31CHINESE GESTURES

Portrait of Anna May Wong in Chinese theatrical costumes, 1937 (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-115194)

“ANNA MAY WONG SLIPPED INTO CITY” was a front-page headline in Shanghai on the day after her return from Hong Kong. Also in the news was the announcement of a military exercise to be conducted by Japanese naval forces in the Whangpoo, which would include the firing of blank ammunition.¹ “Bloody Saturday”—a full-scale Japanese attack on the city—was still more than a year away, but Shanghai citizens had not forgotten the earlier mayhem in 1932. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, protests and boycotts of Japanese goods broke out in China, a nationwide movement particularly fervent in Shanghai. In response, Japan sent a coterie of militant Buddhist monks to the city to stage counterprotests in the streets and openly promote Japan’s imperial interests. When one of the ultranationalist monks was killed by an angry Chinese mob, the Japanese used the incident, as they had done in Manchuria, as a pretext for military action. Bombs rained on Chapei, a densely populated Chinese district of Shanghai, and troops landed from warships. While the Chinese 19th Route Army, defying Chiang Kai-shek, put up a stiff and heroic resistance, thousands of civilians were killed and many more wounded. An overflowing river of refugees fled the war zone under the watchful eyes of the foreign powers, who were appalled but did virtually nothing to stop the carnage. Mindful of President Woodrow Wilson’s inactivity following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, US Secretary of State Henry Stimson issued a warning to Japan. But it was a toothless threat immediately rendered ineffective by President Herbert Hoover, who announced that the United States would not impose economic sanctions on Japan.²

Although the air raid on Chapei had become a distant echo by the spring of 1936, the Nippon aggression had been increasing day by day, as evidenced by the pending military exercise by the Japanese navy in the harbor. Still, Shanghai citizens tried to go about their lives as usual. While the United States government had no interest—not yet—in getting directly involved in China’s fight against the Japanese, new films from America certainly created a sense that nothing was wrong and even might have helped to calm nerves. Playing at the Metropol Theatre was Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, a silent satire on the ills of industrialization, featuring comically the Little Tramp struggling on the assembly line; at the Capitol Theatre was Shirley Temple’s The Littlest Rebel, in which the child star tap-danced and sang, “Polly Wolly Doodle”; and at the Nanking Theatre was Robert Montgomery and Myrna Loy’s Petticoat Fever, a romantic comedy that ends with the loving couple riding off in a dogsled. The highly anticipated Charlie Chan in Shanghai would only be released later that year. For the musically inspired or those who could afford the one-dollar tickets, Sunday concerts at the Lyceum Theatre featured Mozart’s Overture: The Marriage of Figaro, Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto, and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 5, conducted by the Italian maestro Mario Paci.³

It was still too cold to go north to Peking, so Anna May planned to spend the month of April in Shanghai, boning up on Mandarin, studying Chinese drama, and making occasional trips to nearby scenic spots, such as Suzhou and Hangzhou, two southern cities known for their natural beauty, gardens, and cultural milieus. As she told a journalist, she wanted to “delve deeply into the mysteries of China’s theater,” and she was especially interested in the traditional gestures, wishing to learn their meanings and significance. Asked whether she thought the elements of Chinese drama might be applicable to the motion picture, she said no. But she quickly added that Mei Lan-fang’s performance should be filmed in sound and color, “so that the world could become better acquainted with his great work and the dramatic art for which he stands.”⁴

She mentioned Mei in this interview partly because her friend Bernardine Szold Fritz had been trying to sponsor the Chinese master’s performance at her International Arts Theatre. When she was still in Hong Kong, Anna May had heard from Fritz about the difficulty in staging Mei due to costs. To Fritz’s dismay, her plan to bring Mei to London did not pan out either, because Hsiung Shih-I, whose English rendition of Lady Precious Stream was making splashes in London and New York at the time, succeeded in preventing Mei from putting on an authentic Chinese play abroad, perhaps out of professional jealousy. All these hurdles for popularizing Chinese drama in the world further galvanized Anna May. Her vision was to combine several ancient Chinese plays into one modern drama, maybe telescoping three stories into one. Western audiences demand an emotional plot full of action, she explained, “while Chinese audiences are more interested in the intellectual aspects of the drama. A Western drama based on a single Chinese play would not have enough action in it to suit European and American tastes.”⁵

