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Overview
From yellow-face performance in the 19th century to Jackie Chan in the 21st, Chinese Looks examines articles of clothing and modes of adornment as a window on how American views of China have changed in the past 150 years. Sean Metzger provides a cultural history of three iconic objects in theatrical and cinematic performance: the queue, or man's hair braid; the woman's suit known as the qipao; and the Mao suit. Each object emerges at a pivotal moment in US-China relations, indexing shifts in the balance of power between the two nations. Metzger shows how aesthetics, gender, politics, economics, and race are interwoven and argues that close examination of particular forms of dress can help us think anew about gender and modernity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253015686 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 308 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Sean Metzger is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. He is editor (with Olivia Khoo) of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures and (with Gina Masequesmay) of Embodying Asian/American Sexualities.
Read an Excerpt
Chinese Looks
Fashion, Performance, Race
By Sean Metzger
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Sean MetzgerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01568-6
CHAPTER 1
Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish
IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES, THE ABSENCE of Asian bodies on U.S. stages resulted in actors developing what Josephine Lee calls "a complex set of codes for the presentation of the Oriental Other" that borrowed from the lexicon of Asian stereotypes. I group such codes—conventional associations of signs and meanings that purportedly convey Asianness—under the term "yellowface performance." Over the decades, actors in yellowface have often stirred controversy; indeed, Anna May Wong's complaints about Luise Rainer in the film The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937) led in part to Wong's attempts to shift the representations of Chinese figures on the silver screen. But the relative obscurity of nineteenth-century yellowface performers impedes the contextualization of such disputes. The career of the white actor Charles Parsloe during the 1870s provides the most comprehensive case study available with which to examine early yellowface practice. The popularity of his embodiment of the "Chinaman" (a term indicating a theatrical construction that I invoke as a counterpoint to the lived experience of Chinesemen) both depends on and informs hegemonic constructions of Chineseness. Parsloe's performance practice constitutes a kind of ventriloquism, in which he animates the Chinaman and specifically his queue as a fetish that substitutes for and conceals the dominant anxieties about Chinese immigrants among the white majority in the United States during the late 1800s. The histories and genres through and to which Parsloe's hairpiece generates meaning code the object as the dominant feature of the skein of race in late-nineteenth-century melodrama. The queue becomes the material apparatus of racialization through its deployment in frontier narratives.
Parsloe developed the Chinaman role through four melodramas: Bret Harte's Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Harte and Mark Twain's Ah Sin (1877), Joaquin Miller's The Danites in the Sierras (1877; hereafter The Danites) and Bartley Theodore Campbell's My Partner (1879). According to scripts and performance reviews, these theatrical productions depicted their Chinese characters through performers' costumes and mannerisms, with queue jokes and stage dialect frequently notated in dramatic texts. In the case of Parsloe, these signifiers apparently conveyed Chineseness to his audiences. James Moy cites several reviews of Parsloe's performance as Ah Sin, the most flattering of which claims that the actor's portrayal could "scarcely [be] excelled in truthfulness to nature and freedom from caricature." In spite of the fact that Two Men of Sandy Bar and Ah Sin flopped both commercially and critically, Parsloe used these productions to elevate his reputation, moving from a competent character actor to the foremost player of Chinaman roles. After performing Hop Sing in Harte's drama and the title role in Ah Sin, Parsloe played Washee Washee in The Danites. According to his obituary, Parsloe next "toured in 'My Partner.' For 1,300 nights he played the role of Wing Wee [sic], the Chinaman, and his share of the profits amounted to over $100,000." Parsloe's evolving embodiment of the theatrical Chinaman is expressed through the actor's yellowface performance in Ah Sin, The Danites, and My Partner, which constitutes a "melodramatic formation" that reveals nineteenth-century American attitudes about the Chinese in the United States as well as the struggles over changing racial, class, and gender dynamics that characterized the slowly reintegrating union in the 1870s.
