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Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance, by Hye Seung Chung. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Xxii + 232 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN 1-59213-515-3.
Hye Sueng Chung has written the first book examining American film and television's treatment of Koreans, using the marginalized career of Hollywood actor Philip Ahn (1905-1978) to trace the United States' fraught relationships with North Korea, South Korea, and Korean ethnicity over the course of five decades. As Chung rightly points out in her introduction, Asian American film studies have heretofore focused almost exclusively on Japanese and Chinese American stars (for example, Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong) and on a small "handful of canonized motion-picture texts" (for example, Broken Blossoms and Flower Drum Song) (xv). In Hollywood Asian, Chung sets out to probe "neglected yet significant films," imagining an alternative cinematic canon with a Korean American star at its center. Philip Ahn's greatest recognition comes from the legacy of his father, celebrated Korean independence leader Tosan An Ch'ang-ho, who came to America in 1902 with his wife, thereby "becoming the first married couple from Korea to enter the United States" (5). To fans of American popular culture, Ahn is best known for a string of racist bit parts in World War II anti-Japanese propaganda films and later for his long-running stint as Master Kan on the 1970s television series Kung Fu. In the ambivalent space between Ahn's diasporic identity as the eldest son of arguably Korea's greatest national hero and Ahn's mainstream identity as-at best-the sage but emasculated father-figure to David Carradine in yellowface,...