19PICCADILLY

WHEN ANNA MAY, having left her mark in Germany and France, arrived in London in the fall of 1928, the British Empire was near the zenith of its grandeur. Possessing colonies on every continent—more than a quarter of the planet—the empire had never been larger. The stock market’s Black Thursday was still a year in the future, and even though there were hints of a crisis—increasing social unrest at home and incipient independence movements in the colonies—the Union Jack remained the symbol of the most powerful nation on Earth. As if sensing that the best days would soon be over, the British Empire mounted a stunning exhibition at Wembley Park in 1924–25, perhaps a last-ditch attempt to project the fading imperial nimbus. Although the spectacular exposition that made Wembley a household name was long over by 1928, no one could forget some of the exotic scenes on display. Visitors to the Hong Kong booth, for instance, would remember dining in its restaurant on bird’s nest soup, shark fin, and other delicacies served by Chinese “boys” to the accompaniment of a traditional Chinese band. Stepping into the “street” outside, they would perhaps find themselves bewildered by the bright signs in Chinese characters, announcing the names of the pigtailed, smiling proprietors and the wares for sale.¹

Yet, British curiosity about China was hardly new to the twentieth century. In 1829, a hundred years prior to Anna May’s arrival, the world-famous Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, both of Chinese descent, had been displayed as monstrous freaks in Piccadilly—an iconic name that would become the title of Anna May’s first British film and one of her most memorable pictures. Furthermore, the two Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) raised the British stake in the Middle Kingdom and sparked new interest in all things Chinese. In the years leading up to the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901, as Britain further expanded its influence in China and dispatched more soldiers, missionaries, businessmen, and diplomats, a small Chinatown grew up along London’s dockside streets. Boardinghouses, grocery stores, restaurants, association halls, and laundries catered mostly to Chinese laborers and seamen. Unsurprisingly, such an ethnic enclave in the heart of the metropolis inspired opportunistic writers to exploit its dramatic potential. The long-running series of Dr. Fu Manchu stories, for instance, was born out of novelist Sax Rohmer’s obsession with Chinatown as an imaginary locus of drugs, gambling, sex, and other iniquities. The yellow-journalism Limehouse fiction by Thomas Burke also scandalized readers with tales of forbidden romance between Yellow Man and White Girl, provoking Darwinian panic and fears of miscegenation.²

Anna May Wong in Piccadilly, 1929 (Courtesy of Mary Evans / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection)

Interestingly, Anna May had read all of Burke’s books and loved the nightmarish atmosphere of the Limehouse stories. Her new film, Piccadilly, set alternately in Limehouse in East London and in the West End, had a similarly noirish quality that permeated its 105-minute run. And in just a few years, she would personify the progeny of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu in Daughter of the Dragon. Besides the popularity of Limehouse fiction and the imaginary evil doctor, there were other elements in multiple echelons of British society that contributed to the phenomenal success of a Chinese American actress in Great Britain.

Among the upper class and cultural elites, China held a particular allure that could not be undone by the negative images associated with Limehouse. As Ezra Pound, the American poet then living in London, said in 1914, “China is interesting, VERY.”³ Pound and his cohort of Anglo-American poets turned to China for artistic inspirations, a search that gave birth to Imagism. Likewise, Virginia Woolf tried to pinpoint the genesis of literary modernism with her famous claim, “On and about December 1910 human character changed.” That year was marked not only by King Edward VII’s death and the stunning Post-Impressionist exhibition at Grafton Galleries, but also by the June opening of the British Museum’s exhibition of Chinese and Japanese painting, curated by Pound’s friend Laurence Binyon. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf described Lily Briscoe, a painter and a New Woman, as having “little Chinese eyes” and a “puckered-up face.”⁴

In the broader sectors of British society, the aesthetics of chinoiserie, embodied by embroideries, furniture, utensils, and other objects, had historically defined taste and class standing. In the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, British forces and their Western allies looted the Summer Palace in Peking and then burned it to the ground. The spoils from the royal palace were later exhibited and auctioned off, spurring a spike in demand for Chinese objets d’art. In the same period, Chinese objects and embroidery found their way into middle-class homes and wardrobes. As a corollary to the Wembley Exhibition, a marked proclivity for Oriental styles in homes was noted in 1924 and 1925. At the beginning of 1925, the China Express and Telegraph boldly predicted that it would be “A Great Year of Chinese Fashions”: “There are Chinese tea jackets, rest coatees [jackets or coats], and loose wraps made of vivid colors, embroidered with large white lotus flowers with red fish and orange birds. Chinese dance frocks made in marocain [crepe fabric] worked in many colored skeins of silk will be seen in dance halls, and with these will be worn Chinese silk slippers.”⁵ Throughout the year, the influential newspaper continued to run articles about wallpaper portraying Chinese motifs, curtains depicting Chinese dragons or dragon-shaped clouds, eiderdowns having much black in them, lampshades adorned with dragons in gold tinsel, and chinaware glazed in bright colors that imitated the porcelain of the Kang-hsi period. When the Hong Kong section at the Wembley Exhibition closed in October 1925, eager buyers lined up for the auction of lacquerware furniture, ivory, embroideries, mahjong sets, tea, and ginger. As in the United States, mahjong nights across Britain became huge hits, replacing bridge parties.⁶

Such Chinese vogues certainly helped to boost Anna May’s popularity in the United Kingdom, but chinoiserie did little to reduce Sinophobia. Just think: It was at the height of American xenophobia in the mid-1920s that Charlie Chan, an iconic Chinese fellow, burst onto the scene and took the nation by storm. Like racial masquerade, cultural appropriation of objects and images helps alleviate racial anxieties by satisfying consumer desires for the exotic and new. It does not necessarily, however, translate into affection for the people. Even when the so-called coiffure chinoise—in which the hair is pulled back from the face and fixed in a chignon with an ornamental pin—popularized by the Parisian actress Andree Spinelly, was catching on among British women, a Chinese student in London could not find a barber willing to cut his hair or a room to rent outside cramped Chinatown.⁷ This was the kind of cultural reality facing Anna May when she arrived. She needed to bridge the gulf between the China vogue in Bloomsbury and the sordid reality of Limehouse, between the fetish for all things Chinese and a nithering racial condescension no different from what she had been subject to in America.

Piccadilly, her first British film and last silent feature, was another Anglo-German collaborative project. Like its German counterpart, the British film industry was trying to compete with Hollywood and counterbalance the increasing cultural domination by the United States. After Parliament passed the Cinematograph Films Act in 1927, requiring British theaters to show a certain number of domestic films per screen, British studios greatly increased their production pace to meet the spike in demand.⁸ Getting Anna May to shoot a film in England, then, would satisfy several prerequisites: Though directed by a German, Piccadilly counted as a British film; though American, Anna May was Chinese and could appeal to British viewers with a hunger for chinoiserie. In fact, while in England, Anna May received the honorary title of Cultural Ambassador of China, even though she was an American citizen and had never set foot on Chinese soil.

Written by the bestselling author Arnold Bennett and directed by E. A. Dupont, Piccadilly was a feast for the eye. The story involves Shosho (Anna May), a scullery maid who snatches a job as the dancing star at the fashionable Piccadilly Club from Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray), a blonde whose Charleston routines begin to get stale. Using her exotic and youthful charm, Shosho also steals Mabel’s place in the heart of the club owner, Valentine Wilmot. In the end, Shosho is shot dead by Jim, her jealous Chinese lover.

Piccadilly is a singular film for a whole variety of reasons. Critics and film historians often consider it a cinematic masterpiece, not in the least because it features Anna May in a starring role. Whereas other films in which she acts play on racist tropes and negative stereotypes, Piccadilly, while realistically depicting the rank bigotry that confronted the Asian-English community, seems to pander less to inflammatory stereotypes and “dragon lady” dog whistles that populate many of her other films. It is then significant that the film was made in England, not in Hollywood. What also makes Piccadilly historic is the fact that it was filmed in 1928, just as silent movies were yielding to talkies. It is a throwback, yet it distinguishes itself as a masterpiece of the silent era, its cinematography and acting of the highest quality, with Shosho’s balletic movements closer, say, to Buster Keaton than to mere slapstick.

Also striking about Piccadilly is its larger historical symbolism—its depiction of a hedonistic nightclub society that flourished between the wars, whether in Germany or, so it seems, in a post-Edwardian England. The café society of Berlin, so brilliantly animated by one of its finest chroniclers, Joseph Roth, comes to life here, but this is louche London, not Weimar. It is a world that refuses to recognize that an entire generation, only ten years earlier, was decimated, their bodies fallen in Somme and Verdun, or in Flanders Fields, as John McCrae’s eponymous, most poignant war poem describes:

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.⁹

The opening of the film gives not the slightest impression of the imminent crisis—1929 marks the beginning of a global Depression, the most severe of the twentieth century. Piccadilly is all aglitter, the double-decker buses arriving at the Piccadilly Club, the crowds milling outside, with Gilda Gray, soon to be Anna May’s rival, featured on the marquee. The ballroom with its hints of early art deco is especially grand, the twin staircase shaped like a double helix leading to the dance floor, the couples foxtrotting as though they had not a single care but to be narcotized by the rhythmic swaying of the music, the bar inundated by tuxedoed gentlemen angling to catch the bartender’s eye.

Here are the spoils—the wealth and the arrogance—of the overseas colonies on full display: the porcine gentleman diner, plucked from a Georg Grosz painting, remonstrating the waiters for a “dirty plate”; the Lucullan display of food; the mink-swathed women in the ladies’ room applying lipstick, reaching for a cigarette, and gossiping that Vic and Mabel are “the talk of the town”; the dancers in frenzied motion (women backward, please); and the film itself a dazzling montage of motion and energy that suggests life as an endless party.

It is into this world that Anna May/Shosho is thrust. A spectacular display of the glitter and dazzle in London’s upscale West End in contrast to Limehouse’s squalor, Piccadilly cast Anna May in her most provocatively erotic and seductive role. When Shosho first appears in the scullery scene, the camera tracks Wilmot’s coveting gaze and finds her dancing on a worktable, surrounded by a gaggle of dishwashers cheering her on. Then the camera pans over, as if caressing her, slowly tilting down from her fresh face to her braless upper body, her nipples protruding through her sweater. It then lingers for a few seconds on a ragged apron wrapped around her undulating hips, then zeroes in on the runs in her sheer black stockings, finally ending with a close-up of her plain Mary Jane shoes with buckles. As if depicting Anna May as a fashion model, the film shows her in various costumes that match her changing status, at the same time reflecting her shifting psyche. As Shosho emerges as a star performer, her daily attire changes to a keyhole sweater with horizontal stripes of a Parisian apache dancer, then a tight silky black dress with enticing buttons. On a night out as the new paramour of her boss, she dons an elegant coat with fur on the collar and hem. Her most striking attire was the dance costume, an exotic piece she demands that Wilmot purchase for her from a Chinese curio shop in Limehouse for an exorbitant amount. “I dance in that or not at all,” she declares. It is a Southeast Asia–inspired piece consisting of a gold headdress with a phallic horn and armorlike shoulder pads and breastplates. In her shimmering armor, Shosho looks like an androgynous goddess triumphant in the game of love and death.¹⁰

In the final seduction scene, she takes Wilmot back to her flat. Full of kitschy, derivative bric-a-brac like goldfish, pagoda lanterns, a Buddha portrait, and looming shadows of a dragon, the exotic decor suggests a den of an Oriental seductress ready to ensnare her unsuspecting prey. Appearing behind a diaphanous screen, Shosho has slipped into a braless sequined dress dangling on two thin straps, plus a matching embroidered veil. Not surprisingly, she lures Wilmot into her web.

