Photograph of Soong Mei-ling (1897-2003) a Chinese political figure and the First Lady of the Republic of China, during her first trip to America. Image: Alamy

The Chinese in American History

How Afong Moy, Mayling Soong and Bruce Lee Changed the Narrative About China

11.11.19

Conversations about US-China relations often revolve around tariffs, trades and recently, President Donald Trump’s tweets. So on this episode of BackStory, Nathan, Joanne and special guest host Erika Lee go beyond the standard narrative of US-China relations and learn about three Chinese and Chinese American people who worked to change American perceptions of China.

Support for this podcast comes from International Education at the University of Richmond and The Rose Group for Cross-Cultural Understanding.

China; Chinese immigrants; Chinese-Americans; U.S.-China relations

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Segments

Afong Moy

It is believed that the first Chinese woman arrived in America in 1834. The woman was Afong Moy and as historian Nancy Davis tells Joanne, although Moy’s arrival caused a sensation, her story is clouded in mystery.

Music:

Encounter by Podington Bear

Gears Spinning by Podington Bear

Afterglow by Podington Bear

Trundle by Podington Bear

Curious Process by Podington Bear

Afong Moy; Chinese Americans; Chinese immigrants; anti-Chinese

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with our colleagues at Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Speaker 4: All right, the trade wars first shots are officially fired. At midnight, the president’s tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect and China-

Speaker 5: Tonight, the US hit China with tariffs on $34 billion worth of goods. China immediately responded with its revenge tariffs of equal value accusing the US-

Speaker 6: Today’s tariff announcement is another protectionist move against China threatening to disrupt the world’s economy.

Joanne Freeman: For close to two years now, president Donald Trump has been sparring with China. The issue, US tariffs on Chinese imports.

Nathan Connolly: Late last week, news broke that a potential deal between the US and China is imminent. The story is ongoing, but so far it’s not clear when or how the trade war will end.

Joanne Freeman: When it comes to the topic of US China relations, the conversation often revolves around trade, tariffs, and lately the president’s tweets.

Nathan Connolly: But we wanted to get below the surface of all this trade talk to take things in a slightly different direction. We’re honored to have a special guest here to help us host the show, Erika Lee, welcome to BackStory.

Erika Lee: Hey Nathan, thanks for having me.

Nathan Connolly: Erika teaches Asian American immigration history at the university of Minnesota. She’s also the author of several award-winning books, her latest book, America for Americans, A History of Xenophobia in the United States hit shelves later this month. And I guess I should be saying welcome back to BackStory because you’ve been a guest on the show before.

Erika Lee: Yeah, that’s right. But this is my first time co-hosting BackStory, so I’m excited to be here.

Nathan Connolly: And were ecstatic to have you. So Erika, are you ready to start the show?

Erika Lee: Definitely. On this episode of BackStory, we’re bringing you the extraordinary stories of three Chinese and Chinese American people who made an indelible imprint on American culture from the 1830s and beyond.

Joanne Freeman: These were people who changed the way Americans saw China and Chinese people.

Nathan Connolly: And sometimes that change took place on the silver screen, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Erika Lee: Yeah, that’s an important part of the story, but before we can get there, we have to go back to the 1800s. Joanne, I’ll let you take it from here.

Joanne Freeman: Afong Moy lived an incredible and incredibly important life, though you’ve probably never heard of her. Born in the early 19th century in Southern China, Moy arrived in the United States in 1834. According to historian Nancy Davis, this makes Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to arrive in America. Not much is known about Moy’s life back in China, but in the United States she helped merchant firms peddle Chinese goods, things like games, puzzles and lanterns to American consumers. This took Moy across the Eastern seaboard where she went on stage and introduced Americans not just to new goods, but also to new ideas about China and Chinese people.

Nancy Davis: Well, I like to think that probably their way of viewing China was from porcelain or from tea container. Some places that would show or some way that would show what a Chinese person looked like.

Joanne Freeman: That’s Nancy Davis. She’s the author of The Chinese Lady, Afong Moy in Early America.

Nancy Davis: But by and large, no one knew what a Chinese person looked like. There were some men, Chinese men who did come to America before Afong Moy, but they were not really out in front of people. One was a merchant and others would be sailors, so no one would have been presenting this kind of face of China, such as she was doing.

Joanne Freeman: Since Afong Moy’s role in America was to sell goods, Nancy says she performed a particular vision of Chinese identity that appeal to Americans.

Nancy Davis: Fortunately, we have an image of her in her salon in New York in 1834, 35. So she was living with the ship captain and his wife who accompanied her back from China. The salon was fitted up to look like a very exotic Chinese salon. All around her were interesting Chinese objects. Of course, the other part of this is that she was exotic too, with her bound feet and her clothing that was certainly very different from any clothing that any American had seen. And she took tea and she had an interpreter who would help explain the objects and Afong Moy would walk on her bound feet. And this was both a show and also a way to talk about China.

Joanne Freeman: Nancy says Afong Moy provoked a range of responses from Americans. In New Orleans for instance, she performed for close to a thousand people at a beautiful gas lit theater.

Nancy Davis: So there was a woman from New England who went to that theater and talked about the fact that when you looked out into the audience, everyone’s hairstyle was [inaudible 00:06:21]. So, all of them were looking like Afong Moy. Their hairstyle, very similar, swept back, up in a bun. So it’s fascinating to see the way in which her style, and not necessarily clothing, but the way in which she held herself was being reflected in current magazines like Goatees where her hairstyle was commented upon and women found it appealing and followed her lead and fascinating information in various newspapers in Albany, for example, about Afong Moy and how people needed to dye their hair black to be like her.

