Asian American Women in Film and Yellow Fever

I just found this link to a documentary about Anna May Wong.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1107767469/get-anna-may-wong-on-public-tv

The clip was very short, but towards the end, it said that Wong was originally chosen for the role of Auntie Liang in Flower Drum Song before she passed away in 1961.

I had not heard of her before studying other Asian American films in this course, but from what I understand, she was a pioneer, the first major Chinese-American actress.  Her most notable role was a prostitute in Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich.  If Wong had lived, she would have worked with Nancy Kwan, whose signature role was also a prostitute in The World of Suzie Wong.

Gina Marchetti presents one possible perspective of these two prostitute tales:

     "...'the fallen woman,' herself equated with the savage land through which the vehicle
     of civilization passes, is saved and rejoins the civilization that shunned her." (Marchetti 61)

Although Marchetti's remark is directed toward Shanghai Express and Stagecoach, a Western, I could see how it might apply to The World of Suzie Wong as well. Suzie Wong has to work as a prostitute in order to support her son, until she is "saved" by the American artist Robert Lomax.

I wonder how these representations of Asian women have affected the white American consciousness and how much these representations contribute to "Yellow Fever--Caucasian men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women" (Hwang 98).

Works Cited


Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume/Penguin Group, 1989.


Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the "Yellow Peril."  Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California 
     Press, 1993.