26NOT SO GOOD EARTH

Portrait of Anna May Wong by Carl Van Vechten, 1935 (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-135273)

AN ACTOR, as Josef von Sternberg put it bluntly, is a puppet subject to the manipulations of a director and the camera.¹ Just for that reason, Anna May always preferred the live stage, allowing her to bask in the applause of a live audience. In her peripatetic years of 1932 to 1935, she traveled all over the world to do live shows.

In early 1932, she worked the vaudeville circuit that took her to Canada and the Northeast. In a musical revue at the Mastbaum Theatre in Philadelphia, she sang a highly suggestive song, “Boys Will Be Girls and Girls Will Be Boys,” and took a curtain call by thanking the audience in Cantonese, French, German, English, and Yiddish. In July 1932, she entertained a packed auditorium at New York’s grandiose Capitol Theatre, dancing, singing, acting, and reciting a Chinese poem. After returning to England in 1933, she did cabaret at the Embassy Club in London for two weeks. It was the first time that the uptight British club had allowed a cabaret performance, which greatly improved their business. In October, she was in Dublin as the star of a variety show called Tuneful Songs and Intriguing Costumes. Switching between Chinese costumes and European dresses, she “offered an aural tour of global melodies, accompanied by a small orchestra.”² Her performance of the Chinese folk song “The Jasmine Flower,” with its simple melody and hauntingly sweet lyrics, brought down the house:

What a pretty jasmine flower!

Buds and blooms everywhere,

Pure and fragrant we all declare.

Let me pluck one with tender care,

And give it to someone dear.

Eighty years later, at her highly anticipated appearance on China’s CCTV New Year Gala in 2013, the Canadian star Celine Dion would sing the same song in Chinese in front of a billion viewers, bringing full circle the global exchange of pop culture.

In January 1934, the same week that A Study in Scarlet was playing in Liverpool, Anna May made an appearance at the city’s Shakespeare Theatre as part of a revue called 1001 Marvels. An article in the Liverpool Evening Echo called her “that American-Oriental film and stage star.” As the top-billed thespian, she performed “a song and piano act” and entertained “the eye with novel frocks and intriguing ‘creations.’ ”³

After the British Isles, Anna May continued to continental Europe, taking her vaudeville talents to France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Scandinavia. Her Italian tour in the winter of 1935 was the most extensive, including Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Naples, Turin, Palermo, Catania, Messina, Trieste, and Genoa. She took a cram course in Italian and made it known that one-third of her act would be delivered in that language. Also touring widely in Europe at the time was that other American cabaret icon, Josephine Baker, whose career is often compared with Anna May’s. Known for her comic, banana-skirted persona, Baker flaunted her loose-limbed athleticism and artful clumsiness, while lyricizing the primitive-to-Parisienne narrative in a falsetto voice. By contrast, Anna May, clad alternately in elaborate Chinese costumes and chic European clothes, while speaking multiple tongues with affected fluency, projected an Asian mystique in a cosmopolitan world. Yet, for most of the European audiences, both Baker’s primitivism and Wong’s mystique appeared as deadly seductions, representing in essence forbidden love.⁴

To extend the parallel a bit further, Baker, despite her stardom in Europe, never attained popularity in her home country, a land where “separate but equal” still remained on the books. In 1936, her revival of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway was a flop, with Time magazine referring to her as a “Negro wench … whose dancing and singing might be topped anywhere outside Paris,” while other critics considered her voice “too thin” and “dwarf-like” to fill a theater.⁵ Heartbroken, Baker returned to Europe and renounced her US citizenship a year later. Similarly, after an extensive European tour, Anna May returned to America in 1935, hoping to land her dream part in what would become a landmark Chinese-themed film, The Good Earth. After lavishing $100,000 on the rights to Pearl S. Buck’s novel published in 1931, MGM had taken its time to develop the potentially blockbuster film. The studio heads predicted that an epic story about the rise of a Chinese peasant from rags to riches would resonate well with Depression-weary Americans. Who can’t see, they reasoned, the connection between the devastation of famine, drought, and locust swarms in faraway China and the ravages of the Dust Bowl here? They extravagantly budgeted more than $2.8 million for the movie and hired a veritable army of coolie workers for nearly four years to carve a California hillside into a replica of rural China, turning dry desert into rice paddies. They also obtained the services of General Ting-Hsu Tu from China as a technical adviser, rather than rely on Chinatown honchos as usual.⁶ When it came to casting, however, Hollywood’s imagination was stuck in its old ruts, much to Anna May’s dismay.

When MGM first acquired the film rights in 1932, Buck, who was born in China to missionary parents and considered herself bicultural, wrote to a studio executive, hoping for “an entirely satisfactory Chinese cast.”⁷ When the author met with another MGM executive for lunch in 1935, she again expressed her wish for the casting of Chinese actors in the leading parts. But she was told that this would be impossible because of the Hollywood star system. At the time of testing for parts, there were two obvious stars: Luise Rainer and Paul Muni. Rainer, an Austrian-born actress who had just arrived in Hollywood, was touted as the next Greta Garbo. Her limited appearance in a supporting role in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) was so impressive that it garnered her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Dubbed the “Viennese teardrop” for her dramatically emotional performance, she convinced producers that she could play any part, even a poor, plain-as-shoe wife of a Chinese peasant, the part coveted by Anna May. Similarly, Muni was an Austro-Hungarian actor who had cut his teeth in Yiddish theater in Chicago. After his breakaway role in Scarface (1932), Warner Bros. gave him the rare privilege of choosing his part in any film. In the same year Rainer won an Oscar, Muni won his for Best Actor in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), a biopic about the famous French chemist. Now the impersonator of the crazy scientist who revolutionized agriculture would walk in the tattered shoes of a Chinese peasant.

As soon as Muni was cast as Wang Lung, the male protagonist in The Good Earth, Anna May knew that it would be virtually impossible for her to get the female lead part as O-lan, because Hollywood was always queasy about casting an interracial pair as a couple. If the male lead would be a yellowface actor, then the female had better follow suit to avoid offending delicate American sensibilities. As Anna May told a friend, for her to continue to seek the O-lan role would be like bucking up against a stone wall. What she did not realize, however, was that this particular stone wall had been fortified not only by Hollywood’s deep-trenched racism, but also by a China factor.

Since her screen debut, Anna May had received mixed reviews in China. While the Chinese print media had closely followed her career—a beautiful compatriot’s travails in foreign movielands always made good copy—Anna May’s stereotypical roles in some films had raised the hackles of Chinese critics. Censorious scrutiny became intense as Hollywood, entering its Golden Age, enjoyed greater popularity in China than in any other country. The Chinese government began to fight battles over Chinese images in American films. Domestically, the government established a review board that maintained an iron grip on the importation of foreign films, banning those perceived to have tarnished the image of China, including The Thief of Bagdad and Shanghai Express. Overseas, through shrewd diplomacy, the Chinese also scored occasional victories by pressuring studios to change a script or even shelve a project. In 1932, when MGM tried to make a Fu Manchu sequel after the successes of Daughter of the Dragon and The Mask of Fu Manchu, the Chinese Embassy vehemently protested. The United States Government, eager to recruit China as an ally against the Japanese expansion in the Far East, pressured MGM to pull the plug on the production. Even so, in the 1930s, China’s influence in Hollywood was still a far cry from the tremendous clout it carries today. As Erich Schwartzel wrote in Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Battle for Cultural Supremacy, China had by 2020 become a market “too big to ignore and too lucrative to anger,” giving it the ability to green-light film projects and change scripts like an invisible studio chief.⁸ But the Great Wall was not built in one day, and neither was China’s soft-power astrosphere. What is generally not well known is that, as early as the 1930s, China had already made its presence felt in Hollywood.

As the technical adviser for The Good Earth, General Tu exerted considerable influence on the film’s production. A member of China’s Central Film Censorship Committee, which had banned several of Anna May’s flicks, Tu made it known to MGM producers that, given her alleged “tainted reputation,” casting her would be detrimental to the film’s fate in China. “Whenever she appears in a film,” he told them, “the newspapers print her picture with the caption ‘Anna May again loses face for China.’ ”⁹ If the producers had already preferred to cast Rainer in yellowface, Tu’s cautionary message became the last straw.

