Film Dialogue

FROM ‘ME SO HORNY’ TO ‘I’M SO RONERY’: ASIAN IMAGES AND YELLOW VOICES IN AMERICAN CINEMA

HYE SEUNG CHUNG

Over the past three decades, several film and media scholars, including Eugene F. Wong (1978), Gina Marchetti (1993), Darrell Y. Hamamoto (1994) and Peter X. Feng (2002a; 2002b), have begun chronicling the myriad manifestations of Oriental stereotypes in American popular culture. As documented by these and other scholars, Hollywood studios and mainstream cultural producers have long excluded or marginalised performers of Asian extraction through the politics of ‘role segregation’ (prohibition against Asians playing white characters while the reverse – Caucasians playing Asian characters – is deemed acceptable) and ‘role stratification’ (wherein leading roles are reserved for whites, leaving only bit parts and secondary roles to Asians) (see Wong 1978: 11–14).

Moreover, the American film industry has perpetuated such entrenched stereotypes as Fu Manchu, Madame Butterfly and the Dragon Lady persona from the silent period onward. The latest incarnations of these racialised and gendered images can be found in such major motion pictures as Die Another Day (2002), Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 (2003, 2004), Team America: World Police (2004) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), to name only a few. The common points of interest among scholars concerned with these issues are those features traditionally highlighted in critical analyses of motion pictures, including genre elements, narrative systems, characterisations and aspects of mise-en-scène (make-up, costumes, set design, and so on). Less studied, however, are the significant audio properties, such as accented dialogue, voice-over, musical cues and sound effects, which collectively comprise the sonic side of screen Orientalism. As sound theorist Michel Chion asserts, ‘the cinema is a vococentric or, more precisely, a verbocentric phenomenon’ (1994: 5).

Ever since the 1927 introduction of synchronised sound in American cinema, voice has played a pivotal role not only in the making and unmaking of stars, but also in the shaping of fictional characters’ personalities and identities. Indeed, a character’s voice offers important clues for discerning his or her social status, national/regional origin, racial/ethnic affiliation and sexual orientation. As Sarah Kozloff states,

What is often overlooked is how much the speech patterns of the stereotyped character contribute to the viewer’s conception of his or her worth; the ways in which dialect, mispronunciation, and inarticulateness have been used to ridicule and stigmatize characters has often been neglected. Who gets to speak about what? Who is silenced? Who is interrupted? Dialogue is often the first place we should go to understand how film reflects social prejudices. (2000: 26–7)

Although Kozloff puts forth these provocative questions, she does not fully elaborate how speech acts contribute to the stigmatisation of ethnic and racial minorities in American cinema. In the hopes of enriching Kozloff’s promising yet incomplete thesis, this essay focuses on the various vocal tactics that have been employed by mainstream cultural producers to personify Asian characters on-screen and construct an irreducible ‘otherness’. Focusing in particular on the practice of ‘yellowvoice’, a term I use to refer to mock Asian speech characterised by confusion between the letters ‘l’ and ‘r’, subject-verb disagreements, the omission of articles and other grammatical mistakes, this essay will demonstrate how Hollywood producers and writers are prone to utilise dialogue and speech patterns to construct racial/national alterity.

The first part of this essay surveys some of the critical paradigms commonly deployed in the theorisation of performative strategies adopted by early Asian American stars (Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong and Philip Ahn). After ruminating on the discursive meanings of ‘Me so horny’, a famous and widely-quoted dialogue passage from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), I segue into this exploration’s central case study: the Charlie Chan films produced throughout the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that the controversial detective series deliberately foregrounds accented speech as a crucial marker of identity, one that distinguishes the immigrant protagonist Charlie Chan (Warner Oland in yellowface) from his American-born Number One Son (Keye Luke). The final section will be devoted to more recent examples of yellowvoice, targeting the denunciative enunciations of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il in Team America by South Park co-creator Trey Parker. Rather than limit myself to an analysis of representational practices exclusively, I will supplement the discussion with an examination of the ways in which Asian and Asian American audiences and media watchdogs have responded to cross-racial casting and mock Asian stereotyping in mainstream popular culture. The willingness and ability of these groups to exert consumer pressure on cultural producers, who have been forced to remove offensive images and insulting voices from public circulation, reveal the complex dynamics of producer/consumer relations, wherein audiences are not passive recipients but rather active engagers of mass-produced audiovisual texts. Ultimately, subtler forms of yellowface/yellowvoice in recent films and television programs not only attest to the perpetual limitations of cultural authenticity in global Hollywood, but also serve as jumping-off points for viral videos and other online productions that – while indicative of the democratising potential of new media platforms – further perpetuate Asian stereotypes for a new generation of YouTube users.

MASKS, META-YELLOWFACE AND PASSING:

PERFORMATIVE STRATEGIES OF ASIAN AMERICAN ACTORS

The infamous yellowvoice lines – ‘Me so horny. Me love you long time’ – originate from a scene in Kubrick’s anti-war epic Full Metal Jacket. The scene in question takes place around the 47-minute mark of the film: a willowy, scantily clad Vietnamese prostitute (played by the British model-turned-actress Papillon Soo Soo) attempts to leverage a sex deal with two American marines, Private Joker and Rafterman (Matthew Modine and Kevyn Major Howard, respectively) on a street in the port city of Da Nang. Despite the fact that the scene ends with the theft of Rafterman’s Nikon camera (by a Vietnamese teenager posing as a kung-fu artist) rather than a performance of the promised sexual service, and despite the fact that Soo’s unnamed character disappears, never to return, after her brief five-minute appearance, her pidgin dialogue quickly became one of the most quoted catchphrases in contemporary American popular culture.

The infiltration of Soo’s lines into the pop culture lexicon can be attributed in part to 2 Live Crew’s use of sound clips from Kubrick’s film in their controversial 1989 single, ‘Me So Horny’. Uprooting the dialogue from its neo-colonial, Cold War context (in which American ‘protectors’ are eager to take advantage of Third World women providing cheap sex), 2 Live Crew’s ‘dirty’ rap song replays the audio of Soo’s lewd proposition as a chorus interspersed with the sound of a woman’s moaning. The music video of the hit song, aired on MTV throughout the summer of 1989, renders the concept of yellowvoice salient. The corresponding scene of the repeated chorus is set in a nightclub where a line of African American female dancers (dressed in yellow tank tops and tight black shorts) suggestively perform a belly dance. As a close-up of one of the fair-skinned dancers fills the screen, she lip-syncs to Soo’s voice (‘me so horny, me love you long time’).

