37GODDESS OF MERCY

Anna May Wong and Hayward Soo Hoo in Bombs over Burma, 1942 (Courtesy of Everett Collection)

IT MAY SURPRISE readers to know that, in September 1939, when war had commenced in Europe and China, the US Army was ranked nineteenth among the world’s armed forces, a notch behind Portugal and just ahead of Bulgaria. With an active army numbering merely 174,000 men, plus Army Reserves, it ranked forty-fifth in the percentage of population under arms.¹ After World War I, the isolationists in Washington had pushed a clutch of laws through Congress limiting any military buildup, and most Americans had lived with the conviction that the country would never again send boots on the ground to fight a war elsewhere. When Winston Churchill uttered, “We shall fight on the beaches … in the streets … we shall never surrender,” his words sounded surreal to many Americans, as if from a soundtrack heard at a movie theater. Trying to drum up assistance for the US allies, President Roosevelt tried to create a sense of urgency in one of his Fireside Chats: “For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.” Earnest as these words were, they acknowledged that while the United States was willing to provide economic and moral support to its allies, the nation was not at war, at least not yet.²

In paradisiacal Southern California, the 1940 Tournament of Roses Parade took place as usual on New Year’s Day in Pasadena. As a river of floral floats flowed down Colorado Boulevard, keen observers noted that not one float made reference to war in Europe or elsewhere. That afternoon in the Rose Bowl, the USC Trojans walloped the University of Tennessee Volunteers, 14 to 0. If the New Year was any indication, the mood in California—indeed, the whole nation—was one of “willfully oblivious, even defiant, well-being.”³

Despite the ongoing carnage in China, 1940 began with hope for Anna May. After returning from Australia, she maintained her steady pace of charity work while trying to fix up her new home in Santa Monica. Located at 326 San Vicente Boulevard, the L-shaped, green-tiled Spanish-style house sat on two lots on the corner of San Vicente and Fourth Street. After remodeling, she converted the property into four units and promptly named it Moongate Apartments, for the sake of the red moon gates and other Chinese features of its architecture and setting. The garden was lush with exotic tropical plants, including passion fruit and pineapple guavas in season. She also planted her own favorite flowers, the simple ones that she preferred, such as geraniums, stock, ginger, and Chinese forget-me-nots. Next to a bamboo grove, she placed a Chinese wheelbarrow, almost as if she was designing her own film set.⁴ Keeping the main section of the complex for herself, she rented out the other units to defray the costs of housekeeping and repairs.

In February, her Shanghai friend Sir Victor Sassoon came to town, as did Hilda Yan, the famous Chinese aviatrix, who in May 1939 had been flying solo across America to speak against Japanese aggression—until her plane crashed near Montgomery, Alabama. (She suffered severe injuries but miraculously survived.)⁵ Anna May showed her friends around Hollywood and accompanied Yan to an event in Chinatown. In May, she tried to help Madame Koo—whose husband was stuck in Paris as the Chinese ambassador to Vichy France—to sell a precious jade necklace for $5,000 as a contribution to Chinese war orphans and refugees.⁶ In July, she was getting ready to travel east for the opening of the play On the Spot, at the Deerlake Theatre in Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania, when tragedy struck the Wong family again.

On July 25, Mary, who had fled war horrors in China less than three years earlier, committed suicide. According to the New York Times, Mary was having lunch with her father and Lulu at their family house on North Figueroa. After arising from the table, she walked to the garage in the rear of the home and “hanged herself from a clothes-line suspended from a rafter.” Her body was found an hour later.⁷ There was no specific reason given for the suicide, but Mary might have suffered from PTSD after witnessing her Shanghai office destroyed by shrapnel. Besides, her dream of a Hollywood career had reached a stalemate. Her best gig had been a bit part in The Good Earth. The fact that Anna May’s career seemed deadlocked also weighed on Mary, who felt that if Anna May at thirty-five could no longer find work, her own career was hopeless.

