32THE DUST OF THE EARTH

Forbidden City, Peking, 1930s (Courtesy of Hedda Morrison Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library of Harvard College Library, Harvard University)

CONTRARY TO ITS NAME, the Shanghai Express was a very slow train. Josef von Sternberg, who arrived in China after Anna May had left the country in late 1936, admitted, “The actual Shanghai Express, which I took out of Peking, was thoroughly unlike the train I had invented.” Another American traveler, George N. Kates, who had forsaken his Hollywood career to spend some “fat years” in China, took the same trip in 1931 and described it as running “like a cruising tramp, stopping in mid-country, spending leisurely half hours at local stations.” Puffing and chuffing, the iron horse lumbered along, like a sedated water buffalo, “over the broad stretch of this earth’s surface extending from the Yangtze River in the South to the great plains of North China.” There is, as Sternberg candidly acknowledged, “quite a difference between fact and fancy.”¹

After a protracted journey, Anna May’s train arrived in Peking on May 14, 1936. Disembarking at Chienmen (Qianmen) Railway Station, she was greeted by a large crowd of reporters and local cinephiles. Standing under the archway of the lofty Water Gate, she announced that she intended to spend three months in the city, “sightseeing and studying the old Chinese drama with a view to making eventually a picture with a Chinese background.” Having done so much traveling, she was in fact also contemplating a film about China in which she would act as a travel guide.²

Anna May, once out of the teeming station, was struck immediately by the thick, impenetrable medieval walls enclosing the Tartar City, where the ruling Manchus used to live. Despite the sky being blue, Peking was steeped in a color of gray that gave the ancient city its unique character. As a result of sands blown in from the Gobi Desert combined with the muddy mule-cart ruts lining the broad boulevards, Peking seemed permanently swathed in a gauze of dust. As a local proverb says, “On a windless day there are three inches of dust, and on a rainy day there is mud all over the ground.” In Imperial Peking, his magisterial study of the city, Lin Yutang writes, “In Peking one revels in the blue of the sky but eats the dust of the earth.” This prevalence of dust and the universal gray, accentuated by the tinted roofs and painted walls of imperial palaces, conferred a sense of timelessness, an almost ineffable charm that had permeated the city for centuries. Lin compares Peking to a benevolent grandmother who represents to her children, growing up in her all-embracing protection, “a world vaster than one can explore or exhaust.” Compared to money-mad, thoroughly modernized Shanghai, the old Imperial City, bearing the indelible time stamps of the Mongol, Ming, and Manchu dynasties, presented a uniquely Chinese vista to a visitor like Anna May. The perspective delivered by a garrulous character in Harold Acton’s novel Peonies and Ponies (1941) encapsulated the city’s allure: “Peking’s such loads of fun. Jugglers, fortune-tellers, acrobats, puppet-shows, temple tiffins, treasure hunts and Paomachang [racetrack] picnics—not to speak of costume jamborees, galas and fancy-dress affairs—always something original! Home-made natural fun, not imported or artificially manufactured as in Shanghai. And there’s always a delicious spice of the unexpected.”³

What was unexpected—indeed, alarming—was the increasing reality that Peking’s tattered charm was disappearing as a result of the deep inroads made by Japan in northern China. After usurping the three northeastern Chinese provinces and establishing the Manchukuo regime in 1932, the Japanese army headed south, expanding its area of control all the way to the perimeter of Peking. Exerting all sorts of military, political, and economic pressures, Japan coerced the Nationalist government into an uneasy rapprochement, thus creating an environment advantageous to Japan’s immediate goal of detaching northern China as an autonomous state like Manchukuo. Massing troops along the demilitarized zone outside Peking, Japan launched a smuggling campaign designed to paralyze China’s economy and sever the country’s revenue from customs. As Barbara W. Tuchman describes in her study of wartime China, “Bales and shiploads of cotton goods, rayon, sugar, kerosene, cigarettes and other manufactures were smuggled in by armed truck from Manchuria and the seaports. Local officials were bought or bullied into connivance. An enormous business in heroin and morphine was conducted through the Japanese Concession in Tientsin.”⁴ A front-page article in The China Press, appearing next to news about Anna May’s Peking arrival, reported the loss of $30 million in customs revenue from August 1, 1935, to May 10, 1936, as a result of smuggling into Tientsin. After issuing an ultimatum for the separation of northern China, the Japanese intensified the smuggling operation, causing a $1.8 million loss in revenue just six days prior to Anna May’s arrival.⁵ As US Ambassador Nelson Johnson soberly noted, the Japanese attack on Chinese Customs was “as cold-blooded an act by one country against another as any I have read of and I have no doubt that it will succeed.”⁶ The anxiety was palpable as northern China began to crumble under Japanese pressure, while Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland unopposed in March and Mussolini, using poison gas, annexed Ethiopia in May. Fascism, like a political virus out of control, brooked no borders in its global contamination.

