Word: hollywoodism
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...them Americans. Indeed, Murakami's fondness for U.S. pop-cultural references has moved local critics to complain that he worships the West at the expense of things Japanese. Guilty, with an explanation. As Kafka demonstrates, Murakami's Japan is a land of truck stops, rock music, Ray-Bans, Hollywood movies and workouts at the gym. But for his youngish, hip, history-oblivious fans, this is Japan. More than previous Murakami novels, Kafka embraces nearly the entire Western canon, with learned digressions on Beethoven, Schubert, Chekhov, T.S. Eliot and a pantheon of ancient Greeks. It's an education...
...Mask of Fu Manchu, that role went to caucasian Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Jerry Lewis, Alec Guinness, Shirley MacLaine all applied Oriental makeup for mainstream movies. It wasn't until the late 60s, when Americans were seeing East Asians on their TV screens every night, that Hollywood finally renounced this sorry tendency...
...think that her regular demise was the last vengeance of racist screenwriters. Think again. Garbo, the most exalted Hollywood star of the period, died in most of her movies...
...hosted an ABC evening of film clips from the 30s trip to China, called Bold Journey. She did guest spots on The Barbara Stanwyck Show and Adventures in Paradise. In 1956 she got a long-deferred chance to play a role she lost out on in Hollywood: as the Asian blackmailer in Somerset Maugham's The Letter. The director of the TV show was William Wyler, the man who had said no when he made the film version in 1940. She was set to return to Hollywood, with the large role of Auntie Liang in Hunter's production of Rodgers...
...thousand deaths on screen now died for real. And the story of her life traced the arc of triumph and tragedy that marked so many of her films. Wong's youthful ambition and screen appeal got her farther than anyone else of her race. But her race, or rather Hollywood's and America's fear of giving Chinese and other non-whites the same chance as European Americans, kept her from reaching the Golden Mountaintop. We can be startled and impressed by the success she, alone, attained. And still we ask: Who knows what Anna May Wong could have been...