Joanne Freeman: So what was some of the negative response to her?

Nancy Davis: In Boston, they were very negative. They said she looked like a native American with salmon colored skin and were really nasty in their commentary about her. There was a lot of concern that perhaps audiences were being fooled by her small feet. But what happened in South Carolina, which was particularly unpleasant when the manager, her manager decided that in order for people to recognize that this wasn’t a hoax, he would have her unbind her feet and show them in public, which was just unheard of, of course, in China.

Nancy Davis: And so, unbinding your feet in public was a complete disgrace to her. And it was recognized in the newspaper that this wasn’t a front, because it was noted that she was not happy. So, the negative aspects of this related to her body and how her body was configured.

Joanne Freeman: Nancy says, it’s hard to know what Afong Moy thought about all of this. In addition to not speaking English, she didn’t write Chinese, nor could she communicate with anyone in the United States unless it was through her interpreter or her manager, a man named Henry Hannington. This made her situation incredibly difficult when an economic recession known as the Panic of 1837 hit the United States.

Nancy Davis: Well, she traveled with her manager and when the Panic occurred there was little interest in Chinese goods, and there was also less money for people to pay to see her. And the manager just dropped her and she had nowhere to go because she had no family obviously. And even the ship captain who brought her or the wife of the manager, no one came forward. So she was compelled to go to a poorhouse in New Jersey and she was there for eight years.

Nancy Davis: But, the thing that really struck me, and in a sense heartened me was that people in Monmouth, New Jersey found her. They found her in I imagine it was a putting out situation. So she was in a poorhouse and then probably was in a home of someone who was paid a little bit by the poorhouse managers to house her. And they found her there and caused a real uproar. They went to the local paper, they talked to reporters, and they started a search to find out who had dropped her in Monmouth. And it became a national investigation with the Monmouth paper as the headquarters commenting about who was at blame, who was at fault, and really responding to her as a guest who had been abused.

Nancy Davis: Eventually it was clear they found who it was. And that forced the manager, it was the manager to add money to the coffers in Monmouth, New Jersey, so that her life was a little bit easier though she still was in the poorhouse for that entire eight years.

Joanne Freeman: But that’s not the end of her story. So what happens after that point?

Nancy Davis: Hannington new PT Barnum because he had done work for him and obviously Hannington was ready to have her off his dole, and it was also when the Chinese Junk, the Keying came into New York city. It was a Chinese ship that was commissioned by an Englishman and brought … It was supposed to go to London, but veered off course and landed in New York city. But there people were seeing Chinese sailors and also Chinese objects, and PT Barnum knowing that there was a Chinese woman who might be available to extend this interest, plucked her out of New Jersey and brought her into his fold.

Joanne Freeman: I asked Nancy how Afong Moy’s return to the stage reflected changing notions that Americans had of China and Chinese people.

Nancy Davis: In the early period, in the 1830s when she came, she was considered a very special and very exotic, and in many ways respected because China was respected, because people did not know what China was really like except through her, but come the Opium Wars-

Joanne Freeman: And maybe give us a one sentence version of what the Opium Wars are.

Nancy Davis: Yes. The Opium Wars occurred because the Americans and the British were bringing opium into China to sell, to cover the costs of their products. So, it was a product that was not appreciated in China. In fact, it was illegal to bring opium into China. And so, the Chinese rebelled and the British declared war on China. The British won and the Americans followed soon after with a similar treaty forcing the Chinese to open additional trading sites. But it also allowed Americans and British to go inside China, which they had never done before. Americans could explore China and see that there was actually some weakness there.

Nancy Davis: This made China seem less exotic and just less respected. And so when she comes back out in the 1840s, she’s not treated the same way. It is not with the same reverence or respect, but now the Americans have seen the underbelly and a couple of biting ways make fun Afong Moy.

Joanne Freeman: Now, she, according to your work, you note that she drops from the public record in the 1850s at some point. So what do we know about what happens to her?

Nancy Davis: Well, that’s the challenging part because I spent an enormous amount of time both on my own and working with genealogists to try to locate her. She just does not show up. After about 1851-1852, Barnum drops her because he brings another Chinese woman into his troop. And so, there really wasn’t a place for her and I’m not sure whether she married and so her name might have changed, but there is no record of her in poorhouses in New York city or in New Jersey. There’s just no record in Barnum’s accounts. So we don’t know what happened to her.

Joanne Freeman: Nancy Davis is the author of The Chinese Lady, Afong Moy In Early America.

Mayling Soong

Throughout the winter and spring of 1943, Americans turned on their radios to hear speeches delivered by a prominent Chinese woman with a slight southern drawl. The voice belonged to Mayling Soong, the wife of China’s Nationalist leader, General Chiang Kai-shek. And the speeches were part of her goodwill tour throughout the US.

Erika speaks with Karen Leong about how Soong blended Chinese and American culture to change popular perceptions of China — and carve out a new future for Chinese people in America.

