“The images were most horrendous,” says actress Lauren Tom, her voice rising indignantly on the phone. “They made me really angry. I wanted to gag.” Tom, who’s best known for her role as Lena in The Joy Luck Club, has just watched a short documentary by Valerie Soe titled Picturing Oriental Girls, which catalogs some of the most ignorant and offensive portrayals of Asian American women in Hollywood cinema. This Friday Tom will comment on the video at a benefit for the Asian American Institute, a local think tank and watchdog group.
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For five years in the mid-70s she took lessons from Margot Grimmer, who remembers her as “that spectacularly charismatic Chinese girl everybody talked about.” Tom also studied with Lou Conte and briefly joined his fledgling Hubbard Street Dance troupe as an alternate. Then, during her freshman year at Northwestern, she won a spot in the national touring company of A Chorus Line. She quit school, packed her tap shoes, and went on the road. A year later she became a member of the Broadway cast.
“Then my buddies said, ‘You should be in acting.’” Tom lets out a peal of laughter. She pursued their suggestion in earnest, and her timing was right. By the early 80s many New York theater directors, newly aware of ethnic typecasting, had begun seeking out minority actors. “I auditioned for all kinds of roles. Some people might have said, ‘Oh, that part doesn’t call for an Asian.’ But I didn’t care. I suppose that’s what being a pioneer means. I was so ignorant I wasn’t even aware of any racism. I don’t believe I got offers because I was Asian.” Except perhaps in the plays about acculturating Asian Americans written by her friend David Henry Hwang.
Bass liked working with Tom. so much that he changed the part of a strapping Swedish singer in the upcoming When a Man Loves a Woman to fit her. “I play a 19-year-old nanny for Meg Ryan’s kids. The character is Asian and has an accent, but Ron and I turned her into someone recognizable from real life. The role I had in Mr. Jones–that movie came and went–was written for a Caucasian actress. They gave it to me, and I ad-libbed through the whole part so that it became my own. And the fact I look Chinese doesn’t figure in the story at all.”
