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Manchu Poster
The Asian American Male's Fight to End Hollywood Genderization
Early on in Western cinema the visual construct of the Asian American male was solidified into the American zeitgeist. In the 1919 D.W. Griffith film, Broken Blossoms, a "yellow-faced" Richard Bartelmess depicted the character of Cheng Huan. Within Blossoms, the portrayal of a Chinese immigrant was something that morphed into an emasculated male with deviant perversion. Huan is a male that walks with a slight slouch in a subservient position to the white characters around him. He is a representation of the West's xenophobic fantasy of the Asians in the East—flowery gowns, heavy facial make-up, long hair, and feminine facial expressions and features. An American filmmaker, Griffith uses the perceived stereotypes in order to make a presumably white audience feel more at ease and not as threatened by the other. Griffith's direction is an extension of the racialization of a group of people not readily understood; however, it is Griffith's film that sets forth a series of seemingly castrated Asian characters in American cinema for more than eighty years, and which still remain a part of the cinematic storytelling landscape.
In today's multiplexes and art houses, actual Asian actors frequently overcompensate to match the feminized Asian male lead roles of yesteryear. Movies by Asian American filmmakers have swung the pendulum to an extreme the other way in Freudian response to Griffith's Huan and the films that followed over the decades.
Huan is a character that has a home setting of Oriental styling and fabrics. The mis-en-scene is a clear composite of Huan's femininity that complements his attire and demeanor. As Gina Marchetti writes,
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Cheng Huan embodies the "feminine" qualities linked in the Western imagination with a passive, carnal, occult, and duplicitous Asia. Cheng Huan is feminized in the film not only by his close association with the world of women but also by his elaborate, exotic dress, his languid posture and gestures, and the use of soft focus and diffuse lighting to render his features less angular, more ‘womanly.' (Marchetti, 36).
By no means coincidental and given the deliberate use of camera and lighting techniques, the intent is explicitly defining the "antagonist" by Western social constructs of the day. The homosexual context of the image is threatening enough to also make Huan a perverted menace. While Huan is not sleeping with men, his woman-like features are enough to make him a threat to society. In the end, the nascent vilification of Huan is complete when he is accused of premeditated rape.
The impact of this constructed character is sublimated into the consciousness of Western audiences seen again and again in films. In Chong-suk Han's essay, Geisha of a Different Kind: Gay Asian Men and the Gendering of Sexual Identity, he writes,
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For Asian men, the discourse of domination focused largely on the "feminine" East opposed to the "masculine" West. Historic projects that have hindered Asian American family formations and excluded Asian men from the "masculinized" labor market of the West, have simultaneously produced an image of Asian men that has both racial and gendered implications… Moreover, popular media portrayals further emasculated Asian and Asian American men until… at their best, effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan and, at their worst, [were] homosexual menaces like Fu Manchu… Given this tendency to view Asian men through the prism of femininity…(Han, 2006)
Griffith's direction on soft lenses and feminine production design for Blossom's Huan parallels Han's assertion and exemplifies the ongoing Asian male dilemma. Han also writes,
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Song Liling, in David Henry Hwang's critically acclaimed play M. Butterfly, is able to explain his ability to fool a French diplomat into believing that he was a woman for nearly two decades not on his mastery of deception but on the diplomat's inability to see him as anything other than a woman. Given the way that mainstream media has catapulted the image of effeminate Asian men into the national consciousness, this explanation does not seem far-fetched. Asian men have also been portrayed as being more "traditional" and "conservative" when it comes to sex, while being portrayed as meek asexual houseboys or as sexual …While the stereotypes of Asian men being sexual deviants and sexual conservatives may seem contradictory, they both serve the purpose of emasculating Asian men in a process that Eng calls "racial castration." (Han, 2006)
Han's observations illustrate a long timeline of examples of the gendering of the Asian male. The Asian American male is subcategorized as a geisha with a penis; or rather to use Eng's words, to be an Asian American male is to be a castrated man with no masculine identity of his own.