The ‘Me So Horny’ video inversely tweaks or capsises the conventional racial hierarchy, as depicted in Julie Dash’s short film Illusions (1983), set during World War II, in which a black singer, Esther Jeeter, is forced to compromise her talent as a voice actress dubbing for white Hollywood stars. In 2 Live Crew’s music video, it is a light-skinned black chorus girl who appropriates the voice of a Eurasian actress (Soo, a British-born woman of French-Chinese descent). In turn, this disembodied form of yellowvoice has been widely appropriated and quoted by white performers, from Stacy ‘Fergie’ Ferguson (in her song ‘London Bridge’ from the 2006 album The Duchess) to Steve Carell (in The 40-Year Old Virgin [2005] and a Season Three episode of The Office [‘Traveling Salesman’, originally aired on 11 January 2007]). The obscuration of this popular phrase’s original context of racially-coded sex labour has effectively neutralised any negative connotations it might otherwise have in the minds of younger viewers, including Fergie herself (who initially thought she borrowed the expression from 2 Live Crew) (see Vineyard 2008). Even Asian American responses to the expression vary, suggesting its discursive propensity to project meanings differently depending on the intentions of the speaker. For example, the Korean American stand-up comedian Margaret Cho opined, ‘It’s so many different kinds of slurs in one … It’s instantly putting you in the position of being a foreigner, an outsider and a sexual stereotype. It’s an all-in-one combo’ (Cho in Vineyard 2008). On the other hand, the Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang has stated, ‘“Love you long time” comes out of a fairly stereotypical situation, and it’s recycled itself back into the culture.… Now it’s being used as an empowerment phrase, like to deny it – “I won’t love you long time” – or women who take the phrase and use it to assert themselves’ (Hwang in Vineyard 2008). In other words, ‘Me love you long time’ has became an example of ‘unthinking yellowvoice’ (to rephrase the doubly denotative title of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s book, Unthinking Eurocentrism, [1994]) a phrase that many English-speaking Americans unconsciously recite without stopping to consider its inflammatory nature as a racial slur. What is intriguing about the origins of the phrase is the hybridised identity of its first speaker, Papillon Soo Soo; playing the part of a Vietnamese prostitute, the native English speaker was as engaged in the performative protocols of yellowvoice as were her cross-racial wannabes in the years that followed. The complicity of Asian American and Asian British actors in the construction of an Orientalist imaginary in U.S. popular culture complicates the conventional dichotomies of dominant/subordinate, whites/non-whites and natives/foreigners.

Like their successors (the men and women of Soo’s generation), most famous early Asian American stars such as Anna May Wong, Keye Luke, Philip Ahn and Richard Loo were ‘visible but inaudible immigrants’ (to borrow a phrase coined by the Chinese American critic Eugene Eoyang)1 who were often compelled to put on an exaggerated Oriental accent to match the foreign roles made available to them. As such, Oriental masquerade was a compulsory strategy adopted by early minority actors to survive the racist casting and representational politics during the studio system era of the 1930s and 1940s. For example, the pioneering Korean American actor and native Californian Philip Ahn had to fake ‘laundry man-pidgin-English’ (‘You like … aligh … You no likee me … aligh. Me no care. Hip sabee? Me go to school … aligh’) to please the Paramount producers and secure his debut role (a minor Chinese character) in the Bing Crosby vehicle Anything Goes (1936). As I argue in my study of this significant yet overlooked performer of colour, as an actor of Asian extraction, Philip Ahn could pass as an Oriental (of diverse ethnicities, from Japanese and Chinese to Indian, Vietnamese, Burmese and Eskimo) in appearance but not in speech (see Chung 2006: 46). In order to conceal his ‘theft’ of Americanness (his flawless command of English as a native speaker), Ahn – like many of his contemporaries including Benson Fong and Victor Sen Yung – had to put on a verbal act. Despite the many progressive steps taken by Hollywood and network producers to increase minority roles and institutionalise colourblind casting, things may not be that different in today’s mainstream film and television industries, since the Korean American actor Daniel Dae Kim (who immigrated to the United States at the age of two) plays the Korean-speaking castaway Jin in ABC’s ensemble show Lost (2004–10), a character who can barely utter any English words throughout the first three seasons. Similar to the way that this actor verbally impersonates a ‘FOP’ (fresh-off-the-plane) Korean, the bilingual Japanese American actor Masayori Oka fakes a foreign accent in his portrayal of the time-stopping superhero Hiro in NBC’s telefantasy series Heroes (2006–10).

All of the abovementioned native-speaker performers of Asian ancestry can be linked to the ‘mock Asian’ practice of audibly enunciating their on-screen foreignness through Oriental inflections and speech acts. In her article, ‘Ideologies of Legitimate Mockery: Margaret Cho’s Revoicings of Mock Asian’, Elaine W. Chun defines the concept of ‘mock Asian’ as a linguistic ‘discourse that indexes a stereotypical Asian identity’; it entails ‘ostensibly playful renderings of an imagined variety of American English frequently referred to as a “Chinese accent”’ (2004: 263). Chun lists eight phonological features of mock Asian: (i) neutralisation of the phonemic distinction between ‘r’ and ‘w’; (ii) neutralisation of the phonemic distinction between ‘r’ and ‘l’; (iii) alveolarisation of voiceless interdental fricative ‘th’ to ‘s’; (iv) nonsensical syllables with the onset ‘ch’; (v) nonsensical syllables with the coda ‘ng’; (vi) alternating high-low intonational contour; one tone for each syllable; (vii) epenthetic ‘ee’ at the end of a closed word; and (viii) reduplication of word (2004: 268). Syntactically, mock Asian also constitutes ‘neutralisation of nominative-accusative case distinction for first-person singular pronoun’, as exemplified by ‘me so horny’. Confusion between the letters ‘r’ and ‘l’ is highlighted as a primary marker of mock Asian speech, as evidenced by the above-cited example of Ahn’s screen test for Anything Goes (see Chung 2006: 9; 41).

