Transpacific Exoticisms: Performing Asia Across the U.S. Southern Border

Abstract

Transpacific Exoticisms:Performing Asia Across the U.S. Southern Border Rosanne A. Sia (bio) In 1951, Korean American soprano Florence Ahn stood center stage in an elegant gown at the Trocadero nightclub in Havana, Cuba (Figure 1). She gestured graciously toward the audience, soaking up their applause as she prepared to take her bow. Florence took her place among a group of Cuban rumba dancers costumed in polka-dot sleeves and long shiny dresses. An appreciative audience clad in firs and suits clapped from their seats at tables strewn with the remnants of drinks. The Cuban entertainment magazine Carteles wrote that Florence Ahn's arrival in Havana had been a triumph: "This Chinese girl came, saw, and conquered. She came to Cuba like a shining star."1 In the postwar period, Asian Americans traveled on nightclub circuits that took them across the southern border to perform amid the glitz and glamour of Cuban and Mexican cabaret culture. Many of them had first showcased their artistic talents and "oriental" beauty at famed Asian-themed nightclubs, such as the Forbidden City in San Francisco or the China Doll in New York City.2 They gained visibility during the early Cold War period when American policymakers, journalists, and cultural producers sought to demonstrate the promises of American racial democracy to audiences at home and abroad by promoting "desirable" images of race.3 This led to what Christina Klein has termed "Cold War Orientalism," a blossoming of American middlebrow entertainment about Asia, such as the musicals and films Flower Drum Song, South Pacific, and A Many Splendored Thing.4 As Klein has argued, this middlebrow [End Page 151] culture served the pedagogical function of teaching white Americans "correct" feelings of sympathy toward Asians and Asian Americans, but it also served to conceal war and violence across the Pacific. Along with films and musicals, American GIs brought home a taste for live Asian-themed nightclub shows. This led to the growth of lively audiences in the U.S. South at a time when the region was expanding with the postwar growth of the American military, industry, and tourism. Asian Americans took their shows on the road to entertainment hubs down south. Their travels show how the U.S. South served as what Tara McPherson has called a "hinge point between the Americas."5 Asian American entertainers boarded ferries and planes between Miami, Florida, and Havana, Cuba, or took the bus between the small border towns of McAllen, Texas, and Reynosa, Tamaulipas, before heading to Monterrey and Mexico City. In turn, they criss-crossed entertainers of Asian descent traveling in the opposite direction. Asian Cuban and Asian Mexican entertainers formed part of the stream of Caribbean and Latin American artists moving across the border to cater to the American craze for tropical rumba and dancing Mexican señoritas. They brought with them Cuban fantasies of the national symbol of the mulata, a figure that officially incorporated Blackness and whiteness, but also carried erased histories of racial mixing with the Chinese in Cuba.6 Others brought with them Mexican fantasies of Asia that had origins in the sixteenth century Manila galleon trade, intimate transpacific ties subsequently denied because of Mexico's orientation toward the transatlantic.7 This article draws on archival and oral history research to explore how four entertainers of Asian and mixed-Asian descent, Florence Ahn, Estela, Jadin Wong, and Su Muy Key, navigated the multiple racial and gendered imaginaries of the transpacific that circulated throughout the U.S. South, Mexico, and Cuba in the postwar era. They formed part of a much larger circulation of performers of Asian descent in this interconnected region. I argue that performers of Asian descent occupied culturally and racially ambiguous positions that allowed them to embody multiple transpacific fantasies in nightclub performances that experimented with cultural mixing. This included incorporating new genres global in scope, such as zarzuela, rumba, modern dance, and Mexican revista, developed through cross-cultural encounters during the entertainers' travels. In doing so, they disturbed the Black and white binary in the U.S. South as well as the erasure of the long-standing Asian presence within Latin America and the Caribbean; in some cases, they...