Interestingly, her view of the fundamental difference between Chinese and Western dramas was shared by one of the world’s most celebrated playwrights, Bertolt Brecht. Mesmerized by a rare performance by Mei in Moscow in 1935, Brecht drafted an essay, titled “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” which would exert a profound influence on the Western theater of the twentieth century. Prior to his encounter with Chinese drama, Brecht had already experimented with some non-Aristotelian techniques that intentionally created distance between the audience and the play. Watching cross-dressed Mei impersonating a female character on a Moscow stage, the author of Threepenny Opera was struck by the use of what he came to call the “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) in traditional Chinese acting. Like Anna May, Brecht was interested in the symbolisms and gestures used in a Chinese play: “A general will carry little pennants on his shoulder, corresponding to the number of regiments under his command. Poverty is shown by patching the silken costumes with irregular shapes of different colors, likewise silken, to indicate that they have been mended. Characters are distinguished by particular masks, i.e., simply by painting. Certain gestures of the two hands signify the forcible opening of a door.” Acknowledging the difficulty of exporting these culturally grounded techniques from China, Brecht nonetheless proclaimed that one might be able to learn from the alienation effect achieved in the Chinese theater. “The Western actor does all he can to bring his spectator into the closest proximity to the events and the character he has to portray,” Brecht wrote. “In contrast, the Chinese artist’s performance often strikes the Western actor as cold.… The coldness comes from the actor’s holding himself remote from the character portrayed.” Sharing Anna May’s view on the intellectualism of traditional Chinese theater, Brecht concluded, “Acting like this is healthier, [for] it demands a considerable knowledge of humanity and worldly wisdom, and a keen eye for what is socially important.”⁶

In the essay, Brecht told of an incident during the Chinese performance. When Mei was playing a death scene, a spectator sitting next to Brecht exclaimed with astonishment at one of his gestures. “One or two people sitting in front of us turned round indignantly and sshhh’d,” Brecht wrote. “They behaved as if they were present at the real death of a real girl. Possibly their attitude would have been all right for a European production, but for a Chinese it was unspeakably ridiculous.”⁷ As we know, in later years when Brecht was living in exile, he would ingeniously integrate the aesthetics of the alienation effect into his own avant-garde work, producing China-related dramas such as The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucasian Chalk Circle—an adaptation of the play The Circle of Chalk, which Anna May had performed earlier in London.

Undoubtedly, Brecht’s fascination with Chinese acting exemplifies China’s influence on Western modernism, a trend also seen in art, poetry, and philosophy. Of course, cross-cultural influences often go in both directions. When the lacquered gate of millennia-old China was busted open by foreign powers, the West’s impact on Chinese cultural life was seen nowhere more palpably than in film. As soon as the motion picture emerged in the West, the Chinese were quick to adopt the new technology and art, which they called dianying (electrical shadows). The first cinema opened in Shanghai as early as 1896, when a French Lumière cameraman brought a film as one of the “numbers” in a variety show at the Hsu Gardens that featured acrobats, a magician, and a juggler with fireworks.⁸ The first Chinese film, actually just a recording of the Peking opera Dingjun Mountain, was made in 1905. When Hollywood entered its Golden Age in the 1930s, China also saw a surge of its film industry. The first sound film, Singsong Girl Red Peony, directed by Zhang Shichuan and starring Butterfly Wu, was made in 1931. Before the Japanese invasion in 1937, Shanghai, as the epicenter of the film industry from the very beginning (and the home of about 141 studios out of the 175 in China), had three major production companies: Unique Company (Tianyi), founded by the Shaw Brothers in 1925, focused on folklore dramas; Star Studio (Mingxing), built by Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan in 1922, began with comic shorts and then transitioned to feature-length family dramas; and United China (Lianhua), founded by Luo Mingyou in 1930, was the first studio that took advantage of vertical integration, streamlining production, distribution, and theater.

In 1935, the year before Anna May’s visit, the Chinese film world was rocked by the scandal of the actress Ruan Lingyu, a tragedy as disturbing as the death of Marilyn Monroe. Born into poverty but emerging at sixteen as a film star, Ruan had endured a difficult marriage to an abusive man who had frittered away her income with his gambling addiction. Finally having the courage to leave him, she lived with a tea tycoon who turned out to be no better, and, to add to her woes, her ex-husband filed a lawsuit seeking financial compensation. Hounded by relentless tabloid mobs and exhausted from mental and physical abuse, Ruan overdosed on barbiturates during the night of March 8. Dead at the age of twenty-four, she left a note that read, “Gossip is a fearful thing.” Her memorial service extended over three days, while the funeral procession, attended by more than a hundred thousand people, stretched for miles on the streets of Shanghai. Three women committed suicide during the event. In a front-page story, the New York Times hyperbolically called it “the most spectacular funeral of the century,” the reporter perhaps unaware of Rudolph Valentino’s spectacular funeral only nine years earlier.⁹

