'Shanghai Express' & 'The Bitter Tea of General Yen'

These two films -- eerily similar in a lot of ways -- were released within a year of each other. Watching them and understanding how Asian characters, not unlike black or Hispanic characters, were portrayed in popular American culture, I started to think of our grandparents paying a nickel to see the latest film set in the mysterious and godless Orient and imagining their eyes when they consider the current China.

According to these films, the Chinese were an abhorrent, sneaky, manipulative and violent people, who were light years from the sensible culture of the west.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen is particularly disturbing or perhaps equally as groundbreaking in a lot of ways.

General Yen is portrayed by the Dane Nils Asther replete with drawn-on angled eyebrows and spike like a cartoon evil scientist. In a way, I don't know if it's about the barbaric nature of the power-hungry Yen as much about his wiles with the white missionary Barbara Stanwyck. Although she rejects Yen's advances, her subconscious betrays her as she has a series of dreams in which she is intimate with Yen.

Ironically, the film was controversial because it portrayed miscegenation as it shows the "Chinese" Asther kissing Stanwyck in addition to the insinuation of sex. Ironic because, obviously, it wasn't actual miscegenation because the Chinese man was portrayed by a white guy.

Stanwyck claims that the portrayed miscegenation was the reason it was a box-office failure.

Now, we see the kissing and sex as not very controversial at all considering ... it's pretty retarded to consider such a thing as controversial. And because Shakespeare wrote Othello 300 years beforehand.

Yes, I do think our grandparents probably never considered China as it is today, especially the pre-Communist China.