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Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy donned yellowface for 1932’s The Mask of Fu Manchu.
That’s just the authorized stuff, of course. Plenty of properties have done what Marvel did after they lost the license and used the character without referring to him by name, like “the Doctor” in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Both the Mandarin and the Yellow Claw from other Marvel comics are Fu Manchu copies, as is Flash Gordon’s Ming the Merciless and James Bond’s Dr. No, particularly the animated version. And of course, the mustache that he eventually wound up sporting (though he was originally clean-shaven) is today known simply as a Fu Manchu.
What’s more important than Fu Manchu’s omnipresence, though, is his effect. Rohmer was writing while completely ignorant about Chinese people and culture, for an audience equally ignorant, and played on xenophobic fears to create his villain. He depicted the tiny Chinese section of London’s Limehouse district as a nest of vice when those two blocks were in fact some of the most law-abiding in the city during the World War I and interwar periods. Anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment had been prevalent in the West since the late 19th century (see, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers to the U.S., and the earlier Page Act of 1875, which prohibited “undesirable” immigrants but in practice mostly barred entry to Chinese women in order to prevent Chinese population growth), but Rohmer’s creation shamelessly stoked the fires of those fears, portraying the East as sinister, unknowable, and ever-encroaching.
We haven’t gotten as far away from these pulp stereotypes as we’d like to think. In 2012, both How I Met Your Mother and the children’s show Big Time Rush depicted white actors in Fu Manchu mustaches for laughs. A year later, General Motors pulled a commercial from airwaves after public outcry over its use of the mind-bogglingly racist 1938 song “Oriental Swing” and its reference to “the land of Fu Manchu.” (Content warning: that link goes to a CNN clip that also discusses car commercials featuring suicide attempts, sexual assault, and human trafficking; the song’s lyrics also contain racial slurs.)
And comic books, given their love of nostalgia, are even less removed than other genres. Just the fact that Marvel continued to use their Fu Manchu obliquely after the rights lapsed, eventually renaming him “Zheng Zu,” is proof enough, but they’re still churning out new iterations of the trope, too. Check out Charles Soule and Ron Garney’s creation Tenfingers, a Chinatown crime boss who harvests body parts for power, from a 2016 Daredevil storyline:
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Yikes.
Which, of course, brings us to the MCU and their portrayal of Asian and Asian American characters up to now. As Asian characters are nearly completely absent from the films (an issue in its own right, of course, especially when they’re absent because they’re being played by Tilda Swinton instead), criticism has mainly focused on Marvel’s Netflix offerings, particularly Iron Fist and Daredevil. Many critics, especially those of Asian descent, have detailed the issues with Daredevil, Iron Fist, and Defenders better than I can, but the short version is: every single Asian character is a ninja; all of them are evil except for Elektra and Colleen, who start out evil but are redeemed by the love of good white men; numerous characters who speak English perfectly well don’t, in order to more effectively Other them on screen; all of these Asian characters tie into a vast immortal conspiracy to destroy New York and K’un-Lun (that is ultimately led by a white lady because of course Asian people couldn’t really have agency); Daredevil, who refuses to kill, kills the Japanese villain Nobu not once but twice and doesn’t seem to think it counts; even though all Asian characters are ninjas, they are not as good at being ninjas as white guys like Daredevil, Iron Fist, and Stick; and the Defenders writers 100% cannot tell the difference between China and Japan.
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The Punisher, Daredevil, and Elektra fight a sea of faceless ninjas, clearly lethally, in this Netflix ad for Season 2.
This mindless regurgitating of stereotype after stereotype isn’t all that shocking when you consider that Marvel TV’s executive producer, Jeph Loeb, after ignoring the widespread campaign to cast an Asian American actor as Danny Rand, decided it would be a great and funny idea to show up to the Iron Fist panel at this year’s SDCC wearing a kimono. (This was apparently for a bit where he talked about Karate Kid for a bit and then Jessica Henwick, who plays Colleen, told him to take the headband and kimono off, so the joke was…that it was offensive to Asian people? Ha ha? Making Henwick play along feels especially icky.) And even though he has no control over their multimedia properties, it’s worth pointing out once more that Marvel Comics’s editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski wrote for several years under the pen name “Akira Yoshida.”
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And then there’s…whatever this is.
At best, then, we’re looking at a company obsessed with both fetishizing and vilifying the whole of East Asia—one that continually appropriates its stories, culture, artistry, and even names, but refuses to treat it or its diaspora with human dignity. Which begs the question: Is this a company that can tell a non-offensive story about Fu Manchu, even if Fu Manchu is never named as such? Can any company tell that story?
Right now it’s hard to say. On the one hand, it’s certainly a step in the right direction that Marvel has hired a Chinese American screenwriter and is planning to continue hiring Asians and Asian Americans. On the other hand, not!Fu Manchu has apparently been reimagined as a “China-based globalist,” which is about as dog whistle-y as you can get. The South China Morning Post reports that there’s already been pushback on the Chinese social media network Weibo. One user was quoted as saying: “You used Fu Manchu to insult China back in the day, now you are using Fu’s son to earn Chinese people’s money, how smart.”
Obviously China is a massive country and not every Weibo user is opposed to the film (or, presumably, even cares about it), but it will be interesting to see Marvel’s response if Chinese pushback grows. Especially since Chinese audience’s deep pockets and presumed narrow-mindedness are so often held up as an excuse for whitewashing, as with Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange. In the face of actual feedback from China, will Marvel listen?
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Shang-Chi in his most recent lead role. I dig his new costume.
I’ll be honest: I actually really like Shang-Chi as a character. As much as he emerged from stock Orientalist character types of the last century, I enjoy his quiet thoughtfulness, his compassion, and his subtle sense of humor. He’d be refreshingly different from the Marvel heroes we’ve been getting lately (i.e. not a variation on the Tony Stark Template), and it’s potentially a tremendous, star-making role. I plan to see the movie, if and when it releases, and I hope it’s everything to Asian audiences that Black Panther was to black audiences.
But Marvel has a lot of making up for past mistakes to do before they can get there. Let’s just hope they’re up to the task.
