Anna May Wong — Between Two Worlds (1932) 🇺🇸

Oriental by birth and Western by training, Anna May Wong walks broodingly along the imaginary line that divides the races.

Herb Howe tells of the strange career of Anna May Wong

When his second daughter was born to Wong Som Tsing, on Flower Street, in Los Angeles, he named her Wong Liu Tsong — Frosted Yellow Willows — because it was his desire, he said, that his daughter be graceful, tall and golden.

Beneath the poetry lay keen disappointment. The scholarly Wong had wished for a son. And so to please him, Liu Tsong’s submissive mother placed a Chinese boy’s cap on her daughter’s head and arrayed her in the robes of a prince. By a chance of inflection in her name, which I can’t explain, that also took on the masculine.

Complication was added to the role of this American lotus who, despite her success as an actress, her reception in society abroad and her financial independence in a depressed world, is a gently brooding spirit on the baffling line between East and West.

Little Liu Tsong’s first contact with Western civilization was painful. The American boy in the seat behind her at school stuck pins into her. Not meanfully, just experimentally. He wanted to see if the Chinese have the same feelings we do. To his lasting astonishment they apparently have not. Trained to suffer stoically as the Chinese do, Liu Tsong didn’t ouch or tell the teacher. Instead she wore an overcoat the next day.

The little Christian got a longer pin. Anna put on another coat. This kept up until Liu Tsong was wearing six heavy coats as a barricade.. Spring having arrived, the teacher thought the child must be altogether too warm and insisted that she unbundle. Liu Tsong dutifully complied, burst into a sneeze and nearly died of pneumonia.

Nor did her martyrdom stop with this. She continued to wear Chinese clothes and pigtails, into which the little Christians delightedly stuck burrs. But cut them she would not. To this day Anna defies Western fashion with unbobbed hair. And just you try!

In the mornings Anna bravely attended American school. (I have neglected to say that “Anna” is the name the family doctor gave her when she was born. She herself added the “May” after her favorite month.) In the afternoons she went to the Chinese school in the old plaza, by Chinatown. There, oddly, she met with the Christian religion in action for the first time. It, too, was a shock.

On the floor above the schoolroom the Holy Rollers held devotionals. Attracted by the strange sounds, the Chinese children trouped up the stairs one day at recess and were struck spellbound by the spectacle of the Christians rolling about in divine seizures. Catching them there, their mouths agape, their teacher spanked them soundly and they rolled down stairs with seizures of a much more painful kind. Considering all her vicissitudes it is small wonder that Anna tripped home one day with St. Vitus dance. The Christian life was too much for her. But the Chinese, knowing nothing of the nervous disorders that beset us, declared that Anna had become the habitation of evil spirits. It was more than a year before they were driven out by the soothing ministrations of her gentle mother.

Several years passed without outbreaks from Anna. Apparently the evil spirits had been thoroughly evicted. Then one peaceful night the news came scurrying through the streets that Wong Liu Tsong had walked on to a neighborhood screen carrying a red lantern in her hand. Instantly Chinatown was a pandemonium of gonging tongues. The Wong child had gone berserk again.

Wong Liu Tsong was in the movies. She was an extra in Nazimova’s The Red Lantern. Poor Mrs. Wong. To have this happen to her, she who hovered like a mothering spirit over Chinatown outfitting all poor babies. First the child had displeased her father by not being a boy. Then she had possessed herself of evil spirits. And now she walks forth with a red lantern in her hand to sell her soul to the devil. Among the Chinese, you see, there is still the belief that in being photographed you lose a little of your soul. Those who know Hollywood intimately will not flout this superstition.

Anna’s little soul had been risked for a few baby pictures. Her parents were modern, liberal. But when she exposed it to the fast consuming movie cameras her mother was somewhat troubled.

But Anna had been honorable. She had asked her father’s permission. He had been reluctant. Of course, many Chinese girls had played extra, but there are many Chinese girls who are not nice. Father Wong had consented only when certain honorable Chinese gentlemen who were also playing extras offered to lend their protection to Liu Tsong.

