The Dragon Lady - The Dominant Asian Woman

Dragon Lady


Example: Anna May Wong's daughter of Fu Manchu in Daughter of the Dragon and Hui Fei in Shanghai Express.

The dragon lady is Fu Manchu's female counterpart with added sex appeal. As a "dominant" stereotype of Asian women, she is aggressive, cruel, calculating, clever, and powerful but with an air of "exotic" seductiveness. When portrayed the most negatively, dragon ladies are "inherently scheming, untrustworthy, and back-stabbing"(MANAA). Fuller argues that the dragon lady archetype represents a shift from the "sexually exploitable" lotus blossom image of Asian women to a more "provocative and incendiary stereotype" (Fuller 53). The dragon lady depicts the "more dangerous image of Chinese femininity" (Fuller 53).

Like Fu Manchu, theatrical makeup was used on actresses portraying dragon ladies to give them a sinister appearance. Dragon lady characters "wore long fingernails or metal sheaths that were four to five inches in length" (Moon 117). Again, this extreme depiction of dragon lady highlighted Americans' fears about Asians during the early twentieth century. The fear of interracial mixing with Asians is seen yet again in the dragon lady archetype, as the "female offspring of interracial sex" were usually portrayed as "sensual and manical dragon ladies," depicting the belief that nothing good would ever come from the mixing of blood between whites and Asians (Fuller 34). Indeed, in Daughter of the Dragon, the daughter of Fu Manchu falls in love with a betrothed white man but is ultimately killed by another character in the film, "leaving the white couple to live happily ever after" (Prasso 79). This example shows the level of anti-interracial beliefs during this time period. Thus, the dragon lady stereotype, like the Fu Manchu character, arose from Yellow Peril when Americans perceived Asians to be threats to the white way of life.

Case Study: Anna May Wong

 
While she initially played roles of submissive Asian women, like Cio-Cio San in Madame Butterfly, Anna May Wong catapulted the dragon lady stereotype to fame, starting with Daughter of the Dragon (Fuller 24). In today's day, her name is almost synonymous with the dragon lady archetype. Here is a list of some of her dragon lady characters.

• Daughter of Fu Manchu in Daughter of the Dragon - she falls in love with a white man, tries to kill him, but is killed by another character.
• Hui Fei in Shanghai Express - a prostitute who stabs her rapist to death.
• Dancer in Limehouse Blues - Prasso states that Wong, in a Chinese qipao dress that has a dragon emblazoned on it, embodies the dragon lady from a Western standpoint (80).
• Club owner of Tiger Bay - "laughs manically" while "hurling a knife into a thug," then kills herself in the end (Leong 64).

It is interesting to note that when Wong was criticized for "perpetuating stereotypes," she responded that as an Asian-American actress who was just starting out, she did not have much of a choice about her roles (Prasso 81). Asian-American actress Lucy Liu, who often portrays sexualized Asian characters in modern cinema, would years later say nearly the exact same statement.

References

Fuller, Karla Rae. Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Print.

MANAA, . "Restrictive Portrayal of Asians in the Media and How to Balance Them." Media Action Network for Asian Americans. N.p.. Web. 10 Dec 2012. <http://www.manaa.org/asian_stereotypes.html>. 

Moon, Krystyn R. Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Print.

Prasso, Sheridan. The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: PublicAffairs, 2005. Print.