The traces of this history may remain in plain sight but reconstructing this history requires more than critical close readings of China-themed films or Chinatown tourism publicity from the period. While close reading methodologies can help us understand the ways in which popular culture structured dominant ideas of race, gender, and nation, these methods tell us little of the motives of the Chinese Americans who helped produced these films and related performances, or of the emotional or social ties that the production of these performances elicited. To understand these performances in their historical context necessitates both close readings of popular racial representations alongside the use of archival documents and oral history interviews produced by community members. This archival work can help us piece together the lives and actions of the Chinese Americans who played such an important role in producing cultural artifacts from this period. This dissertation unites archival and oral history methodologies from social history with close textual analysis from film studies to foreground the ways seemingly everyday Chinese Americans influenced the process of racial formation. In the process, this interdisciplinary methodology produces new ways of understanding Chinatown both as a representation and as an ethnic enclave. As part of this interdisciplinary methodology, this dissertation is closely grounded in a form of social history often referred to in Asian American Studies as community history. As first deployed in the developing field of Asian Americans studies in the 1970s and 1980s, Asian American community history utilizes community-engaged methods such as oral history and collection of family and community documents to create an archive on which the history of a given place-based, ethnic enclave can be written. If the primary goal of mainstream American history has long been to produce academic interventions in society’s knowledge of the past,drainage pot the goal of Asian American community history, as it was originally developed, was much more politically informed.
Developing out of the political imperatives of the Asian American Movement of the late 1960s, community history methodology sought to address broader historical silences within mainstream narratives of American history while simultaneously documenting, building, and empowering local Asian American communities. Often produced collectively, these community histories originated both out of emerging ethnic studies departments as well as out of the first local Asian American historical associations that were then coming into being. While Asian American community history developed around the same time that “public history” was emerging as an accepted academic field within American history, the audience for these early Asian American community histories was not an unidentified public audience but rather the members of the same ethnic enclaves whose history was being told. This project may be written as dissertation in the field of Ethnic Studies, but it maintains the ethos of these earlier Asian American community histories. In particular, this dissertation builds on the work of community historians at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles. While other archival institutions were used, the collections of these two institutions form the foundation of the dissertation. Central to this dissertation is the Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project. Produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a joint effort between the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, the project interviewed 165 people about their lives in Los Angeles until 1945. The resulting collection contains four hundred hours taped interviews and 1700 pages of summary transcripts. A collective effort that involved volunteers from both UCLA’s Asian American studies center and the CHSSC, the project remains perhaps the most comprehensive archived Chinese American oral history collection of its type focusing on the pre-war period. I employ these archival and community history methodologies alongside those of cultural studies.
Grounded in the work of scholars like Stuart Hall and Edward Said, this project sees culture as intimately tied to social, economics, and political power. Power relations of a given social structure are encoded in popular representations, and subaltern groups, such as Chinese Americans in the 1930 and 1940s, use culture as a means of engaging the intersecting structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This project thus sees films, newspaper articles, and above all Chinatown itself, as texts that can be read to better understand the social structure in a given place and period of time. Reading these cultural texts can lead not only to a better understanding of power relations within a given historical moment, but also to a better understanding of the ways those groups contested their subaltern position within the social structure. Historians are often criticized for their over reliance on the written word as a primary source, and certainly few of the existing studies on Chinese Americans in the first half of the twentieth century have given popular cinematic representations from the 1930s and 1940s the same attention as the written word. In contrast, my dissertation utilizes visual and material culture as “texts” that can be read in a way that will supplement rather than supplant our understanding of community history. As the first dissertation on the history of Los Angeles Chinatown and its relationship to Hollywood film, this project bridges these methodologies from social history and cultural studies to demonstrate the ways in which members of the Chinese American community in Los Angeles shaped dominant ideas of race, gender, and nation. I contend that the same transformations in the urban environment that facilitated the development of film in the late nineteenth century also transformed Chinatown into a similar type of cultural apparatus. Within the field of film studies, scholars such as Tom Gunning, Ben Singer, Laruen Rabinovitz, and Vanessa Schwartz have advanced what has come to be known as the modernity thesis.This modernity thesis posits that urbanization brought about a transformation in the social act of seeing which facilitated the development of new types of visual amusements, key among which was early silent film.A handful of film studies scholars have touched on this visual transformation and its relationship to both New York and San Francisco Chinatowns.My project builds on this earlier scholarship by briefly tracing the shared symbiotic history of Chinatowns and cinema from their roots in Chicago in the 1890s and San Francisco after the 1906 Earthquake. The dissertation then moves on to demonstrate the convergence and development of these two mediums—Chinatown and film—in Los Angeles between in the 1910s and the 1940s. Repositioning Chinatown as a medium of cultural production, symbiotically tied to the development of cinema allows for a more nuanced understanding of the amount of agency Chinese Americans were able to exercise over self-representations of their own community over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. It also allows us to see the myriad ways in which Chinese American in Los Angeles challenged, rearticulated, and at times reinforced ideas of American Orientalism.
