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

Introduction

Introduction The synchronized plate throwing of the Wesselys, a troupe of five jugglers, received an enormous round of applause as they bowed and walked off the stage. With the stage completely empty, Lee Tung Foo, arguably the first Chinese American in vaudeville, stepped out and positioned himself in front of the primarily white audience. The band struck up Dave Reed Jr. and Ernest R. Ball’s “Love Me and the World Is Mine” (1906), a popular ballad that year, and Lee began to sing: “I wander on as in a dream . . .” From what we know of Lee’s act from reviews and his own writings, he then gave a comedic monologue, sang an unnamed song in Cantonese, and broke out into an Irish brogue for his rendition of another 1906 hit, William Jerome’s “My Irish Molly, O” (1906). His act ended with “Im Tiefen Keller” (In the Deep Cellar), a drinking song he sang in the original German.1 During the last week of December 1906 and into January 1907, LeeTung Foo performed at Keith’s Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, and received fulsome praise. Local critics in New England dedicated whole columns to Lee’s act not only because it was original but also because it was a direct challenge to American perceptions of the Chinese. Lee, however, was not from China. As an American of Chinese descent, he knew what it meant to be Chinese only through what he saw in immigrant communities and in American caricatures, and he combined this material to create an image of what it meant to be Chinese. But it was all an “act” (see ill. 1). Novelty was important to Lee, and through it he drew attention to the incongruity between fixed preconceptions of race and his capacity to impersonate non-Asian characters, speak English without an accent, and sing American and European popular songs. As one critic wrote, “Not only has he an excellent voice, which he uses with such amazing intelligence, that one almost forgets his race, but he sings and speaks fluently in English and with an evident sense of humor that is surprising .”2 By all accounts, audiences were stunned at witnessing firsthand a Chinese American performing in an American idiom, a feat they had to see to believe. Indeed, his very presence on the stage challenged widely held beliefs about performers of Chinese descent and heralded the emergence of scores of other Chinese American vaudevillians. 1 Ill. 1. Portrait of Lee Tung Foo in a Chinese costume. Courtesy of the California History Room, California State Library, Sacramento. Lee Tung Foo’s arrival on the vaudeville stage marked an important transition in the relationship between American music and identity. His act may have led the Providence reviewer to “almost forget [Lee’s] race,” but in fact his act had everything to do with race. Since the nineteenth century, several important shifts had occurred in musical and theatrical performances about and by Chinese and Chinese Americans. Large numbers of performers and writers participated in circulating images of China and its people via print media and the stage, which eventually hardened into stereotypes. These individuals , who came from a variety of backgrounds, created certain images on the stage and in music not for the sake of accuracy but to help define and understand themselves as well as others around them. Many Euro-American musicians and writers created race-based distinctions between music and noise, used attitudes about race to question whether the Chinese could participate in Western music and performance, and finally, circulated antiChinese stereotypes. They, however, also turned to China to address other issues in the United States, such as gender relations, the definition of citizenship , working-class identity, the effects of modernity, and the development of new modes of musical expression. At the same time, Chinese and Chinese Americans had their own reasons for performing on the stage. Some came lured by stories of success and huge profits only to be left penniless by their American managers. Several Chinese immigrants, imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit, employed music and theater in hopes of maintaining their heritage among fellow immigrants and promoting cultural understanding with outsiders. Finally, the desire of Chinese American vaudevillians, such as Lee Tung Foo, to perform in an American popular idiom confronted established stereotypes by demonstrating that race was a performance. Together, these diverse voices, although unequal in their access to mainstream media...