[Earlier this year, I shared with Vaughn one of my favorite TV shows and cultural works of all time, Deadwood. Watching and talking about it with her made me realize how many AmericanStudies layers it features, so this week I’ll blog about a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post where I’ll develop my overarching reading of the show’s American ideas!]
On two complicated historical contexts for Deadwood’s fascinating Chinese American main character, and a vital third lens.
From the very first Season 1 scenes featuring Mr. Wu (Keone Young), he and Al Swearengen (I say again, the peerless Ian McShane) are presented as a parallel pair: as allies in the camp’s conflicts, or “hang dai” as Wu puts it (always making that gesture with fingers intertwined when he does); but also as occupying very similar positions within their respective communities in camp. Which means for example that both men are (among other professions they practice in camp, and presumably did at their prior stops as well) pimps, bringing to camp and overseeing groups of prostitutes. I have no doubt that that’s a historically accurate detail about Deadwood, but when it comes to Wu in particular it’s also a fraught one: it’s certainly the case that a decent percentage of the Chinese women who came to the U.S. in the 19th century were either brought here as sex workers or ended up forced into that profession; but it’s also and more importantly the case that all Chinese American women were defined through that category in Chinese Exclusion Era, including in the first national immigration law (the Page Act) which sought to keep all Chinese women immigrants out of the country as a result. Maybe it would have been too unrealistic for Deadwood’s audience to meet a Chinese American woman who is not a sex worker, but I still wish we had.
If that’s a late 19th century Chinese American history with which Deadwood is in somewhat frustrating conversation, however, on another level the show does a phenomenal job engaging in brief but targeted and effective ways with the period’s anti-Chinese prejudices and violence. There’s an entire Season 1 plotline about how the shitbag Cy Tolliver (Powers Boothe) is trying to gin up such prejudice to elicit such violence, and more exactly to orchestra a mass lynching that will clear out “Chink’s Alley” (the white community’s consistent, obviously racist term for the camp’s Chinese American community) for future white ownership (by Cy, natch). One of the most overt and horrific mass lynchings in American history took place in a very similar way, and in Wyoming to boot (which is the territory in which the show’s Deadwood is located, since South Dakota wasn’t a thing yet). Because Al and Wu are hang dai, Al helps stave off that anti-Chinese violence; but so, it’s important to add, does Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), not out of such personal goals but simply because he recognizes the plan for the immoral as well as illegal one that it is (and indeed, the moment directly contributes to Seth’s realization that he needs to serve as the community’s sheriff despite his reservations about doing so).
Deadwood is a work of historical fiction, and those are a pair of important historical contexts for this character and community. But as I hope every post in this series will illustrate, the show’s characters are also always multilayered human beings, with sides to their identities that are both more unique and more universal than those linked to its 1870s setting. When it comes to Wu, we had to wait for the Deadwood movie to get a beautiful payoff for one such element—his profoundly American desire to build a multi-generational family and legacy in this community. In the movie we meet the inspiring result of that goal, Wu’s grandson Mengyao (Alan Ko), whom we see in two striking scenes: first serving as a translator between Wu and Al, adding another layer to their hang dai connection; and then helping guide Seth to save another character of color (Samuel Fields, about whom I’ll write tomorrow) from a lynching of his own. In that way the personal story of Wu and his multi-generational Chinese American family comes full circle to the kinds of historical events to which the show had connected its Chinese American community from the outset, one final element to the kind of multilayered arc that only Deadwood could pull off.
Next DeadwoodStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Takes on Deadwood you’d share?
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