Music:

Bend Blip Clap by Podington Bear

Gentle Chase by Podington Bear

Back Stairs by Podington Bear

Hip Hop Piano Lounge

Sketch (Vlad) by Jahzzar

Chiang Kaishek; China; Chinese immigrants; Madame Chiang; diplomacy; foreign governments

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Support for this podcast and the following message comes from International Education at the university of Richmond and The Rose Group for Cross-Cultural Understanding, celebrating culture and connection, promoting dialogue on campus and learning about each other and the world through this year’s International Education week. Join us November 11th through 15th for a week of programming that spotlights the diverse cultures of East Asia. For more information visit international.richmond.edu

Erika Lee: We’re going to fast forward a bit now and take you to the 1940s, February 18th, 1943 to be exact. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is president and the United States is at war with Germany and Japan. Meanwhile, in the halls of Congress, one woman is about to deliver a historic address.

Karen Leong: When she began speaking, what was most striking to most people listening on the radio and to the law makers themselves was her elocution.

Erika Lee: This is Karen Leong talking about Mayling Soong or Madame Chiang Kai-Shek as she was known to many Americans. She was the wife of China’s nationalist leader.

Karen Leong: And she had this really crisp elocution and she also had this slight Southern accent.

Mayling Soong: And say, that devotion to common principles eliminates differences in race, and that identity of ideals is the strongest possible [inaudible 00:16:53] of racial dissimilarities.

Karen Leong: In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt even reported that she even said to some of the lawmakers after her speech in the house that she said, “I am a southerner,” and she had this slight Georgia twain to her voice

Erika Lee: Mayling Soong address to Congress was unprecedented. She was the first private citizen and only the second woman to address both houses. It was all a part of Soong’s goodwill tour throughout the US in the winter and spring of 1943. It was a tour that would change the way many Americans viewed China and what the future could look like for Chinese Americans. But this 1943 trip, it wasn’t Soong’s first time in the United States.

Karen Leong: Mayling Soong was born to Charlie Soong and his wife, and Charlie Soong himself, her father had lived in North Carolina for a bit. He came to United States, some people say as a stowaway, other people say as apprentice. And he eventually ended up in Wilmington, North Carolina where he became part of the Methodist church and was educated eventually at Vanderbilt university.

Karen Leong: He returned to China where he was married. And his whole upbringing, and influence by the United States was apparent in how he raised his family. All of six of his children went to elite United States universities. So this influence that her father had having lived in the United States, his work with American missionaries all very much meant that Mayling Soong was exposed to many forms of US culture even before she herself went to the United States.

Erika Lee: And see went to Wellesley, correct?

Karen Leong: Yes. She attended Wellesley. Her two older sisters went to Wesleyan. And so her first arrival, her first destination in the United States was Macon, Georgia.

Erika Lee: And of course, this is a time when most Chinese immigrants were banned from the United States, only students, teachers, diplomats, travelers, and visitors could enter the US. How did this policy impact Mayling Soong and her family?

Karen Leong: So what’s really interesting is that even though Mayling Soong’s family was quite wealthy and at the time the exclusion had some leeway for the families of merchants and wealthy Chinese, her older sister, when she first came to the United States and tried to enter the United States to attend Wesleyan was stopped and detained for two weeks. She was not allowed to leave and enter the United States because they didn’t believe she was actually a student, even though she had all the proper paperwork. So, they held her and her father had to, through his connections, purchase a Portuguese student visa in order for Ai-Ling to enter.

Karen Leong: So that had to have affected Mayling’s own experience when she and her other sister Ching-Ling entered sometime later. But having that experience and understanding the humiliation that China faced from the United States being singled out for this restrictive immigration really had a bearing on how she experienced the United States and even her later visit.

Erika Lee: After graduation Mayling Soong returned to China where she married general Chiang Kai-Shek. This put her in a powerful position to help shape American attitudes towards China and Chinese people.

Karen Leong: It’s important to think about the fact that when people think about modernity in relation to China, many of the stereotypes of Chinese woman was that they had their foot bound, that they didn’t have a lot of freedom, that they suffered under great patriarchy. So to have this woman who was married to the leader of China being able to travel about, she was wearing pants even before … When she came to the United States and visited her alma mater, Wellesley, she was the first woman on campus to be wearing pants and that was really this marker of the modernization of China and she became, yeah, this very potent symbol, not only of Americanization and modernity, but also the influence of Christianity.

Erika Lee: This image was a radical departure from what had come before. As you just heard, Nancy Davis explain, many 19th century Americans saw China as an exotic but primitive place and those stereotypes, they served a particular purpose when it came to immigration.

Karen Leong: This all fed in not only into images of China, but also how it contributed to the passage of Chinese exclusion and the idea that Chinese could never be assimilated in good Americans. Meaning, they couldn’t really be civilized and upright Christian standing people as many people assumed Americans should be.

Erika Lee: Although those stereotypes persisted, Karen says, Japan’s 1931 invasion into the Chinese territory of Manchuria started to change the narrative.

Karen Leong: They created a puppet state and there became this real conflict between Japan and China, and many of the missionaries to the US were part of publicizing the struggle China was having against the Japanese. But for the most part, Japan was still seen as the more modern nation, and the United States and other countries did not respond to this invasion and incursion on Chinese soil much to the chagrin of the Chinese.

Karen Leong: The Chinese also were having internal conflicts between the communists and the nationalist party. For a while, at the turn of the century, around 1911 with Sun Yat-sen, there was this real fascination that China might support woman’s equality. In the provisional Republican constitution, there was a clause about equality for all women and minorities in China, but that was not part of the ultimate constitution. But that moment really began to capture some of the curiosity about China and how could it be that they would even talk about equality when they were seen as already so uncivilized.

