David Carradine (1936-2009) was an American actor best known for playing the lead in the television show “Kung Fu” (1972-1975) and Bill in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1″ (2003) and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” (2004). He is a famous example of Hollywood’s racist practice of yellowface – using white actors to play Asian characters. He was found dead last week in a Bangkok hotel.
Carradine was not one bit Asian. And when he was on “Kung Fu” he knew nothing about kung fu or Eastern philosophies – that came later. He was just an actor making a living. Even the writers on the show were white Americans. The Buddhism, if that is what you call it, was watered down too.
“Kung Fu” was a new twist on the tried-and-true shoot-em-up cowboy Western: the hero was not a cowboy with a gun but a Buddhist monk who knew martial arts. Somehow he always avoids getting shot dead.
Bruce Lee came up with the idea and wanted to play the lead. Hollywood thought he looked too Asian: Asians only played supporting characters. So they gave the part to Carradine, who had played the lead in another television Western, the short-lived “Shane” (1966). They named his character Kwai Chang Caine and said his mother was Chinese and his father was white American. They made up the difference with stereotype and make-up.
White American stereotypes about Asian men were such that it was hard to make one the hero of a television show. That is still true. Yet you could not simply throw out the stereotypes either: then the hero would not seem “Asian enough” to white people.
The answer was to have a white man play the Asian hero: he would play to stereotype to “seem Asian” and yet he could go beyond the stereotype when the story required it without it seeming strange. It is why you have white samurais, like in “Shogun” (1980) and “The Last Samurai” (2003).
The show has entered the American bloodstream: my children know the phrases “young Grasshopper” and “snatch the pebble from my hand” but do not know where they come from.
“Kung Fu” showed the racism that Asians faced in America in the 1800s – while helping to strengthen it in the 1900s.
The yellowface thing still goes on. Carradine himself was still at it in 2006 when he did an ad for Yellow Book.
After “Kung Fu” Carradine appeared in over a hundred films. A few were good but most went straight to video and were beneath even his middling talents. He appeared in the 1990s remake of “Kung Fu” on TNT but his star did not rise again till one of his fans from the 1970s grew up and became a famous Hollywood director: Quentin Tarantino.
To Tarantino’s credit he did not make Carradine play an Asian in “Kill Bill”. He had read Carradine’s autobiography, “Endless Highway”, and wanted him to play himself: an offbeat white man who loved martial arts.
See also:
- Racialicious: David Carradine’s Legacy of Shame – an excellent post on growing up Asian American while watching David Carradine on television
- blackface
- stereotype
- Hollywood
- The Princess and the Frog – which talks a bit about casting and race in Hollywood
- Will Smith; America is not a racist nation
It’s great to read the angle you take in this obit. I’ve seen WAY too many fond remembrances of Carradine that fail completely to acknowledge the yellowfaced minstrelsy that launched his career.
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Actually the same thing happened to Dragon Ball movie. It means once white people can substitute any race, everyone else can be dismissed…
This is an asian boy talking about it:
This is a post about a similar thing that happened with a mixed (black-white) woman:
http://httpjournalsaolcomjenjer6steph.blogspot.com/2008/01/white-women-replacing-black-women-in.html
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I have to say David Carradine’s character is nothing compared to Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of a Japanese man in Breakfast At Tiffany’s. I’m of Asian descent. And I found that really insulting.
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One point of contention with your post:
Samurai Jack was not a white samurai, he was fully Japanese. Jack is not even his real name, it’s what people called him when he first arrived in the future.
…But yeah, the yellowface must stop (especially with the new Avatar movie coming out)!
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I’m leaning toward the “Assassination by a secret Kung Fu Sect” theory as the most plausible explanation for Carradine’s death
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I agree with Mr. Noface about Samurai Jack. He got that name shortly after he was thrown into the future from his own time (I watched far too much Cartoon Network during college).
