23DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON

STILL IN MOURNING for her mother while taking daily curtain calls on Broadway, Anna May was tapped by a major Hollywood studio to play the daughter of the most diabolic figure in cinema. In 1931, Paramount had paid a princely $20,000 for the rights to Sax Rohmer’s new installment of his popular Fu Manchu series, The Daughter of Fu Manchu, and planned to lavish another quarter-million dollars on the film adaptation.¹ This would be Anna May’s first American talkie, and, by all accounts, the definitive Anna May Wong picture.

As if pitted in a protracted sumo match, for almost half a century, two Chinese icons sparred for the spotlight in the West’s popular imagination. Ostensibly, these two Chinese gentlemen could not be more different: Charlie Chan, a funny, courteous, aphorism-spouting detective, works tirelessly to maintain law and order for mainstream (as in white) America. Inspired by a real-life, bullwhip-wielding Cantonese cop in Honolulu, the fictional Charlie Chan was created by Earl Derr Biggers, a young Ohioan educated at Harvard. Chan is rather like a multilayered Chinese box: He may have slanted eyes and a chubby and inscrutable face, but he prefers Western suits to his traditional garments, drinks sarsaparilla rather than tea, and beguiles friends and foes alike with fortune-cookie Confucianism—his trademark singsong Chinatown blues. One may love him or hate him, but the fact remains that he is a crime fighter, albeit with outlandish manners.

In contrast, Dr. Fu Manchu is an archvillain who epitomizes the East’s threat to the West. In the words of his progenitor, the British writer Sax Rohmer, Fu Manchu is a superman with a satanic heart: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government.”² Born in the heyday of the “Yellow Peril” frenzy during the 1910s, Fu Manchu is an agent of the Chinese government who moves about, wraithlike, within the opium dens, subterranean passages, and feral dungeons of the modern metropolis. His feline claws can penetrate the rosy bosom of the pristine English countryside or that cradle of Western democracy, the White House. A scientific wizard with almost unbelievable expertise in chemistry, medicine, engineering, botany, and zoology, he is also an omniscient hypnotist who can control someone’s mind for hours or days on end, as well as a skilled linguist who speaks English impeccably but with an odd choice of words. In a nutshell, Dr. Fu Manchu is a menace to what Charlie Chan tries to protect.

Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon, 1931 (Courtesy of Album / Alamy Stock Photo)

Despite their apparent differences, the honorable detective and the evil doctor are two sides of the same coin. They were both figments of the West’s unrestrained racial imagination. Rohmer once famously admitted: “I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese. I know something about Chinatown. But that is a different matter.”³ The Chinese supervillain was indeed born out of the cradle of Limehouse fiction and the “Yellow Peril” discourse around the turn of the twentieth century, a will-o’-the-wisp made palpable by racial fantasy and fear. Likewise, Charlie Chan, as I have argued in my earlier book, is an American stereotype of the “Chinaman.” Even though the inspiration of a real Chinese detective and his own deep dive into Chinese American history helped Biggers mint a character whose strength and virtue extend well beyond a mere chimera of the Chinaman in Western fantasy, Charlie Chan bears the stamp of his time, a birthmark that encapsulates the racial tensions of the nativist, xenophobic America of the 1920s.⁴

Conjoined, then, in one sense like the Siamese Twins, Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan became almost inseparable in the Anglo-American celluloid realm—each jousting to be the foremost Chinaman. Thus, not so strangely, they were even played by the same actor at times. The evil doctor first appeared on the silver screen in a British silent series, The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (1923), starring Harry Agar Lyons. His American debut was a Paramount talkie, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), featuring Warner Oland. Having played Oriental villains in half a dozen silent films, as well as the Jewish cantor in The Jazz Singer, Oland delivered a rather convincing performance of the evil Chinese doctor. After repeating the baddy role in The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1930, Oland was hired by Fox to play Charlie Chan, the good guy. In the previous year, the adaptation of Biggers’s third Charlie Chan novel, Behind That Curtain, had been a flop. In that hour-long talkie, Chan, played by a balding, San Francisco–born Edward Park, appears for no more than a minute. Despite the debacle, the producers at Fox perceived the enormous promise held by the charming, exotic Chinese character. Having secured the rights to Biggers’s new novel, they decided to try Oland, the man who had been the face of Fu Manchu. Premiering in February of 1931, Charlie Chan Carries On showcased a Chinese hero with suave manners, a singsong voice, and a bellyful of witticisms that are both enlightening and befuddling. Due to his vaguely Asiatic features, Oland needed no elaborate makeup, and his habit of sneaking a few behind-the-scene nips put a perennial grin on his face and slurred his speech almost to a perfect pitch for a character who speaks broken English. The film was a smashing success. The audience could not get enough of Oland/Chan’s pearls of wisdom sprinkled throughout the film, “Only a very brave mouse will make its nest in a cat’s ear,” “He who feeds the chicken deserves the egg,” and “Only a very sly man can shoot off a cannon quietly.”

Riding on his success as the wisecracking Chinese sleuth, Oland was about to sail for Hawaii to make a new, on-location Chan flick, The Black Camel, when Paramount offered him $12,000 for cameoing in the third Fu Manchu installment. He would team up with Anna May, his costar in Old San Francisco, and Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese Rip van Winkle who had disappeared from Hollywood for twelve years. As its title indicates, Daughter of the Dragon was less about the sinister doctor than his female progeny, who has inherited his diabolical power but is far more dangerous with her bewitching beauty and serpentine cunning.

In Rohmer’s potent racial imagination, the daughter of Fu Manchu possesses “the uncanny power which Homer gave to Circe, of stealing men’s souls.” Fah Lo Suee is her name, meaning “sweet perfume,” for she wears a faint perfume, which is more an aura than a physical fact. Here is how Sax Rohmer—a pseudonym that suggests an errant Saxon knight on a quixotic quest—describes the witchlike woman from the East: “A delicately slender hand it was, nurtured in indolence—an unforgettable hand, delicious yet repellant, with pointed, varnished nails; a cultured hand possessing the long, square-jointed thumb of domination; a hand cruel for all its softness as the velvet paw of a tigress.” Walking stealthily like a cat in a pair of soft, loose slippers, she has a silvery voice and a slender body that retains its “ivory” illusion. Exceeding her father’s power as a hypnotist, she can cast spells on a man or a woman with her jade-green eyes and listen to the other’s thinking, sort of wiretapping inside the head. She can also leave detailed post-hypnotic instructions to be carried out by the person under her influence. To complete her profile, she smokes cigarettes from a long, enameled holder, which she wields like a dragon lady’s scepter.⁵

None of her past roles had sufficiently prepared Anna May for such a character. The Mongol slave in The Thief of Bagdad might have been duplicitous, but she was less a villainess than a victim, abused by her mistress and subservient to her Mongol prince. The same was true of her role as a gangster’s daughter in Old San Francisco. In Piccadilly, Shosho was a simple, unabashed hedonist, a seductress with no malice, only ambition for career success. Under Rohmer’s pen, however, Fah Lo Suee is more cyborg than human. She is devoid of the kind of humanity saturating Anna May’s previous roles. To bring such a character to life on screen, then, would be quite a challenge, an acting job requiring unusual skills that perhaps only the fabled Daughter of the Dragon might possess.

Taking much liberty with Rohmer’s original novel, Daughter of the Dragon begins at a revue theater in London, where the exotic dancer Ling Moy (Wong) has just wrapped up her closing act for the season. She is excited to learn that her father has arrived in the city, but she does not know his real identity, this being Dr. Fu Manchu (Oland). Presumably already dead for twenty years after he terrorized London, Fu now returns to finish up his revenge killing of the Petrie family—to “clean the slate,” so to speak. After he drugs the elder Petrie and controls his mind, he speaks to his victim in a florid diction that could easily have rolled off the tongue of Oland’s Charlie Chan: “In the twenty years I have fought to live, the thought of killing you and your son has been my dearest nurse.” He kills the father and is mortally wounded in his follow-up attempt on the son, Ronald. On his deathbed, Fu reveals his identity to Ling Moy and regrets that he has no son who can carry on and settle the debt with the Petries, “Gods of my ancestors—if only thou had granted me another son!”

And here comes the metamorphosis, a radical transformation that turns Madame Butterfly into Dragon Lady, a character type Anna May would forever be known for. Realizing her true identity, Ling Moy immediately offers to inherit the family mantle: “The blood is mine. The hate is mine. The vengeance shall be mine.” She also undergoes a gender transition, at least in spirit, as she vows, “Father! Father! I will be your son! I will be your son!” In response, the father no longer addresses her as “my flower daughter,” but instead as “man-daughter.” He implores her, “Swear, man-daughter, to deliver the soul of Ronald Petrie to me, to our ancestors!” Afterward, he simply calls her “my son.” The variations of address may seem like something called for by the plot, justified by a patriarch’s dying wish and his progeny’s eagerness to please, but the impromptu role-play triggers a more profound change in Anna May’s character—or, more precisely, her characterization.

