“All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes”

Pete Townshend's 1982 rock album All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes combines two disparate discourses. On the one hand the title evokes the appealingly enigmatic figure of a cowboy hero squinting into the sun as he surveys his domain, the perilous West. On the other it simultaneously raises the negative image of the inscrutable “Oriental” whose suspicious character is stereotypically symbolized by his slanty “Chinese eyes.” Is Townshend reformulating a derogatory racial metonym into a positive characteristic of one of America's most popular and important cultural constructions? While such speculation might be a generous interpretation of the intent behind this possibly racist moniker, Townshend's All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes evokes the very juxtaposition that is the subject of this essay.