By Erin Chew
The year is 1919 – and Hollywood’s first onscreen interracial love story is about to go before the cameras. This is something never really seen on screen at the time, and it sounds like a very advanced premise. However, the actors involved includes a White actress and a White actor in yellowface. Yes, the usual White man playing all sorts of Asian racial stereotypes.
The movie in question is Broken Blossoms, the director is the notorious D.W. Griffith, and the lovers are being played by Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess, in the roles of Lucy Burrows and Cheng Huan. While this horrid history is known, what is unknown are the Chinese American cultural consultants.
This history is highlighted in the play Unbroken Promises presented by the East West Players in Los Angeles. Moon Kwan, played by Ron Song (Jury Duty, From Scratch) and James Leong played by Gavin Kawin Lee (LATC & EWP’s Tacos La Brooklyn, EWP & The Fountain Theatre’s Hannah and the Dread Gazebo) were employed as a way to check all the boxes, legitimize the film and make D.W. Griffith look good and progressive.
Telling this story is important because it highlights the Asian Americans who struggled, toiled and pushed boundaries in Hollywood in the early twentieth century, despite facing tokenism, racism, and yellow face.
This is why playwright Philip W. Chung (Co-Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble, YOMYOMF Network) collaborated with director Jeff Liu (Yellow Face) to put this production on at the David Henry Hwang Theatre.
“There are a number of story levels ‘Unbroken Blossoms’ tell. The first is that it is a story about Asian Americans working in the Hollywood film industry in the early 1900s, and it is also a story about circumstance, resilience and a mirror to our present day”, Chung stated at a recent interview with AsAmNews.
“It is sad that not a lot of people know about Moon, James and the Asian Americans who worked as film cultural consultants back then. When I first heard about this history, it was mind blowing to just know that they were there and trying their best to push for change”.
In many ways Unbroken Blossoms brings a silent history to the present. It covers themes such as yellow face, negative racial stereotypes, tokenism, the bamboo ceiling, the perpetual foreigner trope and anti-Asian hate in an environment of a pandemic (the Spanish flu of the early 1900s). It mirrors the experiences and the situations of the present and sends the message that where many things have changed and progressed, there are many other things which have remained unchanged.
For Song, playing Moon Kwan was an eye opener for him, providing an insight into the plight of Asian/Chinese Americans in entertainment industry back in those days.
“The biggest learning for me was that there were Asian Americans working behind the scenes in Hollywood back in the early 1900s- tolerating the stereotypes, tokenism and discrimination. They did this to make a mark in Hollywood and pave the way for the rest of us future generations. It was a difficult time for Asian Americans back then and this film was pretty much made just a few years after The Birth of a Nation. The fact that both James and Moon were in the industry back then shows the resilience of our Asian American community”.
Unbroken Blossoms was originally presented in 2015 by Visual Communications in partnership with East West Players, and was also a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. Despite being a work of fiction, the story is based off actual events and people. This is extremely significant and it is refreshing to see it is being told again in 2024.
It definitely shines a light in defining what authentic representation meant back then and in the present in the entertainment industry. In addition it is an education moment on the historical conflict that happened behind the silver screen in the days of silent films.
“We are now living in a world where we do see better representation of Asian Americans in the wake of big films like Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh off the Boat, Everything Everywhere All At Once etc. But really up till these moments that wasn’t the case for representation, and this is why telling this story on stage is important”.
“Yellow face up to recent decades was an accepted and celebrated thing and even now we see this issue pop up – let alone in the early 1900s. With issues around the COVID pandemic and anti-Asian hate we see the similarities with the Spanish flu and the Asians of the early 1900s being blamed for it, so where there has been big changes in the present, many things have remained the same”, Chung expressed.
Finally, Song hopes audiences will enjoy this play and share the history and real story behind it with their family, friends and colleagues. Understanding and feeling the moments Asian Americans went through and being able to walk in their shoes are takeaways he hopes audiences will take away.
Finding hope for the future and learning from the past is what Song hopes to convey playing his character Moon Kwan.
“I want people watching our play to walk away with a sense of living this moment in history – and to reflect upon themselves on the changes that have happened since then. More than a hundred years after James and Moon’s work, we can still see that so much more needs to be done and that we need to give respect to their work in the past. They paved the way for us to do better and that is what we need to strive for. We need to fight against whitewashing of our culture, stories and characters and show the intricacies of who we are as Asian Americans and our stories”.
Unbroken Blossoms continues East West Players 2024 season June 27 through July 21 at the David Henry Hwang Theatre. If you are interested in purchasing tickets and/or finding out more information, please click here. Throughout the run of Unbroken Blossoms, there will be special events and panels, if you are interested you can check it out by clicking on this link.
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