Shape shifters: Racialized and gendered crossings in Piccadilly (1929) and Shanghai Express (1932)

Abstract

The Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) is today considered an ambivalent icon who, on the one hand, was the first Asian American film star to gain international recognition, and on the other hand, became a symbol of the hypersexualized Asian woman in film. In this article, I will analyse the crossing of racial and sexual boundaries in two of her films, Piccadilly (1929) and Shanghai Express (1932). The comparison of Piccadilly with Shanghai Express reveals the journey not only of transatlantic agents, like Anna May Wong, but also the simultaneous trajectory of sets of interrelated motifs, narratives, and aesthetic tropes. As discourses of gender and race converge into the figure of the transnational Asian American actress, Anna May Wong offers a key and privileged site to unpack and discuss them. The relationship between sexuality and race in these films has often been reduced to processes of exoticization. However, I will show that this relationship ought instead to be understood as interrelated through practices of appropriation, subversion, and cross-dressing.

By applying the term ‘exotic’ to the analysis of Anna May Wong’s performances, I aim to foreground the entangled processes of sexualization and exoticization in order to reveal that the delineation of the ‘other’ is more ambivalent than clear. The films are particularly interesting in the context of ‘sexoticization’ because they do not construct a gendered and racialized ‘other’ that is clearly distinct to a western ‘us’. Modes of appropriation and masquerade complicate the representation of the ‘sexotic’, non-European ‘other’.

Keywords

Anna May Wong cross-dressing exotic dance exoticization miscegenation

A photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt shows the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong flanked by Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl (Figure 1). The image of the three actors was taken in 1928 at a journalists’ ball in Berlin. In the picture, Dietrich wears an ornate patterned ensemble, with a broad scarf cinched around her waist. Staring boldly into the camera with a pipe poised jauntily between her lips, Dietrich deliberately plays with forms of fashionable masquerade. Riefenstahl, on the other side of the picture, wears a long, sequin gown whose monochrome style stands in marked contrast with Dietrich’s flamboyant outfit. Yet neither of these two actresses occupy the centre of the photograph. Instead, it is Wong who stands in the middle, in a trendy flapper outfit that is neither exotic, like Dietrich’s, nor conservative, like Riefenstahl’s. Instead, she appears very much a cosmopolitan woman of her time and milieu. Much has been speculated about this photograph, but the only information we truly have about the image resides in the picture itself, in which we can see how the photographer clearly tries to stage the differences between the women, while also bringing them together.¹ Given Dietrich’s fame and Riefenstahl’s subsequent notoriety, it might seem unexpected today that these two stars should flank Wong. Yet at the time, it made sense that she appear in the centre. At that moment she was the most successful actress of the three; by 1928 she had numerous Hollywood features under her belt and she had travelled to Berlin to play the lead role in three feature films.

Figure 1.

Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl, 1928, photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, © Time Life Pictures / Getty Images.

The picture arguably shows all three women in a liminal phase: Dietrich and Riefenstahl are both at the precipice of their respective breakthroughs. Dietrich had worked mostly in stage plays before she became an international star after playing Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (von Sternberg, 1930). Riefenstahl’s directorial debut, The Blue Light, was released in 1932 (in which she also stars as a liminal and sexually ambiguous female). Wong had just moved to Berlin and promoted herself as a star from Hollywood. She did not stay in Europe permanently, however, but returned to the USA where she was able to leverage her European experiences as a lead actor into new types of roles in American films and stage plays. As Tim Bergfelder has noted, Wong’s ‘brief stardom’ is remarkable for the ways in which it set into relief numerous processes of cultural translation within an increasingly cosmopolitan mass media. As an actor, she travelled back and forth between national film industries that sought both to respond to one another in an international arena and to top one another at the box office. In this regard, her appeal can be perhaps understood in terms of the ways in which Wong, as a star figure, was able to combine both cosmopolitanism and exoticism with the image of American-style modernity (see Bergfelder, 1999: 305). In hindsight, Eisenstaedt’s photograph reflects these chiastic movements between cultures and continents, drawing specific attention to the manner in which the performative deployment of costume and sexuality might complicate our understanding of the intersecting cosmopolitan itineraries of the photograph’s protagonists in the 1920s and 1930s. Seen in this manner, we can understand how and why Wong stands not in the margins, but in the centre.

The recovery of Anna May Wong’s unique legacy began in the early 2000s with numerous academic and popular publications and screenings of her films. Much of this work has concentrated on the limitations she faced during her career and the stereotypes she helped to propagate while carving out a place for herself as a screen actress in the 1920s and 1930s.² Although critics have discussed Wong’s racialized and sexualized performances, most have tended to focus on the question of the actor’s agency in the production of her film work, and hence have concentrated on the entirety of her career.³ This article takes a different approach. Because no diaries or letters survive that could provide any definite indications about Wong’s agency in relation to the specifics of her acting, I suggest that beginning with interiority as a means of uncovering intentional subversion in her performances will always remain frustratingly speculative. Her films were commercial commodities, produced by a team of filmmakers and highly dependent on the popular tastes at the box office to which they catered. It is thus hardly possible to assess the personal agency of an actor who tried to achieve success in the movie business.⁴ Instead, I suggest that close readings of individual films can offer a more nuanced prism through which to examine the often complex intersection of race, sex and gender that characterizes the pictures in which Wong played a starring role.

The line of inquiry that I propose to follow, therefore, edges away from attempts to discern subjective agency. I propose instead to take seriously the ways in which both the formal and narrative constructions of her films introduce various layers of what one might term ‘surface’ ambiguities. The interplay between these various layers of surfaces, I suggest, ought not to be understood as superficial. In her groundbreaking book on Josephine Baker (another early 20th-century, transatlantic star who dealt with similar issues of race as Wong during the same period), Anne Anlin Cheng (2011) reclaims the surface as an essential subject in relation to discussions of identity, mediation, and questions of authenticity. Cheng writes, for example, of Baker that ‘it is precisely her surface quality that collapses the difference between person and representation and, in doing so, critiques the assumption of authenticity and embodiment utilized by both liberal criticism and colonial racism’ (Cheng, 2011: 161). I would like to draw attention to similar dynamics in Wong’s films, where a layering of ‘surface’ elements including costume, cross-dressing, lighting, and narrative ambivalence serve to produce ambiguities directly related to figurations of Wong as an exotic and sexually deviant figure.

