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

1. How Yellow and White Women Are Sold: Controlling Chinese and White Female Sexuality and the Making of US Domesticity in East Is West

1 / How Yellow and White Women Are Sold: Controlling Chinese and White Female Sexuality and the Making of US Domesticity in East Is West In the infinite, Ming Toy, whence all things come, there is no East, there is no West. West is East, and East is West. lo sang kee in east is west billy: A Love Boat? What do you mean? lo: Just as I would sell rugs in my store in San Francisco, so they sell women here upon the river. billy: Oh woman market, huh? I should think that would be illegal. lo: So is boot-legging in our beloved United States. east is west script The beginning of the 1930 film East Is West unabashedly introduces us to a Chinese “woman market,” where Lo Sang Kee (E. Alyn Warren), a Chinese American businessman, brings his good friend Billy Benson (Lew Ayres), an international man of trade and son of the US ambassador to China, to browse the nubile female goods that are bought and sold every day in the Chinese sex slave market. One Chinese “sing-song girl,” Ming Toy (Lupe Vélez), stands out as distinctively different from the other Chinese girls on the auction block: she is vocal and rebellious.1 While the other Chinese girls acquiesce to their sale, Ming Toy argues with her father (who is selling her) and physically assaults one of the auctioneers, biting him when he goes to inspect her teeth. Benson is immediately drawn to her, though he has shown very little interest in the other Chinese 24 / how yellow and white women are sold girls and is even seemingly untouched by their misery at being sold.2 Just as Ming Toy is about to be sold to a Chinese man, Benson’s Chinese American friend, Lo Sang Kee, intercedes and secretly purchases Ming Toy, whom he brings with him to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Eventually, Benson and Ming Toy fall in love, and all seems well, except for one problem—she is Chinese and he is white. In the end, Ming Toy’s Chinese father, Hop Toy (Tetsu Komai), discloses to Benson that Ming Toy is not his true daughter but a white girl adopted from missionaries. The taboo against interracial intimacy is lifted upon this discovery, and therefore the film can end happily . . . or so it seems. The Hays Commission prevented East Is West from ever being distributed.3 Its domestic division disapproved of the film’s depiction of miscegenation and prostitution, but especially of the fact that the film implied that white women could be sold into sexual slavery as Chinese women. In 1935, after five years of attempting to obtain approval from the Hays Commission, Universal Pictures finally shelved East Is West in its archives as an “unreleased film.”4 In some respects, the Hays Commission’s decision reflected the persistence of earlier fears of white female victimization during the white slavery scare of 1910–15, as well as fear in the late nineteenth century of an epidemic of Chinese prostitution. The concern that Chinese prostitution and white slavery were rampant phenomena was contrary to the historical case: there is no evidence that either existed in high numbers. Moreover, the Chinese prostitution trade had been virtually eliminated in the United States since the passage of the 1875 Page Law, which prohibited the importation of Chinese prostitutes.5 Thus it is the nature and the abiding power of these fears, contrary to actual evidence, that draws our attention. Censors remained concerned not only by the danger of suggesting miscegenation between Chinese and whites but also, and perhaps more important, by the danger of presenting an equivalency between Chinese and white women, in which both were seen as sexually deviant and threatening to white middle-class families. how yellow and white women are sold / 25 While the idea of interracial sexual desire was abhorrent to Americans during the height of anti-immigrant and antimiscegenation sentiments in the early twentieth century, it was still fairly commonly found in mass pulp fiction, soft-porn literature , and serials depicting sexual relations between Asians and whites.6 However, splashed across the cinematic screen, such vivid and realistic images of interracial intimacies were feared to be more stimulating and alluring to the collective psyche. Cinema cast forth moving and graphic images in a way that enhanced their verisimilitude and presented the public with a far more alarming depiction...