—
IT WAS HE in High German.
It had worked—she in her floaty chemise, her lipstick, her mascara, her swan coat, her diamond bracelet, all diamonds. She stifled the smile growing on her lips, putting on an airy tone to say: Let me guess, Schiller?
Close—but not quite.
Hölderlin?
Impressive, Marlene. Now would you like to hear the rest of the poem?
First you should tell me your name.
My youthful anonymity is my one good card. I should be a fool to give it up so soon.
I’m going to have to call you Bogie then.
Why him?
Casablanca was playing on the TV when you first called.
Ingrid Bergman is a bore compared with you.
How so?
Let’s put it this way, the boy on the phone said. She’s too real.
Marlene could no longer contain the smile on her lips.
I’m going to take that as a compliment, she said.
In which case, he said, you understand me perfectly.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME the maid returned with the Ladurée macarons, Marlene was in a buoyant mood. Bogie—he made her want to read Novalis again. When had she last made a new acquaintance; recited Frühromantik poetry? The maid was unboxing the macarons. Marlene picked one up and nibbled at it dreamily, saying to the maid: Isn’t it nice to remember to feel special about yourself? The maid looked at her with uncertainty. You wouldn’t understand, Marlene said, would you? She patted a corner of her bed and bade the maid sit. Here, have a macaron, she offered. Have you ever had a macaron?
The maid shook her head.
Try one!
The maid picked a rose-flavored macaron, pale pink. She bit into it, and Marlene watched her spread the ganache on her tongue.
Well?
The maid nodded. A blush was prickling her cheeks. The confectionery must have felt so delicate in her mouth. How amusing: her maid was having an aesthetic reaction to Ladurée! It must have been so easy for life to be interesting when you were exposed to so little.
On impulse Marlene slipped off her swansdown coat and held it out to the maid. For you, she said. The maid’s eyes widened. Know what a swan is? Marlene flapped her arms, goose-honked. Those big white beautiful schleppers? They have the softest feathers. Put it on, I say.
The maid shook her head.
Now now, Marlene said, I insist! She pushed the silk lining over the maid’s shoulders. Slowly, the maid slipped her arms into it. Stand back, Marlene said, and let’s have a look. The luxurious coat was lovely on her slender frame. The maid did a spontaneous half twirl on the spot, as she brushed her cheek against the softness of the collar.
Then, remembering herself, she turned and smiled shyly at Marlene.
There, Marlene said triumphantly. This is just what I meant. Isn’t it nice to remember to feel special about yourself?
7
Summer in Marseilles was turning to fall when the Corsican-Chinese Friendship & Trade Association took a predinner aperitif with a prospective turf alliance: a Yeniche hashish gang.
The Corsican brought a multiracial selection of the bordello’s best to trick out the entourage—a Russian; an Algerian; Bébé. The meeting took place at an air-conditioned Italian restaurant on neutral ground. Bébé was in the bathroom when the Corsican made an off-the-cuff remark that greatly offended the Yeniche. She was pulling up her stockings when the shooting began. She kicked off her heels and headed for the kitchen. A sous-chef and kitchen boy were squatting, hands over heads, under the stove top. She bolted through the service entrance.
Bébé did not know where she was running.
She did not stop until she hit a dirty canal. Her stockings were torn. She pulled them off and held on tight to the safety rails, trying to still the dry fire in her lungs. Throwing her balled-up stockings into the water, she startled a family of mallard ducks cruising in a V formation. She followed the ducks and the canal into town, sighted the main train station, and stole onto a train to Paris.
When she—Chinese, shoeless, in a skintight dress—got off at the Gare de Lyon, a patrolling officer asked to see her papers.
She shook her head. He clapped a hand on her shoulder.
Bébé began to cry. What she most wanted to tell the officer was that this was the first time she’d let herself cry in France, but she couldn’t, and he wouldn’t have understood anyway. Non parler français, she said. Parler chinois.
She was detained at a metropolitan police station.
The next morning, a police vehicle came for her. The rear windows were reinforced with wire mesh, and the height of the hard plastic seats had been specially designed such that detainees would have to cower to fit in the back.
Bébé was brought to a building with spotless floors and shown to a fluorescent-lit room. An immigrations officer, a pro bono human-rights lawyer, and a translator were waiting to take her statement. The lawyer shot up at once. She shook Bébé’s hand, and the translator followed suit. Bébé was served an inert bun and a small paper cup of scalding-hot vending machine coffee. She took the food quickly, burning her tongue on the drink. The heat of the coffee spread through her as she closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against them, and opened them again.
I was involved in what happened at Tiananmen Square, Bébé said. I took the last ship out of Beijing. I am a village girl from Taishan. I did not know much. I do not know much. A young man came to my village with an overnight bag. He was very handsome. In his overnight bag was a translation of foreign literature. He stayed a fortnight. In the day he read us Flaubert. In the evening he sang us songs, lay with us in the fields as the sun went down.
When he left the village, we wanted to leave with him. He took us to Beijing. At his university, they told us about freedom. They brought us to the sit-in. We chanted slogans in the streets. When the soldiers opened fire, some of my new friends died. The rest of us were dispersed. Someone said we’d be blacklisted for life if we were caught by the wrong people. We should leave while we could. So I left on a boat. From the boat we got onto a ship. The ship sailed to Marseilles. But I wanted to come to Paris.
In other words, the lawyer said, you have come to Paris as a refugee?
Bébé was unfamiliar with the word. The translator explained, in brief, the term to her. Bébé did not dare answer. She was trying to look for cues in the body language of the lawyer, to see if yes or no was the appropriate response.
I did not think it was possible that they read Flaubert in China, the lawyer whispered, close to tears. Tell us, what of Flaubert did you read?
Madame Bovary, Bébé said.
And how do you find the novel?
Bébé hesitated, lowering her eyes. The lawyer leaned over the metal table to touch Bébé’s hand encouragingly. She gave it a little squeeze.
I do not want to go the way of Emma Bovary, Bébé said.
Oh, the lawyer said, a tear falling down her cheek, bless!
Walter Benjamin Is Recommended an Overnight Motel in Portbou
二
The glass of still water Anna May asked for never came, the tuxedo-swaddled men were disgruntled that she’d stopped dancing, and these two women were a piece of work. First the brunette who demanded a lowdown on Hollywood, then the winking blonde who spilled a drink on her. Though the dress was soaked through and it made no difference, the blonde was still dramatically stanching the champagne with her musky handkerchief.
The night was all balled up.
Anna May decided to be a good sport and laugh it off. The blonde began to laugh, too. Lapping up the kerfuffle, the photographer was still waiting. As they rearranged themselves, Anna May was amazed by the instantaneous effect of the camera pointed in their direction, effortlessly coaxing up bright smiles, like the three of them
had known one another for years and were the firmest of friends. Thanking them, the photographer was about to move on when the blonde asked what magazine the picture might appear in.
I freelance for Life, the photographer said.
Life magazine! the blonde exclaimed.
Anna May saw the brunette blink superciliously at the baldness of the blonde’s excitement. The blonde went right on flirting with the photographer in German, saying something to him while pointing at her legs, and shortly after was called away by an acquaintance passing them by who had rhinestones pasted in a line from cleavage to collarbone, at which the blonde immediately wolf-whistled. The Bergfilm brunette was quick to pull Anna May aside to explain to her in an apologetic undertone that the blonde was “only a chorus girl in a cabaret, not a serious actress, always cracking dirty jokes and dancing barefoot with the transvestites. You mustn’t think it’s typical!”
The brunette was presumptuous, and that put her off.
Don’t worry about it, Anna May said, I never think anything is typical. But the brunette had already turned to a man who must have been very wealthy, by the looks of his large diamond cufflinks. Smiling up at the man and grasping him by the elbow, the brunette slipped Anna May a calling card and signaled to her that they would catch up another time.
* * *
—
ANNA MAY HAD not known anyone at the Berlin Press Ball.
Briefed that it was a highlight of the city’s social calendar, she was on the guest list courtesy of the director she was working with for her first international feature, a German-British-French co-production. Instructing her to stay put and promising to introduce her around the room, he pottered off to procure some canapés and had not returned. No matter; the women were garrulous (Do Chinese women really wash their face in rice water? Is Charlie Chaplin a card-carrying Communist? What slimming cure would you recommend to achieve your flapper figure?); the men wanted to dance. An orderly queue had formed, and it reminded her of the time her father took her to the world expo in L.A. as a child. You can learn a lot at exhibitions, he said. She’d been excited to go because it meant everyone else would be left at home.
Reaching the front of a long queue marked “Congolese Mature Female,” Anna May was given the opportunity to shake the hand of a reclining nude—dark skin oiled to a shine, eyes drugged down to half mast, breasts small with nipples as long as rubber bands—but instead she burst into tears. The tremulous reason she provided her father later: Because they took away her clothes.
No, her father explained, she never had clothes to begin with. It is natural to her, where she is from. In that case, Anna May said, anyone who wants to shake her hand must first remove their clothes. Liu Tsong, her father laughed, you have your ideas, but they don’t make any sense.
They make sense to me, she answered.
But, my girl, he said gently enough, you are not the world.
* * *
—
FOR THIS DEBUTANTE sojourn out of America, her first trip to Europe in the spring of 1928, Anna May packed fourteen alligator-skin valises. What to bring or what not to bring to Berlin, London, Paris, these frolicsome metropoles where surely everything could be had?
Only the common, who have nothing of worth to bring with them, travel great distances with a single bundle tied to the end of a bamboo stick. Worse yet, merely the clothes on their backs. That is how your grandfather left Taishan, her father reminded her whenever he could, with nothing but his shirt and trousers, less than a dollar in his pocket, when he planted his two feet down on American soil.
Packing for the trip, Anna May loaded up those suitcases for the ghost of her grandfather, too. Heaven has eyes. Let him see her now, twenty-three-year-old rising starlet as portended by film magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, crossing an ocean in a first-class cabin with fourteen valises bursting with the finest garments! Seasick on the voyage, she slept it off. She was accompanied by her older sister, who was availing herself of Anna May’s success to explore Europe’s capital cities. Her entire family would have tagged along if they could—Anna May had to explain that this was a work trip, not a holiday. It would hardly do to have the whole Wong clan on her heels as she ran a busy schedule, and besides, it would cost plenty to book extra rooms or cabins wherever she went. Her mother clucked her tongue. No one’s asking for an extra room, she said to Anna May in Cantonese, we can all sleep in one place. Your father and I will take the floor, she added, and you children can have the bed—just the usual!
Her father had been more reasonable.
Liu Tsong is traveling for work, he said. We’ll get in her way.
Her mother soldiered on about the opportunity to travel on the dime of Paramount Pictures, and God only knows what those white devils might do to their beloved daughter were she unaccompanied in a faraway land. Even though her father did not approve of Anna May being an actress, he’d given her a little nod, as if to say: Let me handle your mother, and for that she was grateful. Before she left, he pressed into her hands a safety amulet and a travel-sized Bible. The amulet was requested from a Taoist spirit medium, and the Bible had been borrowed off the pastor. Their household practiced ancestral worship, but they also went to the Chinese Baptist church on Sundays. Growing up this way, Anna May had accepted the harmony of believing in both until she was old enough to notice, one day, at random, how incompatible they were. Her mother’s unimpeachable logic shushed her up: The more spirits the merrier. Double blessings! Anna May took along both amulet and Bible to keep her parents happy, but what she really wanted on the luxury liner out to sea was a map of the world, and someone to tell her where they were. Drink of the water and think of the well, her father had drummed into her over the years. Though our bodies sleep in California, our hearts dream in Taishan. But I’ve never been to Taishan, she said, confused. Doesn’t matter, he assured her. Anna May wobbled when the ship berthed in Hamburg, after which there was yet a train to catch to Berlin. A white-gloved chauffeur with a sign met them at the Hauptbahnhof. When her sister reached over to open the passenger door herself, she was admonished by the chauffeur, who doubled over quickly and primly to seat both ladies.
* * *
—
IT TOOK NO time at all for Anna May to decide she liked Europe more than America: much nicer to be apple-buttered here than to be bullied back home. For the longest time she’d wanted to be just like everyone else, but now she was beginning to see just what she might be able to do with not being the same. Was this a new game in which she’d gained an unexpected advantage, or the same old one trussed up in a different suit? Walking through back alleys in downtown L.A., it was common sport for white joes to set their dogs on Chinese passersby, so much so that when a pit bull was unleashed on Anna May one afternoon, she was instantly relieved that she would no longer have to worry about when it would happen. Her father scooped her up though she was already twelve and no longer a small child, turned to the dog’s owner, and recited a limerick she failed to understand. It ended this way, in a silly singsong tone: Two wrongs don’t make a right / Like two Wongs don’t make a white!
The white man chortled, calling his dog to heel.
Nice, he said. Haven’t heard that one before.
Putting her back down on her feet, her father bowed, and they were allowed to pass unscathed. Anna May could parse the telling of the joke in their moment of danger, but she found that she was unable to accept that scraping bow, after the pit bull had been called back.
Why did you bow? she asked her father, trying to keep the scorn from her voice.
Do you want to have rabies? he said.
I’d rather be bitten by a mad dog, she thought, than to see you bow to that man. But her father was glowering at her, and she did not dare say it aloud. That night, when her mother came to tuck her in, her mother said: Do you know how much your father loves you? Anna May turned away. I don’t want to
know, she breathed into her pillow. She held close to her heart the proud belief that she, unlike her father, would never have bowed down—a high horse she was unseated from at fourteen, when told to “scream like a Chinese” in her first appearance, as an extra, in a Hollywood movie.
It was a silent film. The producers wanted ambience.
She stepped aside as they set up the scene.
I don’t know how to speak Chinese, she said to the line producer.
Doesn’t matter, the line producer said, just make it up. Make it up? Anna May asked. Take this one out, she heard someone say to the casting manager over her head. Sub in another.
Wait, she said, I can do it.
What she ended up screaming was a nonsensical patois of kitchen Cantonese and playground Spanish, which she’d picked up from shooting marbles with the Hispanic boys just outside of her neighborhood. The film was Alla Nazimova’s The Red Lantern. Nazimova played both lead roles, half sisters, in Boxer Rebellion Beijing: the half-Chinese Mahlee and the full-white Blanche. Anna May was one of five hundred Chinese extras culled from Chinatown. She was on a delivery errand when a street-casting assistant had approached her. The release form she took home required her parents’ signature. She was careful to practice her forgery before setting ink down to paper.
Her role, uncredited: Chinese lantern bearer.
Before reporting to Paramount that morning, Anna May fished around her mother’s dresser drawer for her cake of white rice powder. After rubbing it all over her face, she feared it was too pale. Unable to find the rouge paper, she tore a corner of a red packet she’d received lucky money in for the new year, smearing its chalky red pigment onto her cheeks in circular motions. Before she slipped out of the house, she noticed that the powder had obscured one of her eyebrows. With a black crayon from her school satchel, she drew a straight line where her brow was. Arriving at the gates of the hallowed studio, Anna May was more nervous about being caught by her parents than she was about reporting to Paramount for the first time. There was a sign for the Red Lantern extras to proceed to hair and makeup. Her walk was brisk and her stride wide, but as she reached the trailer, she slowed it down to tiny graceful steps lest anyone mark her down for rushing around. A woman with a clipboard saw her face and started laughing.
Delayed Rays of a Star Page 6