Rather than assuming that we can access any direct, or potentially subversive agency on the part of Wong’s person in her work on screen, I analyse instead how these surface layers provoke questions that beg us to address the ways in which the figure of Wong, the cosmopolitan, transatlantic star, intersected with her sexualized and exoticized leading roles on screen. Anne McClintock has argued that different forms of mimicry such as passing and cross-dressing deploy ambiguity in different ways: ‘critical distinctions are lost if these historically variant cultural practices are collapsed under the ahistorical sign of the same’ (McClintock, 1995: 65). By offering a close reading of two of her films, I will propose a contextualized, formal analysis of the specific forms of ambiguities that Wong’s films stage, focusing on the function of surfaces, costumes, and the layered acts of gender and race performances; indeed in her films, these are often staged as performances within the movie’s diegesis. These performances complicate the notion of a unified Orientalism in which a monolithic and ahistorical East was opposed to a stable European identity. Similarly, as scholars like Melani McAlister have suggested, I argue here that Orientalism ‘existed as “an uneven matrix” that was taken up differently in different moments’ (McAlister, 2005: 10). By applying the term ‘sexotic’ to the analysis of Anna May Wong’s performances, I aim to foreground the entangled processes of sexualization and exoticization in order to reveal that the delineation of the ‘other’ is more ambivalent than clear. Modes of appropriation and masquerade complicate the representation of the ‘sexotic’, non-European ‘other’. The films are particularly interesting in the context of ‘sexoticization’ because they do not construct a gendered and racialized ‘other’ that is clearly distinct to a western ‘us’.

Anna May Wong demands our attention because she transgresses symbolic boundaries and spatial borders. Crossings on levels of gender, race, class, and space crystallize in her performances and we find the alleged binary of West and East are blurred in her star persona as an Asian American actress. Piccadilly (GB, 1929, Ewald André Dupont) and Shanghai Express (USA, 1932, Josef von Sternberg) were shot at the height of Anna May Wong’s career and were widely distributed in the period (and have been re-released in recent years). By comparing these films from different countries and directors that both star a travelling, cosmopolitan actress we can see how tropes of miscegenation, exotic dance, and racial masquerades are not limited to one national context but manifest themselves more broadly in film as cross-cultural ambiguities. The comparison of Piccadilly with Shanghai Express reveals the journey not only of transatlantic agents, like Wong and Dietrich, but also the simultaneous trajectory of sets of interrelated motifs, narratives, and aesthetic tropes. I do not intend to explore both films in every aspect but to show the pertinence of a transnational approach, and particularly, how transnational mobility in itself is a driving motor for interwoven processes of ‘sexoticization’. As discourses of gender and race converge into the figure of the transnational Asian American actress, Anna May Wong offers a key and privileged site to unpack and discuss them.

Before turning to an analysis of the films, I cast a brief glance at Wong’s early career in order to contextualize her later screen appearances. The conditions in which Wong initially worked in Hollywood were themselves defined by racialized surface dynamics, specifically those of racial cross-dressing, passing and exoticism. Born in Los Angeles as a daughter of two American-born citizens of Chinese descent, Anna May Wong grew up in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood of the city.⁵ Her first film role was as an extra in the movie The Red Lantern (USA 1919). She subsequently landed her first starring role in the 1922 film Toll of the Sea and rose to mild prominence in The Thief of Bagdad (USA 1924) starring Douglas Fairbanks. In spite of these successes, however, her career in Hollywood did not flourish; she most often found herself cast in minor roles in ‘exotic’ B-films with Chinese themes like A Trip to Chinatown (USA 1926), The Dragon Horse (USA 1926) and The Chinese Parrot (USA 1927). (See Leibfried and Lane, 2004.) The major ‘Asian’ roles in such films were not played by actors of Asian descent like Wong, but instead were given to Caucasian actors made up in yellowface, a practice of reshaping the actors’ facial features in order to match a presumed Asian physiognomy.

The deployment of yellowfacing reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s and white actors like Warner Oland and Myrna Loy were typecast in ‘exotic’ roles. In many states in the USA, anti-miscegenation laws prohibited what was seen as interracial sex and marriage. These laws originally prohibited marriages between whites and African Americans, but by the 1860s had been extended to include Chinese Americans as well.⁶ The Motion Picture Production Code, which was created in 1930, prohibited the depiction of ‘miscegenation’ on screen. This ‘moral guideline’, as the code was seen, prevented Wong from playing major roles since ‘positive’ Hollywood Chinese roles were assigned to European American women in yellowface whereas Wong was relegated to tragic or evil orientalist roles (see Lim, 2006: 53). In this context, artifice and surface qualities play a key role. For the performances of white actors in yellowface never aimed to convince the audience that the actors were Chinese. On the contrary, the surface artifice of yellowface highlighted the Caucasian actor’s ability to convincingly mimic difference, yet maintain an artistic autonomy defined as different from the racialized image appearing onscreen. Racial masquerade, as it were, served in this manner to highlight the actor’s skill as a performer by drawing attention to a split between the sign of the image and the ‘fact’ of the actor’s race. Conversely, Wong’s typecasting in exotic roles would seem at first to collapse the sign and the ‘fact’ of race, although – as we will see in her later roles – this collapse was never free from a range of ambiguities that resided in layers of overlapping surfaces in these films.

Disillusioned by these practices of (type)casting, Wong decided to move to Europe in 1928 where she was to star in three pictures by German director Richard Eichberg. She also worked in England, where the film Piccadilly was released in 1929. Wong was one of several US American performers of colour who decided to move to Europe at this time to escape from American racial restrictions in order to build their careers (see Bergfelder, 1999: 30; Leong, 2006: 15). By contrast, numerous European actors like Conrad Veidt, Elisabeth Bergner, and Greta Garbo left Europe for the American film industry at the same moment, searching for more creative freedom and success in Hollywood. Wong’s career is marked, in a sense, by this chiastic movement between places and cultures. As a Chinese American actress who was a style icon of the flapper generation, she appropriated the sartorial codes of the modern white woman and, to a remarkable extent, she was able to transgress the borders of the racially segregated western world and appear as a Hollywood movie star in a European context.⁷ In the following readings of two of Wong’s films, Piccadilly and Shanghai Express, I will analyse the ways in which her border-crossing appeal found an echo – and complex elaboration – in the visual, surface and narrative qualities of these two films, in which the crossing of racial and sexual borders form an explicit part of the movies’ content.

