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

Conclusion

Conclusion In 1990, the news that Cameron Macintosh’s London hit, Miss Saigon, was coming to the United States was received with both great enthusiasm and sharp criticism from Asian Americans and the theatrical community . Miss Saigon, an updated version of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) by Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, tells the story of an American G.I. named Chris who falls in love with a Vietnamese prostitute, Kim, only days before the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal of American troops. Chris, through circumstances beyond his control, is forced to leave Kim behind during the evacuation of the U.S. embassy.Three years later, Chris has married an American woman, Ellen, while Kim along with Chris’s son Tam and The Engineer, previously her pimp at the Vietnamese club Dreamland, are in Bangkok, where she works as a bargirl. On discovering that Kim is alive and that he has a son, Chris travels to Bangkok with Ellen but has no clear vision of how to balance his love for both women and his feeling of responsibility to Tam as his father. After realizing that Chris has married another woman, Kim sacrifices her life in the final scene so that Tam can go home with Chris and Ellen and become an “American” boy.1 On the basis of Macintosh’s early success with Boubil and Schönberg’s Les Misérables (1987), it was expected that the arrival of Miss Saigon on Broadway followed by a series of national tours would bring in huge revenues. For Asian American actors, it would also mean steady pay and jobs in an industry dominated by “white” roles or stereotypical, Asian/Asian American bit parts. Despite what was perceived to be its positive aspects, the plot and casting of Miss Saigon were intrinsically problematic for Asian American artists and activists. The storyline, characterizations, and music perpetuated stereotypes of the Vietnamese (and more broadly, Asians/Asian Americans) as degraded, violent, and sexually available to Americans. In particular, the casting of Jonathan Pryce to play The Engineer, a character of both French and Vietnamese descent, first in London and later in NewYork City, was also a point of contestation. Actor’s Equity, the union for performers in the United States, had jurisdiction over whether foreign performers, excluding major stars, 163 could appear in the United States and regulated the portrayal of nonwhite characters, ensuring, for instance, that African American roles were played by African Americans and not whites in blackface.2 Pryce, however, was performing in yellowface, and with Macintosh threatening that he would not bring Miss Saigon to the United States if Pryce was not allowed to play The Engineer, Actor’s Equity permitted Miss Saigon to be performed on Broadway in the same way it had been in London. Debates surrounding Pryce as The Engineer focused on the producer’s artistic freedom and the importance of having Asian Americans playing Asian or Asian American roles. Pryce, who for several performances in London even used prosthetics to slant his eyes and yellowish pancake, was participating in the tradition of yellowface—white bodies playing Asian/Asian American roles and controlling what it means to be nonwhite on the stage. Although blackface had disappeared by the 1960s, yellowface was still going strong—for example, Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine (the offspring of a Chinese woman and an American sailor) in the 1970s television series Kung Fu. Both Caine and The Engineer, however, represented the offspring of interracial sex, another group that was far too often ignored in discussions of race by both Asian Americans and Euro-Americans, who argued from monoracialist points of views. Regardless, several Asian American activists believed that because there were so few Asian and Asian American roles on Broadway, an actor of Asian descent should be cast as The Engineer.3 In response to the plot and casting of Miss Saigon, Asian Americans used the term yellowface to reveal the ways in which the entertainment industry caricatured all men and women of Asian descent and to question the perpetuation of Asian stereotypes through yellowing up, storylines, and music.4 Tied to blackface and the portrayal of African Americans on the stage by whites in the nineteenth century, the term yellowface appears as early as the 1950s to describe the continuation in film of having white actors playing major Asian and Asian American roles and the grouping...