Race in a "Civil" Frontier: The Chinese-Story Western of the Civil Rights Era

Today, when we think of the Western, we think of a genre dominated by white heroes conquering the obstacles of the frontier from daunting terrain to indigenous peoples. What we tend to forget - most likely because the most famous westerns did not show - is how Chinese immigrants played an important role in that history. The civil rights era film 'Walk like a Dragon' (James Clavell, 1960) is the only high-profile western which focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the west. While Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s all but omitted Chinese immigrants from their vision of the frontier west, almost every television western included at least one 'Chinese-story' episode centered on Chinese immigrants and featuring Asian American actors. The representation of Chinese immigrants was not heterogeneous nor always progressive with some television westerns recycling out-moded tropes from decades past. What made the civil rights era film 'Walk like a Dragon' significant and unusual, even in the midst of the Chinese-story heyday on television, was its presentation of a Chinese immigrant through the visual iconography of the white western hero as a gunslinger and romantic victor.