Asian & Middle Eastern Studies Events
Will Gow: From Hollywood to Chinatown
Location
Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), Room 040100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
- Free food
- Open to the public
Spring 2025 Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies Lecture Series
From Hollywood to Chinatown: Chinese American Background Extras, Bit Players, and Street Performers in Los Angeles, 1931-1945
By Assistant Professor William Gow, CSU Sacramento
In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM's The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In this talk, historian William Gow discusses his recently published book by Stanford University Press, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood Tourism and the Making of a Los Angeles Community. The book examines the ways that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history.
Performing Chinatown conceives of these racial representations as intimately connected to the restrictive immigration laws that limited Chinese entry into the U.S. beginning with the 1875 Page Act and continuing until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the heart of this argument are the voices of everyday people including Chinese American movie extras, street performers, and merchants. Drawing on more than 40 oral history interviews as well as research in more than a dozen archival and family collections, this book retells the long-overlooked history of the ways that Los Angeles Chinatown shaped Hollywood and how Hollywood, in turn, shaped dominant perceptions of Asian Americans.
Speaker Bio
William Gow is a Sacramento-based community historian, educator, and documentary filmmaker. A fourth-generation Chinese American and a proud graduate of the San Francisco Unified School District, he holds an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a designated emphasis in Film Studies from UC Berkeley. For the past 20 years, he has served as a volunteer historian with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (CHSSC), a non-profit devoted to documenting the history of Chinese Americans in Southern California. At the CHSSC, he co-directs the Five Chinatowns project, which examines the history of the various Chinatowns that existed in Los Angeles between 1875 and 1965. His book, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community was published by Stanford University Press in May of 2024. He also currently works as an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies in the Ethnic Studies Department at California State University, Sacramento.
Sponsored by: The Office of Diversity & Inclusion, the Charles Center and the Film & Media Studies Program