论文总字数：31701字

摘 要

好莱坞至今拍摄了大量的涉及中国人，中国背景和中国题材的电影，深入研究可以发现，“东方主义”的思想在好莱坞电影制作中产生了很大的影响。本文以不同时期的好莱坞电影中的华人女性形象为例，总结出她们的特点以及共性。作为“她者”的中国形象已然是好莱坞银幕形象的一个重要组成部分，同时也对中国形象的国际传播产生了不容小觑的影响。

关键词：东方主义；华人女性；好莱坞电影；中国形象

目录

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

2.1 Definition of Orientalism 2

2.2 Previous studies on Orientalism 2

3. The Formulation of the Images of “Oriental Women” 3

3.1 Oriental dresses in movies 4

3.2 Stereotype in movies 5

3.3 Geographies in movies 6

4. The Influence of the Transformation of “Oriental Women” 8

4.1 New gender relationship 8

4.2 New look at China 9

4.3 New cultural identity 10

5. Conclusion 11

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

With the development of globalization, the film industry is also blooming. Among all film types, Hollywood films are the most well-known ones. As a form of forceful, influential and ubiquitous entertainment, they have been presenting various images of people and promoting ideologies underlying these images.

Movies are very important to human beings, for they tell stories of real lives, reflect the human’s way of thinking and connect people from various backgrounds, of different ages and all kinds of languages. When we look back around the last century, we can find a lot of Hollywood movies including some Chinese elements. However, the images of Chinese, especially Chinese women, in Hollywood movies often contain derogatory content, and the China behind them is vague, ambiguous and dim. That is to say, the image of Chinese women firstly is a film literary image, but it also implies huge cultural, historical, social and political connotations.

Because of the popularity of intercultural communication and more and more use and recreation of Chinese elements by Hollywood, the image of Chinese women in Hollywood movies has got more attentions gradually for it being an intersection between nation and gender politics. This paper will focus on the “cultural work” being done in some of Hollywood movies about Chinese women’s depiction. According to the relationship between China and American, different images of Chinese women in Hollywood movies can be concluded, which can enable this paper to study these movies from different angles and thus analyze them in a deeper sense.

2. Literature Review

As the fresh troops in the American strategy of globalization, whether the Hollywood films depict the images of Chinese women truly or distortedly is not an issue of individual, but directly related to the image of a nation. Chinese women are considered by American as “aliens”, “Chinese catastrophes” and tempting sexy puppets. Although they make various achievements in society, they are still discriminated. This prejudice is also reflected in the Hollywood films. Orientalism, racialism and race centrism shadow the Hollywood, which make the Chinese women always in the situation of “the other”.

“The other” is a common term in Western postcolonial theory. In postcolonial theory, westerners are often referred to as the subjective “self”, colonial people are called “the colonial other” or directly as “the other”. “The other” and “self” can be seen as a pair of relative concepts. Westerners regard the non-western world excluding “self” as “the other” and the two are completely opposed. Therefore, the concept of “the other” actually implies the ideology of west centralism.

2.1 Definition of Orientalism

As an important part of postcolonial theory, “Orientalism” has its own development process. As early as the end of the 18th century, “Orientalism” gained an independent status as a discipline. It originated from a series of British studies on India, including language (Sanskrit, etc.), law, customs, literature and so on. Until the advent of the colonial era, “Orientalism” was generally considered to be neutral and inspiring to the west.

After the Second World War, people’s understanding of “Orientalism” gradually deepened. Orientalism no longer only refers to Orientalist scholars and their works, or the character, lifestyle or quality related to the eastern countries, but mainly refers to the handling of eastern affairs and tools of western imperialism.

2.2 Previous studies on Orientalism

Historically, there have been a lot comments on the east. With the development of history, orientalism have been developing and influencing more and more areas.

The origin of the earliest record of the east is unknown. But the ancient Greeks’ impression of the east can be seen in Aeschylus’ The Persians. It can be said that at that time, the east was transformed into a relatively familiar image from a very distant and dangerous image of “the other”.

