Asian American Sex Symbols in Early Hollywood

This article originally appeared in the September 2021 issue of Gidra Zine.

In the aftermath of the Atlanta Spa Shootings, there has been a renewed interest in the role that Hollywood movies and other popular media portrayals of Asian Americans have in reinforcing negative stereotypes pertaining to sexuality and gender. Although cinema and new media have an undeniable impact on racial stereotyping, Western fascination with the exotic (and often erotic) East is nothing new, given the long history of literary orientalism that extends back to the earliest encounters with the West.

Palestinian American scholar Edward Said who wrote the foundational text of postcolonial studies, Orientalism, defines the concept of Orientalism as, “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” It is the lens of superiority through which European scholars, scientists, literary writers, and artists view the inferior East, and a means of propagating Western ideals as the status quo of what human civilization should aspire to be. Although Said writes specifically about the Middle East, his definition of Orientalism is something that can be attributed to Asia and beyond that to all non-white peoples who have been historically viewed by the West as inferior to Europeans and their white American descendants.

One of Said’s central arguments looks at Orientalist movements in European art in which Western painters conveyed subjects from the East, and specifically, Middle East. Most of these paintings were produced by European painters who had never visited the Middle East, and instead painted from stories they read about these areas. Stories that were primarily based in conflict dating back to the Crusades, retold through literary tropes of violent men and subjugated women. Images of opium dens and scantily-clad harem women evoke notions of deviance and desire, painting their diasporic descendants with the same broad brush.

Everything about this is fantasy. An artist’s rendering based on the writings of literary figures who in many cases had not visited the Orient themselves – a simulation of a fantasy, imbued with negative connotations based in the history of conflict. From the Modern era onwards, these biased perspectives are at the nexus of all East-West encounters, further informed by the power imbalance of colonial hierarchy and the propaganda that reinforced these identities to self-superior colonizers and subjugated colonial subjects.

Extrapolating Said’s concept of Orientalism to analyze representations of East Asians in early Hollywood cinema we find a number of correlations that manifest in the gendered stereotypes that objectify, demean, and vilify Asians as non-white Others.

By the time that Hollywood was establishing itself as the primary producer of American popular culture in the 1910s and 1920s, European imperialism was at the height of its hegemony. Meanwhile the United States enacted their own imperial incursions in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific.

The decade of the 1910s was a period of extreme conservatism in the US when racism and xenophobia became increasingly pronounced through popular culture, news media, and academia. Among these were American racial theorists like Madison Grant who authored The Passing of the Great Race in 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard, whose 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy went on to influence chief Nazi racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg. To what extent the average American accepted these ideas is open for debate, but it is clear that anti-Asian immigration legislation was largely driven by such sentiments.

Negative portrayals of Asians in American popular culture served a political purpose to align the average working class American with the ultra-conservative and isolationist American nationalists who controlled US business and political interests in that era.

In media studies, popular culture is sometimes referred to as a mirror to society, reflecting what is latent within a culture and making it manifest to a greater extent. Perhaps a better analogy is a feedback loop, as the mirroring between reality and media continues in an endless repetition of action, reaction, internalization, and distortion as society shifts and adapts to images of itself. The contemporary dynamics of social media have made this trend more pronounced as evidenced by the increasing polarization of US domestic politics over the last decade. For the purpose of this article however, discussion will be limited to the cinematic realm.

The study of anti-Asian stereotypes is further complicated by the lens of gender, as Asian men and women have been objectified similarly, but for different purposes. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the early Hollywood actors Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong, who both achieved stardom during the first half of the 20th century at the cost of embodying these negative stereotypes within their archetypal roles, which continue to impact contemporary representations of Asian Americans in popular culture today.

Sessue Hayakawa and the Asian Male Sex Symbol

As an early product of the Hollywood star system, many of the details of Sessue Hayakawa’s early life have been obscured by decades of studio public relations. Accounts vary even on his birth year, some stating 1886, while in Hayakawa’s autobiography, Zen Showed Me the Way, he claims to have been born in 1890. Biographical details that follow are taken from Hayakawa’s own account.  