On that seemingly calm spring day, Anna May rode in a car from the train station to her hotel. Passing the Legation Quarter, where the foreign powers had their embassies or consulates, she could see Japanese infantry and cavalry performing daily drills, accompanied by shrill bugling. In fact, the Japanese presence was not only alarming but also ubiquitous in the city. As Tuchman describes, “Japanese officials in cars bearing the flag of the Rising Sun sped through the streets. Japanese officers rode about on horses invariably too large for them which they could not mount without assistance; in case of need orderlies trotted along behind on foot. Japanese businessmen and other civilians filled the hotels, opened their own cafes and brothels, played on the golf courses. Groups of Japanese schoolchildren on conducted tours of Manchukuo and north China visited the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace.”⁷

The Grand Hôtel de Pékin was Anna May’s destination, past the Legation Quarter and down the broad Chang An Chieh, also known as the Avenue of Eternal Peace. A seven-story Beaux-Arts building made of steel and concrete and clad in red bricks, the hotel was one of the grandest in Asia when it first opened in 1915. Since then, it had become the center of activities for the established members of the city’s foreign colony. Like a scene in a film set, diplomats, military attachés, and secret agents shook hands in the hotel’s cavernous lobby, fretting over world affairs and jousting for positions of power. On the hotel rooftop, guests would drink cocktails with the Forbidden City as a backdrop, watching swallows dart in the twilight while listening to the wind-driven temple bells. Desperate Russian émigrés down to their last ruble, and esurient American tourists with Mexican silver dollars in their pockets, would mingle in the mirrored ballroom, eating, drinking, and dancing to the music performed by the hotel’s own orchestra. It was in this hotel that Bessie Wallis Warfield Simpson Spencer, the twice-divorced gold digger from Baltimore, after a brief stint as a nude cabaret dancer in Shanghai, began her ascension to the title of Duchess of Windsor, becoming “that woman” who would force a king to choose between her and his crown. It was here that John P. Marquand, the Boston novelist entrusted by Saturday Evening Post to mint a new Oriental icon following the sudden death of Earl Derr Biggers, would find inspiration for Mr. Moto, a suave Japanese agent who inherits the inscrutability of Biggers’s Charlie Chan. It was also here that Zhang Jingyao, a traitorous Chinese warlord who assisted Japan in setting up Puyi as a puppet monarch, was assassinated in 1933. The Grand Hotel, in the words of Paul French, was “Grand Central, Times Square and Piccadilly Circus all rolled into one.”⁸

Checking into the hotel, Anna May could see why it rivaled, if not exceeded, her favorite New York hotel, the Algonquin. A mile’s remove from the train station, the Grand Hotel was centrally located near both the Legation Quarter and the shopping district. As French writes in Destination Peking, “In the lobby was a branch of the Thomas Cook Travel Agency, American Helen Burton’s famous The Camel’s Bell store (which also had a showroom on the third floor), and the bookshop of Frenchman Henri Vetch who bought up the libraries of any members of the Peking colony leaving and sold new libraries to any ‘griffins’ arriving. The lobby also had a number of smaller shops selling antiques, curios, carpets, embroidery, jewelry and jade.” Like most “griffins”—China-coast slang for new arrivals and parvenus—Anna May took the American-made Otis elevator and headed straight to the rooftop. There, in the spacious open-air garden, she found the legendary watering hole, equipped with bamboo tables and chairs, a bandstand, and a dance floor that would soon open for the summer season.⁹ But the bird’s-eye view was the most breathtaking: majestic palaces of the Forbidden City with golden-yellow roofs; a chessboard of avenues symmetrically laid out along a central axis; ancient city walls with empty bastions; and, in the far distance, on a clear day, one could see the Western Hills and a forest that would glow like a bonfire each autumn.