To keep her promise of vengeance, she needs to seduce not one but two men: the blond Ronald, whom she promises to kill, and Ah Kee (Hayakawa), a Chinese detective tasked to protect Ronald. In the first cat-and-mouse game, Ling Moy affects some Madame Butterfly wiles to ensnare the white man. When Ronald begs her to “chuck everything and stay,” she replies, “If I stayed, would my hair ever become golden curls, and my skin ivory, like Ronald’s?” It may sound like an expression by someone who feels racially inferior—and there is a kernel of truth to it, because she repeatedly hesitates to execute her plot to kill him, partly due to her lingering feelings for the white man with golden curls and ivory skin. But these words are mostly uttered to fuel his fire and thereby give her psychological advantage over this British toff, who responds eagerly, “Strange, I prefer yours. I shall never forget your hair and eyes.” Stoking his ardor, she secretly plots his demise. As she confides to an ally, “I am giving him a beautiful illusion. Which I shall crush.” Her cruelty is revealed after she and her aides—called Dacoits in Rohmer’s original, essentially a pack of subhuman cutthroats—are ready to torture and kill Ronald and his fiancée, Joan. Demonstrating the corrosiveness of the acid she plans to use on Joan’s face, she tells Roland gleefully, “My vengeance is inspired tonight. You will first have the torture of seeing her beauty eaten slowly away by this hungry acid.” When he begs for mercy, she hisses, “Very well, Ling Moy is merciful.” She hands him a knife and barks, “Kill her!”⁶

In her manipulation of Ah Kee, Ling Moy shows the same kind of duplicity but deploys different tactics. Exploiting his infatuation, Ling Moy lures Ah Kee away from Ronald and keeps him occupied while her accomplices abduct Ronald and Joan. She has Ah Kee put on a Chinese robe, and she entertains him like a courtesan, plucking a traditional Chinese pipa (lute) and singing in Cantonese dialect. Totally besotted, Ah Kee kneels in front of her and worships her like a goddess. He begs her to go to China with him, totally unaware either of her real identity or her evil intentions.

With one man at her feet and another at her fingertips, Ling Moy appears as a monstrous female figure who, like Lady Macbeth, cloaks an almost masculine pride in her ability to double-cross and to execute a murderous plot. These gender-bending qualities have led some scholars to argue that Anna May was “cross-dressing” in the film as a man. As Graham Hodges suggests, “Ling Moy’s roles switch between male and female characteristics and blur binary differences between the sexes. Even Anna May’s female outfits were powerfully cut and mannish and provide coded meaning to homosexual viewers.”⁷ Or, to borrow the term from Lady Macbeth, they “unsex” her (Macbeth 1.5).

The initial reactions to Anna May’s newly minted dragon-lady persona were somewhat muted. After the release in August 1931, the New York Times gave the top-billing actress a lukewarm compliment, “Miss Wong does quite well in some of her scenes.” The reviewer was more impressed by the lavish sets with dragons on the walls, secret panels, and other ersatz-Oriental decor befitting a Fu Manchu lair. Variety found faults with the performance, calling the dialogue “mostly amateurish and inept.”⁸ Many critics were troubled by Hayakawa’s heavy Japanese accent. A master of theatrical miming during the silent era, he sounded in a talkie like someone in a losing wrestling match with spoken English. Worse yet, his lines were often more suitable for the stage than the screen, such as: “It is the triumph of irony that the only woman I have ever deeply loved should be born of the blood that I loathe,” suggesting that critics were wrongly blaming the actor rather than the clumsy screenwriter. In the last line of the film, as he gently caresses the long hair of Fu Manchu’s dead daughter, he says, “Flower Ling Moy, a flower need not love, but only be loved. As Ah Kee loved you.” It is as if a technician had suddenly turned on the soundtrack of Broken Blossoms, bringing the once-muted soundscape to hyper-melodramatic life in a Hollywood Oriental fantasy.

All these highly stylized dialogues, sets, and actions combined to accentuate the image of the dragon lady. A quote from the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary would suffice to show how Anna May’s Ling Moy provides a definitive profile in the popular imagination: “A ‘dragon lady’ was a woman of Asian heritage who was thought of as being sexually powerful and generally of a cunning, underhanded, conniving nature, who would use her beauty and sexuality to get what she wanted. Often accompanied in fiction with an opium pipe, jade jewelry, and wearing a Chinese dress, usually with dragons on it. They were usually depicted as snide, assertive, aggressive, sneaky, and explosive in temperament.”⁹ Undoubtedly, it was the film Daughter of the Dragon that introduced dragon lady into the English lexicon. In March 1938, Look magazine crowned Anna May as “The World’s Most Beautiful Chinese Girl.” The feature article described her glamour and fashion sense, while the cover image showed her with a sinister gaze as she holds a blood-stained dagger. In its 1961 obituary of Anna May, Time magazine eschewed the loaded term of dragon lady but apparently implied it when the journal labeled Wong “the screen’s foremost Oriental villainess,” another throwback to the infamous Daughter of the Dragon.