Locating Parsloe's Chinamen
The relations between the United States and China during the late 1800s form the backdrop for the dramatic worlds that Parsloe entered as Hop Sing, Ah Sin, or Washee Washee. Although none of the plays in which these characters appeared explicitly addresses international politics, media concerning U.S.-China diplomacy probably informed the reception of Parsloe's Chinese characters. East Coast theatergoers probably had little contact with Chinese residents in the United States, but "celestials" and "heathen Chinee" had loomed large in the national imagination for some time. As Stuart Miller has noted, "Americans had been trading with the Chinese since 1785 and enthusiastically supporting Protestant missionaries there since 1807," even if the two countries did not formalize diplomatic relations until the mid-1840s. At this time, in the wake of China's defeat in the First Opium War, U.S. representatives followed Britain's lead and negotiated the Treaty of Wangxia, which sought concessions from the Middle Kingdom in the form of access to more ports and fewer restrictions on trade. The United States further benefited from European incursion into Chinese territory when the Treaty of Tianjin was signed in 1858. This treaty contained two provisions particularly relevant to the Sino/American interface as it began to take shape over the long twentieth century. First, the Qing dynasty allowed Anson Burlingame, the U.S. minister to China from 1861 to 1867, to live in Beijing as opposed to one of the port cities, and he therefore obtained a broader view of Chinese society than that of previous ambassadors. Second, foreign missionaries were permitted to travel to the interior of China. These missionaries would, in turn, provide the most detailed accounts—biased, to be sure—of life in China during the 1800s.
If this period witnessed U.S.-China relations reach what seemed a height of relative prosperity, with the Qing government even asking Burlingame to lead the Chinese international diplomatic entourage on its visit to the United States in 1868, the 1870 "massacre" of approximately twenty foreigners in Tianjin altered U.S.-China diplomacy and set the tone for the period up to Chinese exclusion in 1882. Reports of the increasing violence that plagued the waning Qing regime combined with U.S. domestic concerns over Chinese immigrants, who fled the internal revolts and famine that spread through the Middle Kingdom in the mid-1800s. Between 1860 and 1880, the Chinese population in the United States tripled, with the 1880 U.S. Census recording 105,465 Chinese individuals residing in the country. The influx of so many immigrant workers affected employment opportunities, particularly in California, where the Chinese arrived in the greatest numbers. The increasing presence of Asians in the U.S. workforce and the attendant anxieties accompanying the demographic shifts led to a changing discourse around Chinese subjects that culminated in the almost complete restriction of Chinese immigration in 1882.
Ah Sin, The Danites, and My Partner all take place in the homosocial environment of frontier mining camps, as such geographic locations directly correlate to the historical spaces occupied by early Chinese immigrants. By the 1860s approximately twenty-four thousand Chinese, or two-thirds of the total Chinese population in the United States, were working in the California mines. Although the individual striving to raise his social status through industrious efforts in the mines conformed to the ethos requisite for U.S. citizenship, popular views of Chinese men on the frontier depicted them as scavenging opportunists of ambiguous gender and sexuality. This ambiguity arose as Chinese workers adopted the roles of laundrymen in order to mitigate the discriminatory acts that might otherwise force their departure from the mining camps. Unfortunately, the inadvertent challenge to normative masculinity that characterized Chinese labor would also provide one of the justifications for Chinese exclusion, because the malleability of the Chinese workforce led to "both racialized and gendered" indictments of Chinese people as "embodiments of an unrepublican dependence caused by the evils of capitalism," as Gunther Peck has noted.
Although domesticity is quite compatible with and even supports notions of manifest destiny, the assumption of "women's" labor by Chinese men became justifications for Chinese exclusion in at least two ways. First, white observers argued that Chinese men who performed "women's" work facilitated the descent of white women into immoral positions. Second, Chinese laundry work highlighted the absence of women in Chinese communities. This absence fed the belief in the dominant media that Chinese social organization in the United States encouraged female prostitution. So strong was this association that the U.S. government enacted a law in 1862, as well as the Page Act of 1875, that legally established connections among Chinese immigrants, labor, and prostitution. When media images of young white women lured into opium dens began to saturate public discourse throughout the 1870s, two independent lines of thought—that Chinese men's labor forced white women into brothels and that Chinese men frequented prostitutes—converged. "During the era of Reconstruction ... suspicion and fears of division" may have tempered arguments for exclusion based solely on race, but "a moral argument based on gender and sexuality that implicitly substantiated racial difference" finally encouraged Chinese exclusion.