Piccadilly

In Piccadilly (GB 1929) Wong plays Shosho, an Asian femme fatale who becomes the new dancing star of the nightclub Piccadilly and the lover of the club’s owner. At the beginning of the film, we find Shosho living in the Limehouse district of London, where workers, sailors and migrants reside. She works as a scullery maid in the nightclub where the dancing partners Mabel and Vic are the star attraction. While washing dishes, Shosho distracts her fellow workers in the kitchen by doing her own dance, which ultimately gets her fired by the club’s owner Valentine Wilmot with whom the star dancer Mabel is romantically involved. Meanwhile, Mabel’s dancing partner Vic wants to persuade Mabel to go to the USA with him to dance there. Mabel refuses, but when Vic leaves Piccadilly business drops and Wilmot has to find a new star attraction. He hires Shosho who becomes an instant success and the club’s new star. Wilmot falls in love with her and a drama of jealousy is set into motion between Mabel, Shosho, Wilmot, and Shosho’s Chinese friend, Jim.⁸

Although the film is named Piccadilly after the club, the Limehouse area of London also plays a significant role in the film. Piccadilly, of course, is a location in the West End of London, yet in early twentieth-century London Limehouse in the East End was the site that housed the greatest concentrations of the city’s Chinese population. The film is set in both locations, with the club being located in London’s West End nightlife district and in East London’s more proletarian, maritime and ethnically mixed milieu. In Limehouse, as in London in general, the Chinese population remained a small minority until the 1950s. In 1930, for example, approximately 100 Chinese families lived in Limehouse, as part of a mixed community of tradesmen, workers, and transient sailors. What made Limehouse distinctive from the rest of London, however, was precisely this social and ethnic comingling: ‘This was the most cosmopolitan district of the most cosmopolitan city in Britain’ (Seed, 2006: 59). Although there was not a territorially distinct and ethnically homogenous Chinatown in Limehouse, by the 1920s the cosmopolitan associations linked to the neighbourhood had led to this part of London often being figured as an exotic and exciting place in novels and films. Sax Rohmer, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Wallace all chose Limehouse as the location for Chinese criminal activities, for instance. Meanwhile, in the West End, nightclubs and entertainment shows provided further zones of potential social hybridity. As historian Judith Walkowitz has recounted, London nightclubs like the film’s eponymous Piccadilly were locations where liberated sexuality as well as cross-class and cross-racial affairs could be experienced (Walkowitz, 2012: 223; see also Mulvey, 2012: 92). In Walkowitz’s account, dance specifically played a major role as a cultural expression of cosmopolitanism during this era in London. This was the case, she argues, with figures like the American emigrée dancer Maud Allen, whose appeal was shaped by the blending of two historic meanings of pre-war cosmopolitanism: ‘first, a pleasurable, stylized form of imaginative expatriation, associated with privileged mobility; and second, a debased condition of, hybridity, displacement, and racial – degeneration – all the dangers of the unplaced’ (Walkowitz, 2003: 340).

The film is set in this urban context, but we cannot read Piccadilly simply as a reflection of the dynamics of cosmopolitan London. Both the fictitious locations of the club and Shosho’s home are located in districts that carried specific connotations at the time of the film’s production but the movie also draws upon both urban facts and legends to construct its own visual atmosphere. The two locations serve as poles that organize the film’s cross-cultural dynamics. For, as the protagonist Shosho moves from one site to another, she is asked to shift roles and costumes, moving from one ‘fictitious’ representation of the East End to another fictitious representation of herself as an ‘Easterner’ in the heterotopic world of the West End Piccadilly nightclub.⁹ There, the pleasure and danger associated with cosmopolitan transience constitute the club audience’s attraction to her (and also, by extension, that of the audience of the film).

In this socio-geographic context, Anna May Wong portrays Shosho as a deviant woman, who deploys her mysterious femininity and ‘destructive’ personality to occupy the position of the ‘other’, codified as not reconcilable with European culture.¹⁰ In doing so, the boundaries between deviant and acceptable sexuality are conflated with the racial boundaries associated with London’s urban structure.

While the influential British feminist media theorist Laura Mulvey states that ‘Wong’s performance in Piccadilly revolves around details of gesture and look, mediating between the texture of the film and the emotional events of the story’ (Mulvey, 2012: 98), I would suggest that exotic performance and ambiguous cross-dressing are actually the zones that constitute the film’s core. Mulvey claims that:

Piccadilly essentially celebrates Anna May Wong’s photogénie – the quality that French theorists of the 1920s identified as specific to the cinema, encapsulated in the relation of the camera to, for instance, an object, a landscape or a face. The love story itself further enhances photogénie: emotion is materialized in its turn. This is a lingering cinema, delayed by affect rather than driven by action, in which the literal figure of the star has to mutate into a figuration of feeling. (Mulvey, 2012: 98)

However, I would argue that the multiple layers of masqueraded performances in Piccadilly complicate the notion of ‘Anna May Wong’s photogénie’. Because the film frequently draws the viewer’s attention to staged performances (dance) and the preparation of these performances (costuming), the performativity of the racialized sexualizations that it stages are set into dramatic relief. These self-referential stagings of performative media situations within a performative medium – cinema – demand that the viewer (and the critic) unpack the ways in which sexual deviance and race conflate in the film. They also demand that one attend to how the film frames these conflations as part of a doubly performative act: the film itself and the dancing performed within the film’s diegesis. The film’s star, Wong plays the key role in articulating this ‘double’ play, since the dynamics of cross-dressing and exotic performance in the film’s narrative mirror her own engagement with the film itself. She is a professional actress hired to play a character (Shosho) who is in turn hired to play an exotic version of herself on stage.

(S)exotics in Piccadilly

Shosho’s dancing lies, literally, at the centre of Piccadilly; in seeking to pull apart the complex ways in which the film negotiates themes of race and sexuality, we must thus inquire into the nature of Shosho’s dancing. Most obviously, her performance in the Piccadilly club does not reflect her diasporic identity in London (where she makes a home in Limehouse’s Chinatown), but instead stages a phantasmagoric world of the oriental Far East. Her dance, in a revealing costume in front of the white audience, is hardly an innovation of the 1920s. It draws, rather, from the discourse and the practices of exotic dance in the western world (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Exotic dance in Piccadilly.

Artistically speaking, Shosho’s dance is rather unimpressive. She mimics the peacock dance, which was popular in China, Bangladesh and Cambodia, in an improvised and unprofessional way: making small steps from one side to another, waving her arms, maybe imitating the waves of the long ribbon dance; she thus refers to Chinese dancing traditions without actually performing them.¹¹ Seen in this way, it is obviously not Shosho’s dance, but her body and the promise of exotic sexuality that are the actual attractions of the event. By conflating erotics and exotics in the vehicle of Shosho’s dance, the film plays with a specific form of othering. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th century exotic dance acts featuring skimpy costumes began to be performed at colonial exhibitions and soon appeared on the major stages of European capitals: ‘The first exotic dancers (in the West) were thus perceived as erotic, and the first erotic dancers wore the veil of exoticism’ (Staszak, 2008: 137). The perceived excessiveness of exotic dance emerged as a figure of thought in the West that played a central role in the modern construction of the sexual other. Artistic mediations of dancers’ movements functioned as tools that aided in delimiting the excess of the ‘other’s’ body semantically and in controlling the transgressive potential of that body. At the same time, the observation of the dancing body also furnished a means of appropriating the female body in ways that were linked to sexual arousal and conquest.¹²

Mabel and Vic’s performances are staged very differently from Shosho’s in several ways that all serve to mark Shosho’s as ‘other’. Their dancing routines follow a strict choreography which includes different modern dance styles like tap and Gilda Grey’s signature dance, the shimmy. Mabel and Vic perform these dances as a heterosexual pair whose conjoined and organized bodies glide and spin in a disciplined, rehearsed and educated fashion through space.¹³ On the other hand, the film suggests that Shosho’s body has never been tamed by a school: ‘What strikes me about this moment is that, for a scene of seduction, Shosho’s movements are somewhat halting and tentative. She looks inexperienced; she’s smiling freely and joyfully, not coyly or flirtatiously. The dancing feels impulsive …’ (Tu, 2004: 17).

