China Dolls? Anna May Wong and “Joy Ride”

Anna May Wong? Who exactly was she? Fans of Old Hollywood remember her as an “exotic” (though American-born) actress, mostly cast as self-sacrificing Madam Butterfly types or as a sinister Dragon Lady. The most outrageous moment of her career (basically 1919-1961) came in 1935, when MGM denied her the leading role of O-lan, the sympathetic Chinese peasant in Pearl Buck’s bestselling The Good Earth. The part went instead to Luise Rainer, a German actress who won an Oscar for playing O-lan in yellowface. The word is that Wong was screen-tested to play the seductress Lotus in The Good Earth, though it is not clear whether she was rejected by her studio or indignantly turned the part down.

  My colleague Carl Rollyson, an extraordinarily prolific biographer and chronicler of biography as an art form, recently published a piece in the New York Sun assessing what has come to be a boomlet of books on Anna May Wong’s career. Now that people of Asian heritage are slowly being acknowledged as part of the American scene, the time seems ripe to survey those who’ve come before. I read Carl’s column with great interest, partly because my own growing-up years had important links to Japan and partly because I’d just seen (in the wee hours on a trans-Atlantic flight)  a recent flick called Joy Ride.

 There was a time, of course, when actors from Asian backgrounds were rarely at the center of any Hollywood production. In 1961, two decades after The Good Earth, I remember the very Caucasian Alec Guinness being cast as a Japanese businessman with a romantic streak in A Majority of One and a bucktoothed Mickey Rooney in a cringeworthy performance as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Actual Asian women seemed to have slightly more opportunity: though the 1956 comedy Teahouse of the August Moon starred Marlon Brando as a wily Okinawan interpreter, the lovable geisha role was played by a genuine Japanese actress, Machiko Kyo, who had previously starred for the great Kurosawa in Rashomon. In the splashy 1957 romantic drama, Sayonara,  Miiko Taka played opposite Marlon Brando in a story of two post-war love affairs between  American soldiers and Japanese civilians. The same film featured Miyoshi Umeki, who won a Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Red Buttons’ doomed Japanese bride.

 These roles for Asian (and Asian-American) women have tended to showcase them as demure and loving. But in recent years it has started to seem OK to be both Asian and funny, even brash. The burgeoning career of Awkwafina has surely helped move things in that direction, and the success of Crazy Rich Asians is another indicator that Asian (and Asian-American) actors can be as outrageous as anyone else in Hollywood. Then of course there’s the Oscar-nabbing Everything Everywhere All At Once, which introduced some moviegoers to both screen veteran Michelle Yeoh and busy newcomer Stephanie Hsu. Having gotten critical acclaim for playing both Yeoh’s daughter Joy Wang and arch-villain Jobu Tubaki in the Daniels’ absurdist film, Hsu is also highly visible in this year’s Joy Ride, a female-and-Asian take on the kind of raunchy road trip movie that has previous featured white males (The Hangover) and Black females (Girls Trip). Joy Ride begins with the stereotypical high-achieving Asian-American lawyer (Ashley Park), sending her to Beijing along with her hot-to-trot childhood friend (Sherry Cola), an androgynous cousin (Sabrina Wu), and a star of Chinese TV with secrets of her own (Hsu). Their language is raw, and some of their adventures are grotesque, before the inevitable upbeat ending. Who says blondes have more fun?

 

"China Dolls": There’s No Business Like Show Business

Funny – she doesn’t look Chinese. Lisa See, whose mother is novelist Carolyn See, has explained her unusual history on her father’s side in On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese American Family (1996). Through a complex set of circumstances, beginning when her Chinese immigrant great-grandfather married an outcast white woman, See inherited a strong interest in the Chinese side of her ancestry. That interest has led her to write a number of bestselling novels set in China, including Shanghai Girls and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Her latest is China Dolls, which in telling the intertwined story of three Asian-American performers in the era just before and just after World War II graphically delineates the role of the Chinese woman on the American stage and screen.

The three heroines of See’s novel, who take turns narrating the story, become nightclub performers for very different reasons. Grace, a Chinese-American raised in a small town in the Midwest, has always felt inferior to her Anglo classmates. The movies are her refuge, but at first she sees no opportunities for women with Asian faces, aside from the Dragon Lady roles of Anna May Wong. Then she discovers a subculture of Chinese performers who imitate their All-American peers, billing themselves as the Chinese Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and even (as a spicy attraction at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition) the Chinese Sally Rand. Eventually Grace and the novel's other main characters—who have their own reasons to overcome their past—find jobs as dancers at a new San Francisco Chinatown nightclub called The Forbidden City.

The allure of this nightclub, which actually did flourish in pre-war San Francisco, lay in its titillation of mostly-white patrons with a floorshow combining the exotic with the familiar. The lavish décor was straight out of a fantasy opium den, and the all-Asian performance troupe delighted the customers with professionalism and sex appeal. One passage from the novel, in which the nightclub’s dancers are filmed on a local beach for a newsreel, gives some indication of the cross-cultural forces at play: “We lined up on the sand, wearing big headdresses that tinkled and glittered with every movement, and embroidered Chinese opera gowns with long water sleeves made of the lightest silk, which draped over our hands a good twelve inches. Our feet dragged in the sand, but our water sleeves floated and blew in the ocean breeze. We sidestepped until we were behind a coromandel screen set up incongruously on the sand to discard our headdresses and gowns, and toss them toward the camera in a manner bound to provoke good-natured chuckles. The music changed to a jitterbug. Now in bathing suits, we swung out from behind the screen. ‘Well, well, well,’ the announcer intoned with proper surprise. ‘What would Confucius say?’” 

The WASP enthusiasm for ersatz Oriental culture (evenings at the nightclub conclude with a spirited “Chinaconga” line) comes to a quick end with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into the war. See’s story line doesn’t overlook the situation of Japanese-American performers who try to evade relocation orders by masquerading as Chinese Americans. One such, historically, was funnyman Goro Suzuki, who changed his name to Jack Soo and went on to a successful Hollywood career on sitcoms like Barney Miller. As for See’s characters, they eventually learn to make ends meet by going out on the “chop suey circuit” of novelty nightclub acts. My favorite part of China Dolls was learning what American showbiz meant to perceived “lotus flowers” with roots in the Far East.