38WILL THE REAL LADY FROM CHUNGKING PLEASE STAND UP?

WHEN Lady from Chungking, released on December 21, 1942, was showing at movie theaters across the country, the United States welcomed another—one might be tempted to say, real—Lady from Chungking. Invited to the White House, Mayling Soong, more commonly known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, had come to America for a speaking tour to rally support for her country—but, more important, for her husband’s government, which was facing severe economic woes and social ills in its war against Japan. The American interest in her visit was predicated on the need to present a united front in the Pacific Theater and to counter Japanese propaganda that Japan was fighting against the white race on behalf of all the other races, fostering the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Given America’s own treatment of minorities, it was not easy for the State Department’s propaganda machine to present a strong rebuttal to the Japanese. Case in point: Even though patriotic Asian Americans were joining the military enthusiastically and fighting heroically in Europe and Asia against the Axis powers, the inherently racist Chinese Exclusion Act had remained the law of the land since 1882, and a sizable number of Japanese Americans were confined to internment camps, unlike citizens of German or Italian descent. Aware of these issues, the Office of War Information had issued directives to Hollywood studios, urging them to dial down excessively racist portrayals of Japanese.¹ At a time when Hollywood was trying to emphasize patriotism, opening its canteens to GIs, and sending out stars for USO tours, it seemed that the American public could also use a little pep talk by foreign celebrities who were eager to celebrate American values.

China’s First Lady seemed like a good candidate for such a task. First educated at Wesleyan College in Georgia and then at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Madame Chiang was fluent in English, suave in manners, and charismatic in public. Born into a Southern Methodist family in Shanghai, she was also a devout Christian. It remained Chinese lore that she had converted Chiang, a polygamous Buddhist, to Christianity as a condition for their marriage. Yet, as Charlie Chan says, “Front seldom tell truth. To know occupants of house, always look in backyard.” Behind Madame Chiang’s beguiling public image lay a prima donna of enormous guile, a person variously described as “a hard, shallow, and selfish woman, [who] can turn on the charm to melt the heart of the most hardboiled foreigner”; or, a power grabber capable of the “most sophisticated bitchery.”² Of course, such unflattering depictions were obviously tinted by racism, mixing firsthand testimonials with long-held American stereotypes about Chinese women as despotic temptresses, i.e., Dragon Ladies.

One popular American narrative about Madame Chiang, repeated by most biographers, relates to her relationship with Wendell Willkie, a political maverick who lost his presidential bid to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 but remained popular and influential. An Indiana lawyer-turned-politician, Willkie was ebullient and handsome, sporting a homespun manner that appealed to both Main Street and Wall Street. It was widely expected that the rambunctious Midwesterner would make another run for the White House in 1944. In the long summer of 1942, the war had reached a nadir; despite the US victory in the Battle of Midway, the Allies suffered multiple setbacks elsewhere. Roosevelt decided to send Willkie on a worldwide goodwill tour to reassure beleaguered nations that Americans were united and determined to win the war.

On October 2, after stopping in Africa, the Middle East, and the Soviet Union, Willkie and his entourage, flying on the US Army bomber the Gulliver, arrived in the Chinese wartime capital, Chungking. The Chinese rolled out the red carpet for the American VIP and inundated him with long parades, military reviews, and lavish banquets, even though countless Chinese were dying of hunger or wartime injuries every day. Madame Chiang led the charm diplomacy by striking a personal chord with Willkie, literally. According to Willkie’s traveling companion and close associate, Gardner Cowles, Madame Chiang became intimately involved with the man she thought might become the next president of the United States. Falling under her spell, Willkie, who was married and had also been carrying on a long-running affair with Irita Van Doren—the Sunday book-review editor of the New York Herald Tribune—invited Madame Chiang to fly back to Washington with him on the Gulliver. After Cowles convinced his friend that such a scandal would, among other things, hurt his chance of making a second run for president, Willkie came to his senses, but he was too sheepish to rescind the invitation himself. When Cowles broke the bad news to Madame Chiang on Willkie’s behalf, she became so furious that, in Cowles’s words, “she reached up and scratched her long fingernails down both my cheeks so deeply that I had marks for about a week.”³ Cowles, the publisher and editor of Look, seemed to be conjuring up the image of an ill-tempered, vampirish Dragon Lady—personified, as noted earlier, by Anna May in a cover photo of his own magazine in 1938.