Erika Lee: So it’s really important that this particular figure, a Chinese woman who for so long Chinese women had for so long been representative of the most alien aspects of the backward culture that was China, that she herself represents this modernization, a figure that Americans could look up to and admire and see themselves almost in her. It’s important that it’s a Chinese woman, not just any Chinese person, but a Chinese woman because Chinese women in particular had exemplified the most alien and backward aspects of what Americans thought of as Chinese culture. Does that seem right to you?

Karen Leong: Absolutely. And you know, Madam Chiang Kai-Shek, this persona that was cultivated as this public figure for American consumption and others’ consumption around the world, she was credited with converting the general to Christianity in 1929. She was seen as this active force for modernization.

Erika Lee: So if we can get back to the 1943 visit, what was she hoping to accomplish with the visit?

Karen Leong: She was hoping to accomplish many things. First and foremost, she was trying to sway American popular opinion and then US federal policy towards China during world war II. She was trying to make the case that China deserved greater attention and investments against the war against Japan. And it was very clear at this time that China was trying to get the attention and resources they felt they needed to fight Japan and they felt that FDR and his administration was really favoring Europe and the continent in terms of the Hitler first policy.

Karen Leong: She was also trying to further establish her contribution to Chinese leadership in the nationalist government. She was asking her husband to trust her in terms of handling the United States, and she also was trying to prove a point in terms of China being equal to the United States and equal to Britain. She encountered a lot of American arrogance when she was in the United States. She remembered how her father was treated by US missionaries, and she also remembered how Imperial’s policies towards China as early as the Opium Wars had really put China in a position of international weakness vis-a-vis Japan and other nations. And she and others very much resented that.

Erika Lee: So the trip entailed a lot of traveling around, a lot of speeches. If I was in the crowd at one of her speeches, could you describe what it was like? Would there be a lot of people? Where might it have been held? Was there a lot of pageantry?

Karen Leong: So it depended on where she was in the tour. So yes, she started in Washington DC and then she took a train trip across the United States, ultimately ending up in LA. She spoke at Madison Square Garden. She spoke at Veterans Stadium in Chicago. She spoke to the Longshoremen’s Union Hall in San Francisco, which was not an expected visit and she went to Macon, Georgia and spoke there. So she went to a variety of places for different reasons. She went to the Thunderbird Training Academy in Arizona, but when she spoke in New York and when she spoke in Chicago and in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl, those were very large sold out crowds with quite a bit of pageantry the Hollywood Bowl because it wasn’t Hollywood and David O. Selznick had produced it, it was a bit over the top.

Karen Leong: It was sort of this quasi good earth chronology all the way up to modern China pageant that took place. But she very much had different speeches that she made. And her speech to Congress, for example, was all about reminding the United States about the greatness of US democracy and the racial equality. It included, she talked about seeing the different European immigrants of the United States and how they all were considered American equal. And in many ways she was trying to speak out about the promise of democracy and what those promises might mean globally to include China and other places.

Erika Lee: Okay. So after she gives this speech, it’s printed in the newspaper, it’s played on the radio. How did the American public respond to Soong’s image and message? What sorts of things were people saying about her?

Karen Leong: Many newspapers were claiming her as American. They were talking about how she was more American than Americans themselves. In fact, before her speech a few days before, some Congressman even inquired of the state department whether they could give her an honorary US citizenship. That is so important because this was in the age of Chinese exclusion when Asians were excluded from naturalized citizenship. So they were saying, is there any way we can circumvent that and give her honorary US citizenship? That was an incredible marker of how much Americans really saw her as American. And they were taking pride in their influence in the United States culture and democratic influence on her and therefore her influence on China.

Karen Leong: And in fact that very day after she gave her speech in the house, Martin Kennedy, a representative introduced a bill to repeal Chinese exclusion. And this is what he said, and this is I think very telling because this is also what other editorials around the nation were writing about her. He said, “We welcome you also as a daughter is welcomed by her foster mother to the land where you received an American education. Where you spent years far more carefree than those of late and whereby your charm, your modesty, your intellectual attainments, you won the hearts of so many. I take this auspicious occasion in your gracious presence as an indication of my unbounded admiration of a nation’s courage, which has amazed the world to introduce this day, a bill to grant the Chinese rights of entry to the United States and rights of citizenship.”

Karen Leong: So immediately in response to her speech in response to her demonstrating the influence of an American education, he introduces this law saying that the Chinese should have a right to become US citizens. She is proof embodied that the Chinese can become American. Whereas, Chinese exclusion had been based on the assumption that Chinese never could assimilate, could never be American.

Erika Lee: Turns out there was tremendous support for Kennedy’s bill in Congress. On December 27th, 1943, president Roosevelt signed the bill that repealed the Chinese exclusion laws. He said it was a pivotal moment in correcting the, “Historic mistake” of Chinese exclusion. As for Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in many ways, 1943 is just the beginning of her story.

Karen Leong: So of course, just six years after Madame Chiang Kai-Shek’s visit to the United States, China undergoes a very dramatic revolution and becomes the people’s Republic of China. The nationalist government with Madame Chiang Kai-Shek and her husband flee to Taiwan and establish the Republic of China.

Erika Lee: What impact did the communist revolution have on Americans perceptions of China? Just on the heels of this very triumphant and enraptured visit by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek just six years before?

