Representations of Chinatown defined the cultural possibilities of citizenship for Chinese Americans in the same way the law defined the possibilities of legal citizenship. During the Chinese Exclusion Act era , there remained real political and material stakes to the way Chinatown was popularly portrayed. For at least half a century, media elite and leaders in Los Angeles had portrayed Old Chinatown as a site of tong violence, illicit drug use, and prostitution. These stereotypes of Chinatown were rooted not just in ideas of race, but also in perceived differences of gender and sexuality. Images of vice and corruption were a direct result of popular representations that depicted Chinatown as a community of bachelors living together in an all male social world. The few women in the community were usually portrayed as prostitutes. Thus, Chinatown was popularly linked with a deviant form of sexuality that challenged the normative ideas of the white middle class family united in Christian marriage.3 Furthermore, many white residents of Los Angeles believed that the built environment of the Chinatown contributed to this vice. Stories of an underground network of lairs and secret tunnels facilitated the idea that Chinatown lay outside the vision and control of white authorities. New Chinatown in Los Angeles built on prior efforts by the Chinese American merchant class throughout North America to redefine the place of Chinatown in the popular imagination. Beginning with the Chinese Village at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, continuing on through the reconstruction of San Francisco’s Chinatown following the 1906 Earthquake and fire, Chinese American merchants challenged notions of Chinatowns as disease-ridden slums and refashioned them into spaces of commerce that catered to white tourists. 4 During this time period, Chinese American merchants served as cultural brokers, whose position between white tourists and the vast majority of working-class Chinese Americans allowed them to consciously transform these segregated ethnic communities into sites that presented their own vision of Asia to the outside world. This was done in a way that challenged notions of Chinatowns as manifestations of Yellow Peril while monetizing these sites in a way that allowed Chinese American entrepreneurs to make a living.

In New Chinatown,plant pot with drainage local Chinese Americans merchants took concepts pioneered in San Francisco’s Chinatown and in world’s fair expositions and saw them through to their logical end. In fact, New Chinatown was not a neighborhood at all but a corporation, the stock of which was privately held by a select group in the city’s emerging Chinese American middle class.5 These merchants and restaurant owners maintained complete control over their new Chinatown. From the land on which the business district was built, to the architectural style that accompanied the area’s businesses, to the advertisements that publicized the district in the city’s papers, New Chinatown reflected the desires of its owners to both attract tourist and to challenge the conceptions that had come to dominate Old Chinatown. The opening day festivities of New Chinatown featured appearances by local Chinese American actors who had made a name for themselves in the China-themed films of the 1930s.6 Following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Hollywood began producing a series of Chinese-themed films many of which featured Chinese American performers from the Los Angeles area. The most high profile of these films was MGM’s The Good Earth , a film based on Pearl S. Buck award winning 1931 novel. Present at the opening of New Chinatown were Keye Luke and Soo Yung, Chinese American actors with supporting roles in The Good Earth. Also present was Anna May Wong, the most recognizable Chinese American star of the period. Despite being passed over for a role in The Good Earth, Wong had already appeared in number of high profile films including Thief of Bagdad , Piccadilly , and The Shanghai Express . New Chinatown would soon feature a willow tree dedicated to Ms. Wong. To complete the Hollywood connection, the New Chinatown opening featured an art exhibit by Tyrus Wong, a Hollywood animator who would later work on the classic animated film, Bambi . Despite these connections to Hollywood, in many ways New Chinatown attempted to cast itself as the modern Chinese American alternative to the representation of China seen in films like The Good Earth. The opening gala included flags for both the Republic of China and the United States spread around district.

The parade featured four-hundred members of the Federation of Chinese Clubs, local Chinese American youth, most of whom were American-born who had banded together to raise financial support for China following the outbreak of the SinoJapanese War in 1937.7 At the same time, a number of prominent state and local officials participated in the festivities including Governor Merriam who was then locked in a difficult reelection campaign and who hoped that his participation could would solidify the small but not insignificant Chinese American vote. In these complex and hybrid ways, the founders positioned New Chinatown as a distinctly Chinese American business district, one that reflected the increasingly U.S.-born demographics of the nation’s Chinese American community. New Chinatown was not the only Chinatown to open in Los Angeles in the summer of 1938. Two weekends earlier, less than a mile away, a group of white business leaders headed by philanthropist Christine Sterling had opened their own competing Chinatown, which they dubbed China City.8 If New Chinatown was defined by the ethos of the American-born generation, China City was defined by Hollywood. This was to be a Chinatown that embodied the images that film audiences saw when they entered the theaters to watch Chinese and Chinatown themed films so popular in the 1930s. New Chinatown may have drawn on Hollywood actors to publicize its existence, but China City in many senses was a Hollywood production. Like New Chinatown, this was a business district not a neighborhood, but unlike New Chinatown, China City adhered much more closely to the Orientalist images of China produced by Hollywood cinema. In China City visitors could attend The Bamboo Theater featuring continuously running films about China. They walk through a recreation of the set for the House of Wang from The Good Earth. Many of the Chinese Americans employed in China City had also worked as extras on the MGM film.

