East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America by Karen Kuo Elise Lemire (bio) East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America, by Karen Kuo. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. Xi + 237 pp. $26.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4399-0587-6. Within American studies and its various branches, much of the scholarship about sexual and other kinds of interracial encounters focuses on white American anxiety. Karen Kuo broadens our purview considerably. Her wonderfully astute [End Page 120] study finds that even during the period when the United States prohibited Asian immigration, there were literary and filmic texts by and in which white and Asian Americans anticipated greater freedoms through intimate relationships across historical racial boundaries. Deeply invested in examining what she describes as a “mutual gaze” (9), Kuo devotes the first half of East Is West and West Is East to texts that imagine Asians and Asian Americans in the United States and the second to texts that imagine white Americans in Asia. Each of her four largely independent chapters is centered on one text: the Universal picture East Is West (1930), Younghill Kang’s fictionalized memoir East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), the Frank Capra film Lost Horizon (1937), and Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (1935), by Japanese activist Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto. One of the most compelling chapters in the book, on Capra’s Hollywood film, explores how white men sought freedom from militarized masculinity and other modern constraints in the idea of “Asia.” In Lost Horizon, a group of white men find a kind of gender utopia when their plane crashes in an unspecified region of Asia. Once settled at Shangri-la, the survivors, led by a diplomat and former soldier described as Britain’s “Man of the East,” learn to appreciate a new kind of community in which people barter for goods and services and work together on various initiatives. Safe from capitalism and the modern nation state, the white men are able to adopt a new kind of masculinity associated, as Kuo shows us, with “pacifism, nonaggression, cooperation, and even, at times, nurturing” (99). Ultimately, however, the film’s vision is limited by the fact that the Asians living in Shangri-la exist solely to serve the white population. There’s also the problem of a weak ending in which it is unclear if the Man of the East stays in Shangri-la in order to remake the world or retreat from it. Indeed, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Capra had little trouble doctoring the film so that it could be re-released as an anti-Asian propaganda film. The “alternative masculinity” that the Man of the East finds at Shangri-la “cannot be fully imagined as anchoring a new global world” (130–31). In another richly detailed chapter, Kuo convinces us that a text long regarded as intensely anxious about interracial sex and Chinese immigration is in fact using these issues to manifest more general concerns about white women’s sexuality. In the film East Is West, a white California family is distressed when son Billy falls in love with the recently arrived and provocatively named Ming Toy. Their concern evaporates instantly when it is revealed that Billy’s rather racy beloved is in fact the daughter of white missionary parents whose deaths resulted in her adoption by a Chinese family. It seems the film is less concerned about Chinese women’s sexuality harming white American men than about the possibility that there is [End Page 121] little distinguishing Chinese women’s sexual behavior from white women’s. Here, again, American culture used the idea of “Asia” as a mirror in which to see and explore something about itself. Again and again, Kuo is able to tease out often surprising tensions in the various texts she examines, using their production and publication histories as well as contemporary reviews to provide the thickest possible context for her readings. Kuo explores, for example, the friendship between Ishimoto and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger in order to show how Ishimoto’s...