Having just buried a shining star, Shanghai saw another spectacle later that year, the wedding of Butterfly Wu. Like Ruan, born in Shanghai, Wu rose quickly in China’s embryonic film world of the 1920s. In 1926, the Shaw Brothers signed her as a long-term actress for their Unique Company. Two years later, she switched over to the Star Studio and acted in a series of popular films. Her starring role in the first sound feature, Singsong Girl Red Peony, followed by The Flower of Freedom (1932) and Twin Sisters (1934), enabled her to surpass Ruan and gain the title of “China’s Movie Queen.” However, just like Ruan, Wu had her own share of publicity scandals. One of them was the persistent rumor that on the night of the Mukden Incident, Wu had been dancing with Zhang Xueliang, who was supposed to be defending the city against the Japanese attack. She was publicly condemned for allegedly enjoying herself at the moment of national humiliation. Having learned a painful lesson, Wu became circumspect about her personal life and did not publicize her year-long romance with Pan Yousheng, a young comprador, until they announced their engagement in the fall of 1935. Like Ruan’s funeral, Wu’s wedding became a major social event in the glamorous world of Shanghai, with famous actors serving as the bridesmaids and groomsmen, child stars as flower girls and page boys.¹⁰ After the marriage, she dialed down her acting work to no more than one film per year. When Anna May first arrived in Shanghai in February 1936, Wu was, as the gossip columns reported, vacationing in the Wuyi Mountains in Fujian, recuperating from tonsillitis surgery. This time, when Anna May returned to Shanghai, the two women, who had met each other briefly in England a year earlier, reconnected and became close friends.

At their previous encounter in London, the two had not spent much time together due to Wu’s busy itinerary. As part of the Chinese film delegation, Wu, Mei, and other Chinese stars had made stops in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London, Geneva, and Rome. It was on that trip that Mei’s performance in Moscow had inspired Brecht. At a tea party in London, Anna May met Wu, Mei, and the rest of the Chinese delegation. In her memoir, Wu recalled her first impression: “Miss Wong was a tall woman, clad in a colorful dress with wide sleeves and a burgundy straw hat that resembles the cap of a Manchu soldier.” Wu lamented that because Wong’s Taishanese and her Cantonese were as different as Spanish and Italian, the two had trouble communicating in depth at that meeting.¹¹ In Shanghai, however, with Wu’s ability to speak Mandarin, English, Cantonese, Shanghaiese, and several other regional dialects, she could serve as Anna May’s interpreter to help her navigate the multilingual world of China.

On a chilly spring afternoon, two motorcars rolled across the Maple Bridge in the Xuhui District and turned into a sycamore-shaded lane along the Zhaojia Creek. When the cars stopped in front of a brick building, which was the headquarters of the Star Studio Company, out came the immaculately dressed Pan Yousheng. He opened the car doors and led the way for his wife, Butterfly Wu, and their guest, Anna May Wong, followed by a small entourage consisting of a cameraman and reps of MGM. Dressed in a gray qipao under a black coat, Wu smiled like a happy bride, her newly curled hair rippling with soft waves, a pair of diamond earrings sparkling in the sunlight. Standing a head taller than Wu, Anna May wore a dark-green spring coat over a light-blue qipao and a pair of open-toe high heels. She wore her hair with short bangs on the forehead and a chignon in the back. She was holding a black purse with her name embroidered in white on the front, apparently a gift specially designed for her.

Walking in locked arms like sisters, Anna May and Wu went up to the second floor of the building, where several Chinese gentlemen were busy finalizing a shooting script. They were all members of the company and veterans of the industry, including Zhang Shichuan, director and cofounder of Star Studio; Ouyang Yuqian, a playwright and a top Peking Opera singer, widely regarded as the southern counterpart of Mei Lan-fang; and Hong Shen, a Harvard-educated playwright and author of the first Chinese screenplay, Shentu Shi (1925). After a round of formalities, they continued to stand around rather than sit down to chat over tea. Learning of Ouyang’s background, Anna May invited him for a meeting at the Park Hotel in a few days so that Bernardine Szold Fritz could join them for a lengthier discussion about Peking opera. Asked about her progress in the study of Mandarin, Anna May tried her best to count from one to ten, but her strong accent induced hearty laughs from everyone present. When she was asked for autographs, Anna May gladly obliged but committed a faux pas by adding 女士 (Lady, or Madame) to her Chinese signature, triggering another round of guffaws. The native Chinese were too polite to inform the visitor from America that only others can address you with titles like Sir or Madame.