Unlike Emily Hahn, who preferred fast-paced Shanghai over Peking, Anna May was immediately smitten with the quiet beauty of the Imperial City. “I always had a weakness for Chinese art,” she said, “but I thought it was exaggerated.” In Peking, however, she found that it was no exaggeration. “The trees look like they do in a Chinese painting. Even the ruins are alive in Peking, not dead like the ruins in Rome. If I could ever leave my work, I’d choose Peking for my home.”¹⁰ For the next five months, Peking would be her home.

The first few days were spent sightseeing, and Peking provided an abundance of sights. Outside the Forbidden City’s high walls, there were countless temples, altars, and towers with august names, all relics of the imperial past: Temple of Heaven, Temple of Earth, Altar of Sun, Altar of Moon, Bell Tower, Drum Tower, and so on. Artificial lakes and verdant parks dotted the cityscape. Seven miles to the northwest of the city rose the Summer Palace, Empress Dowager Cixi’s favorite place for sheltering from the unbearable summer heat. Nearby lay the ruins of the old palace, bearing the same name, destroyed and burned to the ground by the Eight Nations Allied Forces during the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century.

The Great Wall was also within easy reach by car, and Anna May managed to get a ride from US Senator Burton Wheeler, who was visiting China. A supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the senator from Montana was nonetheless a critic of the president’s pre–World War II foreign policy. The Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), adapted from the unpublished novel “The Gentleman from Montana,” was loosely based on Wheeler’s experience in the 1920s as a freshman senator fighting corruption in the Warren G. Harding administration.¹¹ This time, Mr. “Smith” and Anna May went to the Great Wall of China to stand in awe at the feat of ancient civil engineering comparable to the Egyptian pyramids. From there, they traveled by sedan chairs (the alternative being donkey rides) to visit the burial ground of the Ming emperors. Anna May bowed before each of their thirteen mausoleums. Apparently, she was carried away by the stony grandeur of Chinese history, or perhaps the story she had just heard when visiting the Coal Hill the previous day still resonated: On the last day of China’s longest dynasty, as rebel forces stormed into the Forbidden City, the Ming Emperor Chongzhen drew a sword and cut off the arm of his fifteen-year-old daughter, crying over her ill fortune to be a princess. He then hanged himself at the pavilion on the Coal Hill behind the palace.¹²

It was exactly the kind of Chinese saga that Anna May hoped to take back to America and put on stage or screen. To achieve that goal, and to get a sense of Peking’s daily life, she soon started looking for a place to rent. It was also to cut down on her cost of living: The posh Grand Hotel, equipped with running water, flush toilets, and elevators, was certainly nice, but Anna May needed, as she told Bernardine Szold Fritz, to watch her “shekels” carefully. In fact, she had arrived with letters of introduction from Fritz, who set her up with the British writer Harold Acton.¹³ Sir Harold, author of the novel Peonies and Ponies, was an Oxford-educated poet and historian who had sojourned in Peking since 1932. He was part of Peking’s American and European aesthete circle, a largely gay community that included Desmond Parsons and his lover Robert Byron, the American illustrator Thomas Handforth, and the notorious recluse Sir Edmund Backhouse.

