Performing Chinatown: A Conversation with William Gow & Bill Deverell

About the Book

In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a re-creation of the House of Wang set from MGM’s The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese Exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history. Learn More

About the Speakers

William Gow is a Sacramento-based community historian, educator, and documentary filmmaker. A fourth-generation Chinese American and a proud graduate of the San Francisco Unified School District, he holds a B.F.A. in cinema studies from New York University, an M.A. in Asian American studies from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in ethnic studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He currently serves as the co-director of the Five Chinatowns Community History Project for the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. He is also an assistant professor of Asian American studies in the Ethnic Studies Department at California State University, Sacramento.

William Deverell is an American historian with a focus on the 19th- and 20th-century American West. Deverell has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. He is the founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.