When Bruce Lee penetrated the Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, his martial artistry lead to a masculinity of the Asian male in terms of strength and brute force. However, Lee was not in his films portraying an Asian American character. Lee's voice was dubbed, and his portrayals of martial artists served only to feed another stereotype of Asian men as martial artists shouting out high-pitched warnings of attack. Lee's films introduced American audiences to an Asian masculinity arguably not seen before. Enter the Dragon, Lee's kung fu Hollywood debut feature film, is the tremendous shift in the identity of the Asian male, but it is not a film of an Asian American integrating into society, nor a tangible look at an authentic character. Instead, Lee is almost superhuman in the film and becomes an icon to Asian males seeking to reclaim their masculinity.
In Better Luck Tomorrow, a poster of Bruce Lee is on the wall of a bedroom for Ben Manibag; this signifies a connection of the Asian male, in this case a teenager, seeking his identity in the wake of his sexual development. In Lee's extreme case, the Asian male is a force to be reckoned with, and in the development of Tomorrow, the teenage boys will experience a right of passage to manhood through a series of violent events. From fist fighting to gun-play, the main characters of Tomorrow are challenged with being the model minority while searching for inner machismo. The identity of the film'scharacters hinge on either the genderless man or the testosterone-infused macho fighter. While the ties are clear between Ben and his cohorts, they constantly call each other "pussy" and "cocksucker." These labels are constant challenges to the young Asian male struggling to not only fit within White society by getting good grades, high test scores, and going to top colleges, but these teenagers also carry the burden of overcoming years of public perception.
Paradoxically, the subplot of the film hinges on the boys losing their virginity in order to stand before their friends as true men. However, the sexual accomplishment is less about sexual penetration than about violence, as in the scene with the hired Caucasian prostitute in the third act. Virgil's gun-play on the Las Vegas hooker impedes the transcendent evolution to manhood. The phallic symbol of the pistol is the implicit connection with penis to gun, and the gun is the conduit through which violence (and Virgil's masculine identity) must come. Virgil's use of the gun in correlation to sexual activity and losing his virginity links manhood to violence. However, Virgil never actually uses the gun on anyone but himself. His inability to obtain manhood is his own failing both times: he pulls out the gun in order to show off how much of a tough guy he is, but it halts any possible sex he might have had with the prostitute. Virgil's attempt at violence fails, too, when he loses his grip of the gun prior to Steve's murder. The gun is not fired by Virgil, but Steve instead. Virgil has not been able to fire either "gun," literally or figuratively. This denial of passage, including his missed chance of committing a violent act that is worthy of manhood, causes Virgil to kill himself with the gun in the bathroom like a teen hiding to masturbate.
Ben, the film's protagonist, fulfills his trek to become a man by committing the most violent murder, and thus the film ends with Ben winning the love of his girlfriend. The reward for Ben's rite of passage, albeit a violent one, is a direct cinematic retort by the Filmmaker Justin Lin to the genderization set-forth by Griffith and the Hollywood Asian male.
The sexuality of the Asian male, without context to gender, plays a significant role in The Wedding Banquet when Ang Lee, a heterosexual filmmaker, brings the desire for masculine unanimity from a homosexual Asian American protagonist, Wai-Tung Gao. Wai-Tung is a gay male who, in the beginning of the film, has trouble getting anyone to take him seriously. His tenants don't pay rent on time; his lover, Simon, won't make time for him; and he's constantly threatening to fire his employees in order to get anything done.
Wai-Tung is fighting for his masculine identity on many fronts. In implicit imagery of Wai-Tung's demasculinization, Lee shows Wai-Tung needing to be held by Simon; Wai-Tung driving his compact car and getting cut-off by an aggressive female driver is a Jeep; and he failing to initiate kissing or intimacy with Simon.