Each of these soigné dilettantes was living a life worthy of an entire book. Parsons was the most revered of the group, independently wealthy and naturally gifted as a linguist. He had arrived in Peking in 1934 and rented an old-style house on Tsui Hua Alley, where he re-created a Taoist courtyard, gardens, and traditional room settings full of Chinese porcelain, fans, scrolls, screens, and ceremonial robes. Byron was an explorer and travel writer who had arrived in China via Greece, India, Russia, Persia, and Afghanistan. Author of one of the most influential travel books of the 1930s, The Road to Oxiana (1937), Byron was noted for his unconventional wit. Once asked what he most wanted to be, Byron quipped, “To be an incredibly beautiful male prostitute with a sharp sting in my bottom.” Sir Edmund Backhouse, the subject of a mesmerizing biography by H. R. Trevor-Roper, was dubbed “The Hermit of Peking” for his eccentric lifestyle. Arriving on the Chinese scene in the final years of the nineteenth century, when the Qing dynasty was on life support, the young English nobleman was a brilliant sinologist who soon found his way into the imperial archives of the Manchus and, allegedly, the bedchamber of the Empress Dowager. While many of his so-called research items, deposited into a collection at the British Museum, turned out to be forgeries, his colorful and hilarious memoir, Décadence Mandchoue, was perhaps rightly called a work of fiction. Nonetheless, as a masterpiece of gay porn, if we can even use the word masterpiece for such a louche genre, his shocking account of the sexual deviancy and debauchery practiced by the inner circles of the Manchu dynasty would make William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch “look like a fairy tale for children.”¹⁴

By the spring of 1936, Parsons had departed for Europe, leaving his extravagant abode on Tsui Hua Alley to the care of Byron. Through Acton, Anna May expressed interest in renting the courtyard house. Either hoping his terminally ill lover would soon return, or out of sheer snobbery, Byron refused to rent it to her.¹⁵ Disappointed, Anna May turned to the friendlier crowd, her American compatriots, among whom she found the young, debonair Frank Dorn. Going by “Pinkie,” Dorn was a graduate of West Point and a dabbler in fiction and cartography. After serving in the Philippines for three years, followed by a brief stint as a field artillery instructor at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, he arrived in Peking in 1934 with the intention of studying language. In 1937, when Japan launched an all-out invasion, Dorn would be assigned as an aide to the US military attaché in China, the charismatic General Joseph Stilwell.

When Anna May met Pinkie, he had just settled into a nice courtyard house on Tung Ts’ung Pu Alley. Rent was so cheap in the city that most foreigners could afford at least two servants. On a US army officer’s salary, Pinkie hired five and paid only $26 a month for the entire household staff—his Number One Boy, Kao; the cook, Sun, who had worked for several years at the Russian Legation and prepared for Pinkie a daily variety of Russian, French, and Chinese dishes; the gardener, Wang, who would change the garden six times a year to feature various plants in their season; the chauffeur, Chou, who drove his master’s newly acquired Studebaker sedan; and a coolie for general work.¹⁶ Within an arrow’s range from the Grand Hotel, the alley had a storied past. Due to its proximity to the onetime civic exam hall, it was known in the old days as a neighborhood for the literati. Famous residents along the alley in the 1930s included “the dream couple,” Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, famous architects educated at the University of Pennsylvania; Peking University professor and philosopher Jin Yuelin; John King Fairbank, the future “Father of China Studies”; and Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer who had completed a six-thousand-mile trek across High Asia to China.

With Pinkie’s help, Anna May found a place to rent on the same alley. According to a Chinese journalist who visited her, Anna May’s new digs had a red lacquered gate, behind which was a small granite pavilion in the garden. From her correspondence with Fritz, we may also speculate that it was most likely a section of a traditional compound, or dazayuan (mixed court), an architectural design popular in Peking, which consists of several walled-in houses sharing a courtyard in the middle. In her letter, Anna May urged Fritz to visit her in Peking, but she apologized in advance for her small house, where the two women would have to bunk together.¹⁷

In the summer months of 1936, a year before the fall of Peking, Pinkie was busy researching the history of the Forbidden City. Earlier that year, he had published his first book, Forest Twilight, a novel about the life of the pygmy Negritos in the Philippines. And then he completed a map of Peking, published by a German-owned press in Tientsin. Based on extensive research and numerous field trips, it was such a finely drawn map that it is still on sale today in the city. By then, he was “thoroughly bitten by the writing bug,” working furiously on his next book, which he would publish years later as The Forbidden City: The Biography of a Palace (1970). The ambitious military officer-cum-writer and the fun-loving Hollywood actress seemed to hit it off. As neighbors, they could ride around town in Pinkie’s Studebaker, all the way to the Western Hills. They would also frequent the Grand Hotel for hard-boiled eggs, a Pernod, or a nightcap; or the Alcazar, a nightclub; or the Hotel du Nord, owned by two affable, potbellied Bavarian brothers, who served the best München beer in town and the delightful house specialty, steak tartare. The five-hundred-year-old T’uan Che Te, specializing in Peking duck and chicken velvet, was another favorite spot for visitors and locals alike. No question, a sense of joie de vivre was in the air.¹⁸

