17CONVERSATION WITH AMW

It is essentially a worship of the imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

—KAKUZO OKAKURA, The Book of Tea (1906)

IN “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility,” a landmark essay that remained unpublished in its author’s lifetime, the philosopher Walter Benjamin offers a penetrating analysis of the aesthetics of film and photography. He argues that, compared with traditional artworks of painting, even the most perfect reproduction made by a camera lacks one thing: “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.” In other words, film and photography, by virtue of their reproducibility, lack “the aura.” Benjamin continues: “What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”¹

On a fine summer afternoon in June 1928, Benjamin, a medium-built man with thick dark hair, awkward hands, and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses shining like small headlights, was breathing the aura—not of a mountain range or a shadowy branch but of someone he was meeting for the first time. It was a rendezvous that would, as reported by the native Berliner in a resulting article, shed light on the souls of both the mesmerized beholder and the beheld in her unique aura.

It was a private party, at “a friend’s house in Berlin,” as Benjamin put it. Maybe a backyard gathering, in the shadow of a copse of trees, since the article later mentions “garden games.” It was a time to celebrate the arrival of summer and to toast Anna May’s starring role in her first German flick. “As everyone knows,” Benjamin wrote, “May Wong has a leading role in Eichberg’s great film now in production.” He called her May Wong, as did many of her German fans, who felt “Anna” sounded too Scandinavian. In fact, he seemed to like “May” so much better than “Anna” that when he published the article, he even misspelled “Anna” in the title, “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong” (Conversation with Anne May Wong).²

To this aficionado of astrology, tarot cards, graphology, and other mantic symbols, a name is vital. Earlier that year, Benjamin had published One-Way Street, an experimental book composed of sixty short prose pieces, a Dadaist collage of aphorisms, slogans, dream sequences, philosophical musings, and political pastiche. He dedicated the book to Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik actress, with a striking inscription:

This street is named

Asja Lacis Street

after her who

as an engineer

cut it through the author.³

Asja, or “Asia,” was an elusive, and often unsympathetic, object of desire. In his diary, Benjamin compared her to “an almost impregnable fortress.”⁴ It was a chaotic period in his life. Just separated from his wife Dora, newly experimenting with hashish, he was struggling as a freelancer for newspapers and journals while trying to maintain his love affair with Asja. His entanglement with the latter was a somewhat sadomasochistic relationship, as suggested by the dedication of One-Way Street, which conjures up an image of a dominatrix cutting a path through a man’s heart or body, searing it with her own name—as he seemingly wished.

For a few fleeting hours on this summer afternoon, the eccentric writer, not yet the intellectual giant he was to become, turned his attention from his elusive Asja to the enigmatic Asian actress. By no means an ardent Sinophile, Benjamin nonetheless held China in high regard, as this gem from One-Way Street proves:

“Chinese Curios”: The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out.… Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. The Chinese practice of copying books was thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to China’s enigmas.⁵

The abrupt appearance of China in his musings over the difference between a flier and a pedestrian, a reader and a copier, is not only the mark of a Dadaist disdain for flow or continuity, but also a measure of the Middle Kingdom’s cultural prestige in the mind of the German thinker.

Indeed, his infatuation with this specimen of chinoiserie began with her name: “May Wong—the name resonates with color around the edges, sharp and light like the tiny specks that open into scentless blossoms like full moons in a bowl of tea. My questions were a tepid bath in which the destinies concealed in this name could divulge a little something of themselves.”⁶ Rather than a flier-cum-reader, Benjamin chose the role of a pedestrian-cum-copier, who lets nature reveal mysteries of its own accord, like watching tiny tea leaves unfolding in water, then blossoming into full moons. Comparing the poetics of her name to the hidden secrets of tea, Benjamin, a devotee of Jewish mysticism, would understand what Kakuzo Okakura avows in The Book of Tea, “Teaism is Taoism in disguise.”⁷ At that garden party in Berlin, the writer continued, “we formed a little community around the low table to observe the process of unfolding.”⁸