Born as Kintaro Hayakawa to a noble family descended from the samurai class, his father Yoichiro Hayakawa was governor of Chiba Prefecture. As a teenager Hayakawa enrolled in the Naval Academy with the intention of becoming a naval officer, but after piercing his eardrum in a diving accident, was forced to withdraw. Devastated by the shame he had brought upon his family, Hayakawa attempted seppuku but was rescued by his family dog. Once he had recovered from his injuries, Hayakawa decided to immigrate to the United States where at the request of his father, he pursued a degree in political economics at University of Chicago. After graduating, Hayakawa planned to return home and enter Japanese politics. The evening before his steamship was scheduled to depart, Hayakawa watched a theater performance in Los Angeles Little Tokyo and felt compelled to become an actor.

Hayakawa became a regular performer at The Japanese Theatre in Little Tokyo, acting in Japanese and English language productions, where he was discovered by Hollywood film producer Thomas Ince during his stage production of Typhoon. Against all odds, Ince agreed to pay him the extraordinary sum of $500 per week to star in the silent film adaptation of Typhoon in 1914. Typhoon starred Hayakawa as a Japanese diplomat in France who after having an affair with a chorus girl, strangles her to death in a jealous fit of passion. Despite the negative stereotyping of his character as a literal lady-killer, Hayakawa’s brooding good looks made him an undeniable sex symbol for white women across America.

Cast in a similar role the following year by legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, Hayakawa shared the first ever interracial onscreen kiss with a white woman, actress Fannie Ward, in the 1915 film The Cheat. Although the studio took a substantial risk by visually depicting an interracial relationship during an era where the majority of US states enforced laws forbidding miscegenation, Hayakawa is shown firmly as the villain. A brief synopsis of the film follows.

A wealthy society woman named Edith Hardy (Fannie Ward) is friends with Hishuru Tori (Hayakawa), a wealthy art dealer from Japan. After losing the proceeds from her Red Cross Charity Benefit in the stock market, Hardy faints from shock and Tori resuscitates her with a kiss. This is the point in the movie where Tori begins to reveal himself as a villain, and the kiss is the first action towards making this film a cautionary tale. Tori makes a bargain with Hardy that if she becomes his lover, he will loan her the lost charity money. Although she initially accepts his offer, by the time that Hardy meets Tori where they were meant to have their tryst, she has had second thoughts. Tori refuses to nullify their agreement and tries to force himself on her. Hardy fights back, but is overpowered by Tori who decides to show her that she is nothing more than property to him, and uses a branding iron to scar her back with his insignia. Wounded, Hardy picks up a gun that was lying on Tori’s desk, shoots him, and then escapes. Tori survives the gunshot and blames it on Hardy’s husband, filing a report with the police.

The final act is a courtroom drama where the truth is ultimately revealed. Just before Mr. Hardy is given a guilty verdict, Mrs. Hardy shows her branding iron scar as proof that she shot Tori in self-defense. The crowd is incited to the point of violence, and Hayakawa barely escapes a lynch mob as he is escorted out the back of the courtroom by the bailiff. The court case is dismissed and the film ends with the Hardys walking down the aisle of the courthouse together. Their love for each other reinforced within the norms of whiteness, and repudiation of miscegenation.

In this film we see Hayakawa’s character transform from a supportive friend to an exploitative abuser almost instantaneously as he acts on unreciprocated feelings towards a white woman. Although their kiss is non-consensual and partially obscured from view, this is still revolutionary because an interracial kiss had never been shown before in Hollywood cinema. It is remarkable that this occurred in an era of such deep racial prejudice, and that it was Hayakawa who did it.