Anna May was devastated by Mary’s death. She was, to quote the New York Times, “prostrated by the news” in her Santa Monica home. She did not want to talk to the media or even her friends about the tragedy. Since the early death of her mother, and especially after her father’s retirement, she had been acting as a surrogate parent to her younger siblings. In the US Census of 1940, she was listed at the San Vicente address as the head of household, which included Mary, Roger, and Richard. With Mary gone and Roger, at twenty-four, old enough to make it on his own, Anna May took the youngest one, Richard, under her wing. After weeks of mourning, Anna May and Richard left for the East Coast on August 15 for the postponed premiere of On the Spot in Pennsylvania. In the ensuing months, as war clouds gathered over the Pacific horizon, she zigzagged across the country for various engagements.

On December 7, 1941, the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor not only dragged the United States into the global conflict but also brought the war directly to the coast of California. As the so-called garrison state by virtue of its history and geography, California was on high alert. During the days immediately following the Pearl Harbor debacle, air-raid sirens blared constantly in San Francisco and the East Bay. Blackouts ensued. On December 9, a tabloid-like banner headline in the San Francisco Chronicle screamed: JAPANESE PLANES NEAR S.F.—4 RAID ALARMS. Quoting a military commander, the paper reported, “There was an actual attack.… It was the real thing.” Only it wasn’t. On the same night, hysteria also roiled Los Angeles. A series of false alarms about air raids that never happened triggered massive blackouts, resulting in the deaths of several pedestrians run over by vehicles in the darkness.⁸

Rampant fear swelled two months later with the shelling of Santa Barbara, a California coastal town affectionately dubbed “the American Riviera.” On the evening of February 23, 1942, a Japanese I-17 submarine surfaced in the Santa Barbara Channel, off the rich oilfields at Ellwood. After surveying the Santa Inez Mountains and the city nestled below through the lens of his binoculars, Commander Kozo Nishino of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the firing of twenty-five shells across the scenic highway in the direction of the storage tanks of the Bankline and Barnsdall oil companies. Fired from eight miles offshore, these five-inch shells caused only superficial damage to an oil refinery standing in a field of eucalyptus and live oak. But the first attack on continental soil set off mass panic, not to mention a political storm.⁹

The next day, Santa Barbara’s Representative Alfred Elliott rose to speak in the US Congress, calling for the internment of all Californians of Japanese ancestry as enemy aliens. “Don’t kid yourself,” Elliott intoned as he pounded the podium, “and don’t let someone tell you there are good Japs.”¹⁰ With anti-Japanese hysteria rising, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 three weeks later, on March 18, authorizing the incarceration of all Japanese on the Pacific Coast. By June 5, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly US-born or naturalized citizens, were rounded up and sent to ten internment camps scattered in seven inland states.

In the midst of the hysteria and the ensuing roundups, Chinese Americans, no strangers to racial exclusion and discriminatory laws, tried, often desperately, to distinguish themselves from Japanese Americans. Many of them wore buttons that said, I AM CHINESE or just CHINA. Exploiting the ethnic division, Life magazine published “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” showing contrasting diagrams of a Chinese man and a Japanese one, accompanied by a pseudoscientific analysis of the differences. Using terms recalling the language of phrenology and eugenics, while resorting to crackpot theories, the article claimed that a Chinese face is longer and narrower in shape. It depicted a supposedly Chinese person whose complexion was parchment yellow, with no beard or rosy cheeks; in contrast, the purported Japanese face was broader and shorter, displaying an earthy yellow complexion, sometimes with rosy cheeks, and often a heavy beard.¹¹

Increasingly hostile to Japan ever since its invasion of Manchuria, the Chinese American press played no small role in fueling anti-Japanese sentiment. Mostly neglecting to mention the injustice and pain caused by the massive roundup of Japanese—which was strikingly similar to the ongoing detention of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island—Chinese newspapers reinforced the idea that Japanese Americans, if unhindered, could become the so-called “fifth column” to aid Japan. Having long resented the presence and competition of Japanese-owned businesses in the vicinity of Chinatowns in San Francisco and Los Angeles, some Chinese used the internment as an opportunity to take over those vacated properties, thereby benefiting economically from the Japanese plight, as did many white business and property owners. Scholars believe that the fortune cookie—that obligatory lagniappe given at the end of a meal in American Chinese restaurants—was, in fact, a Japanese invention, a so-called senbei, a rice cracker invented by a Japanese baker in San Francisco as a tea dessert. After the Japanese internment, however, the Chinese entered that niche market and modified the cookies, turning them into a hallmark of Chinese fast food.¹²

In yet another niche market—Hollywood ethnic extras—Chinese bit players also took over the tiny turf after their Japanese counterparts had been sent away to the camps. Due to the rise of Japanophobia in the 1920s, there had been only a handful of Japanese extras in Hollywood to begin with, including the two Yamaoka siblings (Otto and Iris), as well as Tochia Mori, Daro Haro, Mike Morita, to name a few. Otto Yamaoka, for instance, had appeared in no fewer than thirty films between 1930 and 1940, including Libeled Lady (1936) with Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Spencer Tracy; and The Letter (1940) with Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall. He mostly had demeaning roles, often as a servant. His most notable performance was in The Black Camel (1931) with Warner Oland, Bela Lugosi, and Robert Young. Yamaoka played Charlie Chan’s bungling Japanese sidekick, Kashimo, who would soon be replaced by Keye Luke as the “Number One Son” in later Chan flicks. After he was sent off to the Heart Mountain Camp in Wyoming, along with his entire family, Yamaoka virtually disappeared from the silver screen, with one exception being a cameo as a Burmese sailor in an episode of the TV police series, The Naked City (1962), starring William Shatner, the future Captain Kirk in Star Trek.¹³

All was not lost, however. Yuki Shimoda, a young Hollywood aspirant imprisoned at the Tule Lake Camp in California, actually spent his internment time honing his thespian skills. An extant photo shows a scantily dressed Shimoda doing an imitation in drag of Carmen Miranda’s “Mama Yo Quero” inside the camp. After World War II, Shimoda’s performance career took off, with notable appearances in the film Auntie Mame (1958), starring Rosalind Russell, in which he was cast as an overly excitable, squealing houseboy; the NBC television movie Farewell to Manzanar (1976), which recounts the Japanese internment ordeal; and Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway musical Pacific Overtures (1976).¹⁴

In the absence of Japanese actors between 1942 and 1945, the increasing popularity of Pacific War–themed films created a significant demand for Chinese players. After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood immediately jumped on the patriotic, anti-Japanese bandwagon, producing a slew of Japanese-bashing films, including Little Tokyo, U.S.A.; Wake Island; Gung Ho!; Danger in the Pacific; and Halfway to Shanghai.¹⁵ Caught up in the period of toxic jingoism, Anna May was equally vocal, her anti-Japanese behavior having already begun a decade earlier with the Japanese seizure of Manchuria. In 1937, after the commencement of the full-scale Japanese invasion of China, including “The Rape of Nanking,” a Paramount press release claimed that she had “moved from one residence to another to avoid looking down at a Japanese garden.” Later, during her USO tour in Alaska and Canada, she was quoted as saying, “Many of the boys I met had fought the Japs in the Aleutians, and in spite of the fact that they are terribly anxious to get home, they have an outspoken urge to take another shot at the enemy. They think of Japs only in terms of extermination.”¹⁶

Her loudest anti-Japanese pronouncement was conveyed, of course, by her film work. In March 1942, Anna May signed a contract with Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) to star in four films, although only two would be made. Born in the cradle of the antitrust crackdown and industry-wide restructuring in the late 1930s, PRC emerged in the 1940s as a prolific producer of low-budget B-films. Mostly shot in six days or less, PRC films concentrated on Westerns, comedy, horror, war, jungle settings, and noir. Finding its niche in the lower end of B-movies, PRC was rather creative in snatching up talents who were temporarily out of work, putting them in front of and behind the cameras, and delivering a number of low-budget hits.¹⁷ Even though Anna May’s first PRC film, Bombs over Burma (1942), was dismissed by film critics at the time as war propaganda, it is remembered today by both Anna May Wong fans and film students as a unique piece made by Joseph H. Lewis, an auteur with a reputation for fostering a sustained and coherent style within budgetary constraints. Born in New York City of Russian Jewish parents, Lewis began his eclectic directorial career in B-Westerns. He acquired the moniker of “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because he liked to use wagon wheels in the foreground for visual effects. In the 1950s and ’60s, he would be known for directing the dark romance Gun Crazy (1950) and popular Western television series, such as The Big Valley, Gunsmoke, and the hugely successful Bonanza.¹⁸

