1YEAR OF THE DRAGON

Anna May Wong, circa 1907 (Courtesy of Mondadori Portfolio / Archivio GBB / Everett Collection)

ANNA MAY Wong burst into the world at her father’s laundry on the third day of 1905. On the Chinese lunar calendar, it was the tail end of the Year of the Dragon, a mythic animal symbolizing power, nobility, honor, and success. These great qualities might seem to bode well for the newborn, but aficionados of the Chinese zodiac would caution that she was a Wood Dragon, a person destined to be an introvert, a loner always in want of good relationships.¹

The Wongs probably did not put too much stock into these horoscope readings. Their new brood was in fact a disappointment, especially for the father. Hailing from the rough mining camps in Northern California, Wong Sam Sing was a laundryman with ambition. He had already had a son with his first wife in China, and now he was eager to extend further the Wong genealogical line in America with his second wife, Lee Gon Toy. Impacted by racist immigration restrictions, Sam Sing, like many Chinese American men during that harrowing time, had to juggle bits of life orbiting in parallel universes. On September 9, 1901, he married fifteen-year-old Gon Toy, daughter of a Chinese cigar factory owner, in San Francisco. After the wedding, the new couple, weary of anti-Chinese violence in rural America and lured by opportunities in Southern California, arrived in Los Angeles and set up their first home and laundry in Chinatown. A year later, and much to Sam Sing’s chagrin, their firstborn, Lew Ying (Lulu), was a girl. And now, after moving to 351 South Flower Street—a short distance from Chinatown—he had hoped for a son. It seemed that Heaven was not ready to smile on him.²

Naturally, the birth of a Chinese laundryman’s daughter would not be of any consequence to the world outside the nondescript Wong Laundry. On this midwinter day, the weather was almost perfect in the Los Angeles area: sunny, with a gentle northeasterly breeze at four miles an hour. The daytime temperature was seventy degrees, dipping to forty-eight degrees at night. The top story of the day came from the other side of the world: the fall of Port Arthur in China. After a bloody eight-month siege by Japanese troops, Russian Major General Anatoly Stessel, without consulting with the tsar or military command, made the shocking decision to surrender the Chinese port to the Japanese.³ It signaled the imminent end of the Russo-Japanese War, which would result in the total humiliation of Russia and the rise of Japan as a global power. The news sent shock waves throughout the world, portending what Euro-America had dreaded as the “Yellow Peril.”

In Washington, DC, President Theodore Roosevelt and the First Lady had held an annual New Year’s Day reception at the White House on January 2, greeting foreign diplomats, Supreme Court justices, leading politicians, and other dignitaries. The first couple closed the ceremonial day by attending the comic opera Love’s Lottery, performed by Madame Schumann-Heink and her company at the new National Theatre. Upon hearing the news about Port Arthur, the former Rough Rider, no stranger to international conflicts, continued to play his cards close to his vest, while also letting it be known that he would be willing to broker peace between Russia and Japan “when both belligerents jointly invite him to do so.”⁴ Nine months later, on September 5, 1905, Russia and Japan would gather in New Hampshire to sign the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by President Roosevelt himself.

The news of Japan’s military victory lifted the spirit of the three thousand or so Japanese living in Los Angeles. Using racist lingo typical of the era, the Los Angeles Times described the response in the city: “The Japanese colony is in a state of subdued but infinite content. The little brown men of Los Angeles are not swaggering nor putting on airs in their rejoicings over the triumph of the Japanese army and the fall of Port Arthur, but their smiling countenances yesterday were not wholly to be accounted for on the score of New Year celebration.” The next day, the same paper reported that geishas had been holding joyful receptions at entertainment resorts all evening. “In these places there was much feasting and jubilation,” the Times observed.⁵

