“Yellow Face” Satirizes the Limitations of Representation
The phenomenon of yellowface is nothing new. As with blackface and the African American community, whether in minstrelsy, opera, television, or film, images of its instances are burned into our collective consciousness. One only has to utter the words “Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to call up one of the most painful and humiliating caricatures in cinema history.
Originally staged in 2007, David Henry Hwang’s play Yellow Face confronts the surreal contemporary implications of its title. Set in the 1990s era of post-politically correct backlash, the play’s current Roundabout Theatre Company revival at Todd Haimes Theater, one month before a defining presidential election, feels right on time.
With such clear autobiographical references, it’s hard to tell where reality ends and farce begins—Hwang has called the play a mockumentary of sorts. The protagonist, played by Daniel Dae Kim, is named DHH, after the playwright himself. In one of the opening scenes, a series of newspaper headlines are quoted montage-style, recounting the actual epic flop of Hwang’s 1992 play Face Value, which closed after 8 preview performances at a loss of $2 million.
“Take a look at the face on the cover of this magazine,” an announcer’s voice booms, referring to DHH. “Is he Chinese American, Asian American, plain American? Or someone in yellow face? Does any of that matter?”
DHH proceeds to enter the play as a role model lauded by the Asian American community for his crusade against the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a white actor, in a role scripted for an Asian man in Miss Saigon. However, in his desperation to find “a straight, masculine, Asian leading man” for his next play, DHH mistakenly casts a white man, Marcus G. Dahlman (played by Ryan Eggold), as its “Asian” star. But when DHH discovers his misstep, rather than come clean, he maintains the fiction of his lead actor’s ethnic origins, recasting him as a Siberian Jew—“Siberia is in Asia!”—and gives him the racially ambiguous stage name “Marcus Gee.” A comedy of reversals, DHH’s fall from grace is swift, hilarious, and anxiety-inducing.
In both Yellow Face and real life, Face Value functioned as Hwang’s first attempt at satirizing these types of racial parodies. In it, two Asian American activists disguised in whiteface infiltrate the opening night of a production called The Real Manchu. The commercial failure of this production could have been because the idea of two Asians passing as white wasn’t particularly believable. And yet popular culture has primed us to accept, if not believe, that whites can impersonate any other race.
With Yellow Face, Hwang turns his original premise on its head yet again: What happens when a progressive playwright casts a white actor as Asian? The ridiculousness of this scenario keeps the audience laughing throughout the taut, 90-minute show. Daniel Dae Kim embraces the role with a nervous energy, striking just the right tone of self-righteous outrage. It was entertaining, cathartic even, to watch this hunk of an actor (“a straight, masculine, Asian leading man”) show off his comedic chops as a neurotic, ego-obsessed writer. Take the scene where DHH decides to cast Marcus:
DHH: I think he’s a future star.
Stuart: But guys, does he—? Does he look Asian to you?
DHH: What do you mean, “look Asian”?
Stuart: Well, he doesn’t seem to possess—any Asian features … at all.
DHH: And what exactly are “Asian features”?
Stuart: He’s got dark hair, but—
DHH: Short, high cheekbones, slanty eyes?
Stuart: David—
DHH: I gotta say, I find your question sort of offensive. Asian faces come in a variety of shapes and sizes—just like any other human being. Which we are, you know.
Kim’s DHH toes the line, on the one hand, of racial color blindness, pushing back on the idea that his lead actor needs to look stereotypically Asian. On the other hand, he prioritizes his artistic freedom (which has long been casting directors’ rationale for placing white actors in Asian roles), saying, “I have to cast this in a way that feels right to me.” To put the matter to rest, he adds, “I can tell an Asian when I see one.”
Scenes like this one were deeply uncomfortable for me as a mixed race Asian American who is often mistaken for white. I held my breath, reflexively, while the rest of the theater roared with laughter; it felt as though they were talking about me. How many times have I listened quietly as other people discuss my facial features and whether they are Asian enough to serve as proof of my biracial heritage? And how ironic that Marcus takes the Cantonese surname of Gee to shore up his phony identity. Only several years ago, I changed my professional name to Katie Gee Salisbury—Gee is my mother’s maiden name and part of my family’s lineage, but does using it in this way make me just as phony as Marcus?
This, ultimately, is the question Yellow Face provokes in all of us: Who is the imposter and who is “authentic”? Who is actually Asian and who is merely donning an Asian mask?
The answer, like everything in this play, is hardly clear cut. Marcus Gee keeps up his racial charade, which eventually lands him the title role in a revival of The King and I, swallowing up another part intended for an Asian actor. At the same time, he becomes a figurehead in the community who champions Asian American issues. DHH, incensed that he helped launch a white man as the next big Asian star, tries to unmask Marcus, but no one believes him or seems to care.
Yellow Face ends with a final dialogue between Marcus and DHH, the imposter and his creator. “Years ago, I discovered a face—one I could live better and more fully than anything I’d ever tried. But as the years went by, my face became my mask. And I became just another actor—running around in yellow face,” DHH says, admitting that Marcus is merely his own writerly invention.
This may seem to some like Hwang is letting Marcus off the hook. But Yellow Face deserves more than a straightforward reading. Marcus is not a figment, but a foil to DHH, an expression of his outsized imposter syndrome. He’s everything DHH should be as an Asian American role model, except without the ambivalence, the nagging self-doubt, the constant feeling of being boxed into a corner that often comes with the lived experiences of actually being Asian American.
In 1936, two Hollywood actors traveled to China. The first was Anna May Wong, the industry’s only Chinese American actress of stature. She was met with the usual hysterical enthusiasm that most celebrities receive, but there were also plenty of sneers. The Chinese newspapers were ruthless. Critics complained that the parts she played advanced vile and distorted images of the Chinese, especially women. Some went so far as to demand that she be deported for her sins.
The other visitor was Warner Oland, the Swedish actor famous for his yellowface impersonation of Charlie Chan, the Chinese detective. Unlike Wong, the Chinese wholeheartedly embraced Oland. They loved Charlie Chan, he was a positive role model, an upstanding citizen who solved crimes for the white man! They even complimented Oland’s appearance, some claiming he was indistinguishable from a real Chinese.
Yellow Face captures the same racial spectacle and reveals the trap of white supremacy: even as the racial other, we’re stuck competing to see who fits into our own limited ideations of what it means to be authentically Asian.
—Katie Gee Salisbury is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn. She’s also the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese American movie star.