16“ORIENTALLY YOURS”

Anna May Wong publicity photo, late 1920s (Courtesy of New York Public Library)

LIKE HER GRANDFATHER, who had left Canton hoping to strike it rich in America’s Old West, or like the Chinese coolies migrating to Berlin, Anna May got busy acclimating herself to life in a foreign land. Though she was already a star, she never failed to remember her humble origins. More important, she had the uncanny ability to turn working-class aesthetics into high-class symbols, as she would do one day with the coolie hat and jacket.

Taking a crash course in German, she practiced eight hours a day the speech and writing of a notoriously hard language. And she made daily trips to the UFA studios in Babelsberg to rehearse and get ready for the new chapter in her career. Always a quick study, she was soon able to speak, read, and write in basic German. As she stated in an article published in the journal Mein Film, “I am very happy in Berlin, so happy as I have seldom been in my life. I really enjoy my work in Berlin, and I also work very well with director Eichberg.”¹

Knowing German was an asset that came in handy just as photographers began to line up outside her hotel room seeking photo shoots. Likewise, journalists came for interviews, and Berlin’s cognoscenti invited her to prestigious events. She became a regular at the theater and the opera, in addition to making rounds of private parties. When Anna May got tired of being an American flapper, she and Lulu would go to lunch at the Tientsin Restaurant on Kantstrasse. Run by a Mr. Yu and his German Frau—the sort of interracial union that would soon be rendered illegal by the Nuremberg Laws—it was the first Chinese restaurant in town. Diagonally across the street from the train station, the eatery was frequented by Chinese students and diplomats living in the Charlottenburg area, and it often served as a meeting place for Chinese student activists. It was at Tientsin that Anna May had a chance encounter with Gongzhen Ge, a pioneer of Chinese journalism traveling in Europe. Ge recognized the actress, whose face had graced Chinese magazines since the early 1920s. They talked—he in Mandarin, she in Cantonese—and when communication across the dialectical divide became impossible, they sought the aid of an English–Chinese dictionary. She asked him about China, which was being shredded by warlords, torn apart by the infighting between Chiang Kai-shek and the forces of the Chinese Communist Party. Ge reassured her that, despite the unrest, the Chinese film industry was flourishing, and Anna May expressed hopes to visit China one day, perhaps even to make films there. The next day, she granted him a formal interview at her hotel, accompanied by a photographer. In an article published a few months later in the Chinese journal Life Weekly, Ge described his two meetings with Anna May, her Eastern charm in a Western dress, her concerns for her war-torn ancestral homeland, and her dream of visiting China. The article also included a headshot of her with a dedication, “Orientally yours, Anna May Wong.”² Coquettish and witty, this inscription would become her unique signoff, revealing both a quiet acquiescence and a tongue-in-cheek defiance of the public perception of her as an exotic icon. It was with such wry humor that she would assume her roles on-screen and assert her ostensibly Oriental self in the sophisticated cultural sphere of Weimar Berlin.

Her first German film Song (1928) was a smash hit. Ninety-four minutes long, Richard Eichberg’s colonial fantasy was in the heavily treaded tradition of Madame Butterfly. The story was set at “an unspecified Eastern harbor,” but, judging by the architectural landmarks, it is Istanbul, where the East literally meets the West. The title character, Song, is introduced by a title card as “a human piece of driftwood,” and Anna May was paired with Heinrich George, a seasoned German actor and a Communist Party member who had appeared in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

As the plot of the silent film unfolds, Song falls in love with John Houben, a rough, abusive cabaret artist and professional knife-thrower. When he is temporarily blinded, she cares for him in disguise, wearing the perfume and fur coat of the woman he once loved. When he finds out the truth and comes looking for her, it is too late, for Song has been fatally wounded in a sword-dance performance in a nightclub. Unlike The Toll of the Sea, in which Anna May’s performance was stymied by Hollywood’s protocols, Song provides a vehicle for her star qualities, showcasing for the first time her multiple talents as an actress, cabaret dancer, vaudeville artiste, and a pioneer in that tricky art of racial masquerade.

In the style of German Expressionism, which prioritizes inner emotions over replicated realities, artificial props over natural settings, the camera emphasizes Anna May’s expressive face in close-ups and repeatedly isolates her on-screen, as if to carve out from the narrative a separate space just for her performance. In the words of a shrewd film critic, such a mise-en-scène establishes “her as an outsider not only in the story, but also in visual terms.”³ Different from, say, Lon Chaney in Shadow, where he impersonated a Chinese by yellowface, Anna May assumes the title role here by mise-en-abyme, a play within a play. Interestingly, the character’s name, Song, is also Anna May’s Chinese name, Liu Tsong. Thus, the line between Anna May and her character, between reality and art, often gets crossed in this film. There would be additional examples. In Piccadilly (1929), the heroine Shosho signs Anna May’s Chinese name as if it were her own. To add another twist, there was another famous Song (or Soong) living in Germany at the time: Qingling Soong, widow of the founding father of modern China, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Threatened by political enemies after her husband’s death in 1925, Madame Sun had gone into exile and sought refuge first in the Soviet Union and then in Germany.⁴ For German viewers who had read about Madame Sun in the newspapers, her plight resembled that of Anna May’s film character, Song, a shipwrecked Asian damsel awaiting rescue by a strong, knife-throwing white man.

The film also uses Anna May’s talents to reflect other manifestations of Germany’s colonial obsession with romance and fantasy. In one scene, Song performs a Malay dance to the accompaniment of a one-man mariachi band. In another, as the target for a knife-throwing act, she conjures the image of a native Pacific Islander, clad in a grass skirt with her long hair, adorned with beads and flowers, flowing down her bare back. In the final scene, she appears on stage sporting two eagle feathers on her head, looking like an Aztec warrior princess, wielding a sword, and performing a war dance on a turntable of knives pointed upward—before she accidentally falls onto a blade and dies. In its late nineteenth-century heyday, the German Reich had exerted colonial influence all over the world, including Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, Latin America—locales suggested by Anna May’s artistic assumption of multiple female identities in this film.

One particular identity, however, proved tricky for her to appropriate: a white woman. In the story, when Houben becomes temporarily blind, Song takes care of him and helps him recover. As he continues to pine for his old flame, Gloria, Song tries to heal his emotional wound by passing as the white woman. As just described, she puts on Gloria’s perfume and fur coat and gets him into an intimate embrace. While interracial romance remained taboo—for European and American films alike—blindness and masquerade in this plotline provided an alibi for transgression. In fact, taking a cue from the original novel, Dirty Money, the screenwriters were able to create scenes in which the interracial couple kisses. These scenes of intimacy, however, were not filmed, presumably for fear of censorship.⁵ Even though the notorious Nuremberg Laws would not be issued until 1935, eugenics had deep roots in Europe, as it did in America.

Considering how prevalent the practice of yellowface was, and how routinely white actresses played Asian characters, it was rather remarkable for Anna May to be able to return the favor, so to speak, and impersonate a white woman. As Shirley Jennifer Lim rightly points out, “Passing for white is unprecedented in Wong’s career as well as for other Asian American actors and actresses.” Anna May’s scene of passing in Song is indeed, as Lim avows, “a revolutionary remaking of the racial masquerade.”⁶

The boldness and versatility of the Hollywood émigré did not fail to impress the German audiences and critics. Two weeks after its gala debut at Berlin’s Alhambra Theatre on August 21, 1928, Song played in ninety-four cinemas across Germany. In a lengthy review for the Film-Kurier, Ernst Jaeger lauded the silent feature as “a particularly well-done episode of film history,” imbuing Madame Butterfly romanticism into a Dostoyevskian tragedy. The leading German film critic was especially impressed by “the girl from the East, who has filmed long enough in the exotic gardens of California to know how she can pull her facial expressions against the conventional film style.” Jaeger was struck by Anna May’s mimetic power, describing her, in overwrought language, as “the Mongolian woman with the body of an American girl, in whom, only when she is dancing, does the strange rhythm, a rocking that originates in the plum blossom dance of her native country, make her appear magical.” Spellbound by her physique and alien rhythm, Jaeger was most taken by her visage. “The look on her face!” he cried, barely able to contain his enthusiasm:

Eyes like dark coffers. Her eyelashes hang over you like branches. Her lips mimic English—and yet she has a secret of her race which puts her ahead of all her peers: the masklike expression of her face remains fixed and frozen even when her eyes scream, her lips burn. This makes her the perfect choice for the camera, which under [Heinrich] Gärtner’s artistic hand is able to bring us as close as possible to the otherness of that alien expression. This is a great feat of filmmaking: to bring such an alien life into our everyday light.

His language, in retrospect, seems to animalize or “jungle-ize” her, for no German woman presumably would be capable of such uncontrolled passion and lust. It is hardly surprising, Jaeger concluded, that the film was, above all, “the drama of Anna May Wong.”⁷

Other German reviewers echoed Jaeger’s enthusiasm, agreeing that a star had been born in Berlin. The film journal Lichtbildbühne breathlessly proclaimed, “This German film will, in its success, announce the glory of Anna May Wong as one of the greatest film artists.” The evening newspaper 8-Uhr-Abendblatt sounded more nationalistic, as if turning the actress into a new colonial satrapy: “Anna May Wong is ours now, and we won’t let her go again.”⁸

In September, Song was released in Great Britain as Show Life and in the United States as Wasted Love. The British press recognized the film as “Anna May Wong’s first starring vehicle” and praised her performance in glowing terms: “Anna May Wong scores a veritable triumph.… the star’s personality and acting, which from start to finish enchains the attention.… Anna May Wong’s acting [is] a masterpiece of subtlety.” The American press, however, appeared to be no fan of German Expressionism. Perhaps also trying to justify Hollywood’s snubbing of a promising talent, the New York Times dismissed the film as “a hapless piece of work that is years behind the times.” It went on to state sourly, “Anna May Wong is a competent little actress, but it would take far more than good acting, coupled with pleasing photography, to make this production half-way diverting.” Likewise, Variety also dissed the film: “Miss Wong is the only one with the slightest knowledge of what to do before a camera. Promiscuous use of tears has robbed the theme of any continuity and makes it unravel like a cumbersome trailer. Story is patchwork.”⁹

These sour-grape reviews would do little to deter Anna May’s rise in Europe. As she recalled, “The first picture in which I appeared made a hit. Crowds waited in the lobby for me to come out.” Everywhere she went in Berlin, she was mobbed by fans. The success of Song propelled her to stardom, but more important, it induced in her a psychic shift. “Weaving my way through that pack of admiring fans,” she said, “I seemed suddenly to be standing at one side watching myself with complete detachment. It was my Chinese soul coming back to claim me. Up to that time I had been more of an American flapper than Chinese.”¹⁰ While one British reviewer was right in saying that, “paradoxical as it might sound, Anna May Wong has gone to Germany only to be Americanized,” it is equally true that she had gone to Germany to recognize her Chinese self—a role she had been forced to play not so freely in America, but now with much more ease in Europe.¹¹ Looking at herself—and with detachment—through the eyes of the other, she could finally claim with irony and sincerity her identity of “Orientally yours.”