Shot in two weeks on a shoestring budget of $25,000, Bombs over Burma provided a perfect vehicle for Anna May’s two chief interests: acting in a movie and campaigning for China. The film opens in Chungking, the wartime capital of the Nationalist government. Following stock footage of the streets crowded with running rickshaws, pannier carriers in coolie hats, and sauntering pedestrians, the scene cuts to a classroom where the teacher Lin Ying (Wong) sits at her desk and reads in Cantonese-flavored Mandarin to a roomful of small children. The idyllic setting is soon spoiled by the ominous droning of approaching Japanese planes. Mixing stock footage with staged scenes, the film depicts a horrendous air raid with frightened citizens running along the streets and into shelters. Ling, a mischievous child in class, is killed when he, oblivious to danger, sings “Yankee Doodle” and watches the planes flying over him. Cradling Ling’s lifeless body in her arms, Lin Ying is determined to seek revenge on the enemy.

After the dramatic prelude, the film turns into a road-trip mystery—a tale of war, espionage, murder, and propaganda. Traveling incognito on a bus to Burma, Lin Ying is on a secret mission to deliver a vital message. In reality, as part of the China–Burma–India Theater of Operations, Burma was a strategic staging ground for the Allied forces fighting the Japanese. Under the command of General Joseph Stilwell, with the assistance of Anna May’s old Peking neighbor, Pinkie, the United States military provided matériel support via convoys headed from Burma to Chungking. The plot of Bombs over Burma centers on the operation of those convoys, many of which have been destroyed by the Japanese on mountainous roads. As in Shanghai Express, the bus that Lin Ying rides is filled with seedy characters, many with divided loyalties—a slick Briton with dubious credentials, an oafish Portuguese, a dagger-toting Hindu, a fresh-faced American couple, and a straight-talking Yankee driver by the name of Slim. When the bus arrives at a remote monastery, the motley group becomes stuck because someone has sabotaged the bus by stealing the distributor. In the end, the treacherous spy among the group is caught, and the next convoy carrying medicines and supplies to Chungking sets out on the road under the protection of American planes. Bombs over Burma concludes on an upbeat, patriotic note, with a Chinese monk telling Lin Ying, “There will always be a road into the heart of China.”

Ironically, by the time the film was ready for release, Japan had captured Burma, a complete military catastrophe for the United States and its allies. The road to China was cut off. In May 1942, Stilwell and his party of 114 men, including Pinkie, were forced to abandon their vehicles and travel on foot to reach the Indian border. It was a gruesome ten-day journey through the wilderness, in which the group, low on supplies, was chased not only by the Japanese but also by an approaching monsoon.

On July 9, Bombs over Burma premiered in Los Angeles along with another PRC release, Prisoner of Japan, making it a doubleheader in what was billed as “Slap the Jap Week.”¹⁹ In a city from which all the Japanese had been “relocated,” no one would be there to mind—let alone protest—the crude racial slur. While Anna May’s hometown crowd applauded her new performance, with the Los Angeles Times reviewer praising her “very fine work,” critics elsewhere were not so generous. They were troubled by its propagandistic impulse, with Variety seeing it as a “wartime programming of very minor grade,” and the New York Times bluntly calling it a “dud.”²⁰

Anna May’s second PRC film, Lady from Chungking, was directed by William Nigh, another veteran of B-movies. It carried an even heavier dose of war messaging and less of Joseph Lewis’s technical finesse. Nigh had directed several Mr. Wong flicks, a copycat series modeled after Charlie Chan, or what some would call “the poor man’s Charlie Chan.” Caught by the war fervor, Nigh had just made an anti-German, anti-Japanese comedy, Escape from Hong Kong, before taking on Lady from Chungking. In the film, Anna May played Madame Kwan Mei, a guerrilla leader fighting against Japanese occupiers. The character’s name poetically blends “Kwan Yin,” the Goddess of Mercy, with “Anna May.” Once again, the plot required her character to work in disguise, this time as a seductress to gather information from a Japanese general about the deployment of his troops so that the Flying Tigers could bomb them. During the Sino-Japanese War, at the invitation of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and under the command of retired Captain Claire L. Chennault, more than three hundred American pilots volunteered in China and achieved a stellar record of combat success against the formidable Japanese aerial power. In the months after Pearl Harbor, and before its replacement by the officially dispatched squadrons of the US Air Force in July 1942, this American volunteer group allegedly shot down 296 enemy aircraft and lost only fourteen pilots. Like Bombs over Burma, Anna May’s new film with PRC touched upon an important chapter of the anti-Japanese war by incorporating the Flying Tigers story.