Because the character of Wai-Tung is gay and the "man" of the relationship, he bears an extra burden:
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In contrast to Wai-Tung, Simon plays a more effeminate role. He cooks; wears an apron, clingy black tank tops, and jeans; and his earring is prominently displayed. He has the "nurturing" job…(Marchetti)
However, Lee and screenwriter James Schamus confuse that message with the scene in which Wai-Tung consummates his phony marriage with Wei-Wei. Immediately after Wai-Tung has heterosexual intercourse, he is seen dominating Simon with spankings and takes more authority in what needs to be done moving forward. This straight-male fantasy of the homosexual being able to have sex with a woman is in contrast to Wai-Tung's arc as a character, but it is also necessary in order to compensate for the years of the feminized Asian male. The conflicting message of needing to have sex with a woman in order to be considered a man or to claim more masculinity while breaking one stereotype only perpetuates another one in that gay men are feminine by nature. Arguably, this execution blurs the attempt to apply masculinity onto the Asian male by ambiguously drawing any distinction on whether it is being gay that causes struggle with the masculine identity, or is it because Wai-Tung is a product of Asian American stereotypes?
Why such extreme measures such as gays sleeping with women and glorified violence in countering Hollywood's construction of the Asian male? Discourse is a result of the filmmaker's ability to travel to the outermost limits of a character's psyche. The filmmaker and his actors take these film roles into an arc that is a direct response and assault on years of oppressive filmic imagery by Hollywood. Anything else would be a compromise that would allow the status quo to continue. These extreme examples in Asian American films parallel the movement of the Black American cinema in that it moved from the blacksploitation films of the 1970s, Foxy Brown, Blackula, Shaft, and into a renaissance of discourse that is scene in the advent of Spike Lee's film, Do The Right Thing (1989). In that film, Lee raised the bar in the discourse of America's racial and ethnic divides. The martial art films ushered by Bruce Lee are arguably exploitive as well and films such as Better Luck Tomorrow and The Wedding Banquet offer a transition to the Asian males' conquest of the masculine ideal. The emergence of the Asian American masculine male is now more apt to be seen in films like Harold and Kumar (2004) and The Namesake (2006), where the Asian main characters are not achieving their manhood through violent measures or having to actually have on screen sex with a woman. Instead, filmmakers are creating films with Asian characters that audiences of all races can relate to and identify with in an age of online social networking and the diverse society in which the Western and Eastern worlds are more connected.
Still, the overcompensation of the Asian American character remains in mainstream cinema like Tropic Thunder (2008), where Asians are tossing grenades and guns in an attempt at comedy while the feminization of Asians continues in Western television shows such as Ugly Betty and Entourage, where Asians are flamboyant and castrated homosexuals. These conflicting modern images demonstrate that the discourse of the Asian American filmmaker must persevere in the face of the Hollywood machine that wishes to perpetuate the stigma that Griffith manifested into the American consciousness, for the pendulum of the Asian American masculine identity is still swinging.
Works Cited
Better Luck Tomorrow. Dir. Justin Lin. DVD. 2003.
Broken Blossoms. Dir. DW Griffith. DVD. 1919.
Do the Right Thing. Dir. Spike Lee. DVD. 1989.Ellin, Doug. "Entourage." HBO.
Enter The Dragon. Dir. Robert Clouse. Perf. Bruce Lee. DVD. 1973.Han, Chong-suk. "GEISHA OF A DIFFERENT KIND: GAY ASIAN MEN AND THE GENDERING OF SEXUAL IDENTITY." Sexuality and Culture 10 (2006): 3-28.Horta, Silvio. "Ugly Betty." ABC.Marchetti, Gina. ": The Wedding Banquet: Global Chinese Cinema and the Asian American Experience." Abstract. Asian American Cinema Coursepack (2008).Marchetti, Gina. "The Rape Fantasy." Abstract. Asian American Cinema Coursepack (2008).
Tropic Thunder. Dir. Ben Stiller. Film. 2008.
The Wedding Banquet. Dir. Ang Lee. DVD. 1994.
About the Author
Chuck Griffith curated high-art short subject films for Best of Breed: Vol. 1 and served as a producer/director for commercial film and television before becoming a novelist. He holds a BA in English and Comparative Literature and an MA in English Education from Columbia University.
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