Contrasting with many images of Chinese men in the popular imagination, the stage Chinamen of Ah Sin, The Danites, and My Partner express almost no heterosexual desires. In My Partner, Wing Lee accompanies a woman in the mountains, but, despite several months of exclusive association between the two, no suspicion of sexual relations ever emerges. Nayan Shah has described two distinct discourses of sexuality that emerged to describe Chinese men in the years before exclusion that may explain Wing Lee's representation. Citing Thomas Logan, author of the 1870–71 Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, Shah notes the pseudoscientific evidence of male Chinese asexuality: the "'epilatory condition of the genital organs' and the absence of facial hair, indicated the 'absence of strong and enduring sexual appetite.'" The other prevalent view expressed just the opposite perspective: "Sodomy is a habit. Sometimes thirty or forty boys leaving Hong Kong apparently in good health, before arriving here would be found to be afflicted about the anus with venereal diseases, and on questioning by the Chinese doctors to disclose what it was, they admitted that it was a common practice among them." The report of the State Board of Health of California identifies Chinese sexuality as a locus of social and psychological disorder that may require containment and expulsion.
The queue focalized these historical conflicts, anxieties, and contradictions, illustrating the way in which hair reflected and shaped Chineseness as part of a material skein of race that did not depend on skin color but that was also fully imbricated with gender and sexuality. Prior to the queue's adoption, according to the shisanjingzhushu (the thirteen classics of Confucianism that became the basis for imperial examinations), men customarily bound their tresses up on the top of their heads. This convention—however unevenly it may have been practiced—changed with the advent of the Qing Dynasty and the imposition of the queue in 1644. Although not the first to regulate Chinese hairstyles, the Manchu rulers were, as Weikun Cheng suggests, "probably unique in the stress they placed on the political significance of men's hair dressing, and in their willingness to compel by force so huge a population to adopt an alien headdress." Although many men initially resisted the style, most Chinese men in the Qing period seem to have adopted the queue. The missionary, politician, and eventual professor Samuel Wells Williams, who spent many years in China between the 1830s and 1870s, certainly conveyed this impression to his nineteenth-century American readers by noting that "the fashion thus begun by compulsion is now followed from choice.... The people are vain of a long thick queue ... [and] nothing irritates them more than to cut it off."
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, hair once again became potentially dangerous for men in Chinese territory. Queue cutting at the end of the Qing Dynasty signified rebellion against the Manchu government. For example, soldiers in the Taiping Army (1850–64) altered their hairstyles "to show their opposition to the Qing rule." In general, however, changing hairstyle "did not mean the restoration of the Han empire and the traditional culture but rather the establishment of a modern nation-state with a Westernized life style." Numerous calls for reform and revolution pushed modernization in the face of imperialist incursions into China and increasingly ineffectual rule by the Manchu dynasty. People had vastly divergent takes on the queue, but one thing seems certain: although some men retained the style as a result of convention, "after the [Wuchang] Uprising of 1911, queue cutting, like the Manchu tonsure over two hundred years earlier, became the critical mark of changing political positions." Indeed, "Sun Yat-sen, the provisional president of the Nanjing government, promulgated a decree requiring people to abandon their queues within twenty days on March 5, 1912." His announcement was met with varied responses. Cheng recalls the perspective of Liang Dinfen, an imperial official, who stated: "I would rather have my head cut off than have my queue lost." Although individuals sympathetic to the empire most often expressed such sentiments, "some queue bearers even defended queue keeping as the Chinese cultural tradition."
