Delayed Rays of a Star

by Amanda Lee Koe

  I had to look up miscegenation in the dictionary, the Chinese actress said. And I laughed, then I cried, because, let us be honest, every story is a love story. If it is illegal for me to kiss a white actor, where does that leave me? What that really means is that my character will always be a side character, Mr. Benjamin. In America my character dies in nine and a half out of ten films because a white male lead has to end up with a white female lead.

  As she told him about her childhood, growing up poor in a hand laundry, he caught himself thinking how exciting and textured that all sounded. His own childhood had been pampered but colorless. On his travels through cities now he found himself turning in to the grimiest of back alleys, riding the most cramped of street trams, to steep in the mess that had been disallowed him. In Naples he’d found wonder in the fact that children were up at all hours, barefooted, and wrote in a travel column for a German newspaper: “Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought.” The moment he saw it in print, Walter wished it could have been expunged from every circulated sheet. Only the most privileged of men could have written such a giddy, obtuse sentence. This, he thought, was in general the bone he picked with the academy, and the reason for his reluctance to fall in with the doctrine of theory. He still had a long way to go before he found a satisfactory means of expressing his ideas, but he was determined to make it his own.

  A pastry flake had hitched itself onto the rounded edge of the Chinese actress’s lower lip, and he was distracted by it. Walter wanted dearly to brush the crumb away. Not to touch her, but because that cherry-red mouth should remain pristine. When he queried her on modes of accessing interiority in her performance, she suggested girlishly: Might writing not be acting, on the page?

  For him writing was more like blocking, when the director arranges the movements of his actors in relation to how he wants to move the camera within the space in the scene, but perhaps that was a matter of the distance of the approach, and he would doubtless be a far more reserved performer than she. Before he could offer any reply aloud, she retracted her opinion. You will forgive me, Mr. Benjamin, she said. Sometimes I think I feel everything but I know nothing.

  But don’t you see, he said, his eyes on the spot where the crumb had rested on her lip, though it was no longer there. You are an actress, so knowing is the same as feeling.

  She smiled.

  The effect her smile had was to make it seem as if her body were inclining toward him, rendering everyone else in the café absent, when in fact she had not moved, sitting perfectly still as she said: Thank you, Mr. Benjamin.

  * * *

  —

  AT THE END of the interview, Walter paid for their pastries and coffee and they waited some time for change to be returned. He asked if she might be considering a move to Europe. Opportunities here seemed better for someone like her, the Chinese actress said, but L.A. was still home, and she would prefer to remain there. His change still had not arrived, so Walter called over the manager, who said he would be happy to check with the waitress on duty.

  Circling back to their table shortly after, the manager explained in polite German that the waitress was sure she’d already returned the change. Perhaps there has been an inadvertent mistake, Walter said in equally formal tones, my apologies in advance for discommoding you, but might you be able to check again? He’d put down a fifty-reichsmark banknote, and the bill had come up to only a little over six reichsmarks.

  The manager excused himself.

  Is everything all right? the Chinese actress asked. She must have been trying to follow the proceedings, and Walter was growing very embarrassed. Not to worry, he said to her with a nod, there is no problem. When the manager came to them again, his parlance was decidedly more direct than before. Sir, he said. My staff is certain there is no mistake. Walter did not want to make a scene in the crowded café, and already a few customers were beginning to turn their way. In that case, Walter said, standing up, we shall be taking our leave. The Chinese actress remained seated. Wait a minute, she protested in English to the manager, I was here all the while, and I saw with my own eyes that no change was returned. Instead of replying directly to her, the manager exchanged a look with Walter, as if to say: Take your woman in hand.

  Come, Walter said, Miss Wong.

  This is outrageous, the Chinese actress exclaimed indignantly. This is daylight robbery!

  I am afraid, ma’am, the manager said in English, that you are disturbing the atmosphere of our coffeehouse, as a consequence of which I will have to ask your good self and your patron to leave our premises.

  Outside, Walter flushed scarlet as he stumbled into an apology.

  I cannot begin to express my copious regrets—

  Don’t be sorry, she averred, we should go to the police!

  He shook his head.

  Mr. Benjamin, she said, I am thoroughly prepared to be your eyewitness.

  Thank you, he said, but I have no wish for you to undertake an abortive endeavor. He explained that there had been an incident reported recently in the papers where a Jewish guest’s purse had gone missing from his escritoire during a hotel stay. When he went to the police, they contended that many Jews were inventing such stories so as to claim insurance money. Incensed, the man lodged an official complaint with the judicial authorities, which first ruled that he should pay the hotel damages for defamation, then threw his subsequent appeal out for “contempt of court,” with legal fees for all parties to be borne by the plaintiff.

  Therefore, Walter concluded, I submit that it would not do to waste Miss Wong’s valuable time on a fool’s errand while she should be enjoying her time in Berlin.

  So you’re Jewish, the Chinese actress said. I’m stupid about such things, you white people all look the same to me. Taken aback, Walter wanted to say that he wasn’t white, and nominative declarations of categorical polemics were fraught with peril, but he was afraid to come across as chastising a Chinese woman, and he was dazzled, moreover, by the candor of her statement. He braced for a disparaging remark to follow, but she was smiling as she went on to relate, in a fond tone, an anecdote about a birthday party for a Jewish classmate in elementary school. I was the only one who turned up to her party, she was saying. After she dried her tears it was still just the two of us, so we gorged ourselves on the spread. I had a grand time. When I got home and told my parents all that had happened, she added, my mother expressed her approval. “A natural friendship,” she called it, and I asked her what was natural about it. Do you know what my mother said, Mr. Benjamin?

  He waited for her to go on, and she did so with a wry sort of relish he had not expected: What she said was, “After all, we Chinese are the Jews of the East!”

  She began to laugh, a subtle, silver-toned sound, and Walter could not help but join in with his gravelly smoker’s chuckle, even though it felt peculiar and inapposite to find any of this humorous. That girl had the prettiest hand mirror, the Chinese actress recalled with a sigh, backed in sterling silver. I’d wished for my own portable looking glass, too, so I could practice my acting wherever I went. Walter watched as she stopped to skip stones into the river. She was good at it. He wanted to share something with her, too, but he did not know what to say, and he would have picked up a pebble had his stone-skipping skills been any less dismal. They stood in silence for some time, then began walking toward the tramcar. She was due at a house party in Charlottenburg, she said, where she would be performing a Chinese tea ceremony for some artists, writers, and impresarios. Her sister, who had accompanied her on the trip, would also be meeting her there. He offered to escort her to the house party, in case she lost her way again.

  It’s true, she said, isn’t it? I am prone to going around in circles.

  He blushed, explaining he had not intended to imply her ineptitude with directions.

  Mr. Benjamin, she said s
lowly, do you ever get the feeling that where life really happens is off the tracks?

  I believe I do, he said. If he’d known her any better, and this was not their very first meeting, he would have replied: All the time. Now her professional demeanor was returning to the fore—it was so kind of him to chaperone her on her way, she said, and he would be welcome to join them as her guest. Walter was not one for parties, but the journalist in him knew it was bound to yield gainful material for his article. He accepted her invitation, and she admitted to being nervous about the tea ceremony she’d acquiesced to. May I confess, she said, that I don’t know anything about tea? I’m more a soda-fountain type, but I couldn’t tell them that, could I?

  Couldn’t you? he prodded, then snuck a sidelong glance at her willowy, pantsuited frame. She shrugged as she said with a smile: Who wants to see a Chinese girl drink Coca-Cola?

  六

  When Anna May received a copy of Die Literarische Welt a few months later back in Los Angeles, the bespectacled journalist had included an English translation of the article he’d written up on her so she could read it.

  Everything that had happened in Berlin seemed so far away now.

  The movie she’d shot in Europe had been edited and scored, but it was not yet out in America. Occasionally, when she saw a dark blonde with a soft perm on the streets or in a store, she might think of that woman she’d spent the night with. It was good that she was on a different continent—and married. There were no bothersome consequences to deal with when there was an ocean between them.

  Anna May was beginning to think that married people started up affairs with her precisely because they could see the end in sight. The only serious relationship she’d had was a few years ago, with the director Tod Browning. She was only nineteen then, and he’d been married, too. Looking back, she did not know what she had been thinking. She’d not even decided if she really did fancy the man—he had a long, misshapen face, his front teeth were false, and he smelled of hard liquor at any given time of the day—or if it was just his movies she was drawn to, but quickly her parents were talking about disowning her, and the press had a field day flaming her every which way.

  Shaken by all this opposition, she began to see that her only way out was to act like she knew exactly what she had been getting herself into, or no one would take her seriously henceforth. Everyone thought it was wrong, but for sham reasons. Not because she was underage and he in his forties, nor because she was single and he was married, but because she was Asian and he was white. It had taken a good half a year for the press to cool off, during which time reporters hounded not only Anna May but her family: What do you think of your daughter’s interracial contamination? Her mother had come crying to her, begging her to end it so the family would no longer have to shoulder her disgrace. Haven’t we brought you up well, Liu Tsong?

  Compared with the drippy sensationalism Anna May was used to, Walter’s article was hardly like a piece of journalism at all, and more like a mannered fairy tale. Walter certainly had a way with words, and although these words had been employed to flatter her, she noticed that he’d printed her name as May Wong rather than Anna May Wong, and the only reason she could think of for this was because the former sounded more Chinese. Also, he had gone heavy on the Oriental metaphors. On first read, she enjoyed them, they were so lyrical. Then when she looked at the article again she began to find it a touch ludicrous. As to what she had been wearing, he’d written—“one would like to know a Chinese poem for it.” What would that have to do with a voguish pantsuit? She couldn’t imagine anything less appropriate. She wrote back to thank him, though she did offer the comment: Does my name really remind you of “tiny chopsticks that unfurl into moon-filled scentless blossoms in a cup of tea,” Mr. Benjamin? How so?

  Walter’s response came by express mail.

