Race Magic and the Yellow Peril Downloaded from by Guest on 23 September 2021
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MEILIN CHINN Race Magic and the Yellow Peril Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 abstract Among the many historical examples in which the Orient has been imaginatively associated with magic, one of the most fascinating involves an actual overlap between race and magic in the popular performances of yellowface magicians at the turn of the twentieth century. I use this example to show and analyze some of the dynamics between magic and the aesthetics of race, especially as these play out through one of the most influential and long-standing contradictions of the “Yellow Peril”: Chinese people are unassimilable, yet Chinese aesthetics are easily appropriated. The Master said: ‘The people of the South have a saying: English, “Oh my God. Something’s happened. ‘Someone without constancy cannot be a magician.’” Lower the curtain.” He collapsed on stage and —The Analects of Confucius (Lunyu 13:22) was dead by morning. In the legal investigation and media circus following his death, the secret to his bullet catch trick was inevitably revealed, but i. the case of the rival chinese magicians the more astonishing unmasking was Soo’s true identity as William Ellsworth Robinson—a New On the evening of March 23, 1918, the Wood Yorker of Scottish ancestry. Green Empire Theater in London overflowed Complex sociocultural, political, and aesthetic with an audience eager to see the most popular factors contributed to the success of Robinson’s Chinese magician at the time, in a show billed as act, but the first and simplest truth of the matter “Chung Ling Soo, The World’s Greatest Magician, is that he stole the persona of a real Chinese in a Performance of Oriental Splendor and Weird magician named Ching Ling Foo, “The Original Mysticism, assisted by Miss Suee Seen, presenting Chinese Conjurer,” to become Chung Ling in rapid succession the most Beautiful, Baffling, Soo, “The Marvelous Chinese Conjurer” (see and Interesting Series of Illusions even submit- Figure 1). Ching Ling Foo was the stage name of ted to the Public.” On this soon to be historic oc- Zhu Liankui (born in Beijing in 1854), a casion, Chung Ling Soo performed his signature practitioner of traditional Chinese magic skilled bullet catch trick for the last time. In the trick, enough to have performed as the Court Conjurer called “Condemned to Death by the Boxers— to the Empress Dowager Cixi. He also performed Defying Their Bullets,” Soo used a porcelain plate in European-owned theaters in China before to catch marked bullets shot at him by assistants, finding fame in America, including sold-out who were dressed as a Boxer firing squad in a shows at Keith’s Union Square Theater in New nod to the 1900 anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion York. On June 3, 1899, in an article entitled “A in China. This evening, however, one of the rifles Wonderful Conjuror,” The New York Dramatic malfunctioned and a real bullet rather than a blank Mirror said of him, “He is no ordinary professor of fired, striking Soo in the chest and piercing his legerdemain, is Ching Ling Foo, but a past master lung. Having only ever spoken “Chinese” onstage, in the art of fooling people before their very eyes, Soo shocked his audience by crying out in native who has come all the way from the Far East to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 77:4 Fall 2019 C 2019 The American Society for Aesthetics 424 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 figure 1. Chung Ling Soo: Condemned to Death by the Boxers: Defying Their Bullets. Film still from The Saturday Evening Post History Minute: “Chung Ling Soo and the Deadly End of an Illusion.” C Copyright 2018 Saturday Evening Post Society. All Rights Reserved. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] show us a few tricks we have never seen before” than that, his performance was possible, desirable, (16). He went on to tour internationally with and believable because of a confluence of factors his troupe of acrobats and jugglers as well as his beyond his individual abilities. For one, there was daughter Chee Toy, who was billed at one point as a public audience willing to ignore evidence of “the only small-footed girl singing coon songs.” In his true identity in their desire for Chineseness this bizarre atmosphere of ethnic entertainment, more exotic and exaggerated than any actual Robinson was not the first magician to imitate Chinese magician could deliver. This was the era Ching Ling Foo, nor was he a stranger to copying of vaudeville, circus, and wildly popular ethnic another magician’s racialized act. In 1887, Robin- performances through which audiences lived out son had performed as “Achmed Ben Ali” in an act their stereotyped, racialized, and racist fantasies