Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa: Racial Performance, Ornamentalism, and Yellow Voices in Daughter of the Dragon (1931)

Abstract

This article provides a comparative study of Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa—the two most iconic stars of Asian descent of American cinema's silent era—by examining the reception history around their rare collaboration, the early sound film and yellow peril thriller Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, US, 1931). The on-screen collision of these two stars associated with the imaginary East reveals incongruities between a homogeneous Orientalist image and heterogeneous—culturally acquired, professionally trained, mechanically reproduced, and gendered—yellow voices. Situating the star personae of Wong and Hayakawa in the geopolitical environments of the interwar era, the essay foregrounds the plasticity of voice as a form of cultural capital fetishized as an exchangeable commodity through the heavily marketed product of the new sound cinema. In this case study, the accented voice serves also as a contact point between European, American, and Asian film industries. A close analysis of the differently accented yellow voices in Daughter of the Dragon demonstrates the artificial homogeneity of the Orient embodied by the supposedly “authentic” stars of Asian descent and complicates the established configurations of the gendered “Orientals”: the Janus-faced Japanese man and the ornamentalist yellow woman.