How Diana Feng and Sierra Sevilla are interrogating norms that define culture

Responding to Don’t Call Me China Doll and For the Love of Spam

Sierra Sevilla in For the Love of Spam | Photograph: Barbs Dudek/Beady Films

I’ve been chewing on something. The white kids at school who were fascinated by my Korean lunch. The teacher who asked if I was descended from any emperors. The friend who would hold up a yellow object, gesturing from it to me, and playfully mouth ‘you’. People related to me through stereotypes; fetishisation felt like fame. But they were not so much thinking of me as through me. 

As a grown-up, I chase down art that reaches beyond representation, driven by a developing understanding of what I felt as a child – the feeling of being read through a warped and racist lens. In my search for stories that delve into how racist tropes are held up through ‘representation’, I spoke to Diana Feng from Don’t Call Me China Doll and Sierra Sevilla from For the Love of Spam about their Edinburgh Fringe shows. Both productions are about cultural symbols that have passed between the West – the United States, specifically – and Asia, but neither piece treats ‘Asian culture’ as a monolith. Instead, both shows weave a personal narrative through an American-made cultural symbol. 

Feng is an East Asian theatre-maker and academic who is focused, in part, on broadening the kinds of audiences who are interested in East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) theatre. Don’t Call Me China Doll connects the life of Anna May Wong, one of the earliest Asian American actresses in Hollywood, to the fictionalised life of a contemporary actor. 

“I came to know of [Anna May Wong] because she was printed on the American dollar,” says Feng. “She was the first Asian Hollywood star in the [United] States, in the 30s. She had such a rocky career. She played all these roles that are now the typecast for East Asian faces: the ‘dragon lady’, the ‘lotus blossom’. When I started doing my research, I was really shocked to find that, in the 30s, Chinese people hated her, basically because she had represented all of these horrible things that they didn’t want to be associated with. It was basically seen as a lie…So even though she was a big star in the States, she didn’t get any kind of empathy from her own people.”

Don’t Call Me China Doll is about this empathy; over the course of the show, the protagonist must grapple with what it means to play with and into tropes. In order to be represented on their own terms, are ESEA artists required to reject the dragon lady and the lotus blossom? Or does the historical role of those tropes, in subjugating Asianness in Hollywood and Western culture, make them unavoidable? Feng’s solo show contextualises the work of Anna May Wong against the backdrop of a subsequent century of East Asian culture in the Global North.

Diana Feng in Don’t Call Me China Doll / Photograph: Ching Huang

For my part, I was only tangentially aware of Anna May Wong before speaking to Feng. I remember seeing her depicted in Ryan Murphy’s historical wish-fulfilment series/neoliberal fantasy, Hollywood, in which she is presented with the Oscar she was never nominated for in real life. One of the prevailing threads to come out of my conversation with Feng is that Anna May Wong’s life was unfair. In China, she was often accused of ‘losing face’ for the nation. In America, well, it is easy to imagine how high the cards were stacked against her. Anna May Wong did not invent the dragon lady or the lotus blossom, but that does not make her an innocent damsel with no hand in the impact of her work. She was the vehicle through which Hollywood imposed these tropes on East Asian women. So my question remains: would I know if I were being used as such a vehicle? And, if I knew, would I refuse?

For Sierra Sevilla, the Fringe is an opportunity to explore identity and colonialism through food. “Food is a way that we show that we love other people,” she says. Her show, For the Love of Spam, is about exactly what it says on the tin. The American-made canned meat product is synonymous in many parts of Asia and the Pacific Islands with foreign ‘aid’. It is the package from the sky that made survival more possible for people all over the Global South, while also acting as a pervasive symbol of destabilisation brought on by western imperialism. Sevilla calls it a “metaphor for modern-day colonialism.” Her use of the meat product as a symbol interrogates the West’s prevailing obsession with and revulsion toward ‘processed’ food – a food made necessary by the West’s own capitalist interventions. 

Throughout our interview, Sevilla and I can’t help ourselves from naming our favourite spam dishes at random intervals: Spam and egg, Spam musubi, Spam kimbap. When I was young, my parents took my brother and me out fishing. The boat rental place gave us a box of fishing equipment and a can of Spam as bait. My Korean dad spent all day putting one piece of Spam on the fishing hook and one in his mouth. My white mom was grossed out, but not surprised. She accepted that Spam was a part of my dad’s food life, despite the way people around him treated it as no better than fish bait. Since then, Spam and Spam-like products have popped up in Korean restaurants here in Edinburgh – though they always just call it ‘ham’. Now, you can get something resembling the original for £10 a roll, but it’ll never be Spam kimbap.

In both Feng and Sevilla’s cases, theatre is a vehicle to interrogate the norms that define culture. These artists recognise and reclaim the tropes that have simultaneously supported and confined Asian artists. Where Anna May Wong was acclaimed as a cultural first, she was also continuously sidelined throughout her career, both by the public and by Hollywood. On a microcosmic level, Spam has achieved a kind of cultural iconicity within Asian food culture. Feng and Sevilla’s commentary illuminates a throughline by which ‘representation’ is wielded as a tool of assimilation. 

I am brought back to the reappropriation of cultural symbols; as an Asian writer and artist myself, how can I interact with my own history without replicating it? “Is it an act of submission?” Sevilla asks. “Because, arguably, it is brought to us by those who have taken our land, who have not given us full rights. Do I give in and feed that? Am I feeding that beast, or am I owning it by taking it and making something fabulous?” It is an impossible question to answer, but that does not mean it can’t be a delicious one to ask.

Don’t Call Me China Doll at Underbelly, Bristo Square - Clover until 26 Aug, 12:55.

For the Love of Spam at Pleasance Courtyard - Beside until 26 Aug, 14:10.