Asian America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503639089.
Amid the burgeoning scholarship on Hollywood (mis)representations of Chinese Americans, William Gow’s social and labour history of Los Angeles Chinatown is long overdue. Based on an informal assessment of Amazon offerings (circa 2024),Anna May Wong alone anchors about 20 books, the 1871 massacre of 18 Chinese features in two, while only a couple of publications from the Southern Historical Society of Southern California (SHSSC) address more holistically the pre-World War II history of the US’s fourth largest Chinese American community and how everyday Chinese Angelenos participated in orientalist image-making through Chinatowns and movies. Himself a native and long-term community activist, Gow draws extensively on SHSSC oral histories, newspapers, tourism promotions, organizational and legal records, and family histories to explore how average Los Angeles Chinese navigated the discriminations of Asian exclusion by shaping tourism as a key economic sector and their fraught, but necessary, employment in the film industry. In expanding the scope of Hollywood Chinese to an entire community, and not just the most visible of performers, Gow’s monograph significantly complicates conceptual framings of ethnicity and race in fields such as representation, performance, authenticity, and agency.
Performing Chinatown focuses primarily on the eventful 1930s and the double disasters of the Great Depression and the demolition of Old Chinatown with the construction of Union Station. Beleaguered Chinese Angelenos greeted as a godsend the surge in China- and Japan-themed Hollywood productions that provided episodic but well-paying employment as extras. Some Chinese Angelenos such as Key Luke and Bessie Loo parlayed these industry contacts into systematic employment as featured actors, agents recruiting and representing Chinese American performers, cultural consultants, and suppliers of props. The popular culture juggernaut of The Good Earth galvanized greater employment possibilities for Asian Americans in Hollywood even as Anna May Wong was famously not cast, enabling Gow’s necessary consideration of how everyday Chinese Angelenos have been integrated into this powerful manufacturer of images.
For a population as racialized as Chinese, ethnic performance has been for many an inescapable form of livelihood predating the emergence of Hollywood. Gow develops the concept of “Chinatown pastiche” as “a reaction to Chinese exclusion” which “redefined perceived Chinese racial differences through nonthreatening consumption, surface aesthetics, and theatrical performance [that] reimagined the geography of Chinatown as a space of tourism and theatricality compatible with the underlying ideology of US capitalism” (15). Los Angeles’s Old Chinatown paralleled that of San Francisco and New York in pursuing tourist traffic. When it was slated for destruction, the US-born and college-educated civil rights leader, Peter Soohoo, the first Chinese American employed in municipal government (56), managed to delay the bulldozers to give longtime residents greater time to relocate. Soohoo also spearheaded development of New Chinatown to replace its tourist operations, in competition with local developer Christine Sterling who repurposed old movie lots for the China City attraction. Gow’s discussion is granular and nuanced in assessing these competing campaigns and the problematic politics of such ethnic representational projects which are situated in the economic pragmatism of securing stable livelihoods. Then, as now, many Chinese Americans rely on tourism and various forms of ethnic consumption as their primary employment option.
Gow’s nonjudgement of Chinese Angelenos’ and their variety of orientalist performances intersects with social and labour history and highlights their agency in making the best of a bad hand while critiquing authenticity claims that often negate the hybridity that characterizes most ethnic identity formations. Performing Chinatown identifies multiple versions of “Chinese” cultural products and contrasts the Euro American approaches against that of Chinese Angelenos to explore how “authentic” products are manufactured and marketed in comparison to Chinese American openness in adapting and experimenting with their identity representations. Gow traces, for example, the changing costuming of the Mei Wah Girls’ Drum Corps from military-style uniforms to orientalized silks as management for the China war relief fundraising events in which they appeared shifted from the hands of community leaders to those of Hollywood producers and national organizations. Gow acknowledges as well the limits of Chinese Angeleno identification with neighbouring Mexican, African, and Japanese Americans, particularly during World War II when Chinese Americans were cast to portray Japanese villains because all West Coast Japanese Americans had been incarcerated. Navigating racism did not prevent Chinese Angelenos from enacting their own prejudices.
Performing Chinatown enriches what may have seemed the already over-written terrain of Hollywood Chinese. In doing so, Gow recovers the social and labour history priorities of the first generation of Asian Americanists which he melds with perceptive cultural critiques regarding orientalist performance and production to produce this engaged and engaging exploration of how everyday individuals negotiated the racism of capitalist image-making industries in claiming livelihoods as ethnicized subjects.
Madeline Y. Hsu
University of Maryland, College Park