My earlier writing on Oriental masquerade attempted to shift the critical emphasis from the visible to the audible, calling attention to significant instances of aural or linguistic masquerade – or what I term ‘ethnic passing’ – in Philip Ahn’s career (such as the actor’s occasional speaking of Korean in place of Mandarin, Cantonese, or Japanese in low-budget films and television programmes).2 While exploring similar concepts of masquerade and passing, recent scholarship on Asian American stardom tends to privilege visual properties of performance. Daisuke Miyao’s (2007) study of the silent-era heart-throb Sessue Hayakawa’s transnational stardom from 1914 to 1923 offers an elaborate reading of the Japanese star’s mask-like, expressionless face, a tabula rasa or spectral screen on which the cross-racial fantasies and fears of many American audiences could be projected. Yiman Wang’s study of Anna May Wong’s stardom during the Art Deco period emphasises the physically expressive signs of the Chinese American actress’ ‘yellow yellowface performance’, such as her ‘skimpy or excessive costumes’, ‘exaggerated headpieces’, ‘China-doll bangs’ and ‘heavy-handed mannerism’ (2005: 168). As the flipside of Hayakawa’s restrained acting style, Wong incorporated a hyperbolic, ironically framed strategy which allowed the actress to ‘play the Orientalist game by inserting herself into these props (as one of them) and at the same time playing against the game by exposing its artifice and excess’ (2005: 173).

Anna May Wong’s ‘yellow yellowface’ performance, which might more accurately be termed ‘meta-yellowface’ (given her propensity to foreground or ‘play up’ the constructedness of exoticising stereotypes), is uncannily mirrored in Papillon Soo Soo’s hyperbolic impersonation of a Da Nang streetwalker in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. A former law student and Vogue model, Soo pushed the stereotype of an Asian prostitute to the extreme in terms of costume, hairdo, bodily comportment and mock Asian speech. In The Hypersexuality of Race (2007), an innovative study on the representation of Asian and Asian American women on stage and screen, Celine Parreñas Shimizu recuperates the subversively affirmative potential in such outwardly degrading performances. In her discussion of the controversial Broadway musical Miss Saigon, Shimizu asserts,

The site of performance by Asian American actors is too easily dismissed as complicity with the white men who write the productions. Interviews with women actors of Miss Saigon recast the terms of the debate and insert the power of acting as creative and political work. The actors demonstrate awareness of their self-authorship on stage as a form of struggle for self-fashioning.… The creative work actors bear is unique: they are responsible for using their ‘bod[ies], voice[s], speech, walking, movement’ in order to ‘create an image … convey an inner, living spirit’. (2007: 42)

It is debatable whether or not Soo regarded her stereotypical Vietnamese prostitute role as potentially subversive (in the sense of ‘performing and criticising hypersexuality as both punitive, pleasurable, as well as political, for Asian/Asian American women’ [Shimizu 2007: 16]). Nevertheless, Shimizu puts forth a compelling argument that Asian American actors judiciously employ various acting techniques (both aural and visual) to co-author and self-fashion typecast images. Precisely because of this performative labour, the audience – Asian and Asian American viewers in particular – can partially overcome racial ‘pain’, supplanting it with the pleasure that derives from recognising talent and appreciating the extradiegetic struggles that lurk beneath diegetically inscribed stereotypes.

FROM ‘MOCK ASIAN’ TO ‘WHITE VOICE’: KEYE LUKE AND HIS CAUCASIAN/ORIENTAL PARTNERS

While the films of Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong are suffused with visual signs of Hollywood’s Art Deco Orientalism, there are less iconic Asian American character actors who are better known for their distinct voices and endearing catchphrases than for their deadpan facial expressions or self-reflexive corporeal gestures. Keye Luke, fondly remembered for his portrayal of Charlie Chan’s Number One Son, is one such actor. The studio publicity machinery of 20th Century-Fox made concerted efforts to spotlight Luke as someone who represents an equilibrium of sorts, a liminal figure situated between two worlds/cultures (West/America and East/China). For example, in a star biography written by studio publicists, the Chinese American actor is said to speak and write ‘perfect Chinese, Cantonese, and English … He is a profound student of all Oriental and Occidental philosophies and religions [and] collects both Oriental and Occidental art books.’3 Ironically, despite his perceived authenticity as an interpreter of the ‘China mystique’ (a romanticised, progressive image of China in 1930s/40s American popular culture), Luke is best remembered for his character’s hyperbolic American lingo, which can be termed as ‘whitevoice’ (see Leong 2005: 1). In his short tribute essay, Stephen Gong describes Luke’s Lee Chan persona as the ‘image of the first truly Asian American generation, no longer fully Chinese, not fully American. It’s a dichotomy best summarised by the “Gee, Pop” slang affected by Chan children (as opposed to the pidgin stage-English of Charlie’s)’ (1991: 11). At the end of his 1989 interview with the aging actor for Classic Images, Ray Nielsen politely requests: ‘Before we finish our interview, I hope you don’t mind but I am going to ask you to say just one line for me. “Aw, gee Pop’’.’ Ever cheerful and young at heart, the octogenarian – prone to reiterating old Chan routines from his early years as a Hollywood character actor – delivers the requested line, adding, ‘I got a clue. I got it all wrapped up!’ (Nielsen 1989).

In a similarly genuflectory article published seven years earlier in Classic Images, Joe Collura writes: ‘Keye’s character was supposed to attract younger moviegoers who might identify with the eager, inquisitive son trying, often unsuccessfully, to follow in his father’s footsteps. […] When Keye would respond to a reprimand by his father for some impetuous action with, “Gee Pop!” he was more or less defending his generation of well-meaning, yet inexperienced youth’ (1982: 62). This verbocentric focus on particular spoken elements in Keye’s performance shifts attention away from what the Asian American critic Kent A. Ono called ‘ocularcentrism’, which is at the centre of ‘Western representations of Orientalism’ (2000: 136). While feminist and critical race theories have emphasised the primacy of visuality in acts of scopophilic identification and the process of resistance spectatorship (see, for example, Mulvey 1988; hooks 1993), the audience responses cited above demonstrate an alternative mode of spectatorship wherein dialogue delivery and phonetic patterns as well as spoken colloquialisms are given precedence over visual elements.

