Shanghai Interlude
a glimpse of Anna May Wong's trip to China
In the midst of feverishly writing the final chapters of my book on Anna May Wong earlier this month, I received an email from Shutterfly, a photo platform I used when I was in college. “Remember these memories from seventeen years ago?” the email asked. Enclosed were pictures from my first summer living alone in Shanghai. I was twenty years old and had just finished my sophomore year. I’d never lived in a big city before, let alone one in China.
The picture arrived just in time, as China had been on my mind lately while I was writing the chapter on Anna May Wong’s first and only trip to the motherland in 1936. Reading about AMW’s impressions of Shanghai and the endless luncheons, parties, and late night mahjong benders that welcomed her made me nostalgic for my own memories of Shanghai.
Somehow, in the summer of 2005, I found an apartment via an online web forum (these were the days before Craigslist existed in China). The building was centrally located on Chongqing Beilu at the southwest edge of People’s Square. The rent for my studio apartment was about $300 a month (some locals later informed me I was paying way too much). I lived on the eighth floor, the same floor where the only other foreigner lived. The elevators in the building shut off after midnight, so if I arrived home in the wee hours of the morning, I had to walk the eight floors up in the dark. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was just a stone’s throw away from the Park Hotel, where AMW stayed during her initial visit to Shanghai. From her hotel room, located on the other side of People’s Square, she could look out onto the Shanghai Racetrack that once stood where the park is today.
I loved the faded glory of Shanghai’s Art Deco architecture and the grand sweep of the Bund along the Huangpu River. While sipping drinks on the rooftop at M on the Bund or listening to jazz at JZ Club in the French Concession, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to live in Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s at the height of the city’s modernity. People say that Shanghai isn’t the real China, and in many ways it isn’t—or at least it wasn’t in 1936 when most of the country was primarily agrarian. Shanghai was almost too fast, too modern for Anna May and she hardly got any sleep while she was there. Peiping (modern day Beijing) was much more her speed. For me at least, Shanghai was the first city I ever inhabited and came to know intimately. And you know what they say about your “first”—you never forget it.
A little backstory on AMW’s trip: She made the decision to travel to China after MGM decided not to cast her in the lead role for The Good Earth and instead offered her a minor supporting role. She declined the role because she was tired of Hollywood’s racism—studios always seemed to prefer casting white Americans and European immigrants to play Asian roles in yellowface, rather than use actual Asian actors. Pearl S. Buck’s novel, which the movie was based on, had been a huge bestseller and Americans were increasingly interested in China. That being the case, AMW thought she’d one up MGM by giving Americans a peek at the real thing.
As part of the publicity surrounding her trip to China, AMW wrote five diary-like essays for the New York Herald Tribune. For this issue of Half-Caste Woman, which is coming to you in the nether space between July and August since I’ve been preoccupied with finishing up my manuscript (only a few thousand words to go!), I thought I’d give you all a treat and let you discover Shanghai through Anna May Wong’s eyes. Enjoy this excerpt from her account of arriving in the city in February 1936.
ANNA MAY WONG RECALLS SHANGHAI’S ENTHUSIASTIC RECEPTION
Arrives at Shanghai
TUESDAY—Shanghai at last, but a day late, on account of the storm that overtook us after we left Kobe.
I’ll never forget my excitement when at 2 o’clock this afternoon we entered the broad mouth of the Whangpo River. The first craft I saw there was a junk, with ribbed sails and large eyes painted on either side of the prow, so that the boat could see its way. Flat fields, dotted here and there with peasant villages and curved roofed temples, stretched out to the horizon on either side of the stream.
As we approached Shanghai great factories appeared on the river banks and the sky became smudged with smoke. They made me wonder what will happen to the millions of hand-workers in China when the machine age finally becomes entrenched.
As soon as the ship stopped to await the tender dozens of little sampans crowded along the side. These are the homes of the river people; their cats and children were tethered on the tiny decks, and they stretched up their hands to beg for anything we had to offer—a penny, an old newspaper, a cigarette. It saddened me at first to see people struggling so desperately for existence. Yet as I looked at them I realized that they all seemed happy and in good health and that the babies looked as fat as little laughing Buddhas. Perhaps there are worse things in the world than being a nomad on the great Whangpo. Meets Reporters Again
When the tender arrived it brought my brother, James, who had gone to China ahead of me, and reporters from every one of the two hundred Chinese newspapers in Shanghai. For an hour, while I doggedly maintained a pleasant expression, photographers took pictures and reporters asked questions. Some of the former even climbed into the lifeboats in their pursuit of unusual angles.
Although I speak a limited amount of Cantonese, the Mandarin and Shanghai dialects, in which most of the reporters asked their questions, are as strange to me as Gaelic. I thus had the strange experience of talking to my own people through an interpreter.