Wendell Willkie and Mayling Soong at the official residence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Chungking, October 1942 (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Reproduction Number LC-DIG-fsa-8e09297)

Always a go-getter, Madame Chiang refused to let a minor setback stop her. In fact, a month earlier, she had already received a letter from Eleanor Roosevelt, indicating that an official invitation from Washington was pending. When that invitation finally came, Madame Chiang followed Willkie to America in November, traveling aboard a Stratoliner provided by the US Government. Reunited with Willkie in New York, she spent the next three months at the Presbyterian Hospital for an undisclosed illness. The entire twelfth floor of the hospital was cleared for her and her entourage, guarded around the clock by the Secret Service and FBI agents. Living under the code name “Snow White” (assigned by the State Department), she convalesced in her suite like a princess, or as a queen, and was tended to daily by a hairdresser and a beautician.⁴

On February 17, 1943, Madame Chiang arrived in Washington and began her official visit. Staying for two weeks as a guest in the Large Pink Room at the White House, she irked the staff with her impetuous behavior: Claiming an allergy to cotton, she had brought her own silk bedsheets and insisted on having them changed every day; and, rather than use the bell or the telephone in the room, she would clap her hands to summon White House staffers as if she were calling coolies in China.⁵ Watching her up close, Eleanor Roosevelt also saw another side of Madame Chiang. “I was much amused by the reactions of the men with whom she talked,” Eleanor wrote in her memoir. “They found her charming, intelligent, and fascinating, but they were all a little afraid of her, because she could be a coolheaded statesman … the little velvet hand and the low, gentle voice disguised a determination that could be as hard as steel.” Eleanor was alarmed to notice “a certain casualness about cruelty” that emerged sometimes in Madame Chiang’s conversations with others.⁶ Perceptive as these observations were, it seemed that even the First Lady, a well-known champion for racial justice, had played into the racist tropes of the period by referring to Madame Chiang as someone with “a little velvet hand.”

Her misgivings notwithstanding, the First Lady accompanied her Chinese counterpart on February 18 to Capitol Hill, where Madame Chiang delivered two speeches, first to the Senate and then to the House of Representatives. Lobbying for China and the Sino–US alliance, her speeches were broadcast live nationwide and presumably touched so many Americans that, four days later, a bill was introduced in Congress to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act. Truth be told, the success of her speeches might have had less to do with what she said than how she sounded and looked to her intended audience, appearance being the essence of celebrity. The extraordinary oratorical event was, in fact, a theatrical drama in which, not so different from Anna May’s cinematic performances, Madame Chiang played her part almost to perfection by exploiting and exploding America’s expectations. Clad in a tight-fitting black cheongsam slit to the knee, Madame Chiang spoke in a slow, clear voice that blended Dixie softness with New England urbanity. Tracing invisible lines in the air with her red-lacquered fingernails, she entranced the audience with her Circean spell and Ciceronian eloquence. The striking incongruence between her “exotic” looks and her almost flawless American diction—she deliberately sprinkled her speeches with arcane words and obscure references like obtunded, Gobineau, and ochlocracy—had a disarming effect on her mostly white male audience in the congressional chamber. “In just a few minutes, Mme. Chiang had Congress in the palm of her hand,” wrote one reporter. Having trouble transcribing some of the words in her speeches, most reporters fawned over her appearance. One newspaper dubbed her an “Almond-Eyed Cleopatra,” another referred to her as “China’s lissome Joan of Arc,” and yet another depicted her as “petite as an ivory figurine.” Ironically, such an almost prurient obsession with her looks actually worked to her advantage. As one biographer astutely observes, by projecting her image as “a tiny woman, frail yet valiant,” Madame Chiang was trying to present “China as the damsel in distress and America the knight in shining armor.”⁷ It was a calculated move, playing on the lasting American fascination with Asian females, a cultural tradition that had both enabled and handicapped a career like that of Anna May Wong.