Although white American audiences were quite receptive to Hayakawa’s stardom, unsurprisingly, he received quite a bit of bad publicity and flak from the Japanese American community who felt that Hayakawa was portraying Japanese in a way that would reflect negatively on them.

In response to protests by Japanese Americans and diplomats from Imperial Japan, the intertitles were changed in the 1918 re-release so that Hayakawa’s character was renamed Haka Arakau, an ivory merchant from Burma. Regardless, Hayakawa continued to receive negative publicity from both the reporters in his native Japan and among the Japanese American newspapers. Regardless of nationality, Hayakawa’s character is seriously damaging to the American public’s imagination of the Asian man, especially considering the total absence of positive representation in that era.

Yet this role launched Hayakawa’s stardom and established a typecast that would define his silent film career. Hayakawa became a commodity to the Hollywood film studios because of his mass sex appeal for white women. A testament to his success, Hayakawa was the only non-white talent who held a contract among the Famous Lasky Players, which was the precursor to Paramount Pictures. By 1918 he became so wealthy and popular that he was able to establish his own film studio, Haworth Pictures Corporation, and to this day remains the only Asian American to do so.

Over the course of the next decade, Hayakawa would go on to reprise dozens of similar roles as a sort of dangerous, brooding, forbidden lover. Oftentimes he was very bad to the women that he loved to the point of violent abuse, and yet, white women audiences clamored for more of him.

Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake recalled one famous anecdote that demonstrates the extent of his popularity, as quoted in Daisuke Miyao’s excellent book Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom. “When Sessue was getting out of his limousine in front of a theater of a premiere showing, he grimaced a little because there was a puddle. Then, dozens of female fans surrounding his car fell over one another to spread their fur coats at his feet.”

At the core of Hayakawa’s success is the controversial topic of “rape fantasy.” Although feminist perspectives are somewhat split on the validity of these theories (and even whether the term should be used), a considerable body of work has been written by self-identifying feminist scholars that share consensus on the following conclusions.

1)    “Rape fantasy” exists as a product of patriarchal oppression – i.e. women have been conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

2)    The use of force allows the fantasizer to absolve herself of guilt in a society that places taboos on female sexuality.

In the highly conservative and misogynistic society of 1910s United States (a time before women were legally given the right to vote), both of these aspects of “rape fantasy” are fulfilled by Hayakawa’s onscreen presence. To be clear, white women audiences enjoying Hayakawa’s work did not mean they wanted to be raped in real life, but rather provided a guilt-free way to fantasize about sexual encounters. With Hayakawa there was an added element of danger related to the taboo of interracial intercourse, during an era governed by anti-miscegenation laws.

Hayakawa’s typecast roles uphold a white supremacist viewpoint in their cautionary and moralistic messaging by limiting representations of interracial sexual relations to non-consensual and violent encounters. Plainly put, while it was safe to vicariously fantasize about Hayakawa through onscreen surrogates, white women should avoid sexual relations with Asian men in real life because they will be mistreated. This reading seems most valid to Hayakawa, given the rising anti-Japanese sentiment that increased throughout the era in which he was popular.

By the end of World War I, Imperial Japan had emerged as the dominant power in East Asia and demanded their country be seen as equals to the European powers and United States. During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Baron Nobuaki Makino, a senior diplomat in the Japanese government and the principal delegate for the Empire, proposed Japan’s “racial equality bill” to the League of Nations.

Although the equality clause was only meant to apply among members of the League in a diplomatic setting, Makino’s proposal deeply offended President Woodrow Wilson – an openly racist man who defended the KKK on multiple occasions in his book A History of the American People. Indeed, at a time when lynchings and other violence against African Americans was being perpetuated with impunity, it would be difficult to read this as anything other than an attack on US racial politics.

