29CHINESE ALICE IN SHANGHAILAND

Anna May Wong on the cover of Liangyou magazine

“NOTHING SURPRISES ME ANYMORE,” observed Anna May on her third day in Shanghai. “So many of my preconceived ideas have been upset that I feel like a Chinese Alice who has wandered through a very strange looking-glass.” The sound and fury of the glitzy Chinese city made Hollywood seem like a sleepy backwater. Twenty-four hours a day, she could hear the blare of car horns, the shouts of rickshaw coolies, the rattle of buses, and the high-pitched, blood-curdling squeak of the wheelbarrows that brought farm produce into the city. Hardly a stranger to the demands of an international partygoer, she was amazed by the galloping tempo of social life, with invitations pouring in, the telephone ringing steadily in her hotel suite like a burglar alarm out of control.¹

That day’s tiffin was at Sun Ya’s, a restaurant featuring haute Cantonese cuisine. In typical Chinese fashion, a simple lunch turned out to be a fifteen-course meal, including four kinds of soup. Not wanting to insult her host, she had to sample every item. By the end, she seriously considered fasting for a week, a luxury impossible for a visitor suddenly thrown into the fabled world of Chinese hospitality.

After lunch, Anna May visited the Civic Center to witness a mass wedding ceremony officiated by Mayor Wu Tieh-cheng. A diehard follower of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, General Wu had become a close ally of Sun’s son, Sun Fo, following the 1925 death of the founding father of modern China. In 1948, when Sun Fo came to power as the premier of China in 1948, Wu would rise to the lofty positions of vice premier and foreign minister. Assuming the mayoralty on the eve of the first Japanese assault on Shanghai in January 1932, Wu was largely responsible for the erection of the Civic Center, an impressive structure built in Peking style with a curving roof and walls adorned with colorful porcelain tiles. Several times a year, the mayor would host gigantic receptions attended by all the elite of Shanghai. One of the most memorable occasions was the lavish banquet given in honor of the US vice president, John Nance Garner, nicknamed “Cactus Jack,” who made a stop in Shanghai after the inauguration of Manuel Quezon as the first president of the Philippine Commonwealth in November 1935. As recalled by Madame Koo, who had a front-row seat, the event featured about two thousand of Shanghai’s “crème de la crème,” a roster that would dwarf even one of Jay Gatsby’s guest lists.²

Anna May was invited to witness an event that blended East and West. It was one of the series of mass marriages held at the Civic Center since 1934 as a means of encouraging young people who wanted to marry but could not afford the extravagance of a traditional Chinese wedding. “It was an economic move,” recalled Madame Koo. “Yet because romance and economy do not jell, the Shanghai officials cleverly sugarcoated the idea with adroit publicity and made the ceremonies exciting as well as novel. Some sixty couples were married simultaneously at a cost of a few American dollars per couple.” Anna May was particularly struck by the ingeniously designed bridal gowns. “The brides’ costumes were a strange medley of Eastern and Western styles,” she observed. “As a rule, white outfits appear only at funerals, but some of the brides compromised by wearing a pink jacket and trousers, combined with a long white veil of mosquito netting.”³

Still, a few couples who could afford it, or were unwilling to cut corners, stuck to tradition. Earlier, Anna May had seen several old-fashioned bridal sedans being carried through the streets, with the brides concealed behind red lacquer walls, while Chinese bands played loudly. Since some of the brides were graduates of primary or middle schools—a sign that China was catching up and girls were beginning to attend school—their diplomas were displayed proudly at the head of the processions.

After the mass wedding, Anna May was treated to a tour of the Civic Center, including a massive library, a great ballroom, and a sprawling sports stadium. In about a year, the Japanese would bomb the city with ruthless precision and decimate the Civic Center, leaving only a ghostly shell.

