultimately the Broadway musical to demonstrate the how performances of Chinese roles were eventually assumed by the theatre-going public to be of "real" and therefore "true" Chinese characters.

Concomitant with the nearly universal Western distaste for legitimate Chinese music was the establishment of Chinese as mysterious, exotic, and "othered" in American "oriental" extravaganzas. Revived repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century wherever theatre companies and circuses toured, such images of the Chinese were reinforced to the delight and wonder of thousands of Caucasian Americans. Marketing Chinese exoticism was a cash cow for the producers, writers, and performers who promoted these shows. Though the Chinese were initially an object of fascination, the anti-Chinese anxiety that swept the United States in the aftermath of the Gold Rush caused a shift. Now performing artists propagandizing the Chinese portrayed them not as desirable exotics but as fundamentally and unconditionally inassimilable aliens. Songwriters, minstrel performers, and vaudevillians spoke pidgin English and feminized Asian males to highlight the inability of Chinese to become "real Americans." The work of Bret Harte, Harrigan and Hart, and C.T.Parsloe is already known to students of this period, and Moon introduces to the reader an expanded cast of artists who made careers of "yellowface": John "Chinee" Leach, Ackland Von Boyle, and a whole raft of minstrel performers. Indeed, Moon's discussion of the marginalization of Chinese by other immigrant populations, especially the Irish and African Americans—who portrayed Chinese stereotypes in order to identify themselves as "more" American than the Asian immigrants—is an insightful consideration of themes of shifting racial and ethnic loyalties.

Two chapters devoted to Chinese immigrant performers and Chinese American vaudevillians represent Moon at her strongest. Here she describes the earliest Asian and Asian American performers, pioneers forced to perform...