Even so, pressured by a spontaneous campaign launched by Los Angeles newspapers, and sensing the absurdity of not casting the indisputably biggest Chinese star in a big China flick, MGM executives decided to audition Anna May for the part of Lotus, a youthful concubine of Wang Lung. After her first test for the small role on December 10, 1935, associate producer Albert Lewin wrote a casting memo about Anna May: “A little disappointing as to looks. Does not seem beautiful enough to make Wang’s infatuation convincing; however, deserves consideration.” Four days later, after yet another audition, Lewin wrote again: “Deserves serious consideration as possibility for Lotus—Not as beautiful as she might be.”¹⁰ Having been snubbed for the leading part, Anna May felt torn over accepting a secondary role even if she got the offer. As she confided in a letter, many of her friends were advising her to take the part if there was enough money in it.¹¹ But when MGM, after testing hundreds of Asian actors for the various minor roles, found most of them not fitting the producer’s conception of “what Chinese people looked like,” Anna May was so incensed that she decided to have nothing to do with the production. As she told a journalist soon afterward, “I do not see why I, at this stage of my career, should take a step backward and accept a minor role in a Chinese play that will surround me entirely by a Caucasian cast.”¹²

In the absence of the biggest Chinese star, and with a predominantly Caucasian cast, The Good Earth became a yellowface extravaganza. Asian extras were hired only for subordinate roles and “for atmosphere.” After Muni and Rainer, the third-billing Uncle part went to the American actor Walter Connolly, while the fourth-billing Lotus part went to another Austrian starlet, Tilly Losch, effectively producing what one critic called “MGM Chinese.”¹³ But even with its partial Viennese cast, the Chinese-themed film still did well at the box office. It would garner five Academy Award nominations, winning two of them, including Rainer as Best Actress.

To Anna May and her fellow Chinese Americans, the success of the film added salt to their wounds. As the Chinese American film historian Stephen Gong reflected on the legacy of The Good Earth, “It’s big and prestigious. You were going to have a big cast, and there was a lot of interest in China at that time with political troubles and strife in Asia. It would have been, could have been, and should have been our Gone with the Wind. If you’re Chinese American and you’re interested in film, it seems like this great graveyard for all our dreams and aspirations.”¹⁴ Incidentally, Anna May’s younger sister, Mary, did get a tiny part as the Little Bride in The Good Earth. Three years later, depressed by her dim prospects in Hollywood, Mary hanged herself in the family garage. Tragically, Gong’s graveyard metaphor struck home.

Forced to endure this shameful slight, Anna May became increasingly disgusted by Hollywood’s racism. She thought about leaving the country again, as she had done in 1928 when she escaped to Germany. But this time, Europe was standing on the verge of an inferno, and no longer an option. By now, most of her family members had left for China. Their family laundry had been destroyed, along with Chinatown, to make room for the new Union Station. After a prolonged legal battle, California’s Supreme Court approved the construction of the iconic, Mission-style train terminal. As the old American saying goes, “They bring the hammer down to Chinatown”—the demolition of old Chinatown commenced on December 22, 1933, with sledgehammers and axes. The children’s school on Apablasa Street was the first building to go, followed by the once-bustling vegetable market, and then all the other structures. Arriving to witness the destruction, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times observed that two senior Chinese residents, “whose wrinkles and shuffle bespoke many years spent in the area, hurried to their small garden and began pulling the vegetables from the ground.… Others tossed their few belongings into a modern shopping bag and, with their favorite cooking utensils in hand, slowly plodded from the scene of a quickly wrecked home.” Just like that, a community that for half a century had survived massacres, arsons, and all forms of racial violence and harassment was shattered, leaving more than 2,500 residents virtually homeless.¹⁵

With his business gone and dotage beckoning, Sam Sing felt more palpably the pull of his ancestral land. The Chinese notion of luoye guigen, “Fallen leaves return to the roots,” was no mere fortune-cookie truism. On August 5, 1934, accompanied by four of his brood, the old man who had toiled all his life in an LA-based Chinese laundry sailed for Canton. There, his first wife, last seen as a young bride many moons earlier, was still living and waiting, along with their now-adult son. It would be a bittersweet reunion after a four-decade hiatus across the ocean, an occurrence that was nonetheless a textbook saga of Chinese immigrants in America.

Her family’s presence back in China gave Anna May a great impetus to make a visit there, to get her mind and body away from Hollywood’s—both literal and figurative—noisome air. All these years she had been pegged as a Chinese actress, even though she was born in California and, by all accounts, as proverbially American as apple pie. Maybe it was time for her to visit the real “good earth,” not the one fabricated by the movies, or heard in the stories.

Always conscious of her public image, she told the press that she was going to China to study the Chinese theater. “I’ll be a neophyte there, for all my stage experience,” she stated. “I want to work with the old Chinese plays and, eventually, I want to select two or three of them, find good translations, and take a group of English-speaking Chinese on a world tour.”¹⁶ Deep down, however, she was going to China to find out, as she put it, “whether I am really Anna May Wong or Wong Liu Tsong.”¹⁷

Map of China prior to 1937 (Courtesy of Isabelle Hsiao)