As described by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, neither Shosho’s impromptu dance in the scullery nor her star turn on the big stage seem artistically impressive. She does not, unlike Mabel and Vic, exhibit dancing skills. She does not, for instance, cover the full space of the stage with a variety of practised, choreographed corporeal extensions linked to a consistent rhythm, but instead remains fixed in a very small space such that the gaze of both audience and camera focus on her body rather than on her dancing abilities. In keeping with these differences in their dancing styles, the camera work in Shosho’s dance scene also contrasts starkly with the filming techniques deployed when Mabel and Vic dance. In Mabel and Vic’s dance scene the camera moves with the couple, zooming into specific body parts, like Vic’s tap-dancing feet. During Shosho’s dance scene, by contrast, the camera remains very still; the shots are long and the point of view rarely shifts. Both the filmic techniques as well as Shosho’s dance techniques make it apparent that it is not important to recognize her skill but rather her ‘nature’. The audience is enthralled by the undisciplined movements of her exotic dance, which emanate from her individual body and not from a school of dance, or a social context that places her in a direct relationship with a dancing partner.¹⁴

Shosho’s singular nature, rather than her ability to fit into a rhythm, or socially prescribed set of choreographed movements is what seduces every spectator. Mabel, by comparison, cannot establish herself as a solo dancer without a male partner. As a white woman, she needs a man and is dependent on men, whereas Shosho, the Asian femme fatale, becomes a prototype of embodied, erotic immorality. This immorality, figured in the dance, also plays itself out in Shosho’s flagrant lack of empathy for the film’s other characters and her tendency to ruthlessly manipulate them. Jim and Wilmot both risk their lives to be with her, and Shosho willingly hurts Mabel and Jim’s feelings. Mabel, in contrast, is a modern and confident woman, but also loyal and empathetic: she rejects Vic’s offer to go with him to improve her career abroad and stays loyally instead with Wilmot. When Wilmot is seduced by Shosho, Mabel is desperate to win him back. She weakly threatens Shosho with a weapon, but ultimately fails to follow through. This failure affirms Mabel’s soft, feminine nature, which contrasts with Shosho’s brazen, selfish individualism.

The film thus roots Shosho’s sexual otherness in her racial otherness, which makes itself manifest in her dance and lack of compliance to social and emotional norms. This intersectional dimension of sexualizing the racial ‘other’ and exoticizing certain sexual practices lies at the core of the term ‘sexoticization’, as proposed by the editors of this journal issue: an exoticization constructed on the basis of spurious claims of originary difference based on race. Shosho cannot be part of the western world, as Valentine Wilmot states in the prologue to the film. An Englishman, who lived for several years in Shanghai, passes by an inn that is run by Wilmot and they get involved in a short conversation. The latter had given up the management of the Piccadilly and as the guest comments that he left China because of his longing for the Piccadilly, Wilmot replies: ‘I don’t think I’d ever have left Piccadilly if it hadn’t been for China.’ With ‘China’ Wilmot means Shosho who is conflated with an entire country. She is not seen as an individual woman but as the embodiment of an entity, which is not reconcilable with the world of Piccadilly – the club that stands in contrast to western cosmopolitanism; this dynamic, as we have seen, is articulated in the filming of Shosho’s dance.

Yet while Piccadilly reproduces orientalist stereotypes of the (s)exotic dancer, I suggest it also demonstrates their artificiality and perhaps even pliancy by highlighting the performative acts in which they feature as just that: performance. Shosho enacts otherness through her dance performance. The idea of modern nakedness, as Anne Cheng has pointed out, is not only to be understood in the context of imperial history. The club ‘stage as a mass cultural entertainment compared to ethnography produce very different relations between the subject and object of gaze, as well as alter the viewing process’ (Cheng, 2011: 38). The stage of mass cultural entertainment and of the cinema is not bound to the illusions of scientific objectivity, but explicitly calls for the circulation of desire and draws its audience to performance through performances. Shosho can, therefore simultaneously play the submissive dancer and the femme fatale, but the ease with which she crosses from one role to the ‘other’ displays both roles as markedly performative.

Cross-dressings

The suggestive portrayal of exotic dance as performance complicates the claim of authenticity associated with the exoticism of exhibitions like the human zoos of the 19th century. In terms of exotic dancing, the emerging interest in the figure of Salomé and the Dance of the Seven Veils, performed in the tradition of orientalist fantasies during the late 19th century, reflects an increasing understanding of ‘exotic’ choreographic movements as not necessarily literally pinned to racial difference.¹⁵ For as white women started to transgress the boundaries of their bourgeois lives by performing exotic dances themselves, the theatrical components of exoticization were often highlighted in an explicit and spectacular manner (see also Studlar, 1997). In this manner, erotic difference manifested itself as associated with originary otherness, but an awareness grew that this otherness could also manifest itself performatively. The demonic enchantress who was a common trope of western culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries must, therefore, be regarded in a nuanced fashion. The deviance of the femme fatale blends with the figure of Salomé into the racial abnormality of the ‘oriental’ woman. Yet dance as a performance equally foregrounds nature (the matter of the body) and culture (the masquerade, the staging, the body movements); it thus also provides a site in which the conscious, cultivated performance of otherness might threaten to unmask myths of ‘sexotic’ otherness by bringing tropes of authenticity and artificiality into an uncomfortably intimate relationship with one another.¹⁶

Piccadilly repeatedly draws the viewer’s attention to the potentially slippery nature of these performances, for example, in the ways in which the film highlights Shosho’s costumes. As she becomes a more and more successful star at the nightclub, she begins to dress in a new way. At the start of the film Shosho appears as a poor flapper, with a bob, short skirts and runs in her stockings. As her fame grows, Wong’s dress becomes visibly more expensive and more exuberant: she dons cloaks, flamboyant hats and embroidered purses that mark her as part of a more affluent cosmopolitan milieu. The film arranges these different types of styles as part of a larger set of dress-up activities, a set of cross-dressings that move between east and west London, the East and the West, on stage and off stage.