I like how they’ve been trying to justify the lead actor’s casting in The Last Airbender by saying he’s ‘part’ Asian. That makes it all better.
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Asian people are horribly stereotyped against. I dare say even more so than blacks (well, idk) minorities in general get so much flak. When will it all go away? LOL
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I wondered what would have happened if Bruce Lee would have gotten the role. The world will never know.
Except for the TV show “Lost”, meaningful Asian characters are still invisible in the mainstream.
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I thought sure Carradine was part Asian. Wow Abagond, thanks for the info.
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\”Asian people are horribly stereotyped against.\” That is a lie. \”meaningful Asian characters are still invisible in the mainstream.\” Asians make up only %5 of the population. Also, many people play different races in films or theater. In asia thay have white face. Sanna Lathan played a Asain man in a play. Abagond speaks on things he doesn\’t really know about.
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The points about Asian stereotype casting are well made and most certainly carry validity here. Particularly when it was no secret that the original Kung Fu movie script was written for Bruce Lee but was rejected in favour of a white actor – David Carridine.
However, there was in spite of this something that David Carridine did bring to the Kung Fu series and that was a respectful and positive portrayal of an Asian character and accompanying Buddhist influenced wisdom. Something that was sadly lacking in the 70’s westerns and most TV shows even now.
I was profoundly influenced by the Kung Fu series, and its embedded philosophies as I am sure many people were.
I wonder how many people commenting here actually watched the whole series?
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L.T. – I’ve seen that posted around, but I have never watched it because I know it will simply make me angry.
It is true that Asian people are still stereotyped so much that it is rare to see one playing your average person. The only people I can think of who play ‘normal’ characters are Lucy Liu in Ally McBeal (though I’ve never watched it myself, so I may be wrong), Sandra Oh in Grey’s Anatomy and John Cho in the Harold and Kumar films. (Keep in mind I am not in the US, so there may be some I have not seen.) Though Lucy Liu has also been put into those stereotypical dragon lady, kung fu mistress roles like many Asian actresses (especially if they were born in Asia). Asian actresses are also put into Susie Wong, delicate lotus blossom stereotypes: pretty little Asian woman waiting to be ‘saved’ so she can achieve her dream of becoming some man’s submissive slave for the rest of her life.
Asian men are also stereotyped as being kung fu or karate masters and if there are no martial arts in the film or TV series, then they have to be ugly, socially awkward dorks. Asian men also never form relationships with the opposite sex. Even when a film develops in such a way that you’re expecting the two main characters to become a couple at the end, if the man is Asian, they are just good friends for ever. Apparently, Hollywood believes people find Asian men so repulsive, it would be unbelievable. One film that pops into mind is Romeo Must Die. But then again, there is the inter-racial aspect and so many still believe people should stick to their own ethnicities, so Hollywood probably also deemed a black-Asian relationship unbelievable.
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai is a brilliant actor who apparently speaks ‘flawless’ English. He has won many awards for his acting skills. Yet, when he tried to come over to Hollywood, of course he was only offered degrading, stereotypical roles such as what I’ve mentioned above. I don’t blame him for feeling so insulted he refused.
It is true that, in the US, Asian people only make up about 5% of the population, so no one should expect to see 25% of the media being Asian. However, I think if you took all the actors, actresses and TV presenters, etc. seen on TV and calculated the percentages of different ethnicities, that 5% would not be represented there. Even if it is, is it an accurate representation? Or is it mostly a false representation fuelled by stereotypes that continue to degrade and dehumanise Asian people? I don’t think that having a small percentage of one ethnicity in a country excuses degrading or dehumanising them in the media. Where I come from, black people only make up 2% of the population, but that would NEVER make it okay to trot white people around on TV in blackface, or to always have black people carrying around buckets of fried chicken (just as an example, since that stereotype doesn’t really exist there to my knowledge).
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Okay Kung-Fu originated in China. This is not a hollywood sterotype but a simple fact of life. This blog is full of hatred.