Karen Leong: It really changed this view that China again, was seen with suspicion that this turn to communism in some ways confirmed popular ideas that China cannot be trusted. But I’d like to point out that this happened even sooner than the 1950 in the fall of China to the communists. They talk about it that Eleanor Roosevelt in 1944 when Madam Chiang Kai-Shek came back trying to seek assistance. She even said that Madam Chiang Kai-Shek, and this is a quote, “Although educated in the United States had quite naturally reverted to Chinese ways of thinking when she returned to China.”

Karen Leong: And this idea that the United States could be so fickle and its admiration for the celebrity persona of this Americanized Chinese woman and it could be so easily flipped into, we cannot trust this Chinese woman because she is after all, Chinese I think reflects very well this ongoing battle for legitimacy that Chinese people have fought for in the United States to be accepted as equals.

Erika Lee: And as Americans.

Karen Leong: And as Americans. If we’re talking about Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants in the United States, it very much affected again how the United States federal government viewed Chinese. They were again seen with great suspicion. There was this question of whether Chinese in the United States now Chinese Americans were actually communists and the suspicion … And again this reflects this ongoing way in which how Chinese in the United States, Chinese Americans who were born and raised in United States even are so associated with China and it’s about nationality and race combined that somehow if they are of Chinese heritage, they must automatically be Chinese in their hearts as well.

Karen Leong: And there is this idea that they cannot see that people could be born in the United States, could be loyal to the United States, could love democracy if China as a nation suddenly now was communist.

Erika Lee: Karen Leong is an associate professor of Women and Gender Studies and Asian Pacific American studies at Arizona State University. She’s also the author of the China Mystique, Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism.

Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee is one of the most iconic Asian Americans in US history. Throughout his career, Lee starred in only a handful of Hollywood martial arts films. But his image still remains a fixture in American society. Why? Scholar Celine Parreñas Shimizu tells Nathan it might have something to do with what she calls Lee’s “ethical manhood.”

Music:

Beat Creatures by Podington Bear

Dreamliner by Podington Bear

Chinese Americans; Chinese immigrants; Hollywood; acting; cultural blending; masculinity

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connolly: Born in San Francisco, but raised in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee is perhaps one of the most iconic Asian Americans in US history. Despite rampant racism, Lee managed to break through the exclusive gates of Hollywood and he did so in a big way. Best known for his good looks, rippling muscles and charismatic charm, Lee transformed perceptions of Asian American masculinity.

Speaker 11: In the United States I think something about the oriental. I mean the true oriental should be shown.

Speaker 13: Hollywood sure as heck hasn’t.

Speaker 11: You better believe it, man. I mean it’s always that big tail and bouncing around chap, chap with the [inaudible 00:35:18] and all that.

Nathan Connolly: In 1973 Bruce Lee’s life was tragically cut short due to swelling of the brain. But before his death, Lee starred in several Hollywood martial arts movies, and he performed many of his famous fight scenes without a shirt putting his chiseled body on full display.

Celine: If you run into Bruce Lee on the street, right? I mean game will recognize game. You will just say like, “Oh my God, this person is so strong.” The muscles on this person is unlike any other kind of muscles I’ve ever seen or the way he developed different parts of his body. And so, I would choose not to even fight with him because you just know you’ll lose, right? And so he behaved this way on screen.

Nathan Connolly: That’s scholar Celine Parrenas Shimizu. She says Bruce Lee did much to defy stereotypes, particularly the idea that Asian men were a feminine and weak. But for Celine the measure of Lee’s masculinity can’t simply be reduced to brute strength. It’s the way Lee couples violence with regret, sexuality with consent, these are the key components of what she refers to as Lee’s ethical manhood.

Celine: There’s this scene in Way of the Dragon that Bruce Lee wrote and directed, and the culminating scene is one with Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee at the Coliseum. It’s a really humorously shot film because the fighting is intercut with several cats, kittens who are looking at the fight, but at the same time that it’s really humorous. There’s this fight to the death and you don’t quite know who’s going to win, right? Chuck Norris is dressed in all white, Bruce Lee is dressed in all black. There’s a moment where Bruce Lee ends up killing Colt who’s played by Chuck Norris.

Celine: And there’s almost like an asking of permission, like, are you going to go to the death with me? And there’s an acknowledgement of consent on the side of Colt, and that’s when Bruce Lee kills him. And it ends with this iconic shot of Bruce Lee bearing the pain of having taken a life. And so this is where I came up with this idea of ethical manhood because I noticed that the killing of men is really flanked by this hesitation to kill and then a regret at the costs of killing somebody.

Celine: And it’s really similar to the way in which he approaches women in his films as well. There’s the moment where he wrestles with, what would it look like for me to interact with this woman who I really want to touch, but I’m not sure she wants to be touched? So there’s a famous scene, well not a famous scene. There’s a scene that I study where the woman who he’s having a romantic connection with, they look at each other. The way they first meet each other is during the scene, almost like a house party where everyone’s drinking and the men are talking about how you are really powerless in the face of a really sexual woman and you can’t really help yourself, but you have to get with them because that’s what they want. It’s brutish and really horrible.

Celine: But this whole time that these men are talking in the background, Bruce Lee and this woman are looking at each other in a really humorous but intently romantic way. And slowly throughout the movie you’ll see that this woman is being preyed upon by the drug lord. And after she’s prayed upon and Bruce Lee saves her, he’s hesitating in terms of how he should touch her and he’s not quite sure. So, it’s really interesting to me that these two scenes are juxtaposed against each other. Where other men in the movie feel entitled to touch women, whether or not they consent, whether or not they present themselves as sexual beings. They are really overly sexualized in service of male pleasure.

