Lee, Josephine D. "The Chinese Other, 1850-1925: An Anthology of
Plays, and: Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East
West Players (review)"
Theatre Journal - Volume 52, Number 3, October 2000, pp. 430-431
The Johns Hopkins University Press
http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?
uri=/journals/theatre_journal/v052/52.3lee.html


Excerpt
Dave Williams has rescued from obscurity several plays that testify
to the history of the numerous legal, institutional, and social
efforts to control Chinese access to the literal and imagined
borders of the United States during the later nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.

From short amateur vignettes to full-length professional works, each
provides insight into the place of the Chinese immigrant in a
changing American racial hierarchy and into the uses of the stage as
a means of focusing and altering public opinion.

Rife with infantile, demonic, and/or exotic characterizations, these
plays serve as powerful reminders of how theatre articulates race
through the language of distorted physicality (in stereotypes such
as Bret Harte and Mark Twain's Ah Sin, popular for his "grotesque
gestures of roguish delight") (31) or through spectacular Oriental
fantasies (as embodied in the "splendid Chinese tent" of the Ravel
family's pantomime Kim--Ka! or the Misfortunes of Ventilator [1852])
(2).

Worries over the Chinese male immigrant as a threat to white
masculine dominance in the labor market and in the home fuel these
exaggerated representations. Henry Grimm's The Chinese Must Go
(1879) and Joseph Jarrow's The Queen of Chinatown (1899) depict
Chinese characters as opium pushers and enslavers of white women,
who gleefully foresee an economic takeover: "By and by, no more
white workingman in California; all Chinaman--sabee?" (The Chinese
Must Go, 99). Those more sympathetic to the Chinese, such as Ambrose
Bierce (whose Peaceful Expulsion satirizes the Anti-Coolie clubs and
other rabidly anti-Chinese movements) generate more benign
stereotypes. Harte and Twain's Ah Sin (1876) is perhaps the most
influential of these plays; the mischievous, gibberish-speaking Ah
Sin, the comic accessory to the white...