Edward Said defines the idea of Orientalism as a system of knowledge and power through which the West defines itself against the East.For Said, the Orient is more than simply an idea. Instead it is “a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.”While Said originally advanced the idea of Orientalism in discussing Europe’s relationship to the Middle East, a growing number of scholars have examined the way Orientalism functions within the United States. Scholars such as Gordon Chang and John Kuo Wei Tchen have all discussed the roles that discourses and popular conceptions of China played historically in constructing the idea of the United States as a modern, progressive nation.At the same time, Mary Ting Yi Lui, Anthony Lee, and Kay Anderson have all discussed various aspects of Chinatown and Orientalism.These scholars have demonstrated the ways in which popular ideas about China and Chinese people defined so many aspects of the way the United States understood itself as a nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While recognizing the lasting permanence of American Orientalism as a foundational ideology of the United States,large pot with drainage scholars have also acknowledged an important shift that occurred around the Second World War in the way Chinese Americans were popularly perceived. During the Chinese Exclusion Act period, American Orientalism defined Chinese Americans as legally, economically, and culturally as outside the boundaries of the US nation state. Throughout the Exclusion act period, the U.S. citizen came to be defined against the Asian immigrant.As such, representations of an American citizen of Chinese descent remained in many ways a cultural impossibility. Beginning around the Second World War, the ideology of racial liberalism took hold within the United States. With racial liberalism, the United States began the process of attempting to incorporate and manage, rather than exclude, a wider range of racial and ethnic groups within the United States.For Chinese Americans this period saw the symbolic end of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and the increasing acceptance of Chinese Americans into broader society. For the first time, large numbers of Chinese Americans were able to find jobs outside of the nation’s Chinatowns. While Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asian people did not disappear, the advent of racial liberalism transformed the ways in which American Orientalism functioned. Scholars have argued that the shift toward racial liberalism in general and the increasing incorporation of Chinese Americans into the nation-state in particular was largely the result of geopolitical factors directly linked to the war itself. In this narrative, the U.S. alliance with China during the Second World War, and the broader need to combat Japanese propaganda that labeled the United States as a racist nation, necessitated a transformation in the way in which the country treated its Chinese American residents. This accepted historical narrative leaves little room for the agency of Chinese Americans in the shifting notions of race, gender, and nation, and it further demonstrates Karen Leong observation that too often studies of American Orientalism see only whites as being able to engage these Orientalist discourses.In contrast to most earlier studies, I contend that Chinese American engagement with American Orientalism, through Chinatown performance, helped lay the foundation for the eventual incorporation of Chinese Americans into the nation state under the logic of racial liberalism during World War II. During the Chinese Exclusion Act era, Chinese Americans were forced to negotiate U.S. citizenship and national belonging through the discourse of American Orientalism. During this period, the question was not whether or not Chinese Americans would be defined as an Other against the US citizen, but rather what form this image of the Asian Other would take within the popular imagination. Therefore understanding Chinese American self representations before the Second World War necessitates an acknowledgement of the discursive possibilities and limits under which Chinese Americans operated during this period. While a few Chinese Americans such as Wong Chin Foo did attempt to present cultural representations of Chinese Americans as U.S. citizens, most Chinese Americans utilized a largely different strategy to combat Orientalist depictions of Chinese immigrants as a Yellow Peril.Examining what I call, “Chinese American Orientalism,” as a challenge to Yellow Peril stereotypes, the project foreground the ways that Chinese merchants, actors, and street performers used the medium of Chinatown to advance a vision of their community that at once challenged earlier Yellow Peril depictions while still maintaining some of the underlying assumptions about Chinese people’s differences from whites. In the face of Yellow Peril representations that defined Chinatown as an underground den of violent opium dealing tongs, Chinese American Orientalism cast the nation’s Chinatowns as clean, modern commercial areas where whites could shop and eat. These representations remained Orientalist in that they constructed Chinese culture in opposition to that of the West, but this form of Chinese American Orientalism negated rather than perpetuated ideas of Chinese Americans as a threat. This Chinese American Orientalism challenged images of Chinatown as a community of violent, opium-addicted bachelors living in underground dens and presented in its place an image of Chinatown as the modern extension of an ancient Oriental culture and tradition, one that could easily be commodified and sold to white visitors to financially support the needs of an emerging Chinese American middle class.