Anna’s family have never been proud of her success. If she had been the desired boy, it would have been different. Then they would have been very proud. A girl’s place is with a husband in her home.

Anna attributes her forwardness to the paternal prayer for a son. That is what she means by the masculizing influence on her life. Dressed as a boy she had played as a boy. She had three sisters and when finally three brothers arrived she was delighted On her first trip to Canada she bought them all suits of the best English material.

“I tried them all on,” she says. “My youngest brother was a little smaller than I, and so I chose one that was tight for me. The next older was about my size so I had an exact fit.

“I took one that was too big for me. I made no explanation to the clothier. Naturally, he viewed me with alarm thinking me crazy.”

Anna speaks with an English accent which the cultivated in London in order to appear in English pictures. For all her celestial beauty one doesn’t think of her as Chinese. Anna has encountered the stinging rebuff of smug rules against admitting one of her race to “exclusive” apartments. Small boys, bred of smaller parents, have taunted her with the cry “Chink!” She doesn’t suffer meekly any more, as she did when the pins were stuck in her. She can retort as wrathfully as any of us.

Personally I have no use for that Kipling quotation, and I am not using it. It represents the superiority of the old-guard British. It certainly doesn’t represent the attitude of the younger ration of English who applauded Anna May Wong for a performance on the London stage in “The Circle of Chalk” and received her in Mayfair drawing-rooms. As for Americans, let them abide by Lincoln’s “All men are created equal.”

Anna makes no admission of racial problem. Only by her defensive, more effective than the great wall of China, do you suspect there is a perplexity. On one side is her Chinese home, on the other her Occidental career.

Of that home she speaks quietly.

Anna May’s mother became a bride at fourteen by submitting her picture to a Chinese matchmaker in San Francisco.

When you look at that picture of serene beauty you can understand why Wong Som Tsong accepted her unseen.

Anna May’s father is an educated man of humor and charm. He was lord of the old, as a Chinaman is, and only once did his children oppose him.

He had a wife and five children in China. Anna speaks calmly of this other family. Among the Chinese it is proper to have more than one wife if a man can afford to. The two families exchanged greetings and gifts. When the wife in China died, Mr. Wong suggested that Anna’s mother go to China to look after the children there.

Mrs. Wong was willing but her children rose in insurrection, disputing the paternal authority for the first time. They said their mother had performed service enough in raising the nine children here. The father yielded to them, and a Chinese tradition was smashed by an American head-on.

The greatest conflict between Chinese and American duties that Anna has had to meet occurred when her mother died last year.

Anna was appearing on the New York stage in “On the Spot.” Her father wired her to come at once. It was unthinkable that a Chinese girl should be absent from the funeral of her mother. Yet confronting Anna was that unwritten law of the Western stage: The show must go on. American duty opposed the Chinese duty.

Anna’s instinct moved her to observe the latter, but her disregard of the former meant the closing of the play and great loss to the producers. She remained at her post, sustained by Christian Science winch looks upon death beautifully as but the passing through a door.

The Chinese funeral was held without Liu Tsong, and patriarchal Chinese spoke bitterly of a daughter who could so offend her ancestors. Anna’s father understood but was not reconciled to the burial of his wife without Liu Tsong’s presence. So the body was placed in a vault, temporarily, to await Liu Tsong’s return. On the New York stage Anna May Wong went on playing her part and making her bows while the heart of Liu Tsong was breaking. Months later in a little Christian chapel in Los Angeles Liu Tsong, the little Chinese girl, knelt sobbing beside the gentle, understanding mother.

The other night I stood in the wings of a theater watching that graceful, tall and golden girl as she sang a song defining an American girl. Her father attended the performance and was very proud. She was the Frosted Yellow Willows he had envisaged. Only once has he seen her in pictures. That was on the persuasion of one of her brothers. The picture was “The Thief of Bagdad” in which Anna wore not too many clothes. After the film, the brother said, “Well, father, what do you think of Liu Tsong?” The old man smiled whimsically, clutched himself in a mock shiver, and murmured, “It’s cold.” That was his only comment.

