The only way to critique a movie like "Broken Blossoms" is to envision living in the time period and social surrounding of when the movie was made. If someone viewed the film today, he/she would probably frown upon casting another race, especially Caucasians, to play a minority race. But during 1919, when Broken Blossoms was produced, miscegenation was illegal as was the portrayal of a white/minority relationship onscreen. To understand this movie, we must first understand the director and the time period this movie was made in.
             D.W. Griffith was the director of Broken Blossoms. Prior to Broken Blossoms, Griffith directed a highly racist and controversial movie entitled Birth of a Nation in 1915. In Birth of a Nation, Griffith advocated and promoted the Ku Klux Klan. This was when the North and South were waging war against one another and Griffith, hoping to reconcile the North and the South, portrayed the KKK as heroes and the Southern blacks as villains. So it becomes interesting that Griffith decides to direct Broken Blossoms with a sympathetic view towards the Chinese. John K.W. Tchen writes in Modernizing White Patriarchy: Reviewing D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, "Perhaps Griffith was still getting back at those who wanted to censor Birth of a Nation? Was Blossoms a way for Griffith to prove he was not a racist? If this is the case, is Broken Blossoms a plea for racial tolerance?" (1991). Unfortunately, the answer is no.
             D.W. Griffith adapted this film to Thomas Burke's literary text "The Chink and the Child," written in 1916. While D.W. Griffith was a controversial American film director, Thomas Burke was a popular English chronicler of what was considered the unpleasant side of London life. The Chink and the Child was written during the Victorian period, a time in London when sex was repressed. It was taboo of the upper middle class to speak of their own sexual life...