At five o’clock, Mayor and Mrs. Wu held a reception for Anna May at their resplendent mansion on Avenue Haig, a street that straddled the International Settlement and the Chinese section of Greater Shanghai. Residents on that street could enjoy the prestige and extraterritorial protection of the foreign zone, which reinforced strict curfew laws and disallowed late-night clubbing. When they wanted to “do the town,” the nighthawks conveniently stepped across the avenue and hit a joint such as Del Monte, run by White Russians. In the words of Madame Koo, who also lived on that bifurcated street, White Russians were the backbone of the city’s nightlife. “They began to trickle into China after the Russian revolution and arrived in increasing waves until they reached a flood tide after the Japanese occupation of Harbin,” Koo recalled. “They were ambitious, industrious and had no false pride about earning a living. The men became bodyguards, policemen, chauffeurs, masseurs, hair-dressers, night club impresarios.… The White Russian women were more conspicuous, because literally hundreds became dance-hall girls. You found them in every kind of amusement place from the lowly Hong Kew halls, patronized by sailors, to the glittering night clubs where evening dress was obligatory. They were decorative, gay, charming and added a sophisticated touch to Shanghai gaiety.”⁴

In “Malady of Spring Nights,” one of the most celebrated stories about love and despair in prewar Shanghai, the Chinese writer Yu Dafu captured aptly the ambience of a nocturnal world segregated by streets, with White Russians serenading in the background: “By now the inhabitants of the slum had all gone quietly to sleep. On Dent Road, facing me, there stood the modern blocks of Rixinli, with a few high windows lit up with colored lights. Balalaika music and snatches of melancholic songs, clear and lyrical, drifted into the chilly dead of night—probably it was a White Russian émigré making her living as a singer. Above it all, a layer of ashen clouds, heavy like decaying corpses, draped themselves over the sky.”⁵ Such a spectacle made Anna May feel nostalgic for Europe, where she or her friends could wander along the cold pavement of an unfamiliar metropolis, suffering the pangs of exile and yearning.

On this winter night, men and women of Shanghai’s high society, including many film executives, gathered at the Wu mansion, just a stone’s throw from the slums, to toast the Hollywood star. Hobnobbing among these social elites, Anna May was most delighted to see Mei Lan-fang, the “Queen of Peking Opera.” She had met him a year earlier in London, an encounter that had in fact inspired her to come to China and study traditional theater with virtuosos like him. Considered among the greatest female impersonators, Mei had never taken a male role in his distinguished career—actresses were taboo in classical Chinese dramas. In person, as Madame Koo put it, he was “extremely masculine,” and his natural voice, octaves below the falsetto demanded by the stage, often surprised others.⁶ A native of Peking, Mei owned a pleasant house in the Western Hills, as well as a pad in Shanghai, which he frequented now and then. Anna May found him “a quiet, unobtrusive person, with beautiful long hands and a dignified, courteous manner.” They chatted about Lady Precious Stream, an old Chinese play adapted to English, which was becoming a big hit in London and New York at the time. Mei told Anna May that he knew the original drama so well that he could perform it in his sleep.⁷ This second meeting with Mei further deepened her admiration. In a month or so, she would go to Peking and try to apprentice herself to the maestro of Chinese theater.

The ensuing days continued to be a whirl of tiffins, receptions, and dance parties lasting till dawn. Originally, Anna May had planned for sightseeing trips, but seasonal cold rains dampened that hope. She did, however, venture beyond the boundary of the foreign concessions on her own. When the Chinese tailor who was going to come for a fitting failed to show up one morning, Madame Koo sent her amah to escort Anna May to the tailor shop in the Chinese section. “The native city,” she wrote, “proved to be a maze of narrow, crooked streets, flanked by buildings in Chinese style and brightened by swinging signs of red and gold.”⁸ During his trip to America in 1842, Charles Dickens complained about how “distractingly regular” many of the urban thoroughfares were in the New World. After walking around Philadelphia, a city laid out in a rigidly rectangular grid of roads distinguished from one another only by number, the English novelist proclaimed, “I would have given the world for a crooked street.”⁹ Dickens would easily have had his wish fulfilled in any Chinese city. As Anna May explained, “Streets in Chinese towns are always crooked, because of the old belief that evil spirits can travel only in a straight line. The beautiful stone ‘spirit walls’ that screen the entrance to Chinese homes are also meant to thwart the straight-flying devils. Some houses add little mirrors to the screen, so that the evil spirits will be frightened by their own horrid faces.”¹⁰

Having dodged a few “honey wagons,” which collected the contents of chamber pots every morning along the street, Anna May and the amah finally got to the tailor shop, located in a side alley that curved like a limp noodle. The Chinese proprietor apologized profusely for having been ill and unable to keep the previous appointment. He then proceeded to take the measurements in a way that astonished his American visitor: “He merely hurled a few strings around me, rather as if they were lariats, and then tied a knot in each one to indicate the measurement. How, considering his orders, he manages to remember what each stands for is something only Buddha knows.” Inside that dark little shop were heaps of pretty dresses in various stages of creation. A fresh-faced boy apprentice was trying to stitch in a straight line while stealing curious sidelong glances at the radiant actress who could speak neither Mandarin nor Shanghaiese. It reminded Anna May of her years working in her family laundry, folding, bagging, delivering, and at times sewing up tears or sewing on lost buttons. “Here men are the dressmakers,” she observed, “and most of the embroidery was done by small boys.”¹¹

As if specially created for a movie-lot background, Shanghai had become a mecca for refugees, adventurers, smugglers, entrepreneurs, missionaries, spies, and tourists. For comparison, Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca might not be far off: Connection was the key for anyone desiring success in life or simply wanting to have a good time. Thanks to Madame Koo, Anna May had gained access to the highest echelons of Chinese society. In the foreign community, however, her adventure as a Chinese Alice proved to be rather more unpredictable. Her guide in that world of expats and mountebanks was Bernardine Szold Fritz. A native of Peoria, Illinois, Fritz had started out as an actress in Chicago before moving to Paris, and she mingled with Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation—Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Having married three times before age thirty, she arrived in Shanghai in 1929 to marry her fourth husband, Chester Fritz, an American silver broker. Comfortably situated in the foreign concessions, she established her own version of Stein’s Parisian salon (or Rick’s Café Américain), attracting Chinese and foreign writers, artists, musicians, and actors. She also established the International Arts Theatre, promoting ballet and modern dance. Always sporting a head turban in public, she was a fixture at the whirl of parties, balls, club meetings, and other events that made up the social scene in Shanghai’s foreign community. In those years, few prominent American visitors did not have a letter of introduction to Fritz or did not seek her out. Anna May had met her in London a few years earlier, and they also shared a mutual friend in Fania Marinoff, a dancer and the wife of Carl Van Vechten. This time, Anna May finally got together with her after several unsuccessful attempts. She found her charming, admired by many for the wonderful things she had done for the theatrical world of Shanghai. They quickly formed a friendship, which would further blossom as Anna May later traveled north to Peking with letters of introduction from Fritz herself.¹²

Through Bernardine, Anna May was warmly received by various clubs where her socialite friend was either the hostess or the soul of the party. The American University Club entertained Anna May as the guest of honor at a club tiffin, as did Fritz’s own International Arts Theatre. The Rotary Club invited Anna May for its annual Valentine Dance. Also in the midst of those scenes at the time was Emily Hahn, a talented and vivacious American woman who had made a career—indeed, an art—out of scandalizing 1930s Shanghai.