Since Pinkie and Anna May were both avid collectors of Chinese objets d’art, the curio shops, jewelers, and department stores lining Morrison Street, within walking distance from their alley, as well as the nearby Tung An Shih Chang, provided plenty for their picking. The latter, also known as the Morrison Street Bazaar, was an arcade covered by a roof of steel, glass, and iron. In their classic guidebook, In Search of Old Peking (1935), L. C. Arlington and William Lewisohn describe it as a huge rabbit warren, “a kind of covered-in miniature town of its own, crammed with small shops and stalls, where you can buy anything from a cent’s worth of melon seeds to the latest in radio sets, and everything at very reasonable prices.”¹⁹ Pinkie and Anna May probably also enjoyed forays to the Thieves’ Market under the walls of the Altar of Heaven, which was held in the small hours of the morning before it was light enough for either the seller or his goods to be seen too distinctly. According to Arlington and Lewisohn, “It is generally believed that all the articles sold here were stolen goods and can therefore be picked up for a song.” But as Pinkie noted in his unpublished memoir, the market was “no more a gathering of thieves than happen in the cloister of a secluded nunnery.”²⁰

Anna May Wong and Frank “Pinkie” Dorn, Peking, 1936 (Courtesy of Frank Dorn papers, Box 8, Envelope H, Hoover Institution Library and Archives)

When they tired of fooling around, Anna May and Pinkie could simply kick back and relax in their courtyards, enjoying the quiet hu-tong (alley) life. An extant photo shows them sitting on a backyard lawn, basking in the sun. She is holding a Chinese folding fan with one hand and fondling his pet dog with the other. He is sitting in a matching wicker chair, wearing a pair of short pants and a polo shirt, hair trimmed like a teapot cozy. Another photo shows her standing at a moon gate, wearing a traditional Chinese robe with split sides. She appears tall as a willow in her high heels, looking sideways at the camera, against a background of slanting tree branches, flower beds, carved rails, and traceried windows. In his memoir, Pinkie describes his garden, where the moon gate was “reflected in the still waters of the pool and the branches of weeping willows swaying with each breeze like a woman’s long hair brushing over beds of flowers.”²¹ It was as if he was recalling the image not of the moon gate but of the willowy figure who once stood at the gate.

Even though summer days were long in the north, Peking, unlike Shanghai, did not have much nightlife to brag about, and people generally went to bed early. John Marquand, who had found his inspiration for Mr. Moto in a city under constant threat by Japan, penned the following lyrical passage in Thank You, Mr. Moto, published in 1936:

There is no place in the world as strange as Peking at night, when the darkness covers the city like a veil, and when incongruous and startling sights and sounds come to one out of the dark. The gilded, carved facades of shops; the swinging candle lanterns; the figures by the tables in the smoky yellow light of tea houses; the sound of song; the twanging of stringed instruments; the warm strange smell of soy bean soil; all come out of nowhere to touch one elusively, and are gone. A life in which one can never be a part rolls past intimately but vainly. At such a time the shadows of old Peking stretch out their hands to touch you.²²

Such were the quiet days and evenings in the long summer of 1936, before the conflagration that would upend the post–World War I geopolitical order, in the process hurling tens of millions of lives into chaos, ruin, and often death. For now, however, Anna May was getting settled in her temporary home on a dusty Peking alley, looking to enter the penetralia of a culture she had been representing on the world stage. When asked about her favorite cities at the end of her China trip, she would once again reaffirm her fondness for the ancient capital: “Of all the Chinese cities I’ve visited, Peking is the best. To see a real Chinese society and experience the authentic Chinese way of life, it has to be in Peking. Definitely not Shanghai, and not Nanking either.” Peking, she added, is like a hidden treasure: “Outside you may see only gray walls. You enter a gate and before you may be a most beautiful garden.”²³