Down Again...
Mrs. Lewis is back in the hospital again, after experiencing chest pains this morning. Hopefully this will be a shorter stint - my last spin as a single parent left me pretty winded. But the prognosis is good and this is a hospital where they have already shown that they plan to pay more attention to her than in the last one.
Deconstructing Kristina Wong Again...
Kristina Wong http://www.kristinasherylwong.com/ has written that she enjoys how I "deconstruct" some of her blogging. KW is my favorite blogger that I don't know personally, and I guess I can't help commenting on her writing because I certainly always read it. But what follows is not so much a deconstruction as it is a reminiscence of something rather sad that was raised up out of the depths of my memory by Kristina's two most recent works.
In "Oh hell no! Cheryl Rave is going down!" (11/23/03) she reprints an insensitive, but sadly typical by Hollywood standards, casting call for "beautiful Asian women" to be cast as "ancient, 1870s Japanese village women" to mingle at the after-party for the opening of the new Tom Cruise film "The Last Samurai". Kristina also includes her own vitriolic, vicious and hilarious funny response to this letter. In the post following, however "On 'I'm sorry'... and Being a Japanese School Girl" (11/26/03) Kristina nearly recants the letter and explains her mixed feelings about the nature of apologizing, especially for so acrimonious an affront.
Hollywood's history in terms of Asian type-casting is far worse than even that for African-Americans, and it goes back further. Perhaps it was due, in part, that the first movie fatality in Hollywood was that of a director in 1910 who was stabbed to death on the Selig studio lot by a Japanese gardener; I don't know. Hollywood has never wanted for fine quality Asian talent - take for example the extraordinary Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose turn in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Cheat" (1915) everyone should see, although he was playing a Chinese. Anna May Wong was one of the finest and most beautiful Chinese actresses of all.
But when Pearl S. Buck's novel "The Good Earth" was made into a movie in 1938, Anna May Wong didn't get the main female role. it went instead to Luise Rainer, a white actress, who won the Academy Award for it. Hayakawa was lucky to get the role in "The Cheat" that made him a movie star, and he probably only got it because it was the heavy, although the way Hayakawa played it (and the way DeMille handled the story) he ended up being practically the hero.
That did not happen often with Asian actors in Hollywood, because the really good Asian roles ended up being played by white actors - Lon Chaney (several times), Richard Barthlemess, Boris Karloff, Eddie Robinson, Angie Dickenson, Peter Lorre - all played at one time or another in yellow-face. "The Bitter Tea of General Yen" (1933) would've been a GREAT movie if they had cast a real Asian in the crucial role of Yen, rather than lousy, stiff Nils Asther in the part. Meanwhile, real Asian actors got cast in shitty parts like the one Victor Sen Young got in "Across the Pacific" (1942) playing the Japanese-American student who turns out to be an Imperialist spy (a half-assed justification for Japanese internment if ever I heard one!)
So the thinking in the Cheryl Rave letter, or at least what motivated it, was sort of "old Hollywood" - let's throw a party and get some Asian minglers out in cool costumes. Only problem is that the Cheryl Raves of this world forget is that you cannot put on and take off your race like your makeup, unless you are a white actor playing a person of color. It's offensive, but the folks in Hollywood are still getting the hang of it - after all, its only been 25 years since Jack Soo turned up on Barney Miller, playing a Korean-American who was, after all, just one of the guys.
As to apologies, and learning to say you're sorry, I have a personal story I have to relate.
Kristina writes: I think about things that people have done to me that really hurt me. "Sorry" never seems to be enough to cut it. Only time. And even at that, that's still not enough to totally heal the bitterness.
There was a fellow I knew who was a photographer that we'll call Steve. I first met him when I was selling punk rock records at a store in Cincinnati. I didn't like the records he bought, I didn't like his mouth and I didn't like his attitude. As were most of my friends in that day, he was older than me, and I would ask other older friends who knew him about him, and they'd all say "Steve's okay." But we never got along.
He and I ended up at a lot of the same shows, Steve with his camera usually, me either playing, doing sound, or just being a nuisance. And we usually avoided one another. But at a Jah Wobble show at the Jockey Club we got into it, me and Steve - nothing physical mind you, but I just cut that guy to ribbons. And he stormed away, very VERY red in the face.
Jah Wobble came up to me and said "Hey mate - you really slagged that bugger off good!" And I felt great - wow, my idol, Jah Wobble, just told me that he liked something I did! And I walked out of the Jockey that night on a cloud....
Not long after, Steve died. He had suffered from high blood pressure a long time - I'd had no idea. Thereafter I would always wonder whether or not our little contretemps at the Jockey was a contributing factor to the attack that killed him. And the photographs that he took in and around our little scene in Cincinnati I always appreciated, even when he was alive - I just couldn't stand him as a person, that's all. I would love to be able to tell that guy I was sorry for being a jerk and laying into him that night. But that's the problem - I can't.
Kristina has it right when she states that "only time can heal the bitterness, and sometimes that's still not enough." But what is far worse is the uncertainty of believing in the possibility that you may have wronged someone and not ever, ever being able to set the record straight. I probably didn't really hurt him, just made him mad as hell, but I'll never know for sure. That's why apologies are the best policy when they are merited, perhaps even when not, perhaps even when the person you are apologizing to is clearly your enemy. Apologizing is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of maturity and strength, and a means to gain peace
for yourself as well as to disarm your opponent. So don't be afraid to take the gloves off if you can, for in the long run bitterness does fade but nagging uncertainty is forever.
Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis@hotmail.com