Compared with any of her previous films, Piccadilly becomes a star vehicle in which, as American literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng points out, “Wong most actively aligns herself with her character.”¹¹ The plot of Piccadilly in many ways matches Anna May’s own story, as if both the real life and the cinematic one were constructed on a rags-to-riches fantasy, in that the poor Chinese girl is miraculously rescued from her benighted circumstances and suddenly thrust into a starring role, as if she’s been crowned “queen for a day.” The first time we see Shosho, she dances on a table in the scullery under a set of coolie-hat lampshades and against a background of rising steam. Both the coolie-hat imagery and the vapor from the dishwashing sink seem to complement Anna May’s humble origin in a Chinese laundry. Another diegetic moment occurs when Shosho sends Mabel a bouquet of flowers, accompanied by a sarcastic message: “To Miss Mabel: A thought from one who was in the kitchen. Shosho.” After her English autograph, we see Anna May’s real Chinese name, 黄柳霜. The same thing happens when Shosho signs the contract offered by Wilmot. She again writes Anna May’s real name. Thus, the film becomes as much a biopic of Anna May Wong as a Cinderella story of Shosho. That the lives of both Anna May and the scullery-maid-turned-nightclub-dancing sensation would end tragically is not uncoincidental, although it would be more than a quarter century before Anna May’s decline led to her death back in Los Angeles.

The alignment of fact and fiction gives Piccadilly the feel of a documentary, creating a mise-en-abyme that sheds light on what lies beyond the studio lot. At the very beginning of the film, the credits are ingeniously printed on the side of a double-decker bus rumbling through the street, promising a flick full of tourist delights. King Ho Chang, who played Jim, was actually a restaurant owner in Limehouse, which partly accounts for the two realistic restaurant scenes in the film. In the first one, Chinese diners are seen devouring fried chicken and mashed potatoes with knives and forks; in the second scene, the footage depicts Chinese customers brandishing their obligatory chopsticks. In a reprise of those “slumming trips” that took place in turn-of-the-century American cities, the travel agency Thomas Cook began to promote charabanc [open-topped vehicle] trips to the Limehouse district during the same period. As Anne Witchard describes the scene in her study of 1920s London, “At a carefully stage-managed time, doors would burst open and Chinese, complete with pigtails, would chase each other down the street wielding cleavers.”¹² It also became trendy for West End clubbers, after a couple of cocktails, to go carousing down Chinatown way, which is exactly what Shosho and Wilmot do on the fateful night when she is killed. In the rough Limehouse saloon, packed with working-class drinkers and women kicking up their legs or slipping pound notes into their nylons, Shosho tells Wilmot, “You see, this is our Piccadilly,” not his pretentious high-end club. Soon an inebriated white woman dancing with a black man is kicked out of the saloon by the owner, who scolds her, “Are yer blind, or wot?” Realizing the crowd’s animosity toward interracial mixing, Shosho and Wilmot beat a quick retreat.

The fear of miscegenation was actually replicated by what lay beyond the camera. Given the preponderance of eroticism in this film, it was especially difficult for the editor to cut the on-screen kissing scene between Shosho and Wilmot. As the Wilmot actor Jameson Thomas admitted, even though England was less prejudiced about interracial romance than America, they had to be “careful to handle such scenes tactfully.”¹³ In his influential study of film stars, Edgar Morin theorizes the magic of a kiss: “The kiss is not only the key technique of love-making, nor the cinematic substitute for intercourse forbidden by censorship: it is the triumphant symbol of the role of the face and the soul in twentieth-century love.”¹⁴ Without the magic of a kiss, Anna May became a star shorn of stardust.

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

Despite the absence of such scenes, Piccadilly received glowing reviews in the British press and abroad. The Bioscope noted, “This is the most striking film issued recently from a British studio and reflects every possible credit on all concerned in its making. Anna May Wong is perfectly fitted as the little scullery maid whose head is easily turned by sudden success.” Close Up called it “the perfect British film,” and Variety also opined that “this is one British-made that can go around the world.” The Picturegoer gave Anna May a backhanded compliment: “By her immobility, her reposeful body movements that are certainly her Oriental heritage, she gave a touch of dignity to the siren she portrayed.”¹⁵ Almost all reviewers agreed that just as Shosho steals Mabel’s paramour, Anna May outshone the blonde Gilda Gray and was the real star of the two. This newfound glory would open doors to Anna May’s enduring dream: to appear on London’s live stage.