A star vehicle for Anna May, Lady from Chungking also featured Harold Huber, who had appeared in several Charlie Chan films, often as a bungling police chief. A Brooklyn Jew, Huber also had a knack for playing Asian characters in yellowface, such as Wang’s cousin in The Good Earth, bandit General Ho-Fang in Outlaws of the Orient, and Ito Takimura in Little Tokyo, U.S.A. This time, with no viable Japanese actors to choose from—the biggest Japanese name, and Anna May’s one-time costar, Sessue Hayakawa, was living in Vichy France during the war—the producer conveniently cast Huber again in yellowface, as General Kaimura. To be fair, Huber’s characterization of the general, aided by his fake accent, was actually quite convincing. Seduced by the beautiful Kwan Mei, Kaimura unwittingly divulges vital military intelligence. When the train carrying Japanese troops is blown up by the Flying Tigers, Kwan Mei reveals to Kaimura her true identity as the rebel leader. Facing the firing squad, Kwan Mei gives a defiant speech, proclaiming that many more in China will rise to replace her. Using superposition, the film shows her spirit rising above her lifeless body, continuing the speech that no gun can silence: “China’s destiny is victory. It will live because civilization will not die. Tyrants, dictators, the murderers of peace, all will be betrayed. Not even ten million deaths will cripple the soul of China.” In this collage of body and spirit, Anna May not only assumed the role of a martyr who symbolizes the unconquerable China, but she also appeared iconically like Kwan Yin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion and mercy.

Such a strong propagandistic message did not sit too well with the critics. Harrison’s Reports opined that the film was “slow-paced and void of virile action, but it manages to maintain the interest fairly well, despite the familiarity of the plot.” Variety put it subtly: “This is just grist for the grinds.” But Anna May did not care much about the reviews. In the spirit of compassion and mercy, she donated her salary of $4,500 from these two PRC films to the United China Relief Fund.²¹

By the fall of 1942, the war had entered a new phase. Even though Japan had been successful in Asia by capturing Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Burma, and Thailand, as well as threatening Australia, the US Navy in June had won the Battle of Midway, making it the Allies’ first major naval victory against the seemingly invincible Japanese, thus turning the tide in the warfare of the Pacific Theater. In China, the war reached a stalemate. Distracted elsewhere, the Japanese forces were not able to make more inroads into China’s heartland, while facing stiff resistance from guerrilla bands, as portrayed in Lady from Chungking. In the European Theater, the Battle of Stalingrad had commenced in July. One of the bloodiest battles in human history, it would result in an estimated two million casualties on both sides when the siege ended in February 1943 with Germany’s defeat. Still, the war was far from over.

Even though no battle had been fought on the American mainland, the war was closer than one might have imagined. In Southern California, there was a lingering suspicion after the shelling of Santa Barbara that Japanese submarines were still prowling the coastline. Therefore, Civil Defense authorities imposed dimout restrictions on the region, ordering residents to turn off all lights that could be seen from the sea at night. They feared that shore lights would silhouette American merchant ships, making them “floating ducks” for enemy fire from a ghostly submarine. Consequently, all houses pulled down their shades, neon signs flickered off, and motorists drove in the dark.²² Because many of Anna May’s social engagements happened at night, she had to ask her brother Richard to drive her around with only the parking lights on, so she plied him with vitamin A and carrots for bettering his night vision. During the day, she heard spasmodic firing up and down the coast and often saw planes flying overhead—all signs of a region where everyone’s nerves were raw, strung taut.

On the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor disaster, Anna May volunteered as an official air-raid warden, outfitted with a steel helmet, gas mask, and an armband. During the swearing-in ceremony at the Civil Defense headquarters in Santa Monica, she told journalists that even though she had been busy with bond sales, China relief, and other war work, she felt strongly that, since there was so much need and so much suffering, “One can’t do too much.”²³ Like Kwan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, whose Chinese epithet literally means “the one who perceives the sounds of the world,” Anna May witnessed universal miseries, whether far away in China, nearby on the streets of Los Angeles, or even at home—her sister’s death in the family garage. She felt constantly that she could always do more.