Additionally, the queue featured centrally throughout the debates about increased Chinese immigration to the United States in the wake of the Qing Dynasty's decline. Given the complicated dynamics that inform Chinese men's hair in the nineteenth century, Chinese men's retention of their queues in the United States acquired a significance that should properly be understood through the transnational vectors of the Sino/American interface. Removed from their place of origin, Chinese men may have retained the queue as a nostalgic reminder of home. Historical evidence simply reveals that Chinese men maintained a specific kind of tonsure in spite of the harsh obstacles that they faced in the United States. For example, the lawsuit of Ho Ah Kow v. Nunan registers the complaint of a Chinese plaintiff against an American official who enforced the queue ordinance passed in the mid-1870s. The plaintiff alleged that this legislative act, which required any jailed man to have all of his head shaved within an inch of the scalp, brought a Chinese male "disgrace among his countrymen and ... with it the constant dread of misfortune and suffering after death." This explanation for the queue not only simplifies the historical complexity of the hairstyle but also officially documents the queue's meaning. Thus, legal proceedings such as Ho Ah Kow's suit concretized a certain understanding of the queue as part of a racial skein in American discourse by working to foreclose its other valences as a signifier. Because the queue served as an object representing Chinese ethnicity long after Chinese men had stopped wearing it, the foreclosure of possibilities seems finally to have transformed the queue into a synecdoche for Chineseness.
Given these many resonances and meanings, the queue provided a perfect stage prop to signify Chineseness at a moment when Chinese migrants became an organized, relatively inexpensive labor pool in the United States and a frequent topic for newspapers and popular entertainments, including theater and yellowface performance. These Chinese representations substituted for the circus-like exhibitions of people like the Siamese twins Chang and Eng (who began a forty-year career in 1829), Afong Moy (a woman with bound feet, exhibited by P. T. Barnum at a variety of venues from 1834 to 1837), and the crew of the Keying (Chinese sailors of a junk docked in New York harbor for several months during the late 1840s). The swing in emphasis from the live display of Chinese people as exotic others to their representational display in American melodrama, farce, and minstrelsy intimates the anxieties that the Chinese other produced in the dominant American public.
The melodramas I discuss were first staged in the 1870s, a decade in which Reconstruction ended and Chinese workers spread across the United States. To some degree, official U.S. discourses attempted to fit the waves of predominantly Chinese male laborers into existing racial schemas. For example, Tomas Almaguer has argued that "when Chinese immigrants followed blacks into the mining region, whites drew close analogies between black slaves and Chinese 'coolies.'" Strategies to explain and control the challenges posed by these marked ethnic groups to the enterprises of the racially unmarked American working classes emerged, including the theatrical presentation of the Chinese as an unassimilable other. Several scholars, perhaps most notably Eric Lott, have specifically delineated such strategies in relation to blackface performance in antebellum America. Although blackface and yellowface differ in terms of their historical context, mechanics of enactment, and target of mockery, I borrow Lott's general notion of positioning racialized bodies in relation to the white working class at a specific moment to help elucidate Parsloe's work. But yellowface references not only whiteness but also other indices of difference. The skein of race braids together several elements that produce otherness—domestic competition among wage workers and comparison with other "dark" laborers, as well as transnational ties to China and a particular gendered form—that an emphasis on skin or other physiological features could not capture as easily. The increasing presence of Asians in the workforce and the attendant anxieties accompanying the demographic shifts of the time culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Chinese Looks by Sean Metzger. Copyright © 2014 Sean Metzger. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. The Queue
1. Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish
2. Screening Tails
Part II. The Qipao
3. Anna May Wong and the Qipao's American Debut
4. Exoticus Eroticus, or the Silhouette of Suzie's Slits during the Cold War
5. Cut from Memory: Wong Kar-Wai's Fashionable Homage
Part III. The Mao Suit
6. An Unsightly Vision
7. Uniform Beliefs?
8. Mao Fun Suits
Epilogue: The Tuxedo
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
A thoroughly researched, richly detailed study of the ways that items of clothing can both reveal and fashion cultural relationships.