Orientalism originated from the famous American Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s book Orientalism. By researching the traditional analysis of western orientalism, he focuses on the following points. In the first place, the east is deprived of the main body of the power system, which is a western “invention”. Oriental is not a natural geography, but a western construction. Secondly, he emphasized the inseparability of east and west. East /west is interdependent and reflects each other. Western orientalism has a sense of the east in the discourse and power network of orientalism, the “oriental” otherness is objectified to be criticized, studied and described, so as to confirm the western self. For example, west is civilized, positive and progressive while oriental is savage, passive and stagnant. Thirdly, although orientalism is a set of knowledge, a discourse system and a way of thinking, which is the westerner’s ideas and perception of the east, orientalism in the ideological and cultural sense is by no means just imaginary, it is a component of western material civilization and culture. Western cultural and intellectual hegemony over the east is not isolated, but interdependent with political, economic and military hegemony.

In more than one hundred years of American film history, the images of Chinese people in different historical periods have presented different and diversified characteristic, but the perspective of the mainstream ideology still cannot be separated from the inherent thinking and framework. The “orientalism” is lingering in the shaping and constructing of the image of the orient.

In the American films before world war II, “the east” and “the Yellow Peril”(黄祸论) are inevitably linked together. In the 1890s, the “Yellow Peril” holds that the yellow race is physically and psychologically weak, vulgar, violent, uncivilized, immoral and heretical. In this sense, Hollywood is keen to imagine the Chinese as a hideous other who poses a threat to whites. The famous movies during this period are The Cheat (1915), The Yellow Menace (1916), Shanghai Express (1932), The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).

3. The Formulation of the Images of “Oriental Women”

Recently, considering the discussion of the image of Chinese women in Hollywood in domestic academic circles, the dominant position is still the interpretation from the perspective of Orientalism. For example, Orientalism in Hollywood Films written by Yu Jiali and Lin Guoshu, which states the Chinese women in Hollywood movies are not only low status, but also sexual attraction. They show unconditional obedience and sacrifice to western men, like lotus flower (the female character) in The Toll of the Sea. These characteristics are mostly insidious, vicious, pornographic, like Princess Ling in Daughter of the Dragon. The contrast between men (west) and women (east), is a metaphor of the cultural and political image: the dark and mysterious land of the east that demands purification, enlightenment and salvation from the west.

In this part, the paper is going to explore how the dresses, stereotypes and geographies in the films have been used to tell who the women are and thus what kind of images of “Oriental Women” have been formulated in these Hollywood films in different historical periods.

3.1 Oriental dresses in movies

Women have always been one of the indispensable “wonders” in mainstream Hollywood movies. They are created on screen according to the rules and operation logic of pleasure and the psychological needs of the audience. Of course, Chinese women are no exception. Any film involving Chinese themes will have Chinese women in more or less scenes for western audiences to watch and “gaze at”.

Before Lucy Liu, Anna May Wong had been the most famous Chinese-American actress in the world. One of her most notable films was Daughter of the Dragon (1931), in which played a scheming, murderous, other-worldly beauty who killed coldly and mercilessly. She is a stage performer in the film. In the film, Wong makes a spectacular entrance dressed in a sparkling Chinese “goddess gown” with a huge pomp-style headdress. Dressed in this kind of strange, exotic style, she dances on the stage, attracting a large audience. The fantasy towards Eastern mysticism dated back to Afong Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman in America, who came to New York City in 1834 at age sixteen as an exhibit. Museums in New York and Brooklyn displayed her on an Oriental latticework chair, wearing a silk gown and four-inch-long slippers on her bound feet. Audiences watched with fascination as she ate with chopsticks, counted in Chinese, and did computations on an abacus. This extreme difference of the East from the West finds its way into Hollywood films and exerts a powerful and lasting effect on social reality.

In another film, The World of Suzie Wong (1960), clothes, especially the cheongsam, become significant markers of “Chineseness”. The “authenticity” signaled by the cheongsam becomes an external manifestation of the other thing that makes Oriental women attractive to Western men. The silk of cheongsam is silky, like the skin of oriental women. Cheongsam, as in the open and closed, hidden and obvious, is like the smile of the oriental women, which leads the western visitors, and also like a white light, illuminating the west’s secret tunnels to the east.