Each of her guises in the film appears as part of a set of performative roles that can be slipped in and out of: does Shosho cross-dress as the exotic dancer and the femme fatale? We, as the cinema audience, who have seen Shosho as a modern working-class woman, know about the transformation, the staging, and the artificiality of her entire set of performances. Taking up Judith Butler’s notion that gender parody is a ‘parody … of the very notion of an original’ (Butler, 1990: 188, emphasis in original). I suggest that Shosho’s cross-dressings, appropriations, and imitations thereby begin to question the very idea of an exotic origin, even as the film appears to overlap neatly with stereotypes of authenticity as detailed earlier. If we think of Joan Riviere’s (1929) concept of ‘Womanliness as masquerade’ in which the femininity of certain women functions as a mask, we can describe Shosho’s cross-dressing as ‘Exotica as Masquerade’. Riviere describes the feminine behaviour of intellectual women as a mask women wear in order to defend themselves against the hatred from men who perceive them as rivals (1929). Shosho similarly performs exotic sexuality as a mask in order to arouse interest from white men without necessarily appearing to upset the social order even though as a single woman with career ambitions, she might be perceived as a threat. Her ‘foreignness’ in some ways mitigates this threat in the eyes of the white, male audiences she entrances, allowing her added leeway in advancing her social and economic goals.

In fact, in an interesting gender reversal, it is Jim, Shosho’s male Chinese friend (who is in love with her) that appears as the character in Piccadilly who most fully embodies the characteristics of the ‘oriental’ women. The film presents him as desexualized and emasculated. When Wilmot buys the costume for Shosho’s dance performance in Limehouse, he wants her to try it on. She refuses and asks Jim to present the costume for her: ‘Jim – you put it on.’ As Yiman Wang states, in her excellent analysis of Anna May Wong’s yellow yellowface performance, Shosho ‘makes it clear that she is the one who selects the corporeal signs’ (Wang, 2005: 174). The desexualization of the ‘oriental’ man often served as a prerequisite for the sexual conquest of the ‘oriental’ woman by the white man in western popular culture. For in staging the ‘oriental’ man as sexually submissive, the figure of the white male could symbolically enhance the myth of his sexual power (Figure 3). Consequently, the body of the ‘oriental’ woman appeared in popular narratives and visual culture to be reserved for the white man.¹⁷

Figure 3.

Cross-dressing in Piccadilly.

In the film, Shosho herself does not take Jim seriously as a man. There is one moment when she kisses him briefly after he brings her the newspaper that heralds her as the ‘Chinese Dancing Wonder’. But when she kisses him, she covers his face with the newspaper, making him a passive and distanced recipient of her bodily contact. He is stunned by the kiss, enjoying it quietly, whereas she immediately gets up to affix her trophy – the newspaper article – to her wall. This is the only moment in which she shows affection towards Jim. Otherwise she treats him as her servant, commands him and humiliates him in front of other men. When Wilmot leaves Shosho’s apartment after their romantic date, Jim accompanies him outside the door. He knows what has happened in the apartment, but he still wants to help his rival light his cigarette by giving him a lighted match. Wilmot, however, is faster and lights up himself. The lighting of a cigarette is an obvious symbol for masculinity and Jim appears defeated in the contested realm of masculine potency.¹⁸

After Wilmot’s departure Mabel enters Shosho’s apartment. She begs Shosho to give up Wilmot but Shosho coldly humiliates Mabel by saying that she is too old for Wilmot. The argument gets aggressive, with Shosho reaching for a dagger and Mabel picking up a gun. The next morning Shosho is found dead. In the film’s final scene the events of the night are reconstructed and it turns out that Jim – whom the police officer only calls ‘the Chinese boy’ – murdered Shosho. The multiple humiliations forced upon Jim by Shosho and white men function as a substitute for the lack of the submissive exotic woman. As Shosho crosses the racial border and seduces a white man, Jim is effeminized and has to cross-dress as a woman to fill the void. Shosho, on the other hand, ‘undresses’ her identity as diasporic, modern woman and puts on the phantasmatic exotic dance costume. Shosho appropriates the codes of white women and uses her power on Mabel, Wilmot, and Jim, forcing the latter into the role of the submissive exotic woman. The figure of the exotic woman is a performance in the film, a performance that is played out by both Shosho and Jim. The audience witnesses this play in terms of sartorial dressings and undressings, but none of the costume changes appear to point to an external reality in which the sign of the costume collapses easily onto the body of the wearer.

Fear of miscegenation

Shosho’s sexualization as a femme fatale is, in this manner, paralleled by her social exclusion, which introduces the fear of miscegenation as a topic into the film’s structure. Even if Shosho plays deftly with performance throughout the film, ultimately, her death succeeds in removing her from the dominant, heterosexual structure represented by the pairing of Wilmot and Mabel. This process of separation plays itself out not only in relation to Shosho and Jim, but also appearing as a theme even in seemingly minor moments throughout the film. The exclusion of non-white people along the lines of race is especially prominent in one brief scene: Shosho brings Wilmot to her Piccadilly, as she calls it, a bar, where sailors and workers from all over the world dance and get drunk. A black man comes into the bar and dances with a white woman (Figure 4). The bar owner intervenes and he insults the man: ‘Yer know that’s not allowed in my place – dancing with a white girl. Get out!’ The man leaves and the owner starts to yell at the woman: ‘Are yer blind, or wot?’ After this scene Shosho and Wilmot leave the bar abruptly. Although London and Limehouse appear to be cosmopolitan places, the sexual boundary between white and non-white people is not to be crossed. That is also the reason why the kiss between Shosho and Wilmot that was initially planned to follow this scene was ultimately cut from the film.

Figure 4.

Fear of miscegenation in Piccadilly.

Anxieties over miscegenation existed in Britain before the First World War, but increased significantly after the war ‘when the defining of Englishness became a particular concern’ (Bland, 2005: 51). Although these anxieties never took legislative form as in the USA, interracial relationships aroused much hostility in the UK. This anxiety was predominantly directed toward white women because in the early 20th century there were few women of colour in Britain. Chinese men in London, on the other hand, were often associated with drugs and underworld crime, a prejudice rooted in the racist ideology of the ‘yellow peril’. However, in Piccadilly, it is a woman who threatens the ‘racial purity’ of English society. Shosho is demonized as part of the underworld and pathologized in terms of her deviant sexuality.

A similar notion is manifest in the following contemporary film review of Piccadilly from Germany:

Dupont stages the two big love scenes with similar subtlety. But in Anna May Wong he has an artist whose delicate self-possession is tapped to its full potential in every moment, an erotic flower of delicious charm. She carries the drama with aplomb. Since the excellent German director was able to achieve an effect of great style, an interesting game emerges: ‘the world of the night and the underworld’, showing us places and things that, although they fascinate us, are, however – luckily – not accessible. (Bengon, 1929, author’s translation)

The director, the review claims, shows us Anna May Wong as an ‘erotic flower’ who displays her love with exquisite grace. The reviewer understands the staged character of the ‘game’ and the playfulness of the phantasy. The phantasy takes place in the ‘underworld’ and the world of the night where the clarity of the daylight does not exist – a world beyond enlightenment. Exotic sexual encounters in an imagined orient are alluring, but the actual presence of non-white people, the spatial closeness, and the possibility of miscegenation in Europe appears to present a threat to the preservation of the white marital union.¹⁹ Shosho as a solo dancer is capable of enthralling by herself, but she remains isolated both on stage and, ultimately, in her personal life. She is deemed unfit for marital union with a white man.

