Delayed Rays of a Star

by Amanda Lee Koe

Shanghai Express was banned in China for its political window dressing and the implicit suggestion that law and order were ineffectual: the film is set during the Nationalist-Communist civil war, and the titular Shanghai–Peking express train is held up by a band of bandits. There was even an arrest warrant issued for the degenerate foreigner Josef von Sternberg should he disembark on Chinese soil, for his continual insistence on insulting lines like “Time and life have little value in China” in his screenplay, and for the fundamental immorality of having a pair of prostitutes travel together.

  When Anna May rode the real Shanghai express train in 1936, four years after making the film, she rode it alone. The voyage east had been suggested to Anna May by her agent, after the Good Earth casting fiasco with MGM.

  Brood, her agent instructed, but brood photogenically.

  Pack your high-collared silk dresses with the frog buttons, he advised. Send me pictures so I can field them out. Ink calligraphy, fan dancing, whatever, the works. Give me some variety. We’ll send over a small documentary crew when you visit your ancestral village. There’s bound to be some good footage there.

  MGM had done extensive screen tests with Anna May in the spring of 1936 for the lead role of O-lan. The Good Earth was all set to be the first Hollywood production whose lead character was an Asian woman, played by an actual Asian woman. O-lan was not a strumpet or a villain, she was a real character, a strong-willed peasant tending to her harvests. Anna May had read the Pearl S. Buck novel even before it won the Pulitzer and brought to the screen test her personal copy. She’d reread it assiduously, highlighting all the parts about O-lan, and was already developing her mannerisms for the role when it was publicly announced that the part was going to Luise Rainer.

  There must be a mistake, Anna May said to her agent. She’d even met with the head of the MGM costume department to give him ideas on authentic Chinese dress. He’d borrowed some of her cheongsams and made sketches based on old family pictures she’d shared with him.

  Her agent showed her MGM’s screen test notes:

  Too Chinese to play a Chinese. Does not fit my conception of what Chinese people look like. Recommend to use as atmosphere and not principal characters.

  They want to know if you’ll do another audition, her agent said. For the side character, Lotus Flower. Anna May started to laugh. Have you read the book? Anna May asked. Her agent said no. Lotus Flower is the villain, Anna May said. Luise Rainer is O-lan, Paul Muni is Wang, Charley Grapewin is Old Father, Jessie Ralph is Cuckoo—I can’t possibly be the only real Chinese, playing the bad person—

  I’m with you, her agent said, but let’s not be hasty. It’s a high-profile project. If you turn this down and shoot your mouth off about it, you could get a bad rep, fewer callbacks. Sleep on it. I’ll ring you tomorrow. All night Anna May fantasized about firing her agent, but when he called her in the morning, she told him to schedule her in for an audition. She’d been so invested in the project, it was hard to give it up completely. In any case, she tried to rationalize it to herself, it was still a movie about Asians, and that was worth her while, wasn’t it?

  Atta girl, her agent said. That’s the spirit.

  Lotus Flower was a devious girl who tried to steal Wang, the honest farmer, away from O-lan, his honorable wife. For the audition Anna May was to “interpret an Oriental striptease.” A week later, her agent called. MGM was going with Tilly Losch for the role of Lotus Flower. In terms of her acting, they liked Anna May’s audition, but they thought that at thirty-one, she might be too old to play a young seductress. Also, there were some concerns that she would stick out like a sore thumb, since the rest of the cast would be in yellowface.

  A reporter asked: Are you disappointed about The Good Earth?

  How could I possibly be, Anna May said, when I’m too Chinese to play a Chinese?

  For a week she forgot to eat, just lay on the couch with a couple of whiskey bottles within reach, phone off the hook, till she had to go answer the doorbell because it wouldn’t stop ringing. It was her agent. He shook his head when he saw her. She let him in as she tried to decide if she was touched that he’d come to her door. Clean yourself up, he said grimly. I’ve booked you tickets to Shanghai. Shanghai? She laughed. What would I do there? He was junking her bottles and throwing her windows open. Take it as a break, he said. I don’t need a break, she shrugged, swaying on her bare feet. Anna, he said. You need something in your life. No, she disagreed, I need nothing. Go put your face on, he said, I’ll buy you lunch. Over paninis he told her to stay sober, take in new sights, keep a travel journal. As the food hit her stomach, she began to feel sick. I’ve wrangled some column space from the L.A. Times, he said. Pitched it as your China diary, a weekly dispatch. I’ll hook you up with the editor later. We want to call it “Orientally Yours.”

