Lady Tsen Mei — A Chinese Doll (1919) 🇺🇸
Who opens and shuts its eyes and says a lot more than "Mamma" and "Papa”.
China always has been misunderstood. Most of us have a vague idea of the Flowery Kingdom — a sort of chop suey of weird music on cymbals, gorgeous-coated conjurers in vaudeville, long finger-nails, and Thomas Burke. We are apt to forget that China, while picturesque, has sprung some of the biggest practical surprises in history.
China, for instance, discovered printing and concocted puzzles. If it weren't for China we might never have thought of tea. Still, it remained for Lady Tsen Mei — silent T, if you please — to establish China, once and for all, as the place where china comes from — particularly china dolls.
Tsen Mei herself, a black-banged doll from Canton, is China's most charming surprise and ingenious puzzle. A China doll with a Made-in America tag. Daughter of a Chinese mandarin, she is college-bred, a professor of medicine, a musician, and a mimic. And now. a movie star. You have to hand it to China.
Tsen Mei might just as well have been a native of Chicago, for early in life she adopted the Windy City's slogan. "I Will!" America furnished the fillip that brought this China doll to life. Born in Canton, Tsen Mei might never have escaped the traditional lethargy of her race, had not her father, when she was twelve, been sent to America on a diplomatic mission. Tsen Mei accompanied him.
In Washington, she lived the life of an American girl. She studied with an American tutor. Unconsciously she compared the life of the American girl and the mandarin's daughter. She brought the western ideas back with her to Canton. Soon she found the old life intolerable. She decided that she would be American just so far as she dared.
You may be wondering how in Canton a high-caste Chinese girl could so far over-ride the conventions of her caste as to have a few ideas of her own. And imagine the mandarin's consternation when his daughter announced her intentions of getting out and earning her own living. But the mandarin had had to cope with her rebellious spirit since babyhood. He wasted no words; simply let her have her own way.
First, Tsen Mei forced him to teach her all he knew of medicine, learned at an American college. By the time she had attained her majority, she had become a full-fledged physician. This was unheard of in China, but Tsen Mei had become so accustomed to doing the unusual thing that she was quite undismayed, and answered all protests with a simple announcement that she was sailing at once for America, to complete her education.
Influence was brought to bear and Lady Tsen Mei arrived in New York under the protection of distinguished countrymen who arranged for her to enter Columbia University. There the China doll buckled clown to hard work, and obtained her A. B. She went to the University of Pittsburgh and won her M. A. degree!
But instead of practicing medicine, Tsen Mei again became restless and made up her mind to go on the stage. Just like that — "I believe I'll go on the stage;" she remarked carelessly one day. And no sooner said than put into execution. She took up music again; studied just as faithfully at scales as she had at skeletons, and was finally pronounced by her teachers to be ready for a professional appearance. And so Lady Tsen Mei sang.
Vaudeville, always sleuthing for sensations, heