141927

I ain’t seen it advertised at Grauman’s Chinese, so how should I know?

—JAMES ELLROY, The Big Nowhere¹

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hollywood (Photograph by Yunte Huang)

WHILE THE EARLIEST nickelodeon reels had tapped Chinatown for material and inspiration, and the “yellow flicks” had continued the exploitation of popular stereotypes, Hollywood’s Chinese imagination reached an apex in 1927 with the construction of a baroque landmark. Anna May would lend a helping hand, literally and symbolically, to the erection of this shrine to chinoiserie.

After the 1926 failure of the Cosmic troupe, and with the encouragement of her father, Anna May moved back to the family residence on North Figueroa. Proud of his daughter’s accomplishments but concerned with her struggles, Sam Sing built her a separate apartment behind the laundry, so she could live with the family while still having a room of her own. Back in the family’s folds, Anna May felt safe and grateful: “I believe close quarters promote sympathy and understanding. Lives are interwoven. What affects one affects all and much opportunity is to be had for learning the Chinese virtue, compassion.… I am lucky that I am Chinese.”²

Her luck for being Chinese, though, was both a break and a barrier. On January 5, 1926, two days after her twenty-first birthday, Anna May was invited to a Hollywood ceremony. Following the success of his dazzling Egyptian Theatre, the showman Sidney Grauman teamed up with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to raise $2 million for the building of the Chinese Theatre, a spectacularly ornate Mount Olympus in the land of orange groves and poppy fields. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Anna May joined Norma Talmadge in shoveling the first spadeful of dirt. In her silk robe, she looked like her doppelgänger—Lotus Flower—in The Toll of the Sea. Indisputably the most authentic female Chinese icon at the time, she stood on the margin of the lineup, next to Grauman, Charlie Chaplin, Talmadge, and Conrad Nagel. With dozens of Chinese extras hovering in the background, she felt like she, too, was an extra hired for the occasion. In the photo op, she bowed her head, eyes closed, hands held together, as if saying a prayer, a bittersweet benediction on this quixotic tribute to her fatherland.³

In the coming months, after the building’s scaffolding was removed, artisans would install temple bells, pagodas, stone heavenly dogs, and countless other artifacts imported from China. The punctilious process of “Chinafying” was supervised by Anna May’s friend Moon Kwan, who had served as a technical adviser for many films. A young Chinese artist named Keye Luke was hired to paint the murals, a temporary job that would lead to his long and illustrious career as an actor, playing such memorable roles as Charlie Chan’s Number One Son and the blind Master Po in David Carradine’s television series Kung Fu.

On May 18, 1927, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre opened its doors. Soaring to ninety feet, it boasted gigantic coral-red columns supporting a jade-green roof, silver dragons spreading across the ceiling of a 2,258-seat auditorium, a pagoda posed as the box office, and ushers dressed in Chinese costumes. Although there was no acknowledgment of the brightest Chinese star of the era at the grand opening, an alluring wax statue of Anna May would later be added to grace the lobby. By all accounts, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was a monument to Hollywood’s lasting China fever.⁴

Adding to the frenzy, Hollywood released at least four Chinese-themed films that year: Mr. Wu (MGM), Old San Francisco (Warner Bros.), The Chinese Parrot (Universal), and Streets of Shanghai (Tiffany-Stahl). Unsurprisingly, Anna May appeared in all of them, but only in the periphery. At a time when her star power could entice an elite gentlemen’s club in Los Angeles to name a section of its landscaping “Anna May Wong Garden,” no China flick could do without her, but no director could feature her as the lead.⁵ The cultural logic at play is as riddling as a Charlie Chan aphorism.

In Mr. Wu, directed by William Nigh, Anna May reunited with Lon Chaney six years after Bits of Life, playing a handmaid to the female protagonist. Living up to his reputation as the man of myriad faces, Chaney assumed the double roles of Mr. Wu and his grandfather. A mandarin of immense pedigree and wealth, Wu is about to marry off his daughter Nang Ping (Renée Adorée) to the son of a colleague. A chance encounter, however, leads to a secret romance between Nang and a young Englishman. When Wu discovers his daughter’s betrayal, he ritualistically sacrifices her at the ancestral altar to protect his family name (ironically, the Chinese character for “Wu” means militant violence). In this Chinese Romeo-and-Juliet story, there are inevitably love scenes between the Chinese girl and the Englishman, clandestine trysts full of hugging, necking, and kissing. Coincidentally, in June 1927, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America passed a resolution codifying a list of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” for films. Judging by these pre-Code guidelines, the kind of interracial romance and physical intimacy in Mr. Wu would have raised a red flag. However, since Nang Ping was impersonated by the French actress Adorée, not an actual Chinese woman like Anna May, the white Romeo could woo his “Oriental” Juliet freely and gallantly, posing no offense to the industry’s rules or America’s hypocritical sense of decorum.

In a nation whose mythic origin story involves a bevy of Bostonians dressed up as Mohawks and grunting fake Indian words while dumping tea into the sea, the kind of yellowface performance by Chaney and Adorée was exactly what most viewers had come to expect and enjoy at the cinema. Racial mimicry lies at the heart of the American identity. In his studies of classic American literature, D. H. Lawrence astutely identified two streaks of the American character: “First, Americans had an awkward tendency to define themselves by what they were not”—they were not Indians, Blacks, Mexicans, or Chinese. Second, they had been continually haunted by the fatal dilemma of wanting to have things both ways. They abhorred the Indians, driving them off land and killing them in the process, but they also wanted to “play Indian,” savoring the freedom and spirit of those “noble savages.” Such a dialectic of simultaneous repulsion and desire showed up again and again in America’s racial imagination and constituted the foundation of its art and literature.⁶

Nowhere did such a feature reveal itself more clearly than in blackface. From the very beginning, minstrelsy as a form of racial mimicry—white actors blackening their faces to play, and play down, Black characters—defined the birth of popular American entertainment. The same year as the opening of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the release of Mr. Wu and other yellowface flicks, there appeared the first talkie made in Hollywood, The Jazz Singer. Adapted from the biography of Broadway’s leading blackface entertainer Al Jolson, who played his fictional self in the film, the plot involves a Jewish boy named Jakie Rabinowitz, who is captivated by jazz singing. When his father, a cantor, forbids his distasteful obsession, Jakie runs away. Reborn as Jack Robin, Jakie makes a splash on Broadway as a blackface jazz singer. The film ends with Jakie, wearing a woolen cap and covered with burnt cork, performing a Negro number, “My Mammy,” in front of his proud mother and an admiring theater audience.

Perpetuating the American dialectic of repulsion and desire, blackface also attained a new popularity, as The Jazz Singer amply demonstrated, at the height of the Eastern European immigration wave. As Michael Rogin argues in Blackface, White Noise, blackface in the early decades of the twentieth century gave whites an opportunity to act out and solidify their whiteness by playing and parodying Blacks. To turn European greenhorns into white Americans, the melting pot used racial masquerade—blackface, yellowface, redface, Jewface, and so on—to promote identity exchange but also to exclude unwanted racial groups.⁷ In Mr. Wu, we see not only Lon Chaney solidifying his stardom by playing two Chinese, but also the French actress Renée Adorée (a stage name that literally means “reborn adored”) gaining recognition in America by playing Nang Ping stereotypically, with mincing steps and feigned shyness. At the same time, Anna May, a real Chinese talent slotted to the secondary role of handmaid, could only look on with envy and resignation.⁸

Racial masquerade became even more complicated in Old San Francisco, written by Darryl F. Zanuck, who had also produced The Jazz Singer. The connection between these two films, both released in 1927, stems also from the fact that Warner Oland, impersonating a Jewish cantor in one film, played a Caucasian thug who hides his Chinese identity in the other. Whether as an orthodox Jew or an evil Chinese, Oland was a prime example of a newly arrived European acclimating himself to American culture by mastering the art of playing a racial other. Born Johan Verner Ölund in Sweden and arriving in America with his parents at the age of thirteen, Oland attended drama school in Boston. After dropping the umlaut and anglicizing his name, Oland took advantage of his vaguely Asiatic features to pick up Oriental roles in films. As talkies began to dominate the industry in the late 1920s, and many stars of the silent era fell victim to the technological transition to sound, Oland would become Hollywood’s top choice to play an on-screen Chinese. His signature roles were the supervillain Dr. Fu Manchu and the affable sleuth Charlie Chan.

In Old San Francisco, Oland’s character, Chris Buckwell, is a gluttonous villain who bullies, robs, rapes, and kills. Concealing his real Chinese identity, he relegates his Buddhist shrine to his basement, where he prays for forgiveness while keeping his disabled brother locked up in a cage. Like the Mongol spy in The Thief of Bagdad, Anna May plays a nameless Chinese girl who serves as a stool pigeon for Buckwell. With her assistance, he kidnaps a white girl and sells her to a white slaver. As he grabs for the blood money, an earthquake hits the city and buries him under fallen debris. Perhaps the film historian Kevin Brownlow is right in calling Old San Francisco “one of the most racist films ever made in America.” Penned by Zanuck, the film is marred by naked Sinophobia. Derogatory allusions are prevalent, the terms “Chinaman,” “Chink,” and “Mongolian” are used interchangeably, and white slavery by Jews, portrayed openly, is affirmed. In a crucial, revelatory scene that is, in Brownlow’s words, “suffused by the kind of religion best practiced by the Ku Klux Klan,” the title card reads: “In the awful light of an outraged, wrathful Christian God, the heathen soul of the Mongol stood revealed.”⁹

Truth be told, in those early years Hollywood did try to cast a real Asian actor for a leading Asian role. Earlier, Technicolor was using Anna May for the color experiment in The Toll of the Sea, and Sessue Hayakawa, before he was hamstrung by rising Japanophobia, had played leads in numerous films. In The Chinese Parrot, the second Charlie Chan flick, in which Anna May was a vaudeville dancer, the Chinese detective was actually played by Kamiyama Sojin, who had appeared in The Thief of Bagdad. For all the sins committed by Hollywood for casting white actors as Charlie Chan, at least the first three films of the long-running series featured Asian leads: George Kuwa in The House Without a Key (1926), Sojin in The Chinese Parrot (1927), and Edward Park in Behind That Curtain (1929). Unfortunately, the reels of the first two films have been lost, but, judging from the fact that in the third film, Charlie Chan, one of the most popular icons in the print media at the time, appears on screen for no more than one minute—he literally falls out of the picture!—we can surmise that Americans were not so keen on a real Chinese playing a Chinese character. They would have to go to a freak show for that, as they had done in earlier decades, flocking to see the world-famous Siamese Twins at the circus, or the China Lady at Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia. For Americans who cut their teeth on playing Indian or doing blackface, there was just not enough oomph—or too much MSG?—in an Oriental playing an Oriental. It would take someone like Warner Oland, the Swedish-turned-American whiz at yellowface, to salvage the legacy of the honorable Chinese detective.

In such a toxic cultural milieu, Anna May did not feel at home, a sentiment shared by many nonwhite artists in the American entertainment world of the 1920s. “I felt it was a crisis in my life,” she recalled.¹⁰ Even though picking up a handful of supporting roles a year would be boast-worthy for many movie-struck girls, the daughter of a Chinese laundryman maintained her higher aspirations, undaunted by the welter of prejudice she faced. It was at this point that her fortune veered. At one of those swanky Hollywood parties, Anna May met Karl Vollmöller, a German author who had just adapted his own novel, Dirty Money, for a German film to be directed by Richard Eichberg. Film historians have often credited Vollmöller with introducing Marlene Dietrich to Josef von Sternberg, forgetting that the polymath German—he was a poet, philologist, archaeologist, playwright, screenwriter, and auto-racer—was also instrumental in raising Anna May’s profile. Vollmöller convinced Eichberg, who had been quite impressed by her performance in The Thief of Bagdad and others, to cast Anna May as the lead in the German film. In fact, to entice her to make the long trek across the pond, Eichberg offered her a generous five-picture contract. Although she did not know a word of German and had never traveled abroad except for a quick 1924 trip to Mexico with her family to validate their citizenship papers, this was an opportunity she could not decline. “The door opened,” she said, “and I walked through.”¹¹

Thus, joining the exodus of other nonwhite performers such as Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson, Anna May sailed for Europe to seek a better future. On the eve of her departure, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times lamented, “It seems to us the greatest pity in the world that Hollywood producers are going to let that uniquely talented young oriental actress, Anna May Wong, slip through their fingers.”¹² Ironically, just as those European greenhorns came to America to become white in the New World’s race crucible, Anna May was going to “old Europe” in order to be recognized as an American.

Anna May Wong in Piccadilly, 1929 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)