After Washington, Madame Chiang traveled across the country, making public appearances and giving speeches on similar themes. She also made a stop in Macon, Georgia, a bustling railroad town with antebellum-style architecture lining its main thoroughfare, Mulberry Street—as if the Old South was unwilling to let go of its plantation days. Macon was where Madame Chiang had spent a couple of adolescent years with her two older sisters and then later attended college. It was indeed a bittersweet “homecoming” for her. When she was a grade school student in Macon, the local Board of Education had denied her admission to a white school because she was considered an “alien.” Now she had returned as the First Lady of China, who was about to receive an honorary doctorate from Wesleyan College. Interestingly, someone managed to scare up the only Chinese children in town, those belonging to the laundryman Ben Jung, and put them in a lineup to greet Madame Chiang, who had been dubbed “My Heathen Chinee” by one of her college professors.⁸

The grand finale of Madame Chiang’s speaking tour was at the Hollywood Bowl on April 4, an event that drew thirty thousand people, including Hollywood stars such as Ingrid Bergman, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers, and Loretta Young. Her rousing speech was preceded by a spectacular pageant produced by David Selznick, a symphonic narrative accompanied by a parade on stage of Chinese moppets and coolies, whose “peaceful” world was dramatically shattered by the Japanese invasion. Over a simulated bombing attack that scattered the “villagers,” there came the voice of Edward G. Robinson as Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, encouraging people to “go West” to join the fight and to help build a new China. The narrative conflation of the old American shibboleth, “Go West, young man,” with the new reality of China’s western region as the bastion of resistance to Japanese invaders was either a stroke of genius or just pure Hollywood hooey. The deployment of Robinson as the voice of the Generalissimo was also a curious choice. In the pre–Hays Code days, Robinson had been paired with Loretta Young—one of the stars seated next to Madame Chiang at the event—and done a not-so-convincing yellowface performance in The Hatchet Man (1932). It was a movie about Chinatown tong wars and a murder committed with a flying hatchet. Now, in “China: A Symphonic Narrative,” the former hatchet man was deployed to channel the furious falsetto of China’s most powerful man, who had, in fact, terrorized his nation through his own combination of brutality and massacre. As Hollywood’s lavish tribute to a thoroughly imagined China ended with Robinson/Chiang’s crying encouragement to the nation, Madame Chiang, the Lady from Chungking, stepped up to the podium to deliver her speech.⁹

Yet, in all the hoopla, there was a glaring absence: Anna May, the woman who had been Hollywood’s face of China. Perhaps Madame Chiang did not want to be outshone by another beautiful Chinese woman. Or perhaps, since she was born with so-called blue blood, she did not deign to share the stage with the daughter of a Chinese laundryman. Or perhaps those in charge of the event had decided, with the stroke of a pen on a studio executive’s notepad, who should be the face of China. Anyway, it was one of the greatest, most hurtful snubs Anna May had suffered, after she had worked so tirelessly and wholeheartedly as the leading spokesperson for the China cause. The tricky dynamics between the real and reel Lady from Chungking did not go unnoticed by columnists, many of whom cried foul on Anna May’s behalf. But neither the snub by the snooty Madame Chiang nor the Hollywood rebuff would dampen Anna May’s enthusiasm for war work. As Hedda Hopper noted in her column, Anna May went “right back ahead working for China relief.”¹⁰

In August 1943, her kid brother Richard turned twenty-one and became one of the ten million Americans inducted for military service during the war. He was sent to England and assigned to a military intelligence unit near London, where Anna May still had friends and connections. During his leaves from the base, some of his sister’s old pals would show him around the city and take him to luncheon at places like the Café Royale, providing Private Wong a luxurious respite from dull meals at the canteen.

