Chinese Telephone Operators in San Francisco: Between Chinatown and Hollywood

Working in the Chinese telephone exchange, a tourist landmark in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Chinese women telephone operators were celebrated as “memory expert, linguist, and interpreter in one,” fluent in English and five Chinese dialects and carrying “2300 numbers in their heads.” Described in one instance as “Chinese flappers,” these fashionable switchboard operators appeared in newspapers, magazines, newsreels, postcards, celebrity photos, and Hollywood movies in early to mid-twentieth century, and their voices conversing in multiple languages could be heard over the radio.

This talk traces the fleeting appearances of the Chinese telephone girls in an array of classical Hollywood feature films, where they are conjured to connect calls that serve pivotal narrative function or recruited to participate in the chorus line of switchboard montage sequences showcasing the expansiveness of the technological network.

The talk presents archival research that reveals the Chinese telephone operators as operator-performers, who performed their labor of mediation for tourists and the camera, and whose images became stock materials to be appropriated and recycled in media networks and visual culture. Excavating the Chinese girl operators from the interstices of film history reorients our understanding of the visualization of modern media infrastructure where whiteness is the default, creating portals for alternative film historiography and theorization of media.