Mr. Yunioshi

I have a friend who has been earning his living as an actor in Hollywood for 25 years. He was born in Southeast Asia, moved to France, and then finally to the United States. Currently he has a recurring role on a hit network television show.

This friend is one of the nicest people I have ever had the pleasure to know. Nothing upsets him, nothing ruffles his feathers and he never has a bad word to say about anyone. Still there is one topic that makes him crazy: non-Asians playing Asians on the stage, screen or on the tube.

This sore point was revealed to me one day in the midst of a coast-to-coast webcam conversation. We were discussing one of our mutual obsessions, television. Unwittingly, I sailed into an underwater mine by bringing up Kung Fu.

“David Carradine?! Was there no Asian actor who could have played the role!?”

I quickly stopping myself from saying "I thought David Carradine was Asian." Instead I chose to right the ship and steer it into calmer waters. So I brought up a detective show that was on in 1975, Khan! It was set in San Francisco and was about a Chinese police detective. It only ran for four episodes. It starred Khigh Dheigh, who had also played Wo-Fat on Hawaii Five-O. I had unknowingly rammed the ship into an iceberg.

I soon got an education on Khan himself. It seems Khigh Dheigh (pronounced Kye Dee) wasn’t Asian, either. Though Dheigh spent most of his career playing Asians, he was in fact born Kenneth Dickerson in Spring Lake, N.J., of Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese descent.

Thank God for George Takei. My friend, like myself, is a Star Trek fanatic and I knew for certain that Takei is a Japanese American. So we talked trek until his blood pressure dropped.

Who knew this was an issue?

My friend insists the worse example, the "unforgivable of unforgivables” is Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Oddly enough, John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror does not upset him nearly as much.

Honestly, I have a similar issue. It has to do with British actors playing Americans. I am not referring to this practice on BBC programming. But when Hollywood movies do it, that drives me nuts. My most hated example is Primary Colors, in which two of the three lead actors were British. Adrian Lester does a wonderful job as Henry Burton. But are there no young African American actors in this country? As for Emma Thompson, a woman I have great passion for both as a writer and as an actress, the inconsistency in her accent is noticeable. While her performance is wonderful, you can hardly help hearing her try.

Seeing as everyone in the world either openly or secretly wants to be an actor, it seems that Hollywood should be able to cast parts according to what the role demands.

Every once in awhile I will say to my friend over the webcam "Khigh Dhiegh" just to hear his screams. Still, karma is unavoidable. At 3:30 Saturday morning, while battling one of my famous bouts of insomnia, I saw that Anna and the King of Siam was starting. I believed it was the Jodie Foster/Yun-Fat Chow version, which I have never seen. I very quickly sat transfixed as the credits revealed that Anna was being played by Irene Dunne and the King of Siam was Rex Harrison. Rex Harrison? And the king's prime minister was Lee J. Cobb! I was now crazed. This was unimaginable to me. The next day I established my membership into ANAPAS, the Anti-Non-Asians Playing Asians Society.

My friend simply repeated the motto of the organization. "Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffiany’s.”

We are getting T-shirts printed.