Anna May herself, thinking more nationally and internationally, followed the examples of Marlene Dietrich, Bob Hope, Judy Garland, and others by volunteering for USO tours. During the 1943 Christmas holiday, she visited air bases in Nebraska. Unlike the other stars, who sang and danced for the troops, she did not entertain on this tour. Instead, she spent the time having meals with “the boys,” visiting patients in hospitals, and giving brief speeches in camp theaters. Some of the bases had large units of Black soldiers, and she was appalled to find that these servicemen had their own racially segregated canteens, theaters, and mess halls.¹¹

Anna May applied to the Hollywood Victory Committee for overseas USO tours, hoping to go to England so that she could see Richard. Instead, she was sent to Alaska and Canada. In May 1944, a month before the Normandy invasion, while Marlene Dietrich was playing her musical saw in front of homesick GIs in Europe, and opera diva Lily Pons was singing in the sweltering jungles of Burma and India, Anna May landed in Fairbanks for the first leg of her tour. In the arctic region, she found plenty of sunshine that lasted till 10 pm and an equally warm reception from the servicemen. At the canteen, when she was served a plateful of a strange concoction that looked like genuine American chop suey, the sharp-witted actress whipped out a pair of chopsticks, like a cowboy doing a “quickdraw” in a standoff. The hilarious, almost vaudeville, act caused an uproar in the mess hall.¹²

In fact, her chopstick skit, while vintage Anna May Wong, relates to an interest she had begun cultivating in wartime, a new platform for her to present Chinese culture to America: food. Earlier in 1935, she had contributed a recipe to Milady’s Style Parade and Recipe Book, an almanac that paired a celebrity with his or her favorite food. The 1935 edition included Shirley Temple’s menu for children, Will Rogers’s baked ham in cider, and Barbara Stanwyck’s chicken mousse. Anna May’s page features a photo of the actress in a black-and-red velvet gown that trails on the floor. The accompanying recipe is for tea cakes.¹³ During her trip to China the following year, Anna May continued to introduce Chinese food to her American newspaper audience. In her serialized letters in the New York Herald Tribune, she often went into great detail about the multicourse meals offered by her hosts, glamorizing haute cuisine in China at a time when some Americans continued to portray Chinese as a subhuman species whose dietary preferences included rats, skunks, or anything with legs except tables or chairs.

Anna May’s culinary interest also extended to cookbooks. In 1942, she wrote a preface to New Chinese Recipes, a cookbook by chef Fred Yuen Wing and home economist Mabel Stegner. Originally published by the Edelmuth Company in New York in 1941, the book was reissued a year later to raise funds for the United China Relief Fund. Containing nearly two hundred Cantonese recipes, the book focused on home cookery using locally available ingredients. In other words, these were, as Anna May put it in her introductory essay, “recipes made with American ingredients by the Chinese method.” This emphasis on the ingredients related to the fact that meat was in short supply during wartime. The material shortage made Chinese recipes, which call for a good balance of meat and vegetables, often at a ratio of 1 to 3, sound particularly appealing.¹⁴

Eager to bring Chinese food to mainstream America, Anna May, as Graham Hodges astutely points out, invented a fictional character, “an American housewife”—a prototype of the future Margaret Anderson (Father Knows Best) and June Cleaver (Leave It to Beaver)—who desired culinary adventures beyond the confines of her white middle-class kitchen.¹⁵ In Anna May’s conception, the American homemaker was trying to stretch every dollar to bring appetizing, healthy food to the family dinner table. She wanted to learn to cook Chinese but found the process as puzzling as a Chinese box. “She discovered that Chinese chefs measure by ‘feel’ and judge the temperature and cooking time by experience,” Anna May wrote. “All their movements are so deft and swift, she found herself at a loss to follow them.” Here Anna May echoed what she had said earlier to a journalist in Australia about her fledgling culinary hobby: “I have been learning Chinese cooking since I visited China, and it is absorbingly interesting, much more of an art than a science. You do not measure by teaspoons, but have to be able to guess when the proportions are right.” But the modern American homemaker needed someone who could help her translate measurements from dabs and pinches into cups and teaspoons. In the cookbook collaboration between Wing and Stegner, the home economics consultant translated the Chinese chef’s artistry into precise measurements and scientific terms that any American housewife could follow. Moreover, the authors of New Chinese Recipes had judiciously left out items like bird’s nests, water chestnuts, and exotic Chinese vegetables available only in large Chinatowns, where an ordinary American housewife was unlikely to venture.¹⁶

