Performing Chinatown: Tourism, Hollywood Cinema, and the Formation of a Los Angeles Community, 1911-1949

William Gow
Ethnic Studies
UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the relationship between Los Angeles Chinatown, Hollywood Cinema, and American Orientalism between 1911 and 1949. Juxtaposing the opportunities that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles had to perform as bit-players and background extras with the day jobs they held in various community-run businesses, this project explores the ways in which local Chinese Americans drew on Hollywood to transform the meaning of what a Chinatown could be. In Chinatown, Chinese Americans produced an encompassing experience for tourists that presented China and Chinese people in starkly different ways than the dominant Yellow Peril iconography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Local community members transformed Chinatown into a site where they performed their own particular take on Chinese identity for tourists. In the process, Chinatown became the key site through which everyday Chinese Americans engaged dominant notions of race, gender, and national belonging.