Yellow Face

Content Warning: This section discusses stereotypes of, and racism against, Asian people.

The term “yellowface” refers to the practice of non-Asian actors portraying Asian characters, typically by donning make-up, prosthetics, and/or clothing to signify an Asian ethnic identity. The term is related to the history of “blackface” and the racist portrayals of African Americans by non-Black performers popularized during early 1830s minstrel shows. “Yellowface” is also related to brownface and redface, terms that describe when white actors portray people of Latinx, South Asian, or Indigenous backgrounds. 

In the US, yellowface has long been associated with the stereotyping of Asian people and people from the Pacific Islands (AAPI) as racist caricatures such as the “yellow peril,” the “heathen,” the buffoonish laundryman, the inscrutable mystic, the submissive lotus flower, and the hypersexualized dragon lady. Some of the earliest examples of yellowface date to the early 1900s, when American magician William Ellsworth Robinson performed as Chung Ling Soo and white actors portrayed the roles of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and Cio-Cio San from Madame Butterfly. Yellowface performances and “whitewashing” (the casting of white performers to replace non-white characters) continue into the 21st century with much-criticized portrayals in film, television, and theater, such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Kung Fu (1972-75), Miss Saigon (1991), Cloud Atlas (2012), Aloha (2015), and Ghost in the Shell (2017). 

One of the main objections to yellowface performances is that roles are given to white actors instead of Asian or AAPI performers, thereby perpetuating the marginalization of an underrepresented group. Equally problematic are the roles themselves, which often depict Asian and AAPI characters as offensive, one-dimensional caricatures. Even when an actor of Asian descent is cast, the problems of stereotypes and the lack of diverse roles persist.

In David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, the initial “yellowface” performance is that of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian pimp in the 1991 stage production of Miss Saigon, itself an adaptation of Madame Butterfly. Hwang expands on the idea of yellowface as a form of cultural appropriation and explores how the term can also function as a metaphor for the social construction of race, the burden of representation, and problematic conceptualizations of what it means to be an “authentic” Asian American.