Peggy Lee- The Siamese Cat Song

Source: Youtube

In 1955, Disney released "The Lady and the Tramp", a sweet story with dogs. In a sense, the anthropomorpholized dogs could be separated by their breeds as humans are separated by their races. For the sake of this blog entry and our discussion, we can flow with this idea and see that the main protaganists are a purebred American Cocker Spaniel (Lady) who enjoys the comforts of a human nuclear family, and a mutt (Tramp), a dog of mixed breed, who is a stray dog living on the streets, surviving on scraps. Class then, is inadvertently present in this sweet Disney movie, even distinguishing which group or what kind of dog they relegate to each. 

The focus of this clip though, and one which I would like to discuss, is the portrayal of Asian characters. The clip is a musical scene in which two Siamese cats, with thick accents, moving together, long whiskers which they twirl, and slanted eyes, sing while they cause havoc in the house. Eventually, their antics destroy the house and cunningly, they put the blame on Lady. The cats represent a very "oriental" portrayal of Asians, one which today would be considered an offensive cariacature. One may cringe at the portrayal now, but the reason this made it into the movie was because it echoed the sentiment of most Americans about the image of the Asian, or "oriental" character. 

Images like this perpetuated the idea that anyone of asian heritage was foreign-- even applying this to 2-3-4 generation Japanese or Chinese in the US. As in this movie, these cats belonged to Aunt Sarah in her American home, but they were Siamese, and therefore talked and acted in a stereotypically oriental way. Which in popular culture, and the American consciousness, was cunning trickery and opportunistic. With a history of anti-Chinese immigration (they would take all the jobs and were too foreign and strange), and WW2 paranoia about Japanese citizens, Americans could agree with this racist and utterly distorted representation of people from an entire continent (they could be any Asian racial group, it didn't matter in this clip, it applied to all asians), due to viewing them as all the same.