Perpetuating the Yellow Peril

At first glance, Jeff Adachi's Slanted Screen is an earnest documentary that covers familiar ground. The shameful depiction of minorities–in this case, Asian-American men–in television and film is hardly news. What makes the movie special, however, is that it offers a rare view of Hollywood from the inside. Apart from the occasional talking head, the interviewees are actors, producers, directors and screenwriters. Part of the movie's interest lies in their horror stories, which are likely to make even the most jaded viewer cringe. Producer Terence Chang–whose credits include Mission Impossible II, Face-Off and Broken Arrow–describes being told to change the race of the white villain in the script for the Chow Yun Fat vehicle, The Replacement Killers, and make him a Chinese druglord instead. The logic: "If the hero is Asian then the bad guys have to be Asian as well." The racism is open and unapologetic. As gruesome as such anecdotes may be, Slanted Screen is most compelling when its subjects explore the conflict between who they are and what they do. In the seven-minute short film The Screen Test–which was screened along with Slanted Screen in San Francisco–actress Judy Lee sums up every Asian actor's moral dilemma: "Our paychecks come from stereotypes." When there are practically no roles for Asians, a script that calls for an "opium den mistress" is a cause for celebration. The art of survival often lies in enduring what you must, and quietly changing what you can within Hollywood's stifling parameters. What may look like just another stereotype from the outside may in fact be a serious attempt to challenge industry norms. A good example is what has become Hollywood's favorite Asian character: the martial arts warrior. Bruce Lee may seem to be just another one-dimensional macho hero, but his rise marked an epochal shift for Asian Americans, both as actors and as men. After decades of being demonized as sly yet effeminate "yellow peril" in the post-World War II era, Lee represented a positive, vigorous version of masculinity. And it's this consolation that actors like Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa cling to when they play similar roles in movies like Mortal Kombat, even when they're negative. "If the choice is between playing wimpy business men and the bad guy," Tagawa says, "I'd rather play the bad guy.... I want kids to know that Asian men have balls." When Hollywood allows Asian leading men to be macho, it rarely gives them the privilege of being "American." "Asian Americans tend to be looked at as perpetual aliens," says author David Mura. "In other words, an Asian-American male can't be seen as representative of all Americans in the way Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks or even Denzel Washington can." According to University of Delaware English professor Peter X. Feng, the benefit of safely foreign heroes such as Jet Li or Chow Yun Fat is that "they come to these shores to solve a problem and then they leave. So there is never any question of integrating them into the American body politic." In this sense, Mura argues, Asian-American men are worse off than women, who "are more easily assimilated by the white psyche in part because they are seen as sexually available to white men." The stark contrast between the sexual images of Asian men and women on-screen follows the dictates of age-old colonialist logic, where the sexual appropriation of women is accompanied by the emasculation of the men. That the documentary never includes a discussion of women, or their perspective, is a glaring omission. The very action hero roles that seem to affirm Asian masculinity can be deeply problematic from a feminist perspective. Is a Schwarzenegger-like machismo really the kind of Asian male identity that we want to promote? We are more likely to see a more "complete" picture of Asian men if we portray them as they are, rather than as ethnic versions of Hollywood gender-laden fantasies of manhood that haven't served white men well. In fact, those kind of movies will be just as valuable for the rest of us, male or female, Asian or otherwise.