Additionally, because Japan was given possession of the German territories in the Pacific as part of the Treaty of Versailles, Yellow Peril attitudes reemerged as the Empire of Japan was now seen as a threat to US dominance in the region. In this sense, Hayakawa’s onscreen villainy can be read as a threat to white American masculinity, analogous to Imperial Japan’s rising power. By killing off Hayakawa’s characters (which happens frequently) or otherwise depicting the ruinous impacts of an interracial relationship between an Asian man and white woman, white American men join in on the fantasy in a way that allows them to reassert their patriarchal dominance i.e. US hegemony.

Hayakawa’s brief, but prolific popularity in the decade of the 1910s and early 1920s waned by the time that the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, resulting in a total ban on immigration from Japan until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 eased restrictions.  

Hayakawa spent much of the 1920s in France where his popularity exceeded even that of his American stardom. Although he would briefly return to Hollywood in the 1930s, Hayakawa’s thick Japanese accent pigeon-holed him as a character actor in the talkie era of cinema. Hayakawa’s Hollywood return also coincided with the rise of another Asian American star – Anna May Wong, who coincidentally co-starred in Hayakawa’s 1931 talkie debut Daughter of the Dragon.  

Anna May Wong and the white Male Gaze

The American-born daughter of Los Angeles Chinatown laundry owners, Anna May Wong holds a special place in film history as the first Asian American woman to become a major Hollywood sensation.

Filmmaker Peilin Kuo who is an authority on Wong writes, “Anna May was fascinated by film from a very early age… she played hooky from school to watch movies and sometimes snuck into shoots on the streets of Chinatown. From those humble beginnings, she rose to prominence against great odds and paved the way for the current generation of Asian film actors to make their mark.”

Unlike Hayakawa’s frequent onscreen dalliances with white women, Wong’s prospects as a romantic lead were quashed by the Motion Picture Production Code, which went into effect in 1930. Better known as the Hay’s Code after President Will H. Hays of the Motion Picture Association of America, this agreement amongst executives from each major Hollywood studio outlined what should and should not be permitted onscreen – practicing self-censorship to avoid government intervention. Banned topics generally pertained to sexuality, criminality, and religion.

With anti-miscegenation laws active in California until 1948, the Hay’s Code prevented Wong from taking on roles that involved romance with a white male lead in all but a handful of pre-code films like The Toll of the Sea, a 1922 film adaptation of Madame Butterfly set in China. Considered her first breakout role, Wong stars in the role of Butterfly (named Lotus Flower in this film) who marries an American sailor she rescues from the sea. After impregnating her, the sailor returns to the United States alone and remarries a white woman. Years later they return to China and claim Lotus Flower’s son as their own. Conceding to her former lover and his new wife, Lotus Flower tells her child that they are her real parents and the film ends by implying Lotus Flower’s suicide.

Another standout role in Wong’s early career is the 1924 The Thief of Bagdad, in which she plays the role of a treacherous Mongol slave, who betrays her princess and attempts to poison her. Although there are several other slave characters, as the only Asian in the film Wong’s costume of a tube top and short skirt is far more revealing than her white counterparts who are dressed in flowing robes.

Fed up by the limited roles she was receiving in Hollywood, Wong moved abroad to Europe in the late 1920s where she starred in several major British and German films. Her best role during this period was perhaps the 1929 British film Piccadilly, in which she stars as a nightclub dancer. Even in this film however, Wong is reduced to a sexual commodity through her scantily clad and highly Orientalist dance costumes. The film includes an interracial romance with the white nightclub owner, which adds considerable depth to the story, as the British filmmakers addressed the issues of race with far more nuance compared to their American counterparts.

Of particular note is a scene where Wong’s character accompanies her boss on a date to a workingclass pub full of raucous dancing. After a white woman starts dancing with a black man, the dance ends abruptly when the bartender chides the woman for her indecency. Wong and her date exchange glances and leave the pub with a tacit acceptance that their romance is something to remain hidden. Shortly after their romance begins, Wong’s character is killed by her jealous Chinese lover, perhaps suggesting that interracial relationships are destined to end in tragedy.