The scene in which Keye Luke makes his first entrance into the series (nineteen minutes into Charlie Chan in Paris [1935]) accentuates his voice and speech, inflected with a grain of Americanness that distinguishes his character from the elder Chan. The film’s principal setting is the eponymous City of Lights, where the titular detective (Warner Oland) spends his vacation after solving a high-profile case in London. In truth, though, he is on an undercover mission to investigate fraud bonds issued from the Lamartine Bank in Paris. After his French informer, an Apache dancer named Nardi (Dorothy Appleby), is stabbed to death during her performance at the Café du Singe Bleu, and following an attempt on his own life made in the street outside the club, a paranoid Chan returns to his hotel room to find his door unlocked. Exercising the kind of caution that his years as an investigator have taught him, he listens intently and hears the sound of splashing water in the bathroom. The off-screen intruder soon emerges from the bathroom, wearing a silk robe as well as a shower towel around his lowered head. The hero acts decisively, pointing his gun at the intruder and asking who he is. Lifting the towel, Lee Chan reveals his innocent face, which brightens upon seeing his father. The Number One Son bursts into an enthusiastic greeting, saying, ‘Hello, Pop! What’s the matter? Did I scare you? Gosh, it’s good to see you.’ The ensuing conversation between the immigrant father and the American-born son decisively contrasts the former’s accented speech with the latter’s standard English:

CHARLIE: Heart most joyful to welcome. Honorable mother send me cable from Honolulu saying big boss send you to Europe on buying trip. Did not expect to see worthy offspring so soon. Business good?

LEE: Fine. I was in Rome when I heard you were coming here. So I finished my business in a hurry and hopped a train. Now we can see Paris together.

CHARLIE: Yes, yes. Most welcome.

LEE: Say, you’re looking great.

CHARLIE: Most fortunate to be looking at all.

LEE: What do you mean?

CHARLIE: Attempt on life in last hour indicate this humble person unwelcome in gay city.

LEE: Say, I thought you were here on a vacation.

CHARLIE: Vacation only bluff. Am here on case for London banking house.

LEE: Let me stay and help you, Dad.

CHARLIE: No, you here for good time. Go find same. Joy in heart more desirable than bullet.

LEE: That settles it, Dad. If somebody is gunning for you, I’m staying here.

Significantly, what is ‘unveiled’ in this scene is not only the face of Keye Luke but also his flawless American speech. The scene defies audience expectations in a twofold way: first, viewers likely assume (owing not only to circumstantial evidence but also to the incorporation of suspenseful music) that the mysterious intruder is a Caucasian assassin, not Chan’s son; second, Lee speaks ‘perfect’ (non-accented) English and lacks his father’s pseudo-Confucian mannerisms and aphorisms, departing from the norm of Asian and Asian American images and speech circulating in popular culture throughout the 1930s. One could even argue that Luke performs a sort of ‘whitevoice’ parody of filial respect insofar as his articulation of standard English is embellished with colloquial flourishes (‘gee’, ‘gosh’, and so on), which showcase the speaker’s fluency and deftness with everyday language. Near the end of his career, in press interviews Luke self-effacingly labeled himself as a ‘Cantonese ham’ (Collura 1982). The hamminess of his earlier performances is particularly salient in his affected articulations of ‘whitened’ speech, a mode of vocal delivery that is devoid of Orientalist inflections but nevertheless relies on the hyperbolic use of interjections. Luke’s somewhat high-pitched voice – stuck for the most part in the upper register – as well as his animated physical acting contrasts with Warner Oland’s low-key, noticeably accented yet measured yellowvoicing of Chan.

Indeed, the Asian accent is a significant theme in Charlie Chan in Paris. After arriving in Paris, the detective is introduced to Max Corday (Erik Rhodes), an inebriated, wisecracking French sketch artist, in the apartment of Victor Descartes (Thomas Beck), a friendly young banker whose father is Chan’s old friend and a director of the Lamartine Bank. Upon hearing that Chan is from Honolulu, Corday, obviously tipsy, performs an atrocious impression of yellowvoice: ‘Me very happy know you. Maybe you likee have little dlinkee.’ Despite the apparent insult, Chan gracefully greets the Frenchman, saying, ‘Very happy to make acquaintance of charming gentleman’, and then deftly deflects Corday’s mockery of pidgin English in his own exaggerated way: ‘Me no likee dlinkee now. Pelaps later.’ Chan’s polite yet pointed response to the racist assumption of his linguistic identity sparks laughter from Victor, his fiancée Yvette Lamartine (Mary Brian) and another female companion, Renee Jacquard (Ruth Peterson). A reaction shot of Corday is shown in medium close-up to underscore his surprise and embarrassment. The culprit awkwardly dissipates the situation by excusing himself and heading straight to the bar with Renee, who cheerfully imitates him, ‘Me likee dlinkee now’, to which he replies: ‘All light, Ming Toy.’

Max Corday (Erik Rhodes), a wisecracking French sketch artist, performs a “yellowvoice” impression in the presence of Charlie Chan (Warner Oland).

The film’s writers (Philip MacDonald, Edward T. Lowe and Stuart Anthony) obviously made an effort to distinguish between Charlie Chan’s accented yet dignified speech and the stereotypical pidgin English spoken by Corday (who, when read metatextually, is an impersonator of an impersonator). In other words, accented vocality is diegetically foregrounded as a contested terrain where the speaker’s identity (with regard to race, nationality, class, and so on) can be imagined, emulated, re/articulated and repudiated.