  Ha-ha, she said.

  You can thank me later, he said.

  * * *

  —

  EN ROUTE TO SHANGHAI, Anna May had a stopover in Hong Kong, where a meet-and-greet with the press had been arranged for her. She turned from reporter to reporter, but they all had the one question for her, namely: why wasn’t she married?

  The microphone was thrust in her face.

  I am wedded to my art, she said.

  She read the English edition of the morning papers on board the cruise liner the next morning. It was printed that Anna May Wong was engaged to a wealthy European businessman named Art. Worse, they’d dug up the Eric Maschwitz business, even reproducing the lyrics to “These Foolish Things.” This popular jazz standard was allegedly written for Wong after the pair committed multiple instances of adultery in London, the papers read. But even then, Maschwitz attempted to suppress his mistress’s Asian identity by describing Wong’s smile as “the smile of Garbo.” Reader, can this be called love? Or should it more accurately be termed lust and shame? ANNA MAY WONG LOSES FACE FOR CHINA YET AGAIN.

  It was a done deal.

  Anything she did, public or private, could be hung by its thumbs and chalked up to that pet line of the Chinese press. But quite laudably, they were otherwise alive to the same sentiment as she—before things ended between them, when Anna May saw her man after “These Foolish Things” was released, she’d asked: “The smile of Garbo”?

  He could not for the life of him understand what she was going on about. It’s just a metaphor, love, he’d said. You’re what’s real, why are you upset?

  A white songwriter is in love with a Chinese woman, has made frenzied love to her ten times in three days. Driven mad with passion when they are apart he writes a song about her. Lyrics flow out of him onto paper, black coffee is spilled on the piano. But he does not believe for a second that her lips can hold up the symbolic pizzazz of a jazz classic, and so defaults to the generic singularity of Garbo’s Caucasian mouth to carry the bluesy melody. Anna May was afraid she was only ever going to be someone’s side character, in real life or in the movies. It’s just a metaphor, love.

  Arriving in Shanghai, Anna May saw her pictures in the papers, but she could not read the Chinese headlines. She brought them over to the hotel reception to ask what they said. Ma’am would like to know what the papers say, the concierge repeated back to her uncertainly. Yes, she said. He swallowed. This one says you are a race traitor, he started, then stopped, not daring to meet her eye.

  And? She prompted him to go on.

  And—an arse-kissing American lapdog, he continued, looking up at her to see if he should go on. She nodded. An arse-kissing American lapdog with an abominable accent, he said, who can’t even speak a squeak of Mandarin.

  Rifling through the other papers she asked: Do they all say the same thing?

  No, ma’am, the concierge said. This one asks why you are still single at this age. And this one says you look better on the screen than you do in real life, where you remind the reporter of a faded old bag.

  * * *
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  —

  WHEN ANNA MAY headed north to visit Taishan, her ancestral hometown, the villagers formed a line to see her, not out of goodwill but curiosity. That shameless look on her toady face, she heard someone hiss in Cantonese. She thinks she’s better than any of us! She’s asking to be kicked!

  Where were the tea drinkers and philosophers she’d dreamed of?

  China was not in any way like the country she’d built up for herself. Now she saw clearly that the last thing it could be for her was a spiritual homeland. How harebrained that far-fetched scheme had been, and who was her father to have suggested it? What did he know about China, when he had been born in Sacramento?

  The problem, she used to think, was L.A.

  But now, finally, in a place where everyone was said to be the same as she, she was more out of place than ever. She had nothing in common with them but the color of their skin. It was exactly the same difference here: still they heckled her and called her names. The problem was neither L.A. nor Shanghai, she thought. The problem has always been me.

