Around the same time

this movie was made, starting in the late 1950s, America started to develop a yen (pun-intended) for Asian-themed movies and plays: Rashomon, Kataki, Cry for Happy, The Cool Mikado, and The World of Suzie Wong were all playing on NY stages when Flower Drum Song opened in 1958, and Hollywood had recently released Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Tea House of the August Moon, and Sayonara. But this movie is more progressive because it tells an Asian American story using a virtually all-Asian cast. Until the Joy Luck Club (1993) it remained the only major Hollywood film to feature an almost exclusively Asian cast.