After the visit to the company’s headquarters, the group made a stop at Star Studio 2, where the production of a Chinese film, Jingang Zuan (The Diamond Drill), was in progress. Having just spent time with Warner Oland in Hong Kong, Anna May was amused to meet the director Xu Xinfu, who would soon start making “homegrown” Charlie Chan flicks. Somewhat bizarrely, in these Chinese knockoffs, a real Chinese actor would follow Oland’s incarnation of a Chinaman in almost all aspects: walk, talk, and dress. We would thus reach the twilight zone of yellowface, where a real Chinaman would imitate a Swede’s imitation of a Chinaman while someone like Anna May was considered too Chinese to play a Chinese.

Toward the end of the visit, a journalist took Hong Shen aside and asked quietly what he thought of the Hollywood actress. Hong nodded his head, saying under his breath, “She seemed quite modest and sincere. Not a bad person.” Most Chinese knew that a few years earlier, in 1930, at the showing of Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger in Shanghai, Hong had led a protest against the negative portrayal of Chinese. That protest turned violent, with some in the audience throwing chairs at the screen and the projector. Given the Chinese sensitivity and Hong’s position in the film world, it was a reassuring comment from him.¹²

Such approvals, however, were not always so easy to come by. Over the years, Chinese tabloids had preyed on the global celebrity in the same way they hounded domestic stars such as Ruan and Wu, printing rumors about Anna May’s liaisons, her pet peeves, and other salacious matters. Her smoking habit got much press, for cigarettes were often construed as the symbol of a modern woman. One gossip column in the Linglong magazine reported that Anna May not only loved dogs but also liked to kiss them, because “a dog’s mouth has a special taste, as Miss Wong explained.” Several opinion makers published articles condemning her roles in films. For her perceived offenses in appearing in the likes of The Thief of Bagdad and Daughter of the Dragon, one critic believed she should be expelled from China, and another even suggested that she should be shot.¹³

China’s Nationalist government also had mixed feelings about Anna May. Upon her initial arrival in Shanghai, the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence sent her a letter, offering its services “to assist her studying the cultural and social aspects of China.”¹⁴ Knowing well that such services meant surveillance in the name of assistance, Anna May politely declined the offer and tried to avoid any contact with the Chinese government. In May, however, the same bureau issued another missive, inviting her to visit Nanking. She could no longer put off the Chinese version of “a walk to downtown,” to face the authority who would determine the fate of her future films in the Chinese market.

On May 9, 1936, Anna May left Shanghai and arrived in Nanking, an ancient city by the Yangtze River and the seat of the Nationalist government since 1927. There she was received like a visiting foreign dignitary by top officials from the Bureau of Foreign Intelligence, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Central Film Industry Office. Appearance-wise, it was a friendly reception, and the guest of honor was treated to a lavish banquet. The bureaucrats, however, took the occasion to make condescending speeches to air their long-held grievances. “They made speeches that lasted for four hours,” she recalled. “Instead of the usual stereotyped ‘welcome to our city’ speeches, they all took turns berating me for the roles I played.” Feeling indignant, and recognizing the hypocrisy in the way they had treated the Swede, Warner Oland, she navigated the treacherous waters as diplomatically as possible. Still a neophyte at speaking Mandarin, she had to answer in English. “When a person is trying to get established in a profession, she can’t choose parts. She has to take what is offered,” she explained. Appealing to the goodwill of all present without sounding apologetic, she stated that she had come to China to learn, and that she hoped she would now be able to interpret China in a better light. To her relief, there was the kind of happy ending her films rarely had, for her erstwhile interrogators ended up apologizing to her for the chastisements.¹⁵ A dramatic headline befitting a movie star appeared the next day: “Anna May Wong, the daughter who lost her Chinese soul, is ‘resurrected.’ ”¹⁶

After two days of speechifying and sightseeing in Nanking, Anna May Wong, now “resurrected,” boarded the fabled Shanghai Express for Peking on May 11, under the cover of darkness. In that ancient capital, she would continue to recover her Chinese soul.