Here’s what to know about the history of actors of Asian descent at the Oscars, from Merle Oberon’s hidden identity to 2023’s groundbreaking year
, Oberon played a white woman in the middle of a love triangle with her two childhood friends who are World War I soldiers. In a line from a 1935profile that now reads as particularly revealing, she said, “It’s easier for me to be something which I am not than it is to act myself.
Hollywood did, however, reward white actors who played Asian characters onscreen—a practice of using makeup to change one’s appearance known as “yellowface.” One famous example from this period is German actor Luise Rainer winning Best Actress forAs Sandler sums up this milestone, the Oscars had “never rewarded an Asian person but they did reward a person for playing Asian.”
Buck’s novel has generated criticism over the years. Some don’t think the author, a white American who grew up in China with a missionary family, painted a realistic picture of life in China. “The criticism of Buck [is] essentially that she took Asian culture and made it white, and then it became relatable to people,” argues Sandler. The Asian characters in the book have beenfor being oversimplified and portrayed as “victims” who “need a Western outsider to come and save them.
But even back then, there were film critics who wondered why a Chinese actor wasn’t playing a Chinese character. Aswriter Max Breen wrote in 1938, “Could not a normally inscrutable Chinese woman have done, with far less effort, all that Luise Rainer did in that film?”Stephanie Hsu as Joy Wang, Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Quan Wang and Ke Huy Quan as Waymond Wang inBut Breen’s comment did not account for the lack of opportunity for Asian actors at the time.
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