Celine: But Bruce Lee occupies a different domain where he’s very conscious about seeking the consent of a woman, looking her in the eye and making sure that this is something that she wants to do with him.

Nathan Connolly: On that question of strength and in the way that Bruce Lee is thinking through the question of violence specifically, I mean at the time that he’s making some of his earliest films, you have, again, iconic representations of male virility by way of violence and there are characters like John Wayne and characters like Clint Eastwood. I mean, I’m curious about how obviously somebody as violent on camera as Bruce Lee’s characters were there’s still a kind of thoughtfulness as you’ve laid out about how he’s dealing with violence and using it. I mean, what would you say about Lee’s approach to violence compared to some of his contemporaries?

Celine: He was very insistent on hand to hand combat that there was something about not doing a shortcut in terms of that encounter between people who are fighting, right? But what is striking about his representations of hand to hand combat is that he really made sure to express facially vulnerability that discloses the emotional costs of wielding physical power over another. And this face of regret, of a shattering of the self because you wielded violence against the other is something that’s so forceful and so strong that it can end up destroying him, even if he’s the one who is victorious and standing over a dead body, whose death he caused, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Celine: And so I find that really powerful because what it does is that it reveals a psychic consciousness that catches up to the body’s conducting this expression of violence. It becomes an awareness of the wellbeing of others in civil society beyond the gains for the self. Because, you saved yourself when someone was trying to kill you, you’re the one who didn’t die. So I guess the thing that it’s so amazing about Bruce Lee’s representation of violence is that it doesn’t bring about certainty. What instead it does is that it explodes gender. It explodes power. It becomes a position of uncertainty. What we consider victory is instead the raising of many questions, was it worth it to take that life because of that finality?

Nathan Connolly: Right. I’m really, I’m just enjoying taking a moment to appreciate these as choices, as creative choices that Bruce Lee is making, but also deeply political choices that he’s making through his film. And there’s got to be a way to connect these creative choices with Bruce Lee’s broader set of political commitments. I mean, I would love to have you just to talk a little bit about how Bruce Lee’s political vision is coming out of struggles against colonialism, struggles against racism, stereotypes of Asian people. And then it just sounds like from how you’re characterizing what Bruce Lee’s choices are, that he really is challenging a lot of those ideas.

Celine: Other scholars have said that this body of his and his choice of fighting against white men, black men, Italian men, men from other countries or even having a mapping of, oh, there’s a Korean kind of karate, or there’s a Chinese style of fighting, a Japanese style of fighting. He always wanted to show a larger field of relations, whether it’s a black man struggling against racism or the characterization of the Chinese body from the perspective of Japanese enemies, right? He always included a larger field of social hierarchies that were represented in his films.

Celine: I think it’s so interesting, for example, that his film Way of the Dragon was shot in Italy. Why? And it begins with this really strange encounter at the airport. He arrives at the airport and there’s this older white woman who is really staring him down so shamelessly and so aggressively and he’s really uncomfortable. And there’s this discourse of racial otherness that’s happening throughout his films that’s really transnational, and I think it has a lot to do with his own experiences. Later in one of his interviews that he conducted before he died, he said, when I wake up in the morning, I really have to remember which side of the ocean I’m on. Am I this transnational superstar in Hong Kong or am I this exotic oriental support player in the US.

Nathan Connolly: Bruce Lee died in 1973. He was 32 years old, and he starred in only a handful of what we would call Hollywood films or films with that kind of big Hollywood budget. Given that his career was largely cut short, how do you explain how he became such a cultural icon?

Celine: How did Bruce Lee achieve immortality with four films, right? I mean, it’s 40 plus years since he died. But he has this Elvis like what other people have called an Elvis like iconic following, even in San Francisco, right? There’s a night devoted to Bruce Lee when the giants are playing at the park downtown. And the latest Bruce Lee as a DJ T shirts that you see on the street today.

Nathan Connolly: Right. I have one of those.

Celine: Yeah, me too. And so, why did he resonate and why did he achieve this immortality? I think, and I hope this is not particular to me alone because there’s something really deeply satisfying about his representation, not just as a Superman of steel, an invulnerable god on earth. We see through his performances, these pauses that happened before he wields death or before he makes a move sexually or romantically towards a love object. We see that he is a man who depends on others, who needs others and protects others in order to sustain himself.

Celine: So it’s a very socially embracing definition of a man. It isn’t a man by himself. He has to suffer the consequences of society when he kills somebody, even if it means that he has to give up his marriage, or his loved one because he has to be accountable for what he’s done. And so, I think that’s the kind of manhood that’s so pioneering that’s so innovative and inventive that he established in these four different films.

Celine: I actually don’t think I’ve seen anyone else say that, but I’m definitely saying that. I mean, maybe the reason why he has lasted in other people’s minds, whether it’s all of these Asian American male scholars who really prop up this idea that he’s a man who can beat up everybody because he’s a God to all the geeks. But this is what I personally get out of him, that we are not yet done with representations of male vulnerability on screen that does not forsake strength or being attractive. So, I think Bruce Lee, in a pioneering way established this definition of masculinity that’s more open and that really declares a need and love for the other and not just a heroic version of the self alone.