  Ignorance is a dishonorable bulwark, the letter began, and a man could do better than to hide behind it, but might it count toward a mitigating circumstance that you are, indeed, the first Chinese woman I have met? He had not realized it beforehand, he wrote, but this must have exerted an influence on how he thought he had to write about her—namely as ethnography, or dream. Rereading the piece, it unsettled him to admit that it seemed more enamored of the poetic potential of presenting her as a Chinese woman than it was invested in decoding her intricate entanglements as more than that: an American; an actress. He had been ill equipped, in a social and thereby ultimately semantic sense, to transcribe their encounter in plain words. Why are we able only to aestheticize or abhor difference? Metaphors are a poor proxy, he wrote in closing. You will forgive me. There must be a better way ahead.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE FOLLOWING years they kept in touch with the occasional letter. They went, gradually, from “Dear Mr. Benjamin” and “Dear Miss Wong” to “Dear Walter” and “Dear Anna May.” Walter enjoyed maintaining correspondence with a Chinese actress, and Anna May took pleasure in exchanging letters with a German critic.

  She wrote him that she was slated to appear in Daughter of the Dragon, as an aristocrat who discovers the villainous Fu Manchu is her father. Fu Manchu would be played by Warner Oland, whose career was skyrocketing on yellowface roles. His popularity in both America and China had soared with the Charlie Chan franchise, wherein he played a globe-trotting Chinese detective incapable of speaking idiomatic English.

  In China they hate me, Anna May wrote, but then, why do they love Mr. Oland? Each time she appeared in a movie, she told him, China printed in their papers: ANNA MAY WONG LOSES FACE AGAIN FOR CHINA! Whereas, to her stupefaction, the Chinese media sang Oland’s praises. His portrayal of Charlie Chan was intelligent, genteel, capable, upstanding! There were even two Charlie Chan spinoff productions, one in Hong Kong, the other in Shanghai. Chinese actors tried to mime Warner Oland’s mannerisms and gestures as meticulously as they could, Chinamen in a bid to outdo one another in emulating a Swede’s caricature of a Chinaman.

  Encouraged by Walter, Anna May took to the act of writing, too.

  Sometimes she sent him drafts of essays she was hoping to get published in the papers, mostly Californian papers or women’s magazines or entertainment weeklies, asking if he had time to look them over, though, she wrote, my words are surely so trivial next to yours.

  He wrote her: You have no reason to self-efface to the extent that you do.

  Alas, Mr. Benjamin, she replied, self-effacement is part of my rich matrilineal heritage. That is to say, as a Chinese girl, I was brought up phenomenally well.

  In truth he did think her trivial, but all the more noble because of her triviality. She wrote impassioned little tracts on race and identity and stardom with popular titles, published on slow news days in second-rate papers. If collected in a dossier and read through one after the other, some proved flagrantly contradictory—“Beyond Racial Representation,” she sent him, and shortly after, “Chinese Ways of Expressing Love”—but when read separately, they were diverting enough.

  Her thought was neither sharp nor perspicuous enough to be original or savvy, but he read her—as she would be read nonetheless by strangers thumb and nose in newspapers—because she was a beautiful actress, and reading what a beautiful actress had written was a way of being with her.

  She pandered in her writing, and so it disappointed.

  But as an actress she had already abstracted and performed everything she could hope to assay in the curl of her wrist, the arch of her back, in a Chinese brocade costume or a slouchy flapper skirt. He read in her acting complicity and resistance at the same time, each enhancing the other. He read in her writing only one at a time, both cheapening themselves in turn.

  He did not know at what level to address her drafts, and most often sent back niceties and piddling copyedits. Occasionally, he wrote her about how their new right-wing chancellor was cause for concern, but no one was doing anything about it, because w
hat was there to be done, when he had come to power by democratic vote? The people had spoken. Even though the mixed spa Walter frequented in Wannsee had put up a sign to say they were “co-religionist,” he no longer felt comfortable there—someone had daubed a swastika, in red lipstick no less, on the bath towel he’d left on a deck chair while he was soaking in the water. In other cheerless news, Heidelberg had rejected his dissertation on the origins of tragic German drama for being too frothy, and his father, a prominent banker, had curtailed his allowance significantly, disappointed that after enjoying an advantaged upbringing and unbounded financial support, not only had his son failed to make significant headway in his academic career and cultural portfolio, he was veering toward dialectical materialism: Already we are Jewish, must you also be Marxist?

  He was trying to survive on freelance work, even as a radio scriptwriter, if she could imagine that, but with the newest Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, no one would hire him. His preferred Teutonic pseudonyms—Herr K. W. Stampflinger and Herr Detlef Holz—had run their due course, and he could not even legally own a typewriter in Berlin. Still, he wanted to finish up his translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, but it never seemed to end. That would appear to mirror his on-again, off-again affair with a Latvian Bolshevik woman. For now it was on again, and as usual he was of two minds about it. Like you, he wrote, she, too, is an actress. But an agitprop theater actress, who believes that children’s theater could be used as a cornerstone for the education of the underprivileged offspring of the poor proletariat who otherwise have no opportunities for pedagogical enrichment and social advancement. He would have wooed her with zeal, he wrote, but she was already married. She is a woman of ideas, he wrote fondly, that is to say, an ideal woman for me.