In the Suzie Wong book, Lomax notices Suzie because “she wore jeans — green knee-length denim jeans. That’s odd, I thought. A Chinese girl wore in jeans. How do you explain that?” (Mason 5). In the movie version the jeans are there but not evident, covered by a longish coat. What one does see clearly is Suzie’s high Chinese collar. Lomax paints Suzie mainly in Chinese “costumes” — an Empress dress and the traditional black pants with “Hakka hat”, which were probably more “foreign” to her than Western clothes. On one occasion Suzie enters wearing a Western dress and hat. Lomax becomes so furious. He rips the clothes off her and throws them out of the window, saying, “Take that terrible dress off. You look like a cheap European streetwalker.” It is unclear whether he is accusing her of looking like a whore, which she is, or of looking like a Western whore. Chinese women wearing western clothes signal a cultural transgression that western men seem unable or unwilling to tolerate.

3.2 Stereotype in movies

A stereotype is a mistaken idea or belief many people have about a thing or group that is based on how they look on the outside, which may be untrue or only partly true. In Hollywood movies, there is a pair of twin “stereotype” Chinese women, one is “demon” type, they are the embodiment of darkness, depravity and pornography; another is “angel” type, they are beautiful, pure, forbearing and restrained. Both of them wear the mask of “the other”, which represents the two extremes of Chinese women in Hollywood movies.

For example, in the film Daughter of the Dragon, Wong plays a monstrously “masculine” female figure. Despite her love for the white man character, Wong’s character, nonetheless, plots to kill him. She “drugs the wine and ties up her love interest and his fiancée, but is thwarted by Scotland Yard which bursts in and kills her…” (Prasso 25), leaving the white couple to live happily ever after. The emergence of the Dragon Lady of the Hollywood screen is complete. From 1919 to 1960, Wong appeared in approximately sixty films, most of them made in Hollywood, but also in Germany, France, and England – where she became an exotic stage and screen sensation as well. Wong started out playing slave girls, prostitutes, temptresses, and doomed lovers, and carried on those roles in dozens of films throughout her career. It is from her roles on the black-and-white screen that people take images of the Dragon Lady. Of course she didn’t originate the stereotype, but her on-screen representations of it helped make the image an unforgettable part of Western consciousness.

The World of Suzie Wong was the Paramount Pictures’ adaptation of the popular 1957 Richard Mason novel. The book was written in the patronizingly British tone of cultural superiority over the uneducated, “dirty yum-yum girls” of Hong Kong’s red-light district. From Anna May Wong’s “Dragon Lady” in 1930s to Nancy Kwan’s “China Doll” in 1960s, Eastern women have been repeatedly described as extremes in mass media.

Throughout the whole Hollywood movies history, the images of Chinese women can be concluded into 15 types. They are Madame Butterfly, the prostitute, the Dragon Lady, Nora, Mulan, the angel, the demon, the maidservant, the slave, the concubine, the spider woman, the princess, the earth mother, the housewife, and the career women. Each image of Chinese women in these films has its unique value. In the context of history and culture, the pedigree of these images is not fixed, but in a process of flow, development and change. But no matter how they changed, they are all imagined and constructed by Hollywood through the “orientalization of the east” and they change all the time: either “angel”, or “siren”, or a variant of “angel”, or a variant of “siren”.

3.3 Geographies in movies

Some scholars see a direct relationship between the geography of the world and the geography of the imagination. Said defines the “imaginative geography” as a typical example of “Orientalism”: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences (Xing 195)”. As a creator of grand narratives and ideology, Hollywood has long used physical, social, and psychological “distancing” as strategies in its ridiculous representations of Asians (including Chinese). Asian locales in American films – from the mysterious Chinatown, USA, to the colonial Hong Kong, to the Vietnam jungles – are presented as exotic tourist attractions and dangerous wildernesses for colonialist adventurers. Daughter of the Dragon and Year of the Dragon are deliberately situated in Chinatown for many reasons. Chinatown, since the days of Fu Manchu eighty years before, has consistently been portrayed in films as exotic, mysterious, criminal and dangerous. In Daughter of the Dragon, audiences are fascinated by the London China town with its plotting chamber, sliding doors and the labyrinth of the streets. The film Year of the Dragon opens with a location shot on New York City’s Chinatown Street, a street scene showing a Chinese-style funeral. Files of people walk through the street in Chinese funeral style dress, upholding a huge photo of the dead man, who was then the leader of the mafia in Chinatown.