The self-conscious foregrounding of mock Asian practices in Charlie Chan in Paris complicates the seemingly retrograde racial politics of this controversial film series. On the one hand, the Chan series undoubtedly perpetuates racist stereotypes and centres on a sage Oriental sleuth who subserviently solves mysteries on behalf of the white establishment (the French police and London bankers in the case of Charlie Chan in Paris). In the aforementioned scene, Oland’s Charlie collaborates with Rhodes’ bigoted character Max in transforming the painful occasion of racial insult into a lighthearted joke of linguistic misunderstanding and turns a deaf ear to the continued performance of mock Asian accent by the French artist and his lady companion (Charlie is instead busy giving paternal advice to the newly engaged couple, Victor and Yvette). The fact that Oland himself is a crossracial impersonator – a ‘mock Asian’ in his own right (pretending to be a cultured, upwardly mobile model minority type) – further undermines the film’s half-hearted attempt to delegitimise the overt racism exhibited by Corday, who is revealed to be a criminal by the narrative’s end. On the other hand, the scene challenges the widespread misrecognition of Charlie Chan as a purveyor of pidgin English (in the same vein as Corday’s mistake). Unbeknownst to many critics of the Charlie Chan films, one of the most ardent defenders of the series (and of his co-star, Warner Oland) was Keye Luke, who stated in an interview:

A lot of people – his [Oland’s] imitators – think that he spoke Pidgin English. And a lot of the detractors out there – a lot of the young Chinese activists, who argue emotionally, not with their heads, say, ‘Oh, he talks, “Me no savvy” and all that sort of stuff’. I said, ‘Oh, no. If you will listen to him, he, as an actor, is thinking in terms of Chinese and then he has to put it into a language that is not his native language.’ That’s why he fumbles, stumbles, gropes for a word, which all adds to the characterization.… And his English, if you listen to it next time, syllable upon syllable, is what we call International Stage English. It’s perfectly beautiful English. (Keye in Hanke 1989: xv)

Rather than make a polemical case for the Charlie Chan series as either racist or antiracist, and rather than ruminate on the relative negativity (or positivity) of its representational strategies vis-à-vis the emasculated Asian male body, I find it more instructive to ponder the role of language and accent in the construction of racial identity. The positioning of an Asian American actor (Keye Luke) as the ‘voice’ of a quintessentially idealistic, innocent and impetuous young American appears quite innovative, if not outright progressive, in the context of studio-era filmmaking. In Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937), Luke’s character, Lee Chan, literally represents the nation as a member of the seemingly all-white U.S. team at the 1936 Olympics (notably, African American athletes are absent, save for inserted newsreel footage of the gold medalist track-and-field star Jesse Owens). During the team’s sea voyage to Berlin, Lee ventriloquises a series of faux-Oriental aphorisms – ‘Man stretch neck looking up very apt to break neck falling down’, ‘When a woman plays with fire, man gets burned’, ‘Sugar catch more flies than hamburger steak’, and so on-while engaging in unsolicited amateur detective work. As if externalising the nervous state and fluid identity of the speaker, each quotation is prefaced by the expression, ‘As my pop would say’, and each ends with a giggly disclaimer, ‘or something like that’. Borrowed wisdom notwithstanding, Lee fails both as a detective (rooting out clues about a mysterious female passenger who makes romantic overtures to one of his fellow Olympians) and as a sage dispenser of old-world wisdom, although he eventually wins a 100-metre swimming race in the final scene, reinforcing his symbolic status as a model minority.4

An exclusive focus on yellowface/yellowvoice performances in the Charlie Chan series, while beneficial to the further unpacking of the major studios’ perpetuation of racist stereotypes, nevertheless neglects one of the most fascinating phenomena related to ethnic representations; namely, the Asian American ‘whitevoicing’ being performed by Keye Luke and other numbered actors, including Victor Sen Yung (‘Number Two Son’, Jimmy), Benson Fong (‘Number Three Son’), Edwin Luke (‘Number Four Son’) and Layne Tom, Jr. (‘Number Five Son’).⁵ While it might seem counterproductive to recuperate such hammy acting and comic relief characters as part of the ideologically progressive aspects of the series, closer scrutiny into the auditory, as opposed to visual, politics of the Chan films reveals the contradictory discourses of racially excludable yet ethnically assimilable Asian American identity formations in mainstream cultural productions. Given the historical realities faced by ethnic minorities in segregated America, during a time when naturalised citizenship was denied to Chinese immigrants until the end of the Exclusion period (1882–1943)⁶ while their American-born children and grandchildren acquired citizenship at birth, it should not be surprising that national, cultural and linguistic schisms between first-generation and second-generation Chinese Americans depicted in the series can be easily mapped onto the social realities of the era. Moreover, the fact that so many audience members in China and other Asian countries enthusiastically accepted the yellowfaced character (embracing Charlie Chan more fully than his whitevoiced Asian American sons) suggests a complex mode of transnational spectatorship which transcends the binaristic logic (good/bad, progressive/regressive) of U.S. racial politics.⁷

IS CHARLIE CHAN REALLY DEAD?: TREY PARKER AND THE RETURN OF YELLOWVOICE PERFORMATIVITY IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Some readers might think that yellowface/yellowvoice modes of performance are relics of the past, outdated strategies largely confined to the Charlie Chan era of the 1930s and 1940s (when Hollywood’s top stars, from Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni to Luise Rainer and Katharine Hepburn, engaged in what Eugene F. Wong calls a ‘racist cosmetology’).8 However, to many contemporary commentators’ chagrin, the practice has survived the demise of the studio system (coinciding with the discontinuation of the Chan series) and continues to be employed in the era of big-budget blockbusters and digital filmmaking. In the 2007 AsianWeek poll of the 25 most (in)famous yellowface performances, eight entries are post-1960 film roles: Mickey Rooney as the Japanese landlord Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961); Peter Sellers as the Indian actor Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party (1968); Linda Hunt as the Chinese Australian (male) photographer Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously (1982); Fisher Stevens as the Indian scientist Ben Jabituya in Short Circuit (1986) and Short Circuit 2 (1988); Joel Grey as the Korean martial artist Chiun in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985); Christopher Walken as the evil ping pong master Feng in Balls of Fury (2007); Eddie Murphy as the Chinese surrogate father Wong in Norbit (2007); and Rob Schneider as the Japanese minister in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) (see Chung 2007).

