East is West and West is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America

Notes

Notes Introduction Epigraph: East Is West, directed by Monta Bell, with performances by Lupe Vélez, Lew Ayres, and Edward G. Robinson (Los Angeles: Universal Pictures , 1930), DVD. The film’s screenplay was adapted by Winnifred Eaton from East Is West: A Comedy in Three Acts and a Prologue, by Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer (New York: Samuel French, 1924). 1. Historical and cultural works on the formation of white racial identity and superiority in the United States in the early twentieth century point to the ways new immigrants from Asia, southern Europe (Italians and Greeks), eastern Europe (Jews), and Ireland contributed to a destabilizing notion of nativist white identity. Whiteness continued to become more inclusive, mostly of Europeans (though not always, as Jews continued to be marginal white people), through socially and legally establishing nonwhiteness. US naturalization laws that allowed only white persons to become US citizens became inclusive of the Irish, Italians, and Greeks but excluded Asians as ineligible to become citizens. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 2007); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008); Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, rev. ed. (New York: Back Bay Books, 2008); Tomàs Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 2. Pervasive gendered and sexual orientalist stereotypes within US history depict Asian women as castrating dragon ladies, while Asian men are routinely consigned to characterizations of asexuality and effeminacy, on 196 / notes the one hand, and of predatory deviancy, particularly toward white women, on the other. These images have become quite familiar as stock orientalist stereotypes. They point to the persistence of representing Asian men and women as sexually deviant and, in turn, normalize, within a white US racist paradigm, white male and female sexuality and gendered identities. The construction of Asian men and women as sexual deviants has been covered extensively, but probably most notably in the documentary Slaying the Dragon, directed by Deborah Gee (San Francisco: Asian Women United, 1988), DVD. The early twentieth century’s cinematic portrayals of Asian women and men as sexual yellow peril menaces are examined in Gina Marchetti , Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), chaps. 3 and 4 (“The Third Sex” and “Inner Dikes and Barred Zones”). 3. George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 4. Shah, Contagious Divides, 77–104. 5. Luibhéid, Entry Denied, 1–54. 6. Susan Koshy explains how the antimiscegenation laws directed at Asian American men were “shaped by a need to police the sexuality of a primarily male immigrant labor force; the laws worked to impede their incorporation into America through marriage or through the creation of a subsequent generation of American-born citizens.” Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 6–7. Antimiscegenation laws were also passed against Chinese on the US West Coast, but even in areas without such laws, social prohibitions were often as powerful as legal ones. The social prohibition of miscegenation in the absence of laws continued to construct deviant Asiatic male sexualities as a threat to white womanhood and the family. The difference between states that did or did not pass antimiscegenation laws against Asians had to do with the relative size of Asian immigrant populations in different areas (ibid., 7). 7. Like Filipino men, Chinese men were similarly suspect as predators of young white women, even though, for the most part, Chinese (and even Japanese) relations with white women were not nearly as rampant as many white Americans believed. Mae M. Ngai points out that Filipinos’ migratory work, which required them to move repeatedly, notes / 197 and their relationships with white and Mexican women combined to make them appear sexually deviant and...