Originally from St. Louis, Hahn arrived in China with a résumé that read like a dime-store adventure novel. The first woman to receive a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, she traveled, at the age of nineteen, 2,400 miles across the United States in a Ford Model T, disguised as a man. After her brother-in-law forwarded her letters from the road to The New Yorker, that jump-started her career as a writer and a lifelong correspondent for the journal, which would publish many of her witty, elegant essays between 1929 and 1996. In 1930, she spent two years living with a pygmy tribe in the jungles of the Belgian Congo, before crossing Central Africa alone on foot. Arriving in Shanghai aboard a cruise ship in 1935, she was seduced by the siren call of the decadent but foreign city and stayed on. As one of her biographers writes, “She threw herself into it wholeheartedly—taking in the races, inspecting Chinese factories, dining with diplomats, entertaining millionaires and opera stars, visiting White Russian artists, attending garden parties, learning Mandarin, teaching English to a Japanese spy, and having a new dress made every day.”¹³

Living on the income from her work for the North China Daily News and The New Yorker, Hahn rented an apartment in Shanghai’s red-light district, became involved with Sir Victor Sassoon and, more scandalously, carried on an open affair with a married Chinese poet, Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei). The latter introduced her to the art of dayan, opium-smoking, to which she became addicted. One of her most provocative essays in The New Yorker, titled “The Big Smoke,” opens with an unabashed teaser: “Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.”¹⁴ One other notorious item was her pet gibbon, Mr. Mills, dressed in a diaper and a dinner jacket made of trimmings from her fur coat. She went everywhere with Mr. Mills perched on her shoulder, and he would jealously bite any man who dared to look at her the wrong way or tried to touch her. Around the time of Anna May’s arrival, Hahn had outraged the foreign community with her vampish acting in an International Arts Theatre production of the ancient feminist Greek play, Lysistrata. Some members of the more straitlaced audience stormed out of the theater in protest.¹⁵ As she stated in her memoir, China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (1944), of all the cities in the world, Shanghai was her town, where nothing seemed impossible. “Let the aesthetes sigh for Peking and their dream world,” she declaimed. “I don’t reject Peking. Like Carmel, Santa Fe, Fiesole, it is a reward for the afterlife. Shanghai is for now, for the living me.”¹⁶

Though there was no record of Anna May meeting Emily Hahn, it would have been virtually impossible that they had not brushed shoulders, with Mr. Mills looking on mischievously, especially when they shared a mutual friend in the indefatigable hostess Bernardine Szold Fritz. In fact, it was the flamboyant “China coast correspondent” of The New Yorker who, with a keen nose for scandal, recorded in her memoir an otherwise-unreported incident involving Anna May. In China to Me, Hahn wrote, “Our own American country club, the Columbia, wouldn’t take Chinese as members or guests. Some businessman created a scandal by bringing Anna May Wong, American citizen, to bowl in the Columbia bowling alley. They wouldn’t let her do it. ‘You have to be careful,’ the committee would say vaguely when they were asked what it was all about.”¹⁷ Founded in 1918, the Columbia Country Club was a palatial retreat for American expats, most of whom lived at the nearby Columbia Circle. Designed by Shanghai’s eminent American architect Elliott Hazzard, the sprawling set of Spanish Revival buildings contained facilities for swimming, tennis, squash, bowling, and baseball.¹⁸ Even though Anna May was an American citizen and a Hollywood star, her Chinese ethnicity was cause enough for her exclusion from the club, along with the millions of Chinese in the city. A similar indignity was experienced at another club by Liza Roos, wife of the business tycoon Silas Hardoon, who at one point was the richest man in Asia. The Race Club admitted Hardoon, born in Baghdad to Jewish parents, as an Englishman, but his Chinese wife could attend only as her husband’s guest, even though she was half-French.¹⁹ Perhaps also reflecting on her own experience as a Jewish woman, Hahn stated, “Shanghai wasn’t perfect on that score, not by any means.”²⁰ The racism of the Shanghai club scene was as ubiquitous as an infamous sign, NEITHER CHINESE NOR DOGS ALLOWED, hanging over the entrance to a park policed by the British.

Anna May had arrived in a foreign city thousands of miles from Hollywood, but racism nonetheless followed her around like a monkey on her back. Being denied entry in China because she was Chinese sounded as baffling as Alice’s jabberwocky. However, the American club was not alone in snubbing her. As Anna May would soon find out, the Chinese themselves were no strangers to ostracism.