In her pioneering work Romance and the Yellow Peril, Gina Marchetti notes that cities like Saigon, Casablanca and Hong Kong promise romance, adventure and an escape from the mundane reality of everyday life. Hong Kong is seen as home for both the Oriental and the Occidental. Its main attraction is its duality or “two-ness” and here’s a perfect setting for the Western dominance to meet the Eastern backwardness. Let’s take The World of Suzie Wong as an example. The opening scene of the film focuses narrowly on a cluster of boats waving in the water. Then the camera shifts the focus on ordinary people – Western and Chinese heading towards the Star Ferry, which is both a common mode of transportation as well as a symbol of Hong Kong. The title, The World of Suzie Wong, shows the constraints of this particular world through the limited perspective of a single, poor, Chinese bargirl. Her world includes the poorer Chinese areas of Wanchai and the shanty huts where she lives with her baby son. The people she knows are the common folk – street and boat people and the other “ladies of pleasure” as they were called. Lomax, the association of whiteness with wealth, gradually learns to negotiate Suzie’s world with her help and has become a part of her world crossing borders of race and gender. Just as Marchetti notes, Hong Kong is an ideal site where all kinds of binaries can be played out: East – West, capitalism – communism, rich – poor etc. Geographically too, Hong Kong as portrayed in this film, symbolizes the stereotypical binaries of the East as feminine, poor and narrow in contrast to the West as masculine, rich and spacious.

4. The Influence of the Transformation of “Oriental Women”

However, although Hollywood has a strong historic inertia in the highly stylized expressions of oriental women, from the late 1990s to the new century, with the acceleration of china’s reform and opening up and the acceleration of world integration, the understanding between the east and the west has become increasingly deeper. During this period, Hollywood movies have shown a lifeful and colorful china, rather than a gloomy and old image compared to before, as Chinese people more widely integrated into the world.

4.1 New gender relationship

As it mentions in the previous text, Hollywood movies with Chinese images starred in are actually western gazes towards China. In many movies, we can find that men are dominant and active, whereas women are passive, subordinate and submissive. Thus “gaze” shows the imbalanced power relationship between men and women. As I have mentioned in the previous parts, Chinese actresses in Hollywood are depicted as sexual pleaser or mysterious images.

Chinese women are struggling in this unequal gaze or gender relation. Nevertheless, there emerge some new types of sexual relations on the screen. The film Tomorrow Never Dies, which was released in 1997, is the 18th in the Bond movies series. In this film, Agent 007 is faced with a powerful media giant Carver. He owns a “Tomorrow Times”. In order to monopolize the status of the media in China, he instigates a war between Britain and China at any costs. The Chinese police detective secretly assisting the investigation is Lin Hui, played by Michelle Yeoh. In the film, Bond Girl and Bond had an equal relationship for the first time. She was no longer a vase, a sexy stunner, or an object for male James Bond to play and conquer. As the story progressed, she wasn’t defeated by Bond’s handsome, brave and courageous male charm, and then the heroic relationship occurred after the hero saved the beauty like the previous girls. This is an image of Chinese women who are intelligent and self-respecting. Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh introduced Chinese Kung Fu to the 007 film, and developed the type of 007. She also successfully entered Hollywood with her skillful and agile skills and won the favor of the whole world.

Another emergence of the sexual relation is the homosexual. The film Saving Face (2004) directed by Alice Wu tells the story of a Chinese family who moved to the United States. The main character Xiao Wei is a young and promising female surgeon. Her mother, whose husband had died very young, came to the United States with her grandfather when she was young. The originally seemingly calm family has undergone tremendous changes due to the accidental pregnancy of her mother. The father of the child is unknown, and the good-faced grandfather drives his daughter out of the house. Her mother therefore lives with her. During this time, her mother knew that her daughter was homosexual, and both generations were stunned by saving face.

4.2 New look at China

Edward Said once mentioned in his theory of the east in Orientalism, that is, the "Orient" is not the east, but the east imagined by the westerners. In the thousands of years before China and the west really engaged in in-depth exchanges, China’s image in western culture showed two distinct situations. In Mark Polo"s account or Voltaire, Goethe"s literary creation, China attracts ordinary people and explorers in the west with a mysterious fairyland image similar to "Shangri-La". China"s rich and beautiful Datong social image is a reflection of Westerners" problems in the development of western society. In the writings of Montesquieu, Hegel and others, China has become a paralyzed human hell. This image also has a wide market in the west, satisfying the superiority of western society. No matter which one, it does not actually conform to the true Chinese image. Even after the film appeared, the "Oriental" including China was still the object of western gaze and imagination.

Harold R. Isaacs once made a “credible chronicle” of Americans’ perception of China, and he divided it into six stages: the period of reverence(18^th century), the period of contempt(1840-1905), the period of kindness(1905-1937), the period of admiration(1937-1944), the period of disillusionment(1944-1949), and the period of hostility(1949-now) (Harold,43). The images of Chinese women on the Hollywood screen show different styles in different historical periods and they are closely related to the changes in the relationship between the two countries.

For example, the film The Good Earth(1937), in the eyes of director Sidney Franklin and photographer Karl Freund, China is not the lightness of Japan and the mystery of India, but the vast, deep, powerful and essence of the Oriental empire. Empty at the beginning of the film, a long lens, just like traditional Chinese ink painting, shows us the idyll of china. The background of this film is at a time when many American farmers left their homes during the great depression of the 1930s. The fate of Wang long and Alan’s family coincided with their fate and moved them. In addition, the war of resistance against Japan made China and the United States allies. This special political atmosphere also made Americans happy to see a beautiful China.

The film is also successful in the portrayal of characters, especially the protagonists Alan and Wang long set up a positive and objective image of Chinese people for western audiences. It successfully created for us a silent, kind, hard-working and uncomplaining, selfless dedication and brave “mother” image-Alan. Earth mother (on, land) is implied in Alan’s name “O-Lan”. The real significance of this film is that it enables American and even European audiences to experience the importance of simple life in the context of modern industrial civilization. In the film about China, they also see themselves.

4.3 New cultural identity

Cultural identity refers to a kind of common emotion and belief. It is the human tendency to put a certain cultural system into one’s own psychological and personality structure and then judge life and regulate behavior based on it. Cultural identity is a sense of direction, and a psychological demand for finding the direction of value, life, action. Its fundamental purpose is to define self. The most fundamental identity is self-identity, the pursuit of self-identity, knowing that you are yourself.

Hollywood movies under the modern background also began to examine contemporary Chinese women from a fair and objective perspective. For example, the film The Joy Luck Club (1993) was adapted from a novel written by Amy Tan. According to the relationship of the mothers and daughters, the complex feelings of women and sisters, such as the generation gap, cultural background and values, are the foundation of the creation of the Chinese traditional culture and American culture, which is popular with the readers of the different ethnic, annual and cultural education backgrounds of the united states, and it is one of the most influential Chinese writers in the United States. This book has been translated into more than 20 languages, widely circulated in the world, and received multiple awards.

The Joy Luck Club is actually a gathering of people who play mahjong together. A set of textures and language of mahjong is a Chinese-style code society. It not only has the impulse of gamblers, but also the moderate spirit of scholar-officials, which is a mixture of ruffian and noble. Mahjong can allow a person to build a wall in a traditional, code-like society against encroachment from power or political society. This film describes the conflict between Chinese and American mainstream culture in a more detailed way, as well as the complicated and delicate relationship between four Chinese mother-daughter pairs caused by the cultural conflict. The four second-generation Chinese businesswomen can rediscover themselves in the cultural differences and conflicts, and deepen their understanding and respect for their mother generation.

Generally speaking, migrating ethnic groups have to face the problem of dual culture, because the potential role of their mother cultural gene makes them unable to fundamentally go beyond the conventions of the original culture in the context of heterogeneous culture. Thus, in the collision and encounter with heterogeneous cultures, the memes and conventions deposited in the depth of memory will naturally appear, forming the process of the cultural alienation, scrutiny and identification.

5. Conclusion

By tracking these various elements---- Oriental dresses, geographies, stereotypes across various generations of films, it can be revealed that Hollywood’s portrayal of Eastern women, has not changed significantly over time. The mutually shaping relationships between society and cultural products like films ballets and maybe theatre plays, has kept certain stereotypes in circulation. Most characters are either extremely feminine or masculine or both; most attention is focused on the character’s ethnicity and its associated imagery. In discussing the power of the film industry in defining roles to perpetuate imagery, Gina Marchetti writes, the image Hollywood creates of race and ethnicity points to something more fundamentally pernicious about the relationship between American society and the mass media. Hollywood has the power to define difference, to reinforce boundaries, to reproduce an ideology which maintains a certain status (Marchetti 278). Although organized protests always exist as a last resort, the means to challenge Hollywood’s hegemony over the representation of race and ethnicity remain elusive. Alternative media exist, but appear marginal and far-removed from a popular audience (Marchetti 278). Access to the industry also exists, but entrance demands a tacit agreement to assimilate, at least to a certain degree, with the dominant culture.

Finally, when it comes to the discussion of the depiction of Asians, Xing may give us some inspiration: “Asians and Asian Americans are not stoic, emotionless people”, as he puts forward, “the Asian character can be emotional, political, and fallible. They could laugh, cry, and swear... They were ordinary human beings” (Xing 229).

According to Said, “every era and society will recreate its own ‘the other’. Thus identity, or ‘the other’, is not a static thing, but rather an artificially constructed historical, social, academic and political process, much like a competition involving different individuals and institutions in different societies”(Wang 2). By analyzing the influence of Orientalism on the images of Chinese women in Hollywood movies, this paper aims to promote the international communication of the image of China and advocate the equality, cooperation, mutual respect and interaction between eastern and western cultures in the real sense.

Works Cited

哈罗德·伊罗生：《美国的中国形象》. 北京：中华书局, 2006.[Harold R. Isaacs. Scratches on Our Minds American Images of China. Beijing: China Publishing House, 2006] Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the “yellow peril”: Race, sex and discursive strategies in Hollywood fiction. Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1993. Mason, Richard. The World of Suzie Wong. NY: Amereon Limited, 1988.Prasso, Sheridan. The Asian Mystique. NY: Public Affairs, 2005.孙萌:《“她者”镜像：好莱坞电影中的华人女性》. 北京：中国社会科学出版社,2010.[Sun Meng. The Image of The Other: Chinese Women in Hollywood Films . Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2010.]王宇根：《东方学》. 北京：生活·读书 ·新知三联书店，2000.[Wong Yugen. Orientalism. Beijing: Joint Publishing Co., 2000.]王旭，李文硕，杨长云：《黄柳霜：从洗衣工女儿到好莱坞传奇》. 北京：北京联合出版公司，2016.[Wong xu, Li Wenshuo and Yang Zhangyun. Anna May Wong: from laundryman’s daughter to Hollywood legend. Beijing: Beijing Joint Publishing Company, 2016.] Xing, Jun. Teaching Asian American: Diversity and the Problem of Community . US: Rowman amp; Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1998.Xing, Jun. Asian America through the lens: History, Representations, and Identity. US: Altamira Press, 1998.Xing, Jun. Hybrid cinema by Asian American women. Countervisions - Asian American film criticism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

余佳丽，林国淑：《好莱坞影像中的“东方主义”思维》.《电影评介》, 24(2007): 6-8.

[Yu Jiali, and Lin Guoshu. “Orientalism in Hollywood Images” Movie Review 24(2007): 6-8.]

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