To make Chinese food more tempting, Anna May appealed to the American housewife’s concerns about nutrition, taste, and economics. Because Chinese food is usually cooked for a very short time, and in a small amount of liquid, the method, Anna May opined, “saves the minerals and vitamins, and they are bound together with a delicious sauce which enhances the flavor of the other ingredients.” Sounding like Lin Yutang singing the praises of Chinese culture, Anna May remarked: “Evidently, centuries ago, the Chinese people knew by instinct what our nutrition authorities are learning through scientific research—that a short cooking period in a small amount of liquid with none of that liquid discarded is the ideal method for cooking vegetables, and that a short cooking period for most meats is equally desirable.” Delicious and nutritious, Chinese food also would save money. “Just compare it with the cost of the food usually served on [your] dinner plates,” Anna May wrote. She concluded her sales pitch by addressing the American housewife’s sensibility as a homemaker: Chinese recipes are “new and exciting to serve to guests, and they appeal to children and husbands who have never enjoyed vegetables.”¹⁷

In fact, Anna May did more than contribute a two-page essay to the cookbook. In September 1943, after starring in The Willow Tree, a play at the Cambridge Summer Theater in Harvard Square, she went to New York City and did a cooking demo to promote New Chinese Recipes. Speaking to a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune, she once again emphasized the advantages of Chinese cooking: “Many of our important Chinese dishes are a combination of vegetables, with the meat or fish reduced to the role of little more than a garnish.” The dish she showcased that day was a basic item, string beans with beef. It used a pound of string beans, “Chinese or any kind,” cut into one-inch pieces, and a half-pound of flank steak cut into half-inch dice. The ingredients were cooked separately and then combined, creating a one-dish meal (plus bowls of fluffy rice) that could serve a family of three or four.¹⁸

Prior to the publication of New Chinese Recipes, there existed only a few Chinese cookbooks in English, ranging from Jessie Louise Nolton’s Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen, published in 1911, to Henry Low’s Cook at Home in Chinese in 1938. No doubt the paucity of such cookbooks reflected a distinct prejudice against Chinese cooking, as if it was a slum food, a staple for lowly immigrants. And even these two cookbooks introduced either stereotypical items such as chop suey and egg foo yang or highly exotic ones such as shark fin soup and sea slugs. It was not until the publication of How to Cook and Eat in Chinese by Chao Yang Buwei in 1945—a book that introduced terms such as stir-fry into the English-language culinary lexicon—that America would have a more comprehensive encounter with Chinese food. But by then, as Mayukh Sen points out in Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (2022), there was a wave of ethnic cookbooks that looked beyond America’s borders in the post–World War II era.¹⁹ Even Anna May’s old friend Pinkie, after retiring from his service in China as a brigadier general, would publish a cookbook that included Chinese recipes.²⁰ Notably, New Chinese Recipes—or, more important, Anna May’s trailblazing effort to take Chinese food mainstream—predated the postwar fad by several years.

Curiously, by adding gastronomic advocacy to her résumé, Anna May now embodied two of the most distinctively Chinese motifs in American popular culture: the Chinese laundry and Chinese food. If we recall how the early Chinese immigrants—drawn to America by the promise of gold but then driven off by racial discrimination—had turned to running hand laundries and chop-suey joints, we might say that laundry and food represented the uniquely Chinese experience in America. While Madame Chiang Kai-shek, with her eloquence, guile, and connections to the top echelons of American society, made the cover of Time magazine three times, it was Anna May Wong who worked so tirelessly to undo stereotypes and was, in a way, the real Lady from Chungking. Her singular achievement was what Madame Chiang, aided by the clout of two governments and the mythmaking magic of Hollywood, could only aspire to but never attain.