lifted from the German magician Max Auzinger in especially cartoonish fashion—the more unbe- also known as “Ben Ali Bey.” Robinson did not lievable the better.1 This period was also shaped find success copying a German imitating an Arab by what Chris Goto-Jones (2014, abstract) has magician, but in 1900, his fortunes shifted when, in helpfully theorized as the “cultural and political response to the call for Chinese magician to per- nexus of secular (stage) magic, modernity, and form at the Folies Bergere` in Paris, he adopted the Orientalism.” As he details it, this Golden Age persona and much of the magic act of Ching Ling of Magic was marked by a shift away from “real Foo. He went on to become one of the highest paid magic” (occult, spiritual, irrational, and feminine) and most popular magicians of the era despite toward “modern magic” that embraced assump- Foo’s repeated attempts to expose him as a phony, tions about scientific and technological progress, including challenging him to publicly prove both was predominantly practiced by men, and was his Chineseness and originality as a magician. mirrored in the broader struggle between the dis- How did Robinson pull off his most infamous enchantment and re-enchantment of the modern illusion? world. Adopting “Eastern” personas (Arabian Robinson’s successful masquerade as a Chinese genii, Indian yogi, Chinese mystic, or Japanese sor- magician for eighteen years surely owed some- cerer) allowed stage magicians to appropriate the thing to his skills as a magician (he was known as aesthetics of “real magic” without violating mod- a technically adept magician, but a poor showman ern skepticism toward it and, in effect, “displacing prior to adopting his Chinese persona). But more the problem of magic in the modern world to the Chinn Race Magic and the Yellow Peril 425 ‘pre-modern’ peripheries, or drawing on an origi- stereotypical Chinese cultural aesthetics, public nation in such peripheries as a means to claim au- ignorance about and willful denial of real Chinese thentic magical potency” (Goto-Jones 2016, 111).2 people, and the possibilities of mixed-race visual In addition to these cultural and political forces ambiguity to conjure an image born of white driving the association of the Orient with magic, cultural and biological appropriation of Chine- the craft of magic itself was pivotal in the aesthetic seness. While he dressed in traditional Chinese production of Chineseness Robinson offered his fashion, wore his hair in the symbolic queue, audiences. Specifically, the simultaneously real adopted stereotypical mannerisms, and spoke to and unreal art of stage magic offered a para- journalists solely through an “interpreter” (in Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/77/4/423/5981531 by guest on 23 September 2021 doxically believable context for his yellowface fake Chinese gibberish), it was the racialized persona. As Jason Leddington argues in “The mysteriousness of being Eurasian that lent his Experience of Magic,” theatrical magic has an performative identity more persuasive aesthetic ironic, antinomic structure in which impossible force than other white magicians pretending to events are presented as impossible. When a magic be Chinese.4 (Consider the familiarity of the trick is successful, “it appears to be what it simul- question—What are you?—to mixed-race people, taneously admits cannot be” (Leddington 2016, not to mention the ontological puzzle.) 256). That is, the audience must believe the trick is It was also critical that Robinson’s masquerade impossible and is happening anyway. Magic fails as a Chinese magician took place during an era in in the absence of this paradox. Following this line which anti-Chinese racism and violence were at an of analysis, the sense for and subversion of the all-time high in the United States and the preju- limits of the possible in theatrical magic helped dices that came to characterize the Yellow Peril— set the cognitive stage for the kind of race per- the belief that East Asian peoples pose a unique formance Robinson pulled off. While he did not threat to the West—were formed and fomented. explicitly present his Chineseness as impossible Racism against the Chinese was deeply entwined in his show, he did not and could not fully conceal with economic anxieties about cheap Chinese la- his true identity in ways that will be discussed bor and structured in part by the widely held belief later. The broader philosophical point here is that that the Chinese were unassimilable. Rather than Robinson presented as Chinese in the context of assimilate, Chinese “hordes” would “devour” an art (stage magic) in which odd things happen Christian America with the backward culture of to normal belief structures—more unbelievable Confucius and, as Senator John Miller of Califor- is not only better, but paradoxically believable.