Back to Asian Americans on Celluloid Timeline
The Silent Era
The “Silent Era” refers to the period in film history before the widespread installation of sound systems in movie theaters, which occurred around 1930. The American film industry developed in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, and this emergence coincided with the height of “Yellow Peril” fears in the United States. As a result, early representations of Asians in American film generally fell into one of four stereotypes:
The Butterfly: This refers to a submissive and self-sacrificing woman who is sexually alluring to White men. The name of this stereotype is derived from John Luther Long’s short story “Madame Butterfly,” which was adapted into a play by David Belasco and an opera by Giocomo Puccini.
The Dragon Lady: This refers to a strong woman who is deceitful, mysterious and domineering. This stereotype was a key motivation behind the passage of the 1875 Page Act, the United States’ first restrictive federal immigration law, which essentially blocked the immigration of Asian women.
Fu Manchu: This is the male counterpoint of the Dragon Lady. It describes inscrutable genius villains who poised to destroy the Western world.
Charlie Chan: This stereotype was developed in the 1920s to counter the Fu Manchu stereotype. It refers to benevolent and intelligent characters, but that are also inexplicably subservient, bound to odd Asian traditions and unassimilable. This type of character is the precursor of the model minority stereotype.
Mainstream American films of this period did not feature many Asian characters. Of the ones that existed, most were—following established theatrical practices—played by White actors in yellowface. The preference for yellowface over actors of Asian descent stems in part from a reluctance to look for and hire Asian actors, and in part from widespread fears of miscegenation or race mixing.
Despite limited opportunities for people of Asian descent in early American film, several achieved prominence and left important legacies. Their careers demonstrate the different but ultimately limited methods they could use to combat the racism they faced. Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) starred in over 80 films. Despite his stardom following his breakout performance in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915), he was only able to get “Fu Manchu”-type roles. This led him to form his own studio, Haworth Pictures, in 1918. His frustrations with the American film industry led him to spend a period from 1922 to 1949 acting mostly on Broadway, in Japan and in Europe.
Anna May Wong (1905-61) achieved stardom through her performances in The Toll of the Sea (1922), in which she played a “Butterfly,” and The Thief of Bagdad (1924), in which she played a “Dragon Lady.” Like Hayakawa, she became frustrated by how Hollywood had to offer, and spent several years working in both theater and film in Europe during the late 1920s and mid-1930s. When she was passed over for the film adaptation of The Good Earth, Wong decided to visit China. Given the stereotypical roles she was forced to play in Hollywood films, however, she was strongly criticized by the film industry there.
Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) is a biracial (British father, Chinese mother) novelist who worked as a screenwriter for Universal and MGM from 1921 to 1930. Her most prominent credits are Young Desire (1930), directed by Harry Pollard, and East is West, directed by Monta Bell. Eaton did not particularly enjoy working in Hollywood. In 1928, she published an article in a trade magazine entitled “Butchering Brains, An Author in Hollywood is as a Lamb in an Abattoir.” In it, she describes the work of a screenwriter like this, “He has been assigned to adapt and treat an original by one Susy Swipes or Davy Jones of Hollywood. It is an amazing, an incredible document. Its language is almost beyond credence. It is a nightmare patchwork that contains incidents and characters and gags and plots of a hundred or more stories that are horribly reminiscent to the Eminent Author.”
Marion Wong (1895-1969) was a child entertainer, and she founded the first independent Asian American company—the Mandarin Film Company—in 1916 with funding from her uncle Ben Lim. Unfortunately, the company was only able to make one film, The Curse of Quon Gwon (see the entry on our timeline), which deals with issues of assimilation and Westernization. Without any stereotypical Asian roles, no distributor was willing to pick up the film, and the company filed for bankruptcy. After World War I, Wong continued to perform in vaudeville as a musician. She and her husband Kim Seung Hong opened a restaurant in Richmond, California called Singapor Hut, and it was known for its musical cabarets.