Shosho transgresses the line of racial miscegenation and the prescribed role for women as sexually passive but this transgression cannot go unpunished. Her agency, which also defines her deviance, threatens to disrupt western patriarchal society. Order is restored, however by Shosho’s death. Firstly, the threat of an interracial relationship is eliminated; secondly, the ‘exotic’ woman no longer has power over men and white women. After Shosho’s death, the world of the film changes dramatically: the emphasis on costume changes and the ambiguous interplay of surfaces and signs disappears as soon as Wong is no longer on screen. Moreover, by the end of the film both Shosho and Jim are dead, such that the two marginal and liminal protagonists of the film have destroyed themselves by their own hands (Jim having killed himself and Shosho having ostensibly provoked her own demise). With these characters gone, Mabel and Wilmot reunite since the threats to their ‘normal’ union have been removed.

The film thus unconsciously exposes the artificiality of racialized images, as we have seen, while ultimately restoring white dominance in the end. These two aspects of the film, I suggest, rest uneasily with one another, hence the break that the spectator senses in the film’s visual language after Shosho’s final exit. While we can only speculate about Wong’s agency in building the role and the potentially subversive elements that we have detected in the film’s depiction of performative identity, the fact that the film was made by a German emigré director and featured an emigrée Asian American means that it necessarily deals closely with issues of transnational crossing. This fact, coupled with the conflation of on- and off-screen elements in a work that specifically makes performing its subject, renders the film’s on-screen confluence of elements even more intriguing. Before drawing any final conclusions, however, I turn now to a second film in which Wong stars, Shanghai Express, which she filmed after returning to the USA from Europe.

Shanghai Express

The issues of cross-dressing, appropriation, and miscegenation also take centre stage in Shanghai Express (1932), another film directed by an expat German-speaking (Austrian) director, Josef von Sternberg. In this film, the crossing of sexual and racial borders is not connected to the cultural history of exotic dance, but rather to the crossing of spatial boundaries: the film takes place in a train. Sitting in the first-class carriage of the train from Peiping (Beijing) to Shanghai, are a motley crew of characters that can be read as a spread of representative western modern types: a British doctor Captain Donald ‘Doc’ Harvey, a French army major, an American businessman (actually the high-ranking rebel agent Chinese American Henry Chang), a British priest and the elderly Mrs Haggarty who runs a boarding house in Shanghai.

The only two occupants of the train carriage who fall out of this typology are the female figures played by Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong. Dietrich’s Magdalen is a courtesan who selectively doles out favors for men between Shanghai and Beijing. Wong plays Hui Fei, a Chinese courtesan. In the narrative, in order to survive in China, Dietrich’s character has taken on the role of Shanghai Lily, an exoticized cold-hearted femme fatale version of herself, lending an ‘orientalness’ to her sexuality and in her role as a courtesan. Wong’s character Hui Fei, on the other hand, is a Chinese courtesan played by a Chinese American, who differentiates herself from the other Chinese portrayed in the film by virtue of the fact that Wong’s character takes up western manners and converses confidently in both English and Chinese.

Henry Chang stops the train in order to find a passenger important enough to blackmail his aide out of prison. He finds the right person in Magdalen’s former lover Doc Harvey. When Chang tries to force Magdalen to accompany him to his palace, Doc knocks him down. Chang rapes Hui Fei after his advances are rebuffed by Magdalen. Eventually Magdalen/Shanghai Lily agrees to accompany Chang after he wants to avenge himself by blinding Doc. Hui Fei, however, stabs Chang in revenge for the rape and frees Magdalen. After arriving in Shanghai, Magdalen and Doc reunite.

Wong here does not appear as the star, as in Piccadilly. Her role, however, is pivotal to the narrative. Gina Marchetti has described Hui Fei as ‘Lily’s Asian foil’ who ‘positions herself as a rival to Doc, as the “dark” intimate of the sexually ambivalent Lily’ (Marchetti, 1993: 62f.). Marchetti’s analysis focuses on the threat of captivity that emanates from Chang and to a certain degree from Hui Fei, a threat she links to ‘yellow peril’. I will, however, discuss instead the ways in which cross-dressing practices, surface reflections and cultural hybridity complicate readings of the film in terms of clearly defined cultural, or racially marked categories. I will first address the depiction of Dietrich’s Magdalen and her masquerade as Shanghai Lily before turning to the role that Wong plays as Dietrich’s co-star. It is in the role of Shanghai Lily, which crosses geographic as well as sexual boundaries, that Dietrich appears as exotic. And it is Magdalen’s racial cross-dressing that enables her to transgress western sexual norms. This racial cross-dressing, I suggest, is also staged through her encounter with Wong’s character Hui Fei.

When Doc Harvey boards the train, his fellow travellers introduce Shanghai Lily as a ‘notorious coaster’. As Harvey asks his comrades what a coaster is, they reply: ‘It’s a woman who lives by her wits along the China coast.’ After the missionary Carmichael refuses to share a compartment with the Chinese courtesan Hui Fei, Shanghai Lily moves in with her. The two women smoke, listen to music on the gramophone and don’t trouble themselves with the morals of the other passengers, from whom they maintain a certain haughty distance. As Mrs Haggarty tells them about her guesthouse in Shanghai that allows only the most respectable guests, both show no interest. Hui Fei says to her: ‘I must confess I don’t quite know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house, Mrs Haggarty.’ Shanghai Lily as well as Hui Fei are, because of their seemingly deviant sexuality, marginalized in the travel group.

Their sexual deviance is paralleled with a ‘racial impurity’: Hui Fei is not a ‘normal’ Chinese and Magdalen as Shanghai Lily is sexualized through her cross-cultural adoption of an ‘oriental’ alter ego, who professes a distinct lack of interest in traditional forms of marriage. Doc feels that the many men in Magdalen’s past are an obstacle to their reunion and wishes that she did not have any other men but she answers: ‘[F]ive years in China is a long time.’ The otherness of the country allows her to act in a manner that is sexually different. She exoticizes herself as ‘the notorious white flower of China’. In Shanghai Express, Magdalen/Shanghai Lily thereby generates sexual ambiguity through her deployment of masquerade.²⁰ In the train, which like the movie is called the Shanghai Express, first-class people from colonial Europe meet one another: Brits, Germans, and French. Here, the rules of both the West and of China apply. Magdalen comments on her transformation to Shanghai Lily to Doc as follows: ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.’ Dressed up with a veil, a feather boa, silk gloves, and necklaces, Shanghai Lily uses sartorial codes of transvestite performances.²¹ The veil functions, on the one hand as a symbol for erotic play; on the other hand it symbolizes chastity, as the veil is used for nuns and brides (see Garber, 1992: 338). Indeterminate gender identity can also be read as a veil, as Marjorie Garber claims when discussing ‘The Erotics of Cultural Appropriation’ (Garber, 1992: 336). Dietrich’s costuming thus functions as cross-dressing on different levels: She applies ambiguous female codes of dressing and sexualizes herself by exoticizing her looks. Her masquerade draws not only from gendered imaginations, but racialized ones as well. As a femme fatale who does not belong to one man, her Chinese Alter Ego enables her to transgress patriarchal gender norms. Moreover, Shanghai Lily’s lovers enjoy the pleasures of being with a sexually exotic woman while not risking the threat of miscegenation.