My first glimpse of Shanghai, with its tall, modern buildings rising above the curving Bund, filled me with such a rush of emotion that I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep. As soon as we reached the Customs jetty, six smart looking British guards marched aboard. They said that they had been sent to bring me safely through a terrific mob of admirers, assembled just outside the dock.
At first I thought that some one was perpetrating a practical joke, for I never supposed that my cinema work had made any great impression on my own people. When I walked toward the gate, however, I realized that I was in danger of being overwhelmed. Old ladies teetering precariously on bound feet, scholarly looking gentlemen in long silk robes, school girls in tight jackets and short skirts, and returned students in Western dress were pointing toward us and talking excitedly.
The guards tried to get me through a side door, but the crowd saw the maneuver and flew through the air with the greatest of ease, running so fast that they didn’t seem even to touch the ground. After much difficulty I finally reached the Park Hotel, breathless, somewhat disheveled and without baggage, but prouder and happier than I’ve ever been in my life. This tumultuous greeting from my own people touched me more than anything that ever has happened to me in my motion-picture career. Incidentally, I wonder how the idea got abroad that the Chinese are always stolid and without emotion!
Attends Party
WEDNESDAY—I thought that the day’s excitement was over, after my tumultuous reception, but little did I know of the pace of Shanghai. In the evening I was a guest at an enormous party given for my good friends, Dr. and Mrs. Wellington Koo. They soon are leaving for France, where Dr. Koo is to be Chinese Ambassador. Mr. T. V. Soong, the J. P. Morgan of China, was seated at my left, and Dr. Koo at my right. All the gentlemen except Mr. Soong were enthusiastic dancers, and I was kept busy tripping the entire evening. It was all very different from the staid and ceremonious parties I had expected.
Incidentally, one of the ladies present spoke my dialect, and so I began to chatter away merrily in Cantonese. After a few minutes she said, “Miss Wong, do you mind going back to English? You speak Chinese charmingly, but you have such a marked American accent.” I always said that only my family or people with ears of love could understand my Chinese, but I never really believed it until now.
After the dinner-dance we adjourned to Dr. U. Y. Yen’s house to play pai-gu, a game like baccarat. This went on until 5 a.m., not an unusual hour, I was told, for Shanghai parties to break up. This is quite the gayest city I’ve ever been in, not excepting the more brilliant cities of Europe.
To allay my disappointment in regard to having a foreign dinner on my first evening in China, Mme. Koo gave a Chinese luncheon—or tiffin, as they say—in my honor. Afterward she took me out to a great silk shop known as Laou Kai Fook’s. It proved to be an enormous place, heaped to the roof with shimmering bolts. I was dazzled by the richness of the colors; it seemed as if the aurora borealis had been broken into bits and distributed through the shop. Being a privileged customer, Mme. Koo had access to the “topside” room, where they keep rare silks more than a hundred years old. I ordered several pieces to be made into Chinese gowns.
The ladies I’ve met in the last two days are the leaders of local society, and thus, Shanghai being the Paris of the nation, they set the fashions for all China. Modern Chinese dresses are made very simply. They consist of a high-necked, short-sleeved coat, falling straight to the ankles. It is fortunate that nearly all Chinese women are slender, for there are no tucks or darts anywhere to help hide unsightly curves. The only trimmings are plain or jeweled buttons and pipings of contrasting colors.
Since the gowns are split on both sides to the knee, some ladies wear trousers of lace. Those who belong to the less conservative younger set display silk stockings topped by a few inches of creamy skin—an effect which certainly would have startled the ancient sages.
Today I had my first session with a Chinese tailor. He merely hurled a few strings around me, rather as if they were lariats, and then tied a knot in each one to indicate the measurement. How, considering all his orders, he manages to remember what each stands for is something only Buddha knows.
Tailors Don’t Use Patterns
Chinese tailors, I’m told, can look at a picture in “Vogue” or a Paris import in a shop window and copy it down to the minutest detail. A paper pattern is as unnecessary for them as a spinning teacher for a silkroom. THURSDAY—Last night I went to a mah-jong party. Watching the Chinese play is a remarkable experience, if one’s eyes can travel fast enough to follow them. The players didn’t even bother to look at their tiles, for they knew what each was merely by touch. Not being an expert, I soon was left miles behind. The guests having acquired the usual Shanghai restlessness after a few hours, we set out for the Cathay Tower. This night club is managed by a German, who proudly produced autographs of Marlene Dietrich and Lillian Harvey. There was an American orchestra and the star entertainer was a Filipino. So this is China! Blinking with astonishment, I’m hastily revising my early mental pictures. But undoubtedly the hinterland is still true to ancient ways.