Nathan Connolly: So to this question, if you were to think about the moment we’re in now in American history, I mean we’re obviously more than a half century removed from some of the most unfortunate world war II era depictions of Asians and Asian Americans. We are a full half century removed from Bruce Lee’s earliest work on screen. And yet as we’ve been discussing, he holds fast to a certain kind of dominance as an iconic figure. And clearly he’s someone that’s not going to go away. And so just based on your own sense of where the arc of history is bending relative to the place of Asian Americans in American life, the role of someone like Bruce Lee in world culture, what do you see as the possible and positive future for Bruce Lee status as an iconic figure?

Celine: I am such an unhappy spectator because so few people who are not cisgendered straight white men get to make movies in this country, right? 96% of films are made by men and predominantly they are white men. And so what we know about how men relate to each other, whether you’re in a family or a friend or your enemies or what we know about how men occupy positions of romance in relation to their love object, whether they’re men or women or trans people we’re so not done. And we need to continue to make films that really take heed from what Bruce Lee was able to do in the 70s.

Celine: We can’t simply replicate the models of masculinity that have been written and imaged on screen. The films that will do good things for our relationships with each other are the ones that will redefine what masculinity can look like on screen beyond a hero that just counts on himself and saves the day for not only a family but entire countries. Iron man landing and by himself gets rid of everybody. But spirits of cooperation and collaboration, or even what Bruce Lee did, which is to say I had to kill somebody, but it cost me so much, right?

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Celine: That the film can do so much more for us in terms of expanding our ideas of who can be loved and who is strong.

Speaker 13: Do you still think of yourself Chinese or do you ever think of yourself as North American?

Speaker 11: You know what? I want to think of myself as a human being because I mean, I don’t want to sounds like as Confucius say, that under the sky, under the heaven, man, there is but one family. It just so happened, man, that people are different.

Nathan Connolly: Celine Parrenas Shimizu is director of the school of cinema at San Francisco State university. She’s also the author of Straitjacket Sexualities, Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the movies.

Joanne Freeman: So, Nathan, Erika, I have a question. Actually, I’m going to send it towards you, Erika. I gather that we’re at a moment this year in which there are a lot of anniversaries involving Chinese American relations.

Erika Lee: Yeah, absolutely. So it’s 2019. There are three important anniversaries that folks have been marking. One most recently was the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese communist party. So if anyone was watching the news, that’s when all of the tanks and military parades were happening in Beijing and elsewhere. But there’s also the 40th anniversary of reestablishing full diplomatic relations between the US and China, which had occurred in 1979 and then the most fraught anniversary, I think for US China relations is the 30th anniversary of what we in the West referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre where an estimated between a hundreds to thousands were killed. As many as 10,000 arrested following a month of pro democracy protests.

Erika Lee: So in many ways the show on the Chinese and America and US China relations could not be more timely. There’s also the fact that Asian Americans are the fastest growing group in the United States, over 5 million Chinese Americans.

Joanne Freeman: Well, and let’s build on that because as you noted, all of those anniversaries are really centered on Chinese American relations. But the show that we just did, talks about a lot more than that.

Erika Lee: Yeah. So this is the complicated aspect of Asian American history and I think especially Chinese American history, because as we’ve seen from the interviews with Nancy Davis and Karen Leong and Celine Parrenas Shimizu, there’s a long history of Asian-Americans in the United States that many people don’t know about. And yes, it’s shaped by US international relations, but it’s also a history that’s been shaped by fractured race relations and immigration debates. And we can’t understand any of these key figures, Afong Moy, Mayling Soong, Bruce Lee, without understanding all three of those stories.

Nathan Connolly: It almost feels like when you deal with the question of Asian American Americans, really thinking about them as US born folk who have families and multigenerational belonging to the United States, that there’s always still this question of how does foreign policy impact their experience of America? And to your point, Erika, it almost feel like that’s a distinctive problem for that group in terms of how they experience their racial problem in the United States.

Erika Lee: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. For better or for worse, Asian Americans have always been tied to Asia whether they want to or not. And it’s a particular form of racialization that they’ve always been seen as more foreign than American, especially during times of tense international relations, whether it be the trade war now or the anticommunist 1950s, that is the time when Chinese Americans loyalty to the United States, their very Americanness has always come under suspicion. And this is a theme that’s really not just of recent invention, but of course has really long, deep historic ties.

Joanne Freeman: As the early American historian here and even early this week gets to the 19th century, but when we’re talking about the 19th century, you certainly get in the story of Afong Moy the sense of how exotic in every sense of the term and unfamiliar she was and everything that she represented was. And what’s interesting about the later stories, the 20th century stories is there still seems to be that deep sense of unfamiliarity that isn’t necessarily true of all immigrant groups. Is there something distinctive about the Chinese in America along those lines?

Erika Lee: Yes, absolutely. I was thinking about in terms of preparing for the show and thinking about, yeah, so what are some of the other parallel immigrant experiences in relationship to US international relations and it’s all Asian. I think if we were to make this show about Japanese Americans and US Japanese relations or South Asia, you would have the same types of themes that we could map on. So in early American history, it would still be that search for Asia, the search for Asia in terms of riches, in terms of conquering, in terms of Christianizing a heathen land.