He felt much warmer after seeing Liu Tsong on the stage in a Patou gown.

Later in her Park Wilshire apartment Anna and I had cocktails (she’s an expert mixer) and ate ancient Chinese eggs which Anna said were two hundred years old. If you are interested in providing your descendants with these antique delicacies, here is the recipe as Anna gave it: Take fresh duck eggs, sink them in wood ashes, wrap them in rice husks and bury them some place where Mr. Hoover’s anti-hoarders can’t find them. Your heirs will thank you. They are delicious. (My obeisance to these Chinese ducks new enjoying paradise with their ancestors.)

Anna and I talked of Chinese philosophy.

“Isn’t it difficult for you to be Chinese?” I asked.

“No,” she smiled. “I’ve been reading up.”

Anna herself is a citizen of the world, like Plato — or was it Socrates?

After walking into the arms of the Hollywood devil with the red lantern in her hands she played in pictures for several years. Then she received an offer from British International which took her to London. She appeared in pictures and on the stage in London.

Paris called and she went there to perfect her French. In Berlin she appeared in three versions of the film, “Flame of Love,” speaking English, French and German. Vienna, not to be outdone by the other European capitals, requisitioned her for a musical revue, “Tschuin Tschi,” which you may translate as “Springtime.”

When I was in Europe two years ago the name of Anna May Wong was a society feature. Everywhere I went, and, of course, I move in the best social circles, people were discussing this charming, cultured Chinese girl.

And, of course, there were the attendant stories of princes and even kings being madly in love with her.

Anna obviously enjoyed being taken up by people of such rank that their names never appear in new papers.

“Yet sometimes I would stop and ask myself: ‘What am I doing.’” she says. “It all seemed silly and futile.”

Before she went to Europe and was acclaimed by nobility, Anna was not of Hollywood society. But, as she observes with serene detachment: “Once you are a success, color means nothing.”

They are not fooling Anna. She has the divine discontent. Pictures do not satisfy her intellect. From a secret source which I cannot quote I have the opinion that she will one day enter the diplomatic service. For America, of course.

She has the poise and assurance of diplomacy, and an ever-seeking mind.

The Christian religion has interested her, Christian Science particularly. But she adds that she is turning more and more to Oriental philosophy.

“We were followers of Confucius,” she says. “But I think with you that Lao Tzu is the greatest.”

Lao Tzu is the philosopher of inaction.

Anna believes that one gains most when doing little. “Work absorbs. Too much work dulls one. For the one who gives it is necessary to have solitude to re-store.”

Her own proverb is: “Life is too serious to be taken seriously.”

“This game of pictures will not whip me,” she says. “I shall change with my rhythm.”

The Western idea of success is wrong. Material accomplishment is not the happy ideal. Absorbed by work, those who succeed in a material sense are failures in character.

A few days after she said this to me two gentlemen of huge fortunes shot themselves.

The Hollywood absorption in sex is infantile, Anna thinks. When told that she had been quoted as saying she would marry only a Chinese boy, she replied scornfully: “If I were asked such a stupid question I might be pardoned for making a stupid reply. The only basis for marriage is mental companionship and that has no race or color.”

Of the present Chinese-Japanese war she says: “The day is past for conquest by bullets. In killing us they kill their market. I agree with Harry Carr that Japan victorious will be swallowed up by victorious China. The Chinese are a peaceful race and by peace they will conquer.”

Happiness? “For me an island of solitude with books. Not material things — but wisdom.”

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On the left-hand page is a photograph of Anna May Wong taken in Tower Magazines’ studios. Directly above are Mr. and Mrs. Wong, Anna May (next to mother), and a sister. At the right, Anna May in a scene from one of her stage plays.

Photo by: Eugene Robert Richee (1896–1972)

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Anna May Wong named Wong Liu Tsong (Frosted Yellow Willows), by her father because it was his desire that she be graceful, tall and golden. Imagine that name in electric lights.

Photo by: Otto Dyar (1892–1988)

Collection: The New Movie Magazine, July 1932