And so tourists might encounter some of the very people that had seen in the background shots of the film. In China City, tourists could pay to be drawn around by rickshaw. According to the Los Angeles Times, visitors to China City could purchase “coolie hats, fans, idols, miniature temples, and images.”9 One of the shops was owned by Tom Gubbins,pots with drainage holes a local resident of Chinatown who supplied Hollywood with costumes and props for Chinese themed films and connected local residents with jobs as extras. In both New Chinatown and China City, Chinese Americans utilized Chinatown to mediate dominant ideas about race, gender, and nation.10 These two Chinatowns were more than physical sites for members of ethnic enclave to make a living. They also represented the apparatus through which the local Chinese American community performed their own cultural representations of China and Chinese people to crowds of largely white visitors. In more ways than one, Chinese American performances in these two districts were the culmination of a fifty year process through which the Chinese American merchant class challenged Yellow Peril stereotypes by transforming China and Chinese culture into a nonthreatening commodity that could be sold to white tourists. Examining a period of national debate over immigration and U.S. citizenship, this dissertation, “Performing Chinatown: Hollywood Cinema, Tourism, and the Making of a Los Angeles Community, 1882-1943,” foregrounds the social, economic, and political contexts through which representations of Chinatown in Los Angeles were produced and consumed. Across five chapters the dissertation asks: To what extent did popular representations and economic opportunities in Hollywood inform life in Los Angeles Chinatown? How did Chinese Americans in Los Angeles create, negotiate, and critically engage representations of Chinatown? And in what ways were the rights of citizenship and national belonging related to popular representations of Chinatown? To answer these questions, the project examines four different “Chinatowns” in Los Angeles—Old Chinatown, New Chinatown, the MGM set for The Good Earth, and China City—between the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and its repeal in 1943 during the Second World War. The relationship between film and Chinatown stretches back to the 1890s to a moment when both featured as “urban amusements” for a newly developing white urban public audience in places like New York, and yet the connection between Chinatown and film reached its nadir in Los Angeles in the 1930s during the height of the Hollywood studio system.

San Francisco and New York Chinatown may have been larger in size and attracted more tourists, but Los Angeles Chinatown and the Chinese American residents of the city played a more influential role in defining Hollywood representations of China and Chinese people than any other community in the United States. Long before the outbreak of World War II, the residents of Los Angeles Chinatown developed a distinct relationship to the American film industry, one that was not replicated anywhere else during this period. Despite this distinct relationship, there have been no dissertations or academic books published about Los Angeles Chinatown and its relationship to Hollywood cinema. Asian American historians who work on Los Angeles have for the most part focused on the city’s Japanese American population. 11 Sociologists of the region have focused on Asian Americans in the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley.12 Film studies scholars who examine Asian American representations have focused primarily on the films themselves or else on writing biographies of a few well-known Hollywood performers such as Anna May Wong, Philip Ahn and Sessue Hayakawa. 13 With professional academics focused on different but related topics, nearly all of the research that has been done on the history of Chinese Americans in Los Angeles and their relationship to Hollywood film has been completed by community historians at organization like the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles. 14 Most of these community historians are volunteers who research and write because of their passion for the subject matter. Many also have family ties to this history. This familial link is the case with the most popular retelling of this history, Lisa See’s novel Shanghai Girls. Lisa See is a descendant of the Chinese Americans who lived in Los Angeles before World War II. 15 In contrast, professional academics for their part have all but ignored this history. What accounts for the relative absence of scholarship on the relationship between the Chinese American community of Los Angeles and the Hollywood film industry? Certainly, the topic of Chinatown remains one of the most thoroughly studied aspects of the Asian American experience. Alongside scholarship examining the political and legal apparatuses used to exclude Asian people from the US, Chinatown is one of the few topics in Asian American studies that elicited significant scholarly consideration before the birth of the field in the late 1960s.16 More than a dozen monographs have been produced examining various aspects of Chinatowns from the fields of sociology and history. In the popular realm, interests in Chinatown as a site of tourism and as a cultural representation also remains strong. In addition to the long-standing interest in Chinatown as an academic topic, the material traces of this history remain highly visible. Films like Shanghai Express , Lost Horizon and The Good Earth , which all employed Chinese American background performers, are available for home viewing. Photographs from Chinatown performances of this period including those of the Mei Wah Drum Corps have been digitized and are available on-line through archives such as those of the Los Angeles Public Library and their Shades of L.A. project. And yet, the distinct theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary tenants of sociology social history, and film studies have limited the types of questions scholars have asked about Chinatown and film, and by extension the types of conclusions these scholars have drawn.