36YOUR NAME IN CHINESE

PERMIT ME TO DIGRESS a bit from the story of Anna May Wong. In the fall of 1846, when six decades of booming China trade had helped to turn Boston into a hotbed of American Orientalism—or, if you will, a clearinghouse for all things Chinese—a fifteen-year-old girl named Emily Dickinson rolled into town with her parents. Living in Amherst, Massachusetts, the future “Poet Recluse of America” had been struggling with health problems. In late spring through early summer, her cough had become so severe that she had had to take a leave from her classes at Amherst Academy. After she recovered, her parents thought it would be a good idea to take her to Boston for sightseeing, as well as to visit her Aunt Lavinia. After an impressive train ride, Emily spent a month in Beantown, visiting the glorious “City of the Dead”—Mount Auburn Cemetery, America’s first garden cemetery, which had opened in 1831—then climbing Bunker Hill, where she enjoyed a panoramic view of the city, before attending two concerts and a horticultural exhibition.

What really tickled her adolescent mind, however, was the Chinese Museum. Newly opened in the Marlboro Chapel on Washington Street by John R. Peters, who would soon sell it to the humbug P. T. Barnum, the Chinese Museum was “a great curiosity” to the young Emily. As she told her friend Abiah Root in a letter, the collection consisted of twenty-five tableaux, each displaying facets of Chinese life and culture, including objects, paintings, and an “endless variety of Wax figures made to resemble the Chinese & dressed in their costume.” To make the exhibition more enticing (and lucrative), two Chinese men were also installed at the museum: One of them was a musician and the other a teacher. Apparently quoting from the exhibition pamphlet, Dickinson confided to her friend, “They were both wealthy & not obliged to labor but they were also Opium Eaters & fearing to continue the practice lest it destroyed their lives yet unable to break the ‘rigid chain of habit’ in their own land, they left their family’s & came to this country. They have now entirely overcome the practice.” Confessing to a lack of interest in the musician, she was barely able to stay awake as he played upon two Chinese instruments and accompanied them with singing. But she was intrigued by the Writing Master, who was “constantly occupied in writing the names of visitors who request it upon cards in the Chinese language—for which he charges 12½ cts. apiece.” Always obsessed with the slipperiness of signs and their meanings, Emily shelled out twenty-five cents to acquire two cards for her sister Viny and herself. We do not know what Chinese characters the Writing Master used to transliterate “Viny” and “Emily,” but the perennial punster was satisfied to see the names appear in a mysteriously pictorial script she could not decipher. As she told Abiah, “I consider them very precious.”¹

Fast forward about a century, during the years of World War II, when Americans were attending charity fundraisers and would experience essentially what Emily Dickinson had once seen at the Chinese Museum in Boston. The only difference was that, rather than a reformed opium addict, they would espy a beautiful Chinese actress, bedecked in a finely cut cheongsam, offering to write their names in Chinese for ten cents. Thus, on top of their regular exposure to the signage of Chinese laundries and restaurants (or Ezra Pound’s imagism, if they happened to be students of poetry), Americans found that their fascination with Chinese characters and culture just took on a new, humanitarian meaning.

In September 1939, using a ruse similar to Japan’s descent on China, Germany invaded Poland under false pretenses. Next, the Nazis seized France in the summer of 1940, before bombing Britain—all while Europe seemed paralyzed. Even then, millions of Americans held on to their “Never again” mentality, weary of becoming involved in another round of Old World quarrels. Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States desperately sought to maintain neutrality, relying mostly on financial and material aid to support its allies, particularly Britain and China. When Japan officially joined the Axis powers in September 1940, Congress quickly approved a loan of $25 million to China, followed by another $50 million that November.² Among the general public, many China aid societies were established, most of them controlled by white businessmen, former missionaries, and local Chinese American organizations. Well before America’s entry into the war, which would induce a huge outpouring of patriotic fervor in Hollywood, Anna May was the industry’s most active China supporter, crisscrossing the country on fundraising missions.

Having already auctioned off some of her stylish costumes and donated cash to the United China Relief Fund, she became the most visible face of the China cause in the United States. On January 22, 1940, she sponsored a sale of rare Chinese objets d’art at the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel, with proceeds going to the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China. In May, she helped Father Charles Meeus host a charity event at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. A prominent missionary in China and head of the Chinese Boy Scouts, the Belgian-born Catholic priest was employed by the Chinese Ministry of Information to combat the lingering anti-Chinese sentiment among Americans. At this event, Father Meeus showed a short film he had made of rural western China. He spoke highly of Anna May, calling her the leader in relief work.³ In October, in the midst of a heat wave and several earthquake tremors in Los Angeles, Anna May attended a China Aid Council benefit held at Pickfair. In November and into December, she made whistle-stops on the East Coast, attending Bowl of Rice parties—highly popular fundraisers popping up in affluent areas nationwide—at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, as well as in Boston and Ridgefield, Connecticut. In June 1941, she directed an evening program for the United China Relief Fund in Santa Monica, attended by Chinese Consul General T. K. Chang and such Hollywood luminaries as Cary Grant, George Murphy, Una Merkel, and Fanny Brice. Besides a lion dance, a sword dance, and a fashion show, Anna May showed the crowd a homemade film of her China trip: Where the Wind Rocks the Bamboo.⁴ She had wanted to call the film My Country and My People, but Lin Yutang’s publisher refused to let her borrow the title of the bestseller.⁵

Nothing, however, revealed her passion for the China cause better than her trip to Australia, where Anna May performed revues on the Tivoli Theatre circuit for two and a half months. As part of a variety program titled “Highlights from Hollywood,” she arrived in Sydney aboard the ship Aorangi on June 4, 1939. Hailed as “the illustrious daughter of China,” she appeared as an ambassador and spokesperson for China more than for the United States. Besides a gaggle of journalists and a crowd of fans, the enthusiastic throng greeting her on the dock included Dr. Chun-Jien Pao, the Chinese Consul General in Australia, and Doris Chen, a Chinese government representative who had been working in Australia to raise funds for Chinese war refugees. The reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald was struck by Anna May’s distinctly Chinese outfit and demeanor: “Miss Wong, who has a quiet, serene manner, and a low-pitched speaking voice, was an impressive figure in a slim black frock, ankle-length and slit to the knees, to display long white trousers of embroidered sheer. She added a smooth black turban with a gold ornament, and a silver fox cape. Her finger and toe nails were lacquered with a new colored polish, crushed strawberry, which is a deep red with an opalescent sheen.”⁶ Subsequent news coverage also played up Anna May’s Chinese-ness, obviously reflecting her own self-image.

Anna May Wong in Australia, 1939 (Courtesy of New York Public Library)

At the time of her arrival, Australia’s attitude toward China had become more tolerant. Just as in the United States, prejudice against Chinese immigrants had marked the birth of modern Australia. In fact, throughout the Anglophone world, “anti-coolieism” was foundational to Western identities of nation and empire; and Australia was no exception. As Mae Ngai shows in her magisterial study, The Chinese Question, Chinese communities in those far-flung gold-producing regions of Australia routinely faced marginalization, violence, and exclusion from self-described “white men’s countries.”⁷ The rise of Japan as a rival in the Pacific triggered a strategic shift in Australia’s China policy, eliciting slow changes of public sentiment in favor of the Chinese. After the Japanese invasion of China, and with war looming in the Pacific, China was now an ally of Australia and the United States.

On a professional level, Anna May appeared to have reached a turning point in her career. By 1939, she had completed the three films dictated by her contract with Paramount. These films, Dangerous to Know (1938), King of Chinatown (1939), and Island of Lost Men (1939), in addition to When Were You Born? (1938), in which she was on loan to Warner Bros., received mixed reviews, but they earned her a good sum of money—enough to splurge $18,000 on a nice house in Santa Monica, just blocks from the ocean.⁸

The first of these films, Dangerous to Know, was an adaptation of On the Spot, the Edgar Wallace play in which Anna May had made her American stage debut in 1930. It was dismissed by Motion Picture Exhibitor as “repetitious claptrap,” and by the New York Times as a “second-rate melodrama, hardly worthy of the talents of its generally capable cast.”⁹ The reception of King of Chinatown was better, with Variety singling out Anna May for her “nice portrayal” of a Chinese woman, based on the real-life San Francisco doctor Margaret Chung, who led the Red Cross campaign to help war-ravaged China.¹⁰ In the film, Anna May teamed up for the second time with Philip Ahn, as well as the Russian-born, strongly accented Akim Tamiroff. An excellent addition to the cast was Sidney Toler, soon to be chosen by Fox as the new Charlie Chan after the untimely death of Anna May’s friend Warner Oland. The making of When Were You Born? at the Warner Bros. lot provided a respite from most of her previous roles attached to her Chinese identity. Playing an astrologer who accurately predicts the imminent death of a fellow passenger on a cruise ship, Anna May made her entrance in the film with a pet monkey on her shoulder, like a Chinese Emily Hahn. The fourth film, Island of Lost Men, returned her not only to the familiar setup at the Paramount studio, but also to her stereotypical role as a café singer plucking a Chinese banjo and sporting a clichéd moniker, “China Lily.” The New York Times dismissed the film as a portentous burlesque, while Variety lauded Anna May for her “dignified, capable” performance.¹¹

With Island of Lost Men, Anna May entered into what an astute critic has called “the twilight of her film career.”¹² Paramount declined to offer her a new contract, nor would any other major studio enlist her. As she complained to her friends privately, film work had dried up for her as fast as puddles under a scorching sun. Some scholars suggested that the real purpose of Anna May’s visit to Australia was to escape Hollywood in order to ponder her future. Even if that was true, she had at least chosen a good cause to go along with her private concerns: the humanitarian pursuit of China aid.

After a week of rehearsal, “Highlights from Hollywood” opened at the Tivoli Theatre in Melbourne on June 12. With Anna May as the lead, the program included actress Betty Burgess, a platinum blonde in a handful of films, and tap dancer Sonny Lamont, who had appeared in Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939). Accompanied by the musical prodigy Merrill La Fontaine on the piano, Anna May sang her favorite Chinese song, “The Jasmine Flower,” and a French chanson, followed by a dramatic monologue from Shanghai Express. As The Argus reported the next day, “Her presentation is original and ‘color’ is added by the many beautiful Chinese costumes she wears,” and her charming versatility was “met with hearty approval” by the audience.¹³

Two weeks later, Anna May added a dramatic episode called “At the Barricade” to her repertoire. In the skit, which was a response to the war raging in China, she impersonated a brave Chinese woman arrested by Japanese soldiers in occupied Tientsin, while the impressionist Bugs Wilson played a Japanese commander. To simulate gunfire, firecrackers obtained from Melbourne’s Chinatown were used in the episode. Such a hybrid of entertainment and propaganda would become an inspiration for future films she would make in wartime.¹⁴

With the added episodes, “Highlights from Hollywood” concluded its successful run in Melbourne and traveled to Sydney in late July. On top of the busy work schedule—two shows per day, six days per week—Anna May participated in many fundraisers and charity events. On August 8, she hosted an “Anna May Wong Ball,” attended by the Chinese consul general and other dignitaries. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, during the event, Anna May “autographed photographs of herself at a small charge, and the money was donated to the relief fund.”¹⁵ Playing on the variation of “Your Name in Chinese for 10 Cents,” she attempted to rally support for China in any way she could.

After two and a half months in Australia, Anna May left Sydney for Los Angeles on August 18, aboard the SS Monterey.¹⁶ Just as the luxury liner sailed into the port of San Pedro on September 3, she learned that France and Britain had declared war on Germany. World War II had officially started.