Asians in Western entertainment

On YouTube, a video of Lea Salonga’s audition for the original cast of “Miss Saigon” has been viewed 1,006,142 times since its upload in April 2006. There are 2,134 comments to date and viewers, mostly Filipinos, are still awed. It’s all about being proud that a fellow Filipino bested talents from all over the world. I read many of them and found no mention of the controversies surrounding Miss Saigon including accusations of its racist and stereotypical portrayal of Asians.

Set during the days before the fall of Saigon, the musical’s lead character, The Engineer, is a Eurasian pimp. The lead female character, Kim (played by Lea Salonga in both the original West End and Broadway productions), is a bar girl. The plot reprises Madame Butterfly except for the more modern setting. Critic Nicasio Cruz, S.J, in his September 17, 1988 Reel World column published in Starweek wrote that none of the Asian characters in Miss Saigon had any redeeming value while the Americans were portrayed as the good guys, concerned with the children they left behind.

Then, there’s the issue of bigotry. Mr. Cruz wrote, “No matter what we think of communism, we cannot deny that the Vietnamese fought a war to get rid of foreigners in their own land.”

Yes, the Vietnam war really happened. But Miss Saigon is fiction. It’s entertainment. It’s Asia during a war as seen through the eyes of the White Man. I don’t think the stereotypical portrayal of Asians was all that surprising. We can get as livid as we like but, the fact is, if we look at the gamut of Western popular entertainment, very rarely have Asians been portrayed in a genuine light.

It goes way, way back. To Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. To Suzie Wong and Breakfast at Tiffany’s Mr. Yunioshi (played, ironically, by American actor Mickey Rooney). And it persists to the post-Miss Saigon era. Asian men are martial arts experts who are most probably connected with the Triads or the Yakuza. Asian women are exotic, submissive creatures who are the perfect objects of conquest by the white male. Otherwise, they were dangerous and evil. It was hard not to laugh at the antics of Jacky Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 3 but it was even harder to miss the obvious stereotypical portrayal of the two Asian female characters — the frail Soo Yung who wouldn’t have survived without a knight in shining armor and the Dragon Lady with the killer fan.

Of course, there have been exceptions. The Hollywood production of Amy Tan’s novel “The Joy Luck Club” is one. The roles played by Sandra Oh in “Grey’s Anatomy,” Gong Li in “Miami Vice,” and Maggie Q in “Mission: Impossible 3″ and “Live Free or Die Hard” are also examples.

The question is why the stereotyping persists. Why can Asians play only Asians and why do Asian characters have to be portrayed only a certain way? In his paper “Representation of Asians in Hollywood Films: Sociocultural and Industrial Perspectives”, Ji Hoon Park (who, as far as my research went, is an associate professor of Hope College in Michigan) says the reasons are both sociocultural and industrial.

The sociocultural aspect in a nutshell is about how popular entertainment is merely representative of already existing and deep-rooted racial biases (he explains this wonderfully and extensively from a historical context but including it here is too much obiter dictum so just go and read the 22-page paper which is available free at www.allacademic.com) or what Professor Park calls “the common sense assumptions and specific knowledge about racial minorities by defining racial characteristics, such as violent Latinos, physically strong but unintelligent black, and sneaky and evil Asians.”

One specifically interesting discussion revolves around the image of the Asian woman as a sexy whore. Professor Park refers to D. Y. Hamamoto’s “White and Wong: Ethnical Dilemmas of Racist Love and Lust on the World Wide Web” and his assertion that “the [hypersexual] portrayal of Asian women in film requires an examination of the historical contexts, such as U.S. militarism and neo-colonial domination in Asia.” Now, that should put Miss Saigon in context.

The second aspect is “a natural consequence of industrial routines and conventions in Hollywood.” Citing Turow (”Casting for TV Parts: The Anatomy of Social Typing” in Journal of
Communication), Professor Park says “it is important for producers to create characters that the audiences buy instantaneously. Common cliché or stereotypes are preferred in casting, because they contribute to a sense of reality by conforming to prevailing notions of social categories.” In short, the largely white market rarely accept anything other than what conforms to its belief — that the white man in supreme and must, therefore, play the lead and heroic roles. And because entertainment is a business, TV and movie producers are wont to gamble with the box office by casting Asians in non-stereotypical roles. It’s just too hard for the white market to accept.

It is these industrial routines and Hollywood conventions that make color-blind casting (defined as the practice in the casting a role without considering the actor’s ethnicity) difficult for Asians, whether on Western television, film or stage. Some overcome it. Maggie Q and Sandra Oh have and so have Lea Salonga when she eventually won the role of Eponine in “Les Miserables.” Others end up taking on the usual stereotypical roles.