Like Dietrich, the ‘real’ exotic woman, Hui Fei, is also a liminal figure and appears in multiple respects as a loaded counterpart to Magdalen/Shanghai Lily. She is a self-assertive courtesan who mediates and literally translates between the Chinese and the white passengers of the train, yet she is also treated as an outcast. After being raped by the general Henry Chang, she wants to commit suicide, but Magdalen dissuades her. Instead, Hui Fei kills Chang, freeing Magdalen. As the only Chinese woman in the film,²² she is confined to a marginalized status among the Chinese and the white passengers; she finds acceptance only from the equally ambiguous Shanghai Lily/Magdalen. But unlike Magdalen, she cannot be saved by love.

In the artificial world of the train compartment, where strangers live together for a limited amount of time in a mobile space, Hui Fei and Magdalen follow their own rules. They are excluded from the rest of the group and establish a third space in which hybridity and translations are practised.²³ Hui Fei (who serves as a cultural broker between East and West) and Shanghai Lily (who masquerades as ‘Oriental’) are boundary crossers on many levels. Shanghai Lily’s sexuality remains ambiguous for the passengers of the train. They do not know that she offered herself to the general in order to save Doc and it appears to them as if she voluntarily acquiesced to him. On the other hand, Mr Carmichael watches her as she prays for Doc’s safety. And he is the only one who defends her against the other passengers, which leaves them stunned. As Doc and Magdalen rekindle their love, the latter begins to de-exoticize herself. She transforms from playing the exotic and sinning courtesan into the Christian (Mary) Magdalen(e).²⁴ Cross-dressing must not only be thought of in terms of gender, but, I argue here, can be also imagined in terms of ethnic-crossing; the act of appropriating the codes of the (alleged) ‘other’ presents itself as possibility for liminality and change, even as it may simultaneously make use of stereotypes (see also Sieg, 2009: 2).

As Anne Cheng points out in The Melancholy of Race, ‘the realization of agency in drag (be it racial or gender) is borne out of a maneuver between opposites: that is, in drag, one is neither “just acting like” nor “really being” but some complicated combination of the two’ (Cheng, 2001: 72). Gina Marchetti notes in her analysis of Shanghai Express, ‘Lily, the Caucasian blond always dressed in black, and Hui Fei, the brunette Asian always dressed in light colors, visually function as mirror images, pictorially complementing each other’ (Marchetti, 1993: 64). Hui Fei and Lily both appropriate the codes of the ‘other’, becoming an ethnic hybrid of sexual deviance, united in the space of their ‘third’ cabin. However, as a Chinese American actor, Wong performs a complex double play: She poses as Chinese without performing ‘Chineseness’, although for the film audience she passes as Chinese and her acting is not perceived as crossover.

Melting pot as cultural cross-dressing

One might say that as a transnational Chinese American actress, Anna May Wong’s performance here invokes the metaphor of the melting pot, which itself can be understood as cultural cross-dressing (see Cheng, 2001: 72). Her portrayal stands in contrast to the figure of Henry Chang who was played by Swedish American actor Warner Oland. Oland was famous for his yellowface portrayals of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. In Shanghai Express the gambler Sam Salt and Chang have an interesting conversation about his racial identity:

Sam Salt: I can’t make head or tail out of you, Mr. Chang. Are you Chinese, are you white, or what are you? Chang: My mother was Chinese, my father was white. Salt: You look more like a white man. Chang: I’m not proud of my white blood. Salt: You’re not, are you? Chang: No, I’m not. Salt: Rather be a Chinaman. Chang: Yes.

Oland as a white man in yellowface playing a half Chinese, half white man is not authentically Chinese. This inauthenticity is discussed, on the level of narrative, as a product of miscegenation. Not surprisingly, this miscegenation is conflated with his role as a Janus-like, two-faced rebel agent – a connection that Garber also notes in her major book on cross-dressing Vested Interests: ‘Actor, diplomat, transvestite, spy. Treason is often associated with “acting ability,” the ability to delude others and, on occasion, oneself’ (Garber, 1992: 255). Unlike Oland’s racial masquerade, however, Wong’s racial mimicry stays unnoticed and she passes for the audience as Chinese.

But Chang, as a mixed-race character, poses a problem for an audience concerned with issues of miscegenation in terms of his relationship to the culturally mixed characters Lily and Hui Fei. Linda Williams addresses this issue in Playing the Race Card: ‘Under the prohibitions of the Production Code, the very existence of a mixed-race character on the screen became problematic proof of the prior “crime” of miscegenation. Such characters automatically opened up the vexed question of with whom this mixed-raced person should mate’ (Williams, 2001: 181). Von Sternberg’s film negotiates multiple threats of miscegenation on various levels. Chang brands the German opium dealer Eric Baum with a hot iron poker and tries to blind Doc, both acts of violence that function as symbolic substitutes for rape. Chang fails to captivate Lily but violates Hui Fei. For the audience, the mixed-race/yellowfaced Chang poses the difficult question: should he couple with the white Magdalen, or with the ‘oriental’ Hui Fei? Neither option is free from cross-cultural anxiety. Adding to the complexity, Hui Fei may not be mixed-race but her cultural hybridity represents the threat of interracial relation itself.²⁵ The borders of race and gender are reconstituted by Chang’s rape of Wong’s character. For through this act the film ends up associating Chang clearly with his ‘Chinese’ quality. Sexually, he comes together (forcibly) with Wong’s character; this conjoining of the two leads to a reduction of the characters’ previously emphasized cultural and/or racial ambiguity: both are cast firmly through the act of violence as Chinese. As Chang and Fei become constituted as Chinese through these plot developments, Dietrich’s character – Wong’s counterpart – becomes white: Hui Fei loses her sexual and cultural closeness to Lily and Lily chooses to become Doc’s respectable lover.