Erika Lee: And then similarly, in the immigration decades, the late 19th, early 20th century, you would have the same in a similarble foreigner, more like African Americans then European immigrants racialization. Obviously the same exclusion laws, the same bars to naturalized citizenship. So you would have the same mapping if we’re talking other Asian immigrant groups. I would think it’s more similar to Mexico, Mexican Americans and fraught US Mexican relations for sure. To show one’s pride in one’s ancestry in this political climate opens up the doors to charges that you’re not fully American, don’t want to become American or are part of a larger immigrant invasion from the South. What’s the commonality here? It’s race, it’s race and a particular kind of racialization in terms of which immigrants are more assimilated, more Americanized than others regardless of generation in the United States.

Nathan Connolly: But the thing about the Asian American question that I always find to be so striking is it’s a group about which there are these lingering narratives about forever foreigners even as there are a bundle of what are effectively positive stereotypes about this group. So when you think about, the way in which we regard native Americans or we’re surprised as native Americans engaged in modern practices like driving cars and using appliances, right? That actually becomes a way of fixing that population in space and time imagining that they’re on this timeless reservation.

Nathan Connolly: And obviously you think about the question of folks coming across the border, there’s always a sense about, well they’re struggling with their language. They engage in particular kinds of unskilled work, and this is a way that we have to then deal with the question of the border crisis and very much in these terms. And this is a very different dilemma where you have a population that again goes back to the 1830s in terms of its discernible presence in North America and certainly has an extraordinarily important role to play in how housing history develops, how the history of immigration develops, how popular culture develops. And yet it’s almost as if there’s always a sense that at any moment any geopolitical concerns like in the case of a trade war with China can write them right out of the American story.

Nathan Connolly: So, I guess I’m curious about how we are to understand this duality of positive, negative stereotypes. How does this work in the case of the Asian American presence in America?

Erika Lee: Yeah, I mean, I think that framework of duality is really important. I also think of it in terms of a probationary status. So one of the positive stereotypes that, I’m sure listeners are thinking about is the model minority. This idea that Asian Americans of course lumping together a really diverse group of people’s into one category. But this idea that Asian Americans are somehow the model minority more than African Americans, Latin X peoples, native Americans, meaning that they “play by the rules.” They, “work hard.” And now there’s all sorts of data and research that shows how false the model minority stereotype is. Nevertheless, it’s so persistent in defining the ways that many Americans think of Asian Americans.

Erika Lee: The other labels that I think are perhaps more useful in thinking about this idea of duality is forever foreign and honorary white. So Asian Americans are such a fascinating case study because they go from the 19th century being much more categorized alongside African Americans and native Americans as these racial problems, racial inferiors to now whiter than white. The whole tiger mom phenomenon of a couple of years ago that Asian Americans are out pasting, out competing, out earning whites. This is still a threatening stereotype because they’re still based on the zero some racial game where, ones “success” comes at the expense of white Americans.

Erika Lee: It’s a complicated status that’s both domestic based on what’s happening in the US, race relations, immigration debates, et cetera. But also just, much more tied towards the international side than many other groups in the United States.

Joanne Freeman: The other thing along similar lines that is striking to me and in particular about the three stories that we explored today is all of the complications of that duality of seeming foreign but seeming as you put it, whiter than white. All three stories in one way or another, those three people, it’s culture that gives them the major impact that they have in the United States. It’s being on stage, it’s being in film, it’s having a speech broadcast on the radio. And that striking too is that there’s a political dimension and the international dimension and a race dimension. And then mix that in with what people find to be the attractive parts of Asian culture and Chinese culture and the ways in which the media familiarizes these people with Americans and then changes their thinking.

Nathan Connolly: Right, right. I mean, is there something about the history of all of these different forms of engagement and transformation in American life coming out of a Chinese American tradition that will hopefully be much more evident on the political stage or even in a cultural arena that’s not simply relegated to cuisine or to other kinds of cinematic representations, right? That there’s a future of broad expression for Chinese Americans?

Erika Lee: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And I think actually that the demographics of immigrant America actually are going to necessitate that diversity because even though on this show we’re talking about Chinese Americans and then when we talk about other immigrant groups, we often use similarly broad terms like Mexican Americans. We’re talking about groups that are extremely diverse in terms of generation, in class and where they’ve come from. And you can see this very precisely within the Chinese American community and how fast it has transformed in the past generation. So maybe, 1980 or so we’re talking about the Chinese American population being majority, maybe 60, 40 US born, now it’s exactly opposite.

Erika Lee: Back then, most Chinese Americans came from the Southern region of China. Now it’s from all across that great country. Politically, it’s extremely diverse as well. Older generations tend to vote democratic, newer, more conservative. There’s a very active group, Chinese Americans for Trump, which has taken some people by surprise. And of course the debates over affirmative action, so where Chinese Americans are fitting into and making their voices heard.

Erika Lee: In terms of, again, our ongoing debates over immigration and race, it’s a much more diverse field of voices than we’ve ever had before, but it’s also perhaps one of the most fraught times because of these ongoing tensions between US and a much more powerful China than we’ve ever seen in the US history period that we’re talking about in the show.

Joanne Freeman: Well, I mean I suppose in a way you could say it’s appropriate we’re talking about a moment of change in American society and we had a really wonderful change in this week’s episode, which is having you here, Erika, and really thank you for being here with us.

Nathan Connolly: Indeed here, here.

Erika Lee: Thank you so much.

Joanne Freeman: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStory Radio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger and special thanks to the studios at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Nathan Connolly: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Support for this episode comes from International Education at the university of Richmond and The Rose Group for Cross-Cultural Understanding.

Speaker 1: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the university of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the university of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins university. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.