The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, simultaneously challenged the racial and gender stereotypes of Asian Americans prevalent in 1961 and created new ones. In challenging these stereotypes the film both created a space for Asian American actors to assume larger roles in subsequent films catering to a mass market, and created new stereotypes that would define these new roles. Flower Drum Song shifted the point of intersection between gender and racial stereotypes by racially redefining Asian Americans as a ‘model minority’ rather than ‘yellow peril,’ and by moving the gender stereotype from the image of a subservient, exotic Asian female to a coquettish, yet ultimately submissive, Rodgers and Hammerstein ‘girl.’
Asian Americans are portrayed in this film, less as the exotic ‘other’ of a blatant Saidian Orientalism, and more as an intriguing ‘similar’ – unique and yet ultimately comfortingly familiar. Asian Americans in the film are divided, not from the largely white audience by a cultural barrier, but between themselves in a classic generational conflict. The song, ‘The Other Generation,’ speaks with a culturally non-specific voice to what was an all-American dilemma in the early 1960’s: cross-generational misunderstanding and conflict. The second generation Asian Americans in the film are clearly ‘Americanized,’ cleverly familiar in the song ‘Chop Suey.’ These Asians are acceptable to a white gaze, even when occupying a dominant role.
Positively, this shift in perception from ‘other’ to ‘familiar’ opened somewhat the door of opportunity for Asian American actors in 
Charles Leong writes eloquently in his article, “Mandarins in Hollywood” in the compilation Moving the Image, of the prejudice he encountered and difficulties he experienced in Hollywood, just to be assigned bit-part stereotyped roles and to see larger Asian roles being played by white actors. In Flower Drum Song, Asians could now portray Asians. Negatively, however, Asians could now portray Asians not by self-representation, but by mediating a new stereotype: the model minority. The menace of the ‘yellow peril,’ gendered as either Fu Manchu or the Dragon Lady, was replaced with the cheery and charming Nancy Kwan as Linda Low.
This shift in racial perception correlated with a shift in the perception of gender. Gender, in Flower Drum Song, in many ways seems to transcend race. Males are no longer weak (along the lines of the meek and mild Richard Barthelmess of D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms) or connivingly villainous, but charming, handsome and throroughly masculine. Warner Oland (Dr. Fu Manchu) has been supplanted by the young James Shigeta.
The cinematic construction of femininity, of femaleness, is much more problematic. In the person of Mei Li (Miyoshi Umeki) the stereotype of Asian females as passive and submissive to the point of obsequiousness is still present; she awaits a traditional arranged marriage, she is a devoted, self-effacing daughter and bride-to-be. The character of Linda Low, on the other hand, is much more complicated. She appears ‘liberated’ from stereotyped traditional mores. She has freedom in her choice in marriage; she is a thoroughly modern 1960’s female. She smokes, dances, flirts. She is seductive without lapsing in anyway into the stereotyped image of ‘dragon lady.’ Linda Low is ‘liberated’ from previous Asian American gender stereotypes only to become a deracinated Rodgers and Hammerstein ‘girl:’ coquettish, flirtatious, and hopelessly male-dependent. She sings: “I’m strictly a female female/And my future I hope will be/In the home of a brave and free male/Who’ll enjoy being a guy having a girl… like… me.”
The portrayal of race and gender in Flower Drum Song are deeply problematic and easily criticized. I believe that it is important to recognize that a remarkable shift occurred through this film’s characterization of Asian Americans, a shift at the intersection of race and gender. The distinctness of race as a social category was blurred by the familiarity of the characters. Asian Americans, second generation Asian Americans in particular, became less the exotic ‘other,’ and more the familiar ‘model minority,’ fashioned by and acceptable to a white gaze. Gender was no longer a social construct whose role was strictly defined by race, rather gender now had a broader, but equally constructed definition.
In opposing several existing stereotypes, Flower Drum Song, generated new categories, tailored to a white audience, which Asian American actors would now have to operate in. This ironic process of opposition creating new limiting categories is portrayed in Deborah Gee’s Slaying the Dragon. Peter X. Feng, in his introduction to Screening Asian Americans, argues, “there is no such thing as a positive or negative representation, rather there are representations that are mobilized positively or negatively depending on discursive context.” (5). Employing Feng’s distinction, I argue that the representations of Asian Americans mobilized in Flower Drum Song in the discursive context of the pre-1960’s representations of Asians by white actors according to previously dominant stereotypes, were a positive mobilization. They opened up the possibility of films featuring Asian American lead actors and dissolved old stereotypes of Asians as either weak or sinister. We should bear in mind when assessing this film that it supplanted these old stereotypes with new ones. Asian Americans were well on their way to being perceived as a model minority; the notion of the Asian female as subservient was being supplanted by the notion of the female (without any racial referent) as ‘girl.’ This shift embodied in the film is obvious in retrospect. It should not obscure the fact that the images of Asian Americans in Flower Drum Song were mobilized positively and challenged many previously dominant stereotypes.
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Flower Drum Song, a review”