Doubled veils: Entangled makings of Piccadilly and Shanghai Express

The dynamics that I have identified in the foregoing sections are not limited to issues of narrative. Rather, I suggest, that von Sternberg’s staging of surfaces and costume throughout the film serve, as in Piccadilly, to highlight cross-cultural ambiguities. Let us look at the different acts of mimicry in both films. Here we can see the distinctions between different forms of mimicry that Anne McClintock has usefully developed: Whereas drag is a ‘theatrical parading of identity as difference’, passing means ‘the careful masking of ambiguity, difference as identity’ (McClintock, 1995: 65, emphasis in original). Shosho in Piccadilly is a Chinese immigrant living in London played by Chinese American actress Anna May Wong. Shosho is a culturally hybrid character. She lives in the Limehouse district in the Eastern part of London, works in the West End, and crosses class boundaries. She is a modern flapper girl who poses on stage as an exotic temple dancer. Shosho rejects the role of the sexual object off stage, pushing Jim into cross-dressing as the Oriental woman.

Passing also comes into play in Shanghai Express. Wong passes as the Chinese character of Hui Fei who also adopts the codes of a sexually liberated modern woman. Magdalen culturally masquerades herself as an exotic ‘other’ in order to seduce her lovers. She does not obscure her looks like Warner Oland who uses a yellowface masquerade to pose as half Chinese, but appropriates the codes of the allegedly sexually deviant ‘oriental’ woman. The practice of appropriating exoticized sexuality as an intertextual connection between Shanghai Express and Piccadilly finds an echo in the films on an aesthetic level, as I have suggested, specifically in the use of expressionist cinematography and the treatment of light and shadow. Magdalen as Shanghai Lily is staged with a black-and-white chiascuro cinematography, which combines frequently with the effects of ornamental shadows.²⁶ She wears a doubled veil, two costumes, one made of fabric, the other of light and darkness (Figure 5). The aesthetics of the cinematography refer to the multiple layers of performativity and construction that are at work here, including the sexually ambiguous figure of Marlene Dietrich playing Magdalen who exoticizes herself as Shanghai Lily.

Figure 5.

Doubled veil in Shanghai Express.

This kind of aesthetic is also used in Piccadilly. The photography works heavily with ornamental shadows, adding a veil of ambivalence and eroticism unto the image of Wong (Figure 6). The veil of light and shadow is visible, but immaterial, is both existent and non-existent, referring to the character of illusion in the performance of gender and race, the acts of cross-overs and passings, the double game with authenticity and artificiality, and ultimately the nature of cinema itself as a ‘shadow play’.²⁷

Figure 6.

Doubled veil in Piccadilly.

By masquerading Wong and Dietrich in this manner through camerawork, the films deal with their own artificiality and staging in an extraordinarily self-referential manner. This aesthetic interweaving can be understood both as emphasizing the cultural ambiguities that are inherent to the plots, as well as reflecting the related, entangled histories of transatlantic film. The spaces of the Shanghai Express train, the Piccadilly club, and the Limehouse neighbourhood function not only as heterotopia, as Laura Mulvey has pointed out, but also refer to the transnational mobility of the film industry. Films as commodity products were consumed by audiences on both sides of the ocean and therefore had to cater to tastes that were not geared to one specific nation: they aimed at cross-over appeal.

The directors Josef von Sternberg and Ewald André Dupont from Austria and Germany started to work on both continents in the later 1920s. The former promoted Marlene Dietrich as an ‘exotic star’ in Hollywood in 1930, two years after the photograph of Wong and Dietrich photograph was shot in Berlin, as described at the outset of this article. At that point, the gay and lesbian scene was thriving in the German capital and Dietrich’s roles as cabaret singers who cross-dress in The Blue Angel (Germany 1930) and Morocco (USA 1930) deliberately cultivated a sexually ambiguous public image. Anna May Wong’s love life remained mysterious to the public and was subject to many rumors, including one that she and Dietrich had an affair. This rumor was, in fact, provoked by Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph, perhaps in part thanks to the ways in which the image alludes suggestively to cross-dressing, masquerade and ambiguous boundaries by physically entangling the three actresses. The choice to cast Dietrich and Wong as Magdalen/Shanghai Lily and Hui Fei in Shanghai Express especially appears to consciously play with and capitalize on the salacious rumors about the two actors, intertwining the transvestic acts of Dietrich and Wong with their performances in drag on screen.

These myriad entanglements suggest that the image of a racial and the sexual ‘other’ is not merely constructed as feminized, as Edward Said claimed in Orientalism (1978).²⁸ In examining these films, we have observed how codes of the ‘other’ can also be appropriated and denaturalized in a much more polyvalent and ambiguous manner, and hence complicate the notion of a homogenously represented ‘other’. In this article, I located Wong’s double star turn in Piccadilly, as both the star of the film and the star performer in the film’s narrative, within the historical context of western images of exotic dances. By appropriating the characteristics of the ideal exotic woman, Wong denaturalizes and subverts – while simultaneously reproducing – these characteristics. The film Piccadilly, I argued, reproduces orientalist iconography, but by focusing on the figure of the cross-dresser it exposes the generic artificiality of the exotic dance. Moreover, Wong portrayed an aestheticized abstraction of an exotic woman that no ‘real’ exotic woman could embody. Only a person who is simultaneously unauthentic, but passes as authentic can portray an ideal fiction. This conundrum itself highlights the multiple levels of boundary ‘crossings’ that govern the dynamics of these films. By casting Anna May Wong in the roles of Shosho in Piccadilly and Hui Fei in Shanghai Express two principal modes of cross-dressing are staged: passing and crossing.

In Shanghai Express the structure of crossing and passing is even more complex. Here, dance is no longer foregrounded as a site in which racial and sexual stereotypes display themselves as theatrical performance. Instead, von Sternberg’s film replaces the stage with the train as a vehicle to explore numerous racialized and sexualized ‘crossings’. The western and the Chinese women thereby appropriate the alleged characteristics of the ‘other’ and cross boundaries of sexual propriety and race in these films. The actresses, however, do so in ways that highlight the performative nature of these acts of cross-dressing, exposing these practices as highly artificial and thereby opening up room for potential ambiguity; artificiality and authenticity no longer appear as dichotomous opposites, but intertwine with one another in complicated ways on the bodies of the actors. Viewed in this manner, we can see how the films serve as locations where the reproduction of sexoticization and its subversion simultaneously exist. This space of ambiguity cannot be uncovered, I have argued, by seeking to reveal Wong’s agency in the construction of her roles. Rather, I suggest that it manifests itself literally in the surfaces of the films. By entering the most ‘superficial’ spaces of the cinematic experience, we discover a flickering zone in which the categories of race and gender are both stabilized and destabilized.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback, Sasha Rossman for editorial input and the editors of the special issue of the journal.

Funding

I would like to thank Professor Ulrike Schaper for her support and financial assistance with the image rights.

Notes

Yumin Li works as a research assistant at the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University Berlin. She is a member of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. A fellow of Evangelisches Studienwerk e.V., she studied at Universität Konstanz and University of California, Berkeley, and holds an MA in Studies in European Culture. Her research interests revolve around the History of Sexualities, Race and Gender, Border Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Critical Theory. Her dissertation project analyses the transnational career of the American-Chinese actress Anna May Wong. She is also a performer in the award-winning performance collective cobratheater.cobra.

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