Wong’s next major role brought her back to Hollywood for the 1931 Daughter of the Dragon, a spinoff of the popular Fu Manchu series in which she plays Princess Ling Moy, daughter of the sinister Chinese crime boss Fu Manchu. Starring opposite of Sessue Hayakawa in his debut talkie film, Wong’s character embodies the evil dragon lady stereotype as the film’s main villainess.

In each of the roles discussed, Wong gravitates between a submissive, demure, and sexually available “lotus flower” or cold, conniving “dragon lady” who uses her sexuality to make men do her bidding. Sexual objectification is present in both cases, and similar to the moralistic lessons warning off interracial romance with Asian men, by contrast, Asian women are portrayed as disposable playthings that can be enjoyed for pleasure, but should be cast off before any real attachment develops. Sadly, little has changed in terms of how mainstream media depicts Asian women today.

The marginal success that Wong enjoyed as Hollywood’s first Asian American female star is marred by the negative impacts that such representations conveyed to the American public about Asian women, but like Hayakawa, she was limited in what roles were available based on the racism of their time – with the added barriers of misogyny.

Kuo explains, “During her Hollywood career, Wong suffered from the frequent stereotyping of Asian women as ‘China dolls’ or ‘Dragon ladies’. Despite her prodigious talent and screen presence, she was usually relegated to playing secondary roles to white actresses. The closest she came to a lead Asian role in a major studio film was in The Good Earth (1937), but she lost the role to Luise Rainer, a white actress in yellowface, who won an Oscar for the role.  

By the 1930s romantic Asian male leads were virtually non-existent, and when the script called for one, Hollywood frequently cast white men in yellowface, as was the case in The Good Earth. Even in these cases when a white actor was portraying an Asian character onscreen – interracial relations were forbidden, thus preventing Wong from landing these roles.

A rare exception is the 1937 B-movie thriller Daughter of Shanghai in which Wong stars opposite of Korean American actor Philip Ahn as the daughter of a wealthy Chinese merchant who goes undercover as a nightclub dancer to try and expose the illegal human-trafficking operation that led to her father’s death. Despite the potential for an onscreen romance with Ahn, the couple barely holds hands, let alone kisses, before she agrees to marry him in the closing scene. This suggests that either onscreen romance between two Asians was deemed inappropriate by Hollywood tastemakers, or perhaps the Asian male had already been emasculated to the point that white women audiences were no longer interested.

While Wong never fully recovered from the disappointment of being passed over in the Good Earth, her career briefly flourished during the early years of World War II as she landed back-to-back lead roles in Bombs Over Burma and Lady From Chungking. In both films Wong portrays Chinese freedom fighters who struggle against Japanese imperial aggression. On the surface these roles are a positive departure from the hypersexualized roles that had previously defined Wong’s career. Yet in both films, Wong’s femininity is instead exploited for the purpose of wartime propaganda, using gender stereotypes to metaphorically suggest dominance and power.

Colonies exist to be exploited by the colonizer, mined of its resources with a clear power imbalance in favor of white hegemony. This is not solely a European or white American concept, as Imperial Japan also employed such tactics in their propaganda film campaigns during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In their case the Manchurian-born actress of Japanese descent known to contemporary audiences as Ri Koran (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) famously portrayed ethnic Chinese characters in Japanese held territories.

In the Japanese context, Neo-Confucianist ideals that were popular during the imperial era prioritized men as the head of the household while women were instructed to show deference to their male counterparts. Extrapolating this way of thinking to Japan’s relationship with its colonial territories, Japan as colonizer is masculine and its colonized subjects are feminine. The uneven power dynamics are implied through Japanese propaganda films where Ri Koran plays opposite of a paternalistic Japanese romantic lead.  

While less dogmatic than Neo-Confucianism, the US and other Western imperial powers shared a misogynistic worldview with Japan that clearly delineated women as inferior to men during much of the 20th century, and particularly in the 1940s.