For the majority of Angelenos, the talk of the town on this fine midwinter day remained what had happened much closer to home: the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena a day earlier. The annual festival, featuring parades, pageants, and chariot races, was usually held on New Year’s Day. However, when January 1 falls on a Sunday, the event switches to Monday, January 2, because the founders of Pasadena did not want the festive hoopla to spook the horses hitched outside Sunday church services. Thus, having attracted seventy-five thousand people from the area and across the country, the seventeenth Rose Parade took place on the second day of 1905. A huge crowd descended on this “Crown of the Valley” via trains, electric streetcars, automobiles, carriages, motorcycles, bikes, or on foot. The interurban transportation lines were taxed to the breaking point. The Pacific Electric Company and the Santa Fe Railroad estimated that between 8 and 10 a.m., they had handled between twenty-two and twenty-five thousand passengers on their way to Pasadena. The Los Angeles Herald reported, “The exodus from Los Angeles commenced early in the morning and reached its greatest height at 9:30 o’clock, when the transit companies had difficulty in taking care of those who wished to be in Pasadena to witness the parade.”⁶

Under the azure skies and against the purple hills, the eager throng crowded both sides of Colorado Boulevard and were treated to a spectacular extravaganza. Starting with the scurrying heralds and trumpeters, and quickly followed by the Police Marshal and aides, the parade featured floral floats of all sorts, marching bands both local and from out of town, equestrians, novelty acts, and the like.⁷ Amidst a local carnival, an “exotic” item suddenly appeared that seemed more political than celebratory. As the Herald reported,

As a crowning feature of the parade, following in the wake of the long line of heralds, pages, charioteers, fairies and damsels, came the “Yellow Peril.” And as the expectant spectators caught a glimpse of a dazzling figure on horseback covered with a cloak of scarlet and crowned with the plumed helmet of a marshal, a shout of welcome and fellowship went up as they greeted the little Japanese with congratulations, while closely following their leader marched rank after rank of miniature warriors, dressed in a Japo-American costume, with the heavy rifle across each shoulder, a fitting representation of the sturdy little fighters of the Orient who have succeeded in bringing down the fame of the Slav.⁸

Not to be outdone, a natty company of fifty-eight Chinese American soldiers, trained by Captain Obanion of the US Army, also joined the parade. It was a regiment recruited from Chinatown by none other than Homer Lea—an eccentric five-foot-tall hunchback who was a Stanford graduate. It was Lea who had earlier gone to China to help restore the young emperor and, failing that, had now returned to the United States as a fugitive with a price on his head. At his command now was this small army of trainees meant to be sent to China to take charge of Chinese troops. Legginged, musketed, and grim, they “swung up the street like West Pointers, perfect alignment and cadence, rigid as German dragoons.”⁹

The dual presence of Japanese and Chinese in the mix of this quintessentially American Rose Parade did not just provide the crowd some flavored amusement; it also provoked the editorial imagination of the city papers, characteristically sensational at the time. “The war between Russia and Japan has taught an object lesson to the great powers of the world,” stated an article in the Los Angeles Times published soon after the parade. And the lesson was that the United States needed to build “bigger ships and bigger guns.”¹⁰

In another piece, an editorial titled “The Immigration Evil,” the author asserted: “The pouring of vast hordes of foreign immigrants upon our shores, year by year, is confessedly a serious evil, from the standpoint of American good citizenship.” This may sound like the familiar xenophobic rhetoric that rises and falls throughout the history of this great democracy, but the editor was pointing his finger at one particular group of immigrants:

It has never been, and should never be, the policy of the United States to exclude desirable immigrants. Some of our foremost citizens came to us from foreign lands, and others of their class will continue, let us hope, to come. There is ample room and need for them under the Banner of Stars. But the majority of immigrants, or at least a large proportion of them, are of a kind not needed nor desired in this country. They settle largely in the cities, becoming a charge upon public charity, and are responsible, to a great extent, for the crimes committed in the larger cities.¹¹

It was the city dwellers he found most objectionable, the “huddled masses” who crowded into crime-ridden, poverty-stricken slums, who were labeled “the other half” by the Danish muckraker Jacob Riis in his 1890 runaway bestseller. In Los Angeles, it was the Chinese and Japanese, both showcased at the Rose Parade, who would best fit the bill for the Times editorial writer.

Especially for the Wongs, who had eschewed racial violence in remote rural areas and sought safety and communal connection in Chinatown, the editorial condemnation, with its familiar racist tinge, would certainly have hit home. Now that they had just added a new member to their household, with more children to come, the Wongs surely wished that the new Western-calendar year would be peaceful and prosperous. And perhaps in honor of the winter season, they named their second daughter Wong Liu Tsong, meaning “Yellow Frosted Willow.”