Anna May’s apotheosis as a dragon lady would draw the ire of some racially sensitive viewers and historians. They vilified her for helping to create stereotypical Asian women by performing roles that “call for stylized and patterned displays, requiring less in the way of acting than a series of directed Oriental affectations.”¹⁰ This kind of criticism would later be leveled at Nancy Kwan in China Doll, Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies, or Lucy Liu in Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill, for their ostensible perpetuation of the dragon lady stereotype. In her self-defense, Anna May confessed to a Hollywood reporter, “When a person is trying to get established in a profession, he can’t choose parts. He has to take what is offered.”¹¹ Such a reality check never succeeded in dispelling the disparaging views. More than eighty years later, Lucy Liu, facing the same critique, would supply the same answer—that she did not have much choice. Not surprisingly, it did not quiet her detractors, either.¹² To better understand the iconography of the dragon lady as fashioned by Anna May, we need to open a different line of inquiry.

By condemning the stereotypical performance, most critics, as Cynthia Liu has rightly pointed out, seem to assume that the primary task of film is mimesis, to reproduce the world as is. But film, either as an art or as a technology, never records reality as it is found. In his Film as Art, Rudolf Arnheim reminds us that “people who contemptuously refer to the camera as an automatic recording machine must be made to realize that even in the simplest photographic reproduction of a perfectly simple object, a feeling for its nature is required which is quite beyond any mechanical operation.”¹³ Siegfried Kracauer, perhaps the most ardent apologist for this medium’s photographic nature and realist aesthetics, also stresses the indexical rather than the iconic dimension of film. From closeup shots of the silent era to bullet time in the digital age, traditional models of representation have given way to what film historian Miriam Hansen calls “the reign of simulation.”¹⁴ Likewise, Anna May’s impersonation of Ling Moy should be understood as a performative, not simply mimetic, act. In her essay “The Art of Screen Passing,” Chinese American scholar Yiman Wang situates Anna May’s career in the context of art deco in America, a popular trend that surfaced in the first few decades of the twentieth century that affected all aspects of design. Wang considers the practice of yellowface to be a component of the art deco aesthetic, because it “provides a vehicle within which whites can play out a fantasy of otherness.” The audience was drawn to a simulation of reality rather than a realistic representation, for the escape from realism and history was consistent with the art deco aesthetic, “which decontextualizes icons and objects and repackages them for decorative purposes.”¹⁵ It is symptomatic, then, that the New York Times reviewer was more enthused by the film sets than the performance in Daughter of the Dragon.

Within such an elaborately Oriental setting, Anna May, as Wang argues, performed “screen passing,” by which she means Wong’s “ability to act and overact in a wide range of racialized roles, by which she brings to the fore the stereotypical and Orientalist underpinnings of these roles.”¹⁶ In other words, Anna May drew attention to or even exploded the stereotype by overacting these roles. A comparison with another controversial actor of the 1930s would help shed light on this thorny issue. Once the best-known and most successful Black actor in Hollywood, Stepin Fetchit played characters who exploited all the clichés about a so-called nitwit negro. In Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935), for instance, Fetchit portrays Snowshoes, a fez-wearing, hookah-puffing, and superstitious Black servant who harbors a native sentiment toward life on postbellum Southern plantations. His characterization is so overblown, flashy, and exaggerated that, as film critic Ken Hanke put it, “the very stereotypical images they ostensibly represent become mocked by the format in which they are confined.… One might go so far as to make the case that Stepin Fetchit was subversively antistereotypical.”¹⁷ As the film scholar Donald Bogle suggests in his classic study of Black film history, the essence of blackface or yellowface is not found in the racial stereotype itself but rather in “what certain talented actors have done with the stereotype,” or what they have accomplished with even stereotyped roles.¹⁸ In the same vein, what Anna May achieved with the dragon-lady persona and other roles was sharing with her audiences the thrill of being part of what might be deeply shameful, an almost illicit pleasure. The goal of such a performance is to expose the stereotypes as human construction rather than simple mimesis.¹⁹

Such a delicate dance between stereotype and imagination, convention and subversion, has made Anna May both revered and reviled in Asian American history. Between Madame Butterfly and the Dragon Lady, there lies the alluring art through which Anna May Wong continues to haunt us all.