Media theorist Laura Mulvey writes about the male gaze in cinema, essentially how the majority of Hollywood films portray women in a voyeuristic manner as objects to be desired – viewed from the camera lens as the male character would presumably see them. This evokes feelings of lust and desire from the male audience, and some would argue, encourages the objectification of women beyond the screen. In Hollywood portrayals of Asian women, there is an additional layer to this objectification that is informed by colonial and white supremacist hierarchies that I will call the “white male gaze.” 

Thusly, while Wong’s wartime roles exhibit more strength and independence than the majority of her pre-war films, she is still depicted through the white male gaze as something to be desired – the spoils of war, once saved to be savored by the liberator. An alternative reading is that by showing a Chinese woman outsmarting Japanese men, both films serve the purpose to further emasculate the Japanese enemy, which in turn has a negative effect on the perception of Asian American men.

Although Wong would go on to enjoy brief success as the first Asian American woman to helm her own television show in the 1951 detective series, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, she would spend the last decade of her life in an alcoholic depression, dying of a heart attack in 1961 at age 56. Like so many of the characters she played, Wong was tossed aside by the industry once they had satiated their desire for her. 

Contemporary Implications

In contemporary American popular media Asian women remain hypersexualized by the same tired tropes that have existed for more than a century, exacerbated by decades of military occupation in Asia where prostitution has often been necessitated by circumstance. From the Babysan comic strip series (which depicts the sexual misadventures and cultural misunderstandings of American soldiers in Occupied Japan) to the “me love you long time” scene in Full Metal Jacket, the many problematic references to sex-trafficked “Asian hookers” in popular cartoon Family Guy, and countless other examples in Hollywood films and network television – images of Asian women have become synonymous with sexual commodification.

The connotation of the Asian woman as a sexually available commodity is something that we are all too familiar with in contemporary discourse. In the aftermath of the Atlanta Spa Shootings, shooter Robert Aaron Long made a statement to the police in which he claimed that sex addiction fueled his deadly rampage that claimed the lives of eight people, six of whom were Asian women. There is no evidence that these women were engaged in sex work. Just a stereotype repeated too many times, delivered once again by the many news media outlets who reported Long’s statement without critiquing his assumptions. Given the prevalence of the Asian prostitute stereotype in American popular culture it is surely no wonder why these assumptions are taken at face value.

Inversely, Asian men have been fully emasculated in the decades following World War II, largely as a result of wartime anti-Japanese propaganda. Hayakawa’s best-known role by contemporary audiences is Colonel Saito in Bridge Over River Kwai where he plays the role of an obstinate Japanese military officer who oversees a POW camp in Burma. Similar portrayals of the honor-bound, but ultimately irredeemable Japanese soldier abound in the postwar era canon of WWII films. The majority of postwar representations of Asian men in mainstream US media consist of emasculated and undesirable nerds epitomized by the character “Long Duk Dong” in John Hughes’ teen comedy Sixteen Candles.

As such, Asian men and women have been positioned as the perpetual butt of the joke, even at a time when Hollywood has begun to self-reflect on their history of racial inequity. In the aftermath of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign when Chris Rock hosted the award show in 2016, he made a joke about Asians being good at math and also referenced child labor sweatshops. Recent strides have been made with male leads like Henry Golding and Simu Liu helming action hero franchise films Snake Eyes (a G.I. Joe spin-off) and Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, but both have been subject to extremely racist backlash from internet trolls who cannot fathom Asian men being shown in a positive light.

Although it is impossible to predict with certainty what may come next for Asian American representation, as the growing Chinese economy begins to eclipse US global hegemony, pay close attention to how Chinese men and women are portrayed in American popular media over the next decade. It is possible we will see many of these historic tropes revisited. Or perhaps the flash of capital from potential overseas box office returns will lead to more positive representations of overseas Chinese. Still, if the history of US cinema teaches us one thing, it is that Asian Americans will likely face the brunt of repercussions from negative media portrayals.