  Contributing to MGM’s decision to bypass Anna May for The Good Earth was something Pearl Buck had said. She’d expressly described O-lan’s character to the studio as “not a slangy Anna May Wong type.” When Anna May found out about this, she wanted to meet with this puffed-up novelist so she could slap the hot air out of her—a white woman writing about a Chinese woman had called her a type, purporting to know better what a Chinese village woman was like!

  Yet as she moved through Taishan, Anna May was first ashamed, and later amused, even at her own expense, to admit she could see what Pearl Buck meant. The Chinese peasant folk had a guileless honesty to their bodies, a robust strength in their faces. Anna May was much too self-aware to resemble them in any way, and was it any wonder that Pearl Buck knew better? Having lived most of her life in China, Pearl Buck spoke various Chinese dialects, read and wrote in classical Chinese, translated Tang dynasty poems. She’d even survived the Boxer Rebellion and the Nanking uprising. Anna May had grown up on Chaplin flicks and Fitzgerald stories, trying to look like Clara Bow and sound like Baby Esther. Who was she to play O-lan? They couldn’t cast me not because I was too Chinese, Anna May explained to herself, but because I was too cosmopolitan!

  At the 1938 Academy Awards, Luise Rainer would go on to win the Best Actress Oscar for her convincing and compelling portrayal of O-lan.

  * * *

  —

  SHANGHAI’S MOST EXCLUSIVE enclaves could easily be mistaken for Paris or London or New York. Furs, fashions, foods were up-to-the-minute, and the merrymaking never ended. Even if the press were baleful and unkind, Anna May was still invited to dine out with the local and expatriate elite night after night. Over dinner in a fine French restaurant booked by a popular Cantonese songstress who was wedded to the city’s Belgian ambassador, a retired Chinese journalist said to her in clipped, British-accented English: Excuse my frankness, but you’re quite charming in person—you’re not nearly as obnoxious as I thought you would be!

  He had been the chief film critic of the biggest English newspaper in Shanghai, and confessed that he’d written a scathing review of Piccadilly some ten years ago.

  It was not because she was a Chinese girl who wore a cloche hat and knew how to jive to jazz, he said, they had plenty of new women in Shanghai who dressed and danced just like her character, Shosho. It was not even that she was a Chinese girl in the film, but Shosho was a Japanese name; perhaps that oversight was out of her control. But why was it that Shosho did a “Chinese dance” in a “Chinese costume”—when her dance and costume were obviously Siamese! It was a spectacular sequence, but Anna May couldn’t blame him for feeling outraged when he’d read her eager declarations in press interviews that she’d choreographed the dance herself, from some Far Eastern travel pictures she found in a shop in the Pacific Palisades.

  A few guests turned toward Anna May, waiting to see what she had to say.

  She was not sure, in the moment, that she understood him, and capitulated quickly to her stock response: To be a nonwhite actress in Hollywood is to be a puppet playing by rules that are the opposite of your own beliefs. I was so tired of the roles I had to play, but if I didn’t do what I was asked, I would be out of a job, and the role would still go to someone else who would be made to do the same thing anyway—

  Here he interrupted her.

  Even if you could not learn a Chinese dance for the role, Miss Wong, you could have just danced the Charleston or the polka. That would have been less deceitful, and I would have had no complaint.

  It’s just a dance, Anna May said, but as soon as the words left her mouth, she tasted the bitterness of having to smile and teach Lon Chaney and Renee Adoree how to use chopsticks when they were all acting together in Mr. Wu. Without naming names, she’d lamented to the press that MGM was not looking for Chinese, they were looking for MGM-Chinese, who knew next to nothing of the cultures they were portraying, were only mining them for a visual impression at the expense of authentic expression!

  So it is not that we find you too daring, Miss Wong, the reporter was saying in a summative fashion, but that we find you quite derivative. You have found success in Hollywood not just for your talent, but your willingness to exploit Western fancy. Can’t you smell your own hypocrisy? You speak out strongly against the prejudice you face in Hollywood, when the white devils do it to you. But as soon as you, an Asian American, are given the opportunity, you have no problems at all poaching from Asians who are not American. Worst of all, you think you are doing us a big favor with your false representations on the imperialist screen. In your own actions, you replicate the same bigotry you decry.

