The Chinese Exclusion Act and Hollywood

In 1848, Swiss immigrant John Sutter hired men to build a mill on his property in the Central Valley of California, near Sacramento. One of them, James W. Marshall, found gold there. Almost immediately, what had been a sleepy backwater, still mostly populated by Native Americans and immigrants from Spain and Mexico, became a draw for people from all over the world. The majority, however, were from the United States, and within two years, California was able to enter the Union in a position of power, as a region that could easily have afforded to become its own country if Congress had imposed unwanted terms on them. Sixty years later, though, silver would be more important than gold—specifically the silver in film stock.

Unfortunately, a major issue in Gold Rush California was racism. Yes, the Spanish had brought their own version to the New World, and there was already a strong caste system based on Native American and African descent. However, the Gold Rush brought further immigration, and the racism in California was not the same as the racism elsewhere in the US. While China is not exactly close to the West Coast of the US, it’s closer than it is to the East Coast, and the lure of the gold fields was a powerful one. Chinese men flooded into California, just as American and European men did, and the white majority instituted racist policies designed to protect their own dominant status.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by Chester A. Arthur on May 6 of that year. There was a certain amount of resistance to it for economic reasons; Chinese workers were important to things like the building of railroads. However, it prohibited the entry of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Tourists and diplomats were allowed—and, crucially, relatives of people already there—but the Chinese immigration spurred by problems in China was cut off almost completely, with only “paper children,” people claiming to be relatives of those already there, making it in.

Okay, so far so awful, you’re saying, but what does this have to do with anything? Fair enough. What is has to do with anything is the way people are shown onscreen. Since the earliest days of Hollywood, in the 1910s, much of how the US sees itself is how things are shown on the movie screen. And in Hollywood, plots that involved Chinese characters couldn’t use Chinese actors a fair amount of the time. This being the 1910s, the solution was generally “yellowface,” but when East Asian actors were hired instead, the odds were against their being Chinese.

Now, there were exceptions. Anna May Wong was second-generation American, and there were doubtless no few people like her in California at the time. Obviously we can’t have the conversation without using the word “racism” again. Because you did get a lot of prominent Asian characters’ being played by white people. It happened, and it’s a part of Hollywood history we have to acknowledge. Keye Luke, who genuinely got into the US as the son of someone who’d been in the US before the law, got to play Number One Son to a Swedish Charlie Chan.

But mostly, when Asian people were needed in movies, they weren’t Chinese. Laws regarding Japanese immigration were only codified by the Immigration Act of 1924, but there were unofficial agreements in place long before then, and limitations on Japanese immigration to the US meant fewer Japanese actors in Hollywood. Koreans and other East Asians trickled in, but the biggest barriers were in place against Chinese and Japanese people. I’m not saying Hollywood necessarily would’ve cared about the ethnic background of East Asian actors anyway—see also Charlie Chan again—but it is trivially easy to trace the crossover if you are familiar with the naming conventions of various East Asian nations.

By the 1940s, the industry had grown used to hiring the more plentiful Japanese actors, such as Sessue Hayakawa, when Asian actors were needed. What’s more, while yellowface arguably still hasn’t gone away, blatant yellowface in leads had become less acceptable. (Though I did decide not to buy Teahouse of the August Moon, a post-war comedy with Marlon Brando as a Japanese character, yesterday at Goodwill.) Actual Asian actors were preferred in most Asian roles.

The real boom for Chinese actors in Hollywood came starting in 1941. Not only were there suddenly a ton of roles for the Cruel Japanese Character, actual Japanese actors were interned—or in other countries. (Sessue Hayakawa, for reasons, spent the war in France.) What Chinese actors there were, plus several Koreans and other East Asians, found themselves very busy. Too, the Chinese were our allies in World War II, and there were several movies made featuring Heroic Chinese People, and they couldn’t all be Katharine Hepburn with taped eyelids.

The history of Chinese Americans in general is one that could take years to study properly, and even the history of Chinese Americans in Hollywood is barely being touched on here. But it’s worth noting that it happened, that the racist exclusionary policies in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America had a ripple effect. We do see ourselves based on what’s on the screen, and it was possible to see an America without Chinese people long after Chinese immigration began again.