East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo

Karen Kuo’s monograph argues that in the decades between World War I and World War II, American films and popular prose narratives represented “an overriding ontological fear” of the “profound changes” resulting from “modernity itself” (3). More specifically, these cultural texts evinced the ruling elite’s attempts to grapple with the influx of nonwhite immigrants on the one hand and, on the other, the so-called girl problem, an early twentieth-century euphemism for changing gender and sexual norms among women of all classes (7). The perceived invasion of nonwhite immigrants would alter the character and nature of the nation, defined by politicians and nativists as Anglo-Saxon or Western European. Motivated by racist logic, the upper class sought to prevent the supposedly superior Anglo-Saxon stock from being contaminated by these inferior races; to accomplish this goal, the upper class restricted or, in the case of Asians, altogether stopped immigration. This protectionism meant reinforcing definitions of who was American. The other major source of anxiety that Kuo identifies is the New Woman’s clamor for reproductive rights and sexual freedom, which threatened male dominance in all spheres of life: family, work, and society. These twin threats came from inside and outside of the political and geographical borders of the United States.

By building on the work of David Palumbo-Liu and Amy Kaplan, among others, Kuo’s book extends our understanding of how identity categories have been policed and maintained as binary, essentialist, and hierarchical. Kuo bases her analysis on a range of texts from the 1930s: the film East Is West (1930) directed by Monta Bell, Younghill Kang’s novel East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), Frank Capra’s film Lost Horizon (1937), and Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto’s memoir Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935). The title of Kuo’s book, East Is West and West Is East, signals her main contention that attempts to insist upon binary identity categories worked poorly, at least in these specific texts. Categories such as “Asian” versus “(white) American” were mutually constitutive; the discursive realization of one inherently depended on the other.

In Chapter One, Kuo analyzes Bell’s film East Is West, which ran into trouble with the Hays Commission and has never been released; the Commission’s ostensible objection was to the depiction of prostitution and miscegenation. However, as Kuo asserts, the film explicitly casts the morality of its white characters as superior to those of the degenerate East. Furthermore, the problem of miscegenation is resolved at the conclusion of the film when the Chinese female protagonist Ming Toy is revealed to be white. Kuo convincingly argues that the censorship of the film elides a much more profound anxiety than with prostitution or even miscegenation: an unconscious desire to maintain the structural binarism and essentialism of white versus nonwhite bodies. The audience, in accepting that Ming Toy is really white, would also have to accept that racial categories are socially constructed. Moreover, this dénouement implies that white women can be bought and sold just as Chinese women are and thus can also be contaminated by Asian men, which radically undermines white patriarchal control.

In Chapter Two, Kuo considers Kang’s novel, East Goes West, in terms of the ways that class, race, and gender undergird the experiences of George Jum, the working-class “pagan,” To Wan Kim, the “Oriental intellectual,” and Chungpa Han, the naϊve protagonist. In Kuo’s reading, Han learns about gaining acceptance in the United States by observing the other two characters’ attempts to integrate: Kim’s refusal to accept “marginal integration” (66) leads to his suicide; Jum’s “compromised integration” does not satisfy Han either. Kuo asserts that Han is willing to exploit the role of foreign student and scholar as a way to mediate his...