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The problem is not to do with anyone saying kung fu came from China. The problem is with stereotyping an entire race of people as one-dimensional martial arts robots and nothing more. As if they aren’t even human and do not have normal lives like other people in the world.
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It’s ridiculous that Bruce Lee didn’t get the part, for all the reasons Abagond made. But damnit, I love Kung Fu!
That show was a huge part of my childhood, something I watched on Sunday afternoon’s when I visited my father. Despite it’s original sin in the casting department, the show produced positive and powerful morality plays, including many that openly dealt with racism and prejudice. Violence was always Caine’s last option, and although there would be a scrap or two in every episode, the real solution almost always lay in Caine finding a way to bring out the best in the people around him.
One day I’ll watch it with my kids, especially if I have sons.
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I just found this website Yesterday So I know I am so late to this party. I am black and I thought Asian didn’t care about the racial Bias Hollywood had agaist them in the past the present and the future. I am a huge DB/DBZ fan of the Manga and Anime and I was hugely pissed off when Goku was white, but the surrounding caste were asian. Plus the only asian male actor was a buffoon, while all of the females were kinda cool. To be honest I never seen that movie but the commercials and fan critiques was enough to tell me what the movie was about. IT was another White man Kicking ASS and taking names movie. White man Saves the world. Just like what they are goignt to dwith Akira and future anime story. Where was this website five years ago.
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You can go way back to the thirties ‘Charlie Chan’ chinese detective played by Warner Oland (Johan Verner Olund) of Swedish descent. Then after his death the part went to American actor Sidney Toler and later to Roland Winters (Roland Winternitz). Seems like some things never change.
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O yes that last air bender movie was bs total bs @noface your right jack was asian
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This hasn’t stopped.
A reiteration of this is playing out as we speak, with 47 Ronin, a supposedly originally in-depth movie in development turned into ‘Keanu saves Japan’, after the actor wanted to play a role.
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@Kiwi,
You realize how impossible that would have been in the 19th century. There were scarcely many Chinese women in SF, not to mention in any place in the “Wild West”. It would have been 100 times more likely to find a boy with a Chinese father and a white mother, but even that was exceedingly rare.
But the movie came out in the 1970s, after 2-3 decades of white men bringing over Asian women to the USA (and still going on during the Vietnam War). By the 1970s, the concept of an Asian male with a white female offended white people’s sensibilities, and still does in the 2000s (cf. Charlie’s Angels).
Just think about it. The producers wanted to cash in on the 1970s Kung Fu craze, and loved the idea of a story of a Chinese man in the 19th century West, a story of Kung Fu in America. But Bruce Lee who conceived of the idea and was an authentic Martial arts master was way too Asian to play a lead role in anything in the USA. It had to be a white guy. But it would be over the top for a white guy to do complete yellowface, so they had to make him Eurasian (although Bruce Lee is the one who actually has Eurasian background.). But even that, the most likely scenario for a late 19th century Eurasian would have been one with a Chinese father and white mother. But nope, that was too offensive too.
It is the idea or concept of the thing that was offensive. Did they actually SHOW his parents in the TV show?
On top of that, his character was one stereotype after another. Imagine Asian American males having to grow up in the 1970s with that image on TV.
The story of “Kung Fu” encapsulates many of the issues that Hollywood and US society in general has towards Asian men.
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Everywhere I see “Kung Fu was a racist show because they had a white actor playing a mixed race character, and the role was due to Bruce Lee” while disregarding that in nearly every episode the leading character was abused because of his race, that the series showed the widespread abuse against Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and the extermination of First Nations. Also, the snippets of Asian philosophy were in great part literal transcriptions of Tao Te King and other original works; for many in the public, their very first taste of Asian culture or an ethical view other than Judeochristian.
Carradine got the role because he was more suited to play a naive unassuming monk than Lee, who smelled to invincibility at a long distance.
Ever considered that a TV show can’t singlehandedly end the original sin of American society?
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