At the beginning of their meeting, Anna May introduced Benjamin to the people sitting around her: a novelist, then an artist on her left, a female American journalist on her right, and her sister Lulu. Clad in a dark-blue suit and a light-blue blouse fronted by a yellow tie, Anna May surprised Benjamin with her chic attire, leaving him to struggle for words: “Her outfit might be most fitting for such garden games, [and yet] one would need a Chinese verse to describe this.” Trying to reconcile his expectation of a “chinoiserie specimen” with the reality of an American flapper, he added, “She has always dressed like this, having been born not in China but in Los Angeles’s Chinatown.” He was amused when she told him, perhaps as a tease, that her favorite dress was cut from her father’s wedding jacket, and she would wear it on occasion. The writer was indeed tickled, waxing poetically: “The fabric donned was divine/But the face more than fine.”

He had not yet seen her acting, so they did not talk too much about the film that was being made, but she did tell him that the role was perfect for her. Looking back on her arduous ten years in Hollywood, she said, “It is a role that belongs to me like no other before.”

As the conversation went on, the two moved to another room, away from the chatter of the party. An inveterate aphorist, Benjamin quoted a Chinese proverb from Yu-Kia-Li, a German translation of an old Chinese text: “Idle prattle about people’s affairs prevents important discussion.” Not to be outdone, Anna May ad-libbed one of her own sayings rather than tap the wisdom of dead ancients: “Bitter truth is only heard from enemies.” And she was quick to add, “I want to hear bitter truth from my friends as well.”

Reclining on a couch, she loosened her long hair and arranged it in the manner he poetically compared to “a dragon romping in water.” She pushed her dragon’s mane back over her forehead, and it came down a bit lower, cutting into her oval face and making it look like a heart. Spellbound, he observed, “Everything that is heart appears reflected in her eyes.” Perhaps he was recalling a passage in One-Way Street, where he depicts the piercing eyes of the woman he loves: “Had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I would have gone up like a powder keg.”⁹ If earlier he was struggling to find a Chinese verse to describe Anna May, he found it now, in another quote from Yu-Kia-Li: “An ample face like a spring breeze/Formally round, spiritually in peace.”

Their tête-à-tête continued. She spoke of her desire to play a mother: “The best are mothers. I played one at fifteen.” It was her first big break, as Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea, the young mother of a biracial child. “Why not?” she went on. “There are so many young mothers.” He agreed, thinking of Dora and their son Stefan, who had just turned ten, and of Asja, who was reluctant to have children with him.

Like a movie camera, he recorded the scene with the keen eye of an inspired writer. If he had begun the interview by likening it to tea brewing—his questions became a “tepid bath” in which the tea leaves would unfold their secrets—she had changed the game somewhere along the way. “May Wong turns question and answer into a kind of swinging,” he wrote. “She leans back and rises up, sinks down and rises up, and I imagine that now and then I give her a push. She laughs, that is all.”¹⁰

Save for this essay Benjamin would publish in the July 6, 1928, issue of Die Literarische Welt, there is no other record from this intimate encounter between one of Weimar Berlin’s leading critics and the rising Chinese American actress.¹¹ About a year after their rendezvous, the stock market crash on Wall Street and the subsequent worldwide economic depression would precipitate, inter alia, the rise of Adolf Hitler to power. Jews such as Benjamin would be expelled from Germany or rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Though spared genocide, the Chinese who chose to stay in Nazi Germany rather than return to China were sent to labor camps. By the mid-1930s, Anna May would not have been able to make films in Germany. Benjamin would flee to France. In 1940, he perished during a desperate attempt to cross the border into Spain, with the ultimate goal of coming to America. His death was recorded by the French police as a suicide.

In retrospect, the meeting of Walter Benjamin and Anna May took place in the twilight of the almost ephemeral glory of the Weimar Republic. To quote the Japanese savant Okakura again, “Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the sounding of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence, and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”¹²