Anna May Wong, a woman so desirable that her gardenia perfume and lipstick traces were immortalised in These Foolish Things, could not kiss. To be precise, she could not kiss a white man. Anti-miscegenation laws and the outright racism of 1930s Hollywood – one studio deemed her “too Chinese to play a Chinese” – consigned the Asian-American actor to supporting roles. Directors preferred white actors in ill-judged eyeliner.
Things have improved, but not as much as one might hope. These days the problem is not (usually) yellowface but the inverse problem: “whitewashing”. Asian roles are recast as white, or white characters are written into the heart of Asian stories. So a Tibetan character is rewritten as Celtic and played by Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange, while Scarlett Johansson plays a role initially called Major Motoko Kusanagi in an adaptation of the seminal Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell. Matt Damon takes the lead in The Great Wall, a fantasy adventure set in medieval China. It has become noteworthy that Disney actually wants a Chinese actor to star in its live-action movie about the legendary Chinese warrior Hua Mulan.
Asians are not allowed to be the heroes of even their own stories. Viewers of the forthcoming Bruce Lee biopic Birth of a Dragon complain that it focuses on a fictional white friend. It is all the more insulting because Mr Lee was an icon whose journey from sidekick to star inspired a generation to take pride in its roots. His imaginary chum sounds like the “white saviours” lionised for their empathy in movies purportedly about black lives, from Cry Freedom to The Help. British Film Institute research has found that only 13% of British movies from the past decade featured a leading black role; almost 60% had no named black characters.
There can be a case for redrawing roles or including white characters in stories set in other cultures or among diasporas. The problem is the consistency with which such characters displace people of colour, and the dearth of major roles for other actors. Film-makers say it “just happens” that a white performer is cast, or complain that people of colour are not bankable – as if you can become a star when always relegated to the sidelines, or as if white stars have not been extended second or third chances after turkeys. They argue that audiences will otherwise struggle to relate, treating white experience as neutral, even universal, and dismissing others as particular and limited.
The lure of the Chinese box office may help to change this, though tokenistic responses so far are not encouraging. But responsibility lies with the producers, not consumers, of movies. Diverse audiences identify with white protagonists; James Cameron’s films are consistently popular worldwide. Less well known is that the director of Avatar has been unmistakably influenced by the 1995 Ghost in the Shell – as have other Hollywood filmmakers including the Wachowski siblings and Steven Spielberg. The Japanese original spoke to them.
Removing Asian faces from Asian stories is not only evidence of bias but of creative failure: of film-makers (and, crucially, their backers) too lazy or lacking in imagination to produce and fund stories that resonate without taking cheap short cuts, which are, incidentally, often unsuccessful in winning audiences. That kind of complacency does not just insult Asian actors and moviegoers; it insults all audiences.