  * * *

  —

  THE OTHER GUESTS at the table were trying to pretend that they were not listening in, but their forks and knives had stopped moving as they surveyed the dustup. Anna May floundered for something she could grab on to and fend him off with. She had no role models. Was pragmatism really a sin when the end of the stick she had been given was so short to begin with?

  She could hardly put her hand around it.

  The Good Earth snub was such a crying shame, she thought it afforded her the everlasting self-respect of suffering injustice with dignity. She had been determined to move through the ugly double standards of the industry with integrity, but why was this stranger telling her that not only was she far from the graceful martyr she thought herself to be, she was part of the problem?

  Could anyone blame Hattie McDaniel for playing only maid roles?

  And let us not forget the curious case of Hollywood’s first sex symbol: Sessue Hayakawa had been a pre-Code headlining superstar, rivaling Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Stepping out of his limousine in front of a theater in 1915, Sessue grimaced at a puddle. At once, dozens of white female fans fell over one another to spread their fur coats at his feet. His popularity upset many American men, who wrote disparaging letters to the studios. Sessue himself protested being typecast as an exotic man of sexual prowess, turning down the glamorous lead role in Paramount’s blockbuster extravaganza The Sheikh in 1921. The lead role of The Sheikh was passed on to the then-unknown Rudolph Valentino, who became an overnight sensation, while Sessue was quickly downgraded following Hays Code prohibitions. Soon, the types of roles Sessue usually played were given instead to Euro-American actors, so as to assuage the menaced virility of white male viewers.

  When Anna May and Sessue worked together on Daughter of the Dragon, he confided in her his one ambition: To play a hero. He was older then, but still handsome. He had a supporting part as a Scotland Yard sleuth in Daughter of the Dragon. It was a small role, but at least this time he wasn’t a sadistic, cruel villain. That was left to Anna May, and Warner Oland, who played Fu Manchu, as usual. Anna May played his daughter, Ling Moy, an Oriental princess turned evil for vengeance, who spoke her lines in perfect English but had
to refer to herself at every point in the third person: Ling Moy will do this, Ling Moy wants that, Ling Moy swears she will restore glory to the Fu ancestral tablet!

  No matter what they make you do, Sessue said, think of it as jujitsu.

  Jujitsu?

  Sessue smiled. He hoped this wouldn’t sound like Oriental flimflam, he told her, but he was, in fact, descended from a line of samurai back in Japan. Jujitsu was the gentle way, a weaponless defense developed by an Edo pacifist. Your opponent might be much bigger or stronger, he said, but you would be able to defeat him. Not by brute force or size, but by using his body weight against him. The smallest movement, the largest impact. Instead of resisting his force, yield—then use his movement to throw him.

  We don’t need a hundred lines, Anna May, he said. Steal the scene.

  * * *

  —

  EVERYONE AROUND THE dinner table was staring, waiting to see what would happen next. They were no longer trying for discretion. Anna May had made no verbal response to the journalist’s condemnation, but tears were running down her face. My apologies, Miss Wong, the journalist sputtered, offering her the dinner napkin he had already wiped his mouth on, I was only sparring with you.

  She sat there without cleaning the tears beginning to streak her makeup, keeping her eyes at a fixed point before her, on a platter of imported cheese and terrine. The hostess songstress cleared her throat. Would anyone like to take a look at the dessert menu? No one dared to answer. The air was tense, but in fact Anna May was completely calm inside. Sitting there without moving, hardly blinking, she was working through all of it, waiting for the right moment to start. It was taking some time for the frustration and insecurity that had turned into embarrassment and anxiety to pass through into quiet rage, but she would not begin until she was ready. She could feel it building up in the middle of her chest. When it swelled and reached the back of her throat, she held it down and snapped her purse open. She counted aloud some banknotes for dinner, inquired as to an appropriate tip amount, looked around the petrified table, nodded at the host to answer. It’s on me, the woman stammered twice, first in Cantonese and then in English. Thanks, Anna May said, but I’d prefer not to owe anyone anything. No answer came, so she dropped a big bill onto her plate of half-eaten food, clicked her fingers, and called a waiter for her furs.