In postclassical Hollywood cinema and contemporary media, diverse strategies have been mobilised to ‘spin’ yellowface/yellowvoice performances; that is, to make them more palatable in a post-Civil Rights environment. Frequently, the characters are identified as mixed-race individuals (Eurasians or Amerasians) to justify the casting of Caucasian talent in Asian and Asian American roles. Jerry Thorpe, the producer of the ABC television series Kung Fu (1972–75), famously opted to hire David Carradine for the role of the first Chinese hero in American primetime television (a decision that angered fans of the real martial artist and superstarin-the-making, Bruce Lee, who vied for the part). Although comic Margaret Cho sarcastically comments that the series should have been called ‘Hey, that guy’s not Chinese’ in her concert film I’m the One That I Want (2000), the writers/producers of the show carefully frontloaded their defense in the pilot episode, showing orphaned Kwai Chang Chain reveal his dual heritage (half-American, half-Chinese) to Shaolin monks who soon take him under their wings and teach him martial arts.9 The British producer of Miss Saigon, Cameron Mackintosh, succeeded in transferring Jonathan Pryce, one of the original cast members in the London production, to the show’s 1991 Broadway opening, despite the Actors Equity Association’s initial boycott and the uproar among members of the Asian American community (who thought that the role of ‘Engineer’, a Eurasian pimp, should have gone to a different actor). Defenders of artistic freedom and ‘non-traditional casting’ were quick to point out that Engineer was half-Vietnamese, half-French, and therefore an attempt to bar Pryce from playing the part would be an act of ‘hypocritical reverse racism’.¹⁰

Fox’s late-night television sketch comedy show MADtv (1995–2009) sparked another casting controversy, one that called attention to the popular character Bunny Swan (played by Alex Borstein). Having debuted as Ms. Kwan, the character was quickly rechristened as the ethnically ambiguous Ms. Swan, who nevertheless retains the stereotypical markers of mock Asian: she is a slanted-eyed, bowl-haired manicurist who speaks infantile pidgin English as exemplified by her catchphrase, ‘Okee, I tell you eh-we-ting: he look-a like a man!’, and her mispronunciation of Gorgeous Pretty Beauty Nail Salon as ‘Goji Pitty Booty Nay Salon’. In an attempt to obscure her race/ethnicity and forestall Asian American protests, the creators of MADtv disclosed Ms. Swan’s country of origin as the fictional Kuvaria (home of Santa Claus) in one sketch. They also publicised the fact that Borstein’s character was inspired by the actress’ Hungarian immigrant grandmother as well as the Icelandic singer Björk (Borstein even wears Björk’s infamous swan dress in another skit). However, these tactics of ‘ethnic bleaching’ and de-Asianising failed to placate special interest groups like the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, which pressed Fox to either employ a real Asian American performer or pull the character off the air (see Robb 2000). After years of Asian American protests, the network finally rectified the situation in 2002 by adding the Korean American stand-up comedian Bobby Lee as a repertory cast member and retiring Borstein’s controversial character.

Unlike live action films and television programs, in the world of animatronics dubbing allows the speaker/voice actor to conceal his or her identity and to circumvent the controversy of yellowvoice. For example, in the marionette satire Team America: World Police, Trey Parker – the blue-eyed, brown-haired co-creator of South Park (1997–present) – voices the arch-villain Kim Jong-Il. The lion’s share of comedy surrounding this dwarfish caricature of the North Korean dictator derives from his over-the-top enunciation of English words and phrases (‘herro’ translates as ‘hello’ and ‘Arec Barrwin’ as ‘Alec Baldwin’). The film’s producer/director/writer Parker and his co-producer/co-writer Matt Stone have admitted to harbouring affection for the somewhat sympathetic, misunderstood villain whom they perceive as ‘a cartoon character of the equal of Elmer Fudd or Bugs Bunny or Yosemite Sam’ (see Pope 2005). After being introduced as a ruthless dictator who shoots his translator during the meeting with a Chechnyan terrorist to sell weapons of mass destruction, Kim reveals his soft side in the musical number, ‘I’m So Ronery’.

Strolling through his joyless palace, festooned with marble staircases, revolutionary murals, a torture chamber, Hummel figurines and portraits of classical Hollywood stars (Ava Gardner, Jean Harlow, and so on), Kim pours out his heart in a doleful song with the following lyrics:

I’m so ronery, so ronery

So ronery and sadry arone.

There’s no one

Just me onry, sitting on my rittle throne.

I work rearry hard and make up great prans,

But nobody ristens

No one understands.

Seems like no one takes me serirousry,

And so I’m ronery, a rittle ronery

Poor rittle me.

There’s nobody I can rerate to

Feel rike a bird in a cage.

It’s kinda sihry, but not rearry

Because it’s fihring my body with rage.

I’m the smartest most crever most physicarry fit,

But nobody else seems to rearize it.

When I change the world maybe they’ll notice me.

Until then I’rr just be ronery, a rittle ronery

Poor rittle me. I’m so ronery.

The ruthless North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Il (Trey Parker) reveals his soft side in the doleful musical number ‘I’m So Ronery’.

Parker’s yellowvoice performance in this number accentuates stereotypes of mock Asian speech by replacing all ls with rs. The then-head of the North Korean state, Kim Jong-Il, is reduced to an idiosyncratic fanboy of Western things (from glamorous Hollywood stars of yesteryear to Hummel figurines), a caricatured figure whose enunciation of English is impaired and infantilised. The Dear Leader’s mispronunciation of the word ‘inevitable’ as ‘inevitabre’ is gently mocked by his American captive Lisa, a blonde member of the titular espionage squad who asks him to repeat it several times. In both body size and articulated speech, Kim is a ‘kid’ to the taller, more verbally dexterous wiseacres in Team America. As the film’s arch villain, the North Korean dictator is the ultimate Oriental other to the Caucasian self/hero, Broadway actor-turned-spy Gary Johnston, who serves as an identificatory conduit for mainstream audiences. As the voice actor for both characters, Parker made concerted efforts to verbally position Kim as on the opposite side of the sonic spectrum vis-à-vis Johnston, contrasting the former’s shrill, effeminate mock Asian voice with the latter’s mellifluous, masculine American voicings.

In the DVD special featurette entitled ‘Up Close with Kim Jong-Il’, Parker accounts for the inspiration and motivation behind this song:

We always had this idea of Kim Jong-Il singing a song about him being lonely. And I had written it really early on, and we just really liked the song. I mean, I actually think if the real Kim Jong-Il ever sees that, he’ll probably start crying. He’ll break out in tears.… In fact, my dream is that, if we can get ‘I’m So Ronery’ nominated for an Oscar, that he comes and performs it at the Oscars.

While Parker’s intention is benign and perhaps even transgressive (insofar as he and Stone are highlighting a humane, vulnerable side of the habitually vilified enemy, who is more typically labeled as ‘Dr. Evil’ in American popular culture),11 the Kim character is ultimately described as an ‘asshole’ by the jingoistic members of Team America, who bask in their own self-designated status as ‘dicks’, and literally transforms into a cockroach after being killed.

It is instructive to frame the Kim character in Team America as an extension of yellowface/yellowvoice performances in the arena of animatronics and puppetry, a subject less scrutinised by Asian American activists and media scholars than live action features and primetime television. Parker’s yellowvoicing as Kim Jong-Il is in fact a big-screen recasting of his televisual ‘blackvoice minstrelsy’ in Comedy Central’s South Park. In an article entitled ‘Coloring Whiteness and Blackvoice Minstrelsy’ (2004), Michael A. Chaney identifies Parker as a blackvoice performer who not only plays the fourth-grade ‘wigga’ Eric Cartman – an ‘inappropriate’ appropriator of Black English – but also vocalises secondary African American characters such as Chef’s (Isaac Hayes) parents and Michael Jackson, who each make visits to the titular Colorado town in particular episodes. After pointing out the show’s racial inequality, wherein white creators are allowed to play multiple parts (including African Americans) while the African American actor-musician Hayes is denied the same privilege, Chaney elaborates Parker’s blackvoice:

Trey Parker forces us to hear him doing his generalized black man’s voice again, even to characterize one with such a tenuous claim to that identity as Michael Jackson. As with his voice characterization of Chef’s parents, Parker hereby performs vocal mastery over subaltern subjects, as his white man’s bad version of blackness functions as the voice in a cartoon marked as black within the cartoon universe.… Parker’s accent is bad, indicating that the show’s self-conscious satire is always on hand as an alibi to exonerate its seeming flippancy over primarily marked identities as objects of ridicule. (2004: 174)

Like the case of his blackvoice performances in South Park, it is the animatronic face of the Kim Jong-Il marionette that afforded Trey Parker the anonymity necessary to impersonate the ‘Dear Leader’ without the kind of spectatorial blowback or repercussions faced by yellowface performers such as David Carradine, Jonathan Pryce and Alex Borstein. In her article on ‘brownvoice’ and South Asian accents, Shilpa Davé explains why contemporary viewers readily accept this cross-racial ‘act of speaking in the Indian accent’ (such as the Greek American Hank Azaria’s portrayal of Apu, the beloved owner of Kwik-E-Mart of Springfield in Fox’s perennial series The Simpsons [1989–]) in a way that could not occur were the actor to engage in a ‘brownface’ performance:

The practice of brownvoice avoids most of the problems of racial stereotyping because it is not physical. Animation foregrounds the sound and resonance of voice, not the person whose voice it is. The voice is disembodied from the speaker and attached to something else.… It is this anonymity that allows Hank Azaria to voice the character of Apu because, although most of America (and the world) knows about the character Apu, they cannot identify Azaria as the man who voices him. (2005: 321–2)

However, as noted by Davé, brownvoice does not have the same type of demeaning implications as yellowvoice. As the ‘vocalization of the model minority’ associated with such professions as entrepreneurs, computer engineers and doctors, brownvoice is ‘an inflected version of English [that imparts] an accessible dose of foreignness rather than an irritating form of speaking’ (2005: 314; 317). Emphasis is given to the differentiated stress of particular syllables and words as opposed to mispronunciation and incorrect grammar, both of which are characteristic of yellowvoice. In other words, like Italian and French accents that add a dose of familiar exoticism to English words, brownvoice does not infantilise its speakers even though it marks them as ethnics/foreigners.

Produced more than half a century after the theatrical release of the last entry in the original Charlie Chan series (The Sky Dragon), Team America demonstrates that yellowface/yellowvoice practices still exist in contemporary cultural productions, albeit sometimes in displaced forms, and particularly in Hollywood films aimed at impressionable viewers – young males, generally – who may lack the critical consciousness necessary to negotiate or contest racial/ethnic stereotypes. The legitimacy of the latter film as a well-intended parody of yellowvoice is debatable since the performance is given by a Caucasian man, not an Asian American voice actor. As Elaine Chun puts it, ‘practices that invoke laughter, and that are thus defined as humorous, can still reproduce hierarchies of race and other social axes.… It is for this reason that some Asian Americans have voiced opposition to out-group Mock Asian, even if intended as a “joke”’ (2004: 281). Here it helps to be reminded of the question that Guy Aoki, president of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, posed to the producers of MADtv in his protest letter: ‘Why is it still permissible to use “yellowface” in the year 2000?’ (Aoki in Robb 2000). While it is not within the purview of this essay to examine the systemic roots of racist ideology or xenophobic attitudes, which stretch back to the prefilmic past and continue to creep into corporate boardrooms and onto psychiatrists’ chairs, it may be worthwhile to direct my departing thoughts to the role of the internet and new media as public platforms conducive to the replaying, remixing and refashioning of the latest cultural phenomena, including politically incorrect humour.

Team America’s online effects are far-reaching. The social networking site My-Space has dozens of ersatz Kim Jong-Il pages and most of them incorporate Team America-inspired yellowvoice recordings in members’ profiles and blurbs (‘I’m so ronery’, ‘I rove Horrywood movies’, ‘I rike kirring infaderls’, ‘I hate Team Amerweca because they stopped my diaborical pran’, and so on).12 Several pages use stills from the film as profile photos and/or wallpaper. Kim’s eminently quotable lines have quickly turned into a cross-media commercial property, inspiring internet-based T-shirt vendors to manufacture their own versions of Abercrombie & Fitch’s controversial ‘Two Wongs’ T-shirt design from the spring 2002 season.¹³ One can order Kim Jong-Il T-shirts with the ‘I’m So Ronery’ logo on ebay.com or cafepress.com. The film’s satiric portrayal of the former North Korean leader likewise has had geopolitical ramifications on the part of postmodern bloggers prone to borrow from pop culture sources in accounting for world events. When North Korea resumed its nuclear and ballistic missile programs in April and May of 2009, several online bloggers headlined their commentary with Parker and Stone’s catchphrase ‘I’m So Ronery’.¹⁴ It is quite conceivable that in the next decade, ‘I’m so ronery’ will become as entrenched in the public psyche and as often quoted by teenagers and frat boys as that earlier example of yellowvoice: ‘Me so horny.’

The fact that a Caucasian man has coined/voiced the former phrase makes some of us with a vested interest in identity politics and racial equality sceptical about the so-called progress being made in the field of Asian representations. In 1993, the Filipina American writer and multimedia performance artist Jessica Hagedorn optimistically titled her anthology of Asian American fiction Charlie Chan Is Dead. Regretfully, it seems that this wishful thinking is premature in the verbocentric arena of mainstream popular culture.

notes

1 By this term, the author means Asian Americans who were born and raised in the United States and who ‘speak without an accent [and] can pass for Americans much more easily over the phone than in face-to-face encounters’ (Eoyang 1995: 133).

2 For specific examples of such linguistic masquerade, see my book Hollywood Asian (Chung 2006: 46–56).

3 See H. Brand (n.d.) ‘Biography of Keye Luke’, 20th Century-Fox Publicity Press Kit, Keye Luke clippings file, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA.

4 A Caucasian American male swimmer indeed garnered one gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. After unsuccessfully auditioning for the role in Tarzan films, that 100-metre backstroke swimmer – Adolph ‘Sunny Boy’ Kiefer – joined the Navy during World War II.

5 Edwin Luke, a co-star in the 1945 Monogram film The Jade Mask, was Keye Luke’s younger brother.

6 Although Keye Luke immigrated to the United States as an infant and received education as an American, he could not acquire his citizenship until after 1943, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Other Asian immigrants had to wait another decade until after the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act was passed, lifting the racial bar to immigration and naturalisation (despite nominal annual allowances of a hundred visas per Asian nation).

7 For information about the popularity of the Charlie Chan series in China, see ‘Charlie Chan in China’, The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History. On-line. Available at: http://www.chinesemirror.com/index/2008/05/charlie-chan-in.html> (accessed 9 June 2009).

8 Wong singles out the epicanthic fold (the so-called slanted eye) as the most important feature of racist cosmetology. Various materials from the adhesive tape and latex to jelly moulds and clay were used to simulate the ‘Oriental eyes’ in Caucasian faces (1978: 40).

9 According to James Hong, a Chinese American actor and ex-president of the Association of Asian Pacific American Artists (AAPAA), at that time the Asian American community felt that ‘if they were going to have a so-called Asian hero on Kung Fu, then why don’t they hire an Asian actor to play the lead? But then, as the show went on, we realised that it was a great source of employment for the Asian acting community’ (Hong in Pilato 1993: 33).

10 For example, Frank Rich vehemently attacks the Actors Equity Association’s ban on Jonathan Pryce: ‘By refusing to permit a white actor to play a Eurasian role, Equity makes a mockery of the hard-won principles of non-traditional casting and practices a hypocritical reverse racism. This is a policy that if applied with an even hand would bar Laurence Olivier’s Othello, Pearl Bailey’s Dolly Levi, and the appearances of Morgan Freeman in The Taming of the Shrew and Denzel Washington in Richard III in Central Park this summer’ (1990: C1). Under pressure, Equity reversed its decision and allowed Pryce to play Engineer, a role that earned the actor a Tony Award in 1991. In coalition with various civil rights groups (including the Japanese American Citizens League, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Hispanic American Coalition, the Organization of Chinese Americans, and so on), the AAPAA denounced not only the ‘blatant practice of labeling a role “Eurasian” to justify casting a Caucasian in a visibly Asian Pacific leading role’ but also the distortion of the ‘non-traditional casting’ policy which was originally created for the ‘casting of ethnic, minority, and female actors in roles where race, ethnicity or sex is not germane’. ‘True Equity Now!’ (1990), advertisement, Variety, 21 August 21, 82.

11 For example, Newsweek carried a photo of Kim Jong-Il on the cover of the 13 January 2003 issue with a caption that reads, ‘North Korea’s Dr. Evil: Is Kim Jong-Il a Bigger Threat than Saddam?’

12 A few examples include <http://www.myspace.com/roneryandsadryarone>, <http://www.myspace.com/kimjong_il>, <http://www.myspace.com/dirka_dirka711>, <http://www.myspace.com/k_tothe_imjongil>, and <http://www.myspace.com/24575995>.

13 In April 2002, the Ohio-based casual clothing manufacturer Abercrombie & Fitch launched a new line of ‘Asian-themed’ T-shirts with stereotypical images and slogans (available at any of their 311 stores in fifty states). One T-shirt reads ‘Wong Brothers Laundry Service – Two Wongs Can Make it White’, and it shows two slanteyed Chinese caricatures outfitted with coolie clothing and conical hats. The T-shirts prompted numerous protest emails and phone calls and they were quickly taken off the market.

14 See Tom Jackson, ‘I’m So Ronery’, <http://tomjacksononline.blogspot.com/search?q=I%27m+so+ronery>; CrabbyCon, ‘Kim Jong-Il: ‘So Ronery…’ Time to Launch a Missile’, <http://www.stoptheliberalsnow.com/archives/1029>; The Armorer, ‘I’m So Ronery’, <http://thedonovan.com/archives/2009/05/im_so_ronery.html>; Maverickwhig, ‘I’m So Ronery, So Ronery, So Ronery and Sadry Arone’, <http://defendliberty.net/2009/06/02/im-so-ronery/> (accessed 9 June 2009).

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