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

Chapter 5: From Aversion to Fascination: New Lyrics and Voices, 1880s–1920s

Chapter 5 From Aversion to Fascination New Lyrics and Voices, 1880s–1920s At the end of the nineteenth century, the musical expression of American popular music changed in ways other than notation and instrumentation. By the mid-1880s, lyricists and performers had begun to produce an assortment of songs, skits, and musicals with Chinese themes, which were combined with emerging Chinese musical motifs. This development was tied in part to the consolidation of the American music industry into Tin Pan Alley, the name given to several streets in NewYork City that were the center of music publishing in the United States from the 1890s throughWorldWar II. New sites and modes of consumption increased the distribution of music and enabled songwriters to reach a wider, more diverse audience.The phonograph, piano rolls, vaudeville, musical comedy, and sheet music catered not only to white working-class men, as had been the case with earlier songs about Chinese immigration, but also to the middle classes and especially to women. These changes in the makeup of audiences led popular songwriters to produce a more varied view of the Chinese in the United States and abroad.1 Shifting attitudes toward the Chinese also influenced the ways in which they were portrayed at the turn of the century. Legislation had mitigated some of the open hostility surrounding Chinese immigration, and for some Americans , what was once unconditional hatred became a form of fascination. By the end of the nineteenth century, both China and Chinatowns were popular tourist destinations for whites who were looking for a more bucolic (albeit exotic) world that contrasted with their own increasingly urban and industrial one. Sympathetic views continued to emerge with China’s transition to a republic in 1912. Older anxieties continued throughout this period, however. Anti-immigrant fears of unrestricted groups—merchants, students, ministers, and those of the working classes who remained in the United States—persisted and led to further restrictions and violence. New scientific attitudes toward race based on Social Darwinism and the application of empirical methods to social and cultural relationships also helped maintained antiChinese attitudes. The allure of Chinese culture had its limits.2 112 As part of these changes, Tin Pan Alley songwriters broke away from the depiction of the solitary Chinese immigrant man on the frontier and located Chinese subjects in two disparate places—China and Chinatowns. These places became sites where exoticism satisfied non-Chinese fantasies and ignored the realities of those who lived and worked there. By the 1870s, national economic interest began to focus on China as a vast market for American products and, concurrently, as a source of curiosity for visitors. China trade was no longer about bringing Chinese goods to the United States but about exporting American products to China. Tourists saw China as a country filled with ancient treasures and quaint people untouched by modernity. Chinatown, on the other hand, had a different image. Like a menagerie, it was a place where whites could observe and even experience Chinese life without traveling abroad. Some Chinese immigrants took advantage of the growing interest in China and helped transform what had once been seen as slums into tourist destinations.This phenomenon opened up the community and created new connections between whites and Chinese immigrants, but it sent other messages as well. Chinese restaurants and bazaars (as well as theaters, temples, and opium dens) were popular places for white tourists to spend their time and money, and these institutions had the potential to help diminish hostility toward Chinese immigrants. These businesses, however, also played to American conceptions of exoticism and reinforced the view that Chinese immigrants were outsiders and potential sources of vice. Ultimately, as artificial as these Chinatowns were, they became the backdrop for how most Americans viewed the Chinese in America.3 Post-1880 musical productions containing Chinese subjects served as a forum to develop notions of gender and race in new, contradictory ways. Questions surrounding Chinese masculinity persisted, mostly conveyed through performance styles and sheet music covers, while white women in yellowface and songs depicting Chinese women increased dramatically. Portrayals of Chinese women in popular music, as in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art music, served as models of femininity, simultaneously functioning as a criticism of feminism for being “unnatural” and as justification for the sexual desires of white men. A handful of more daring American popular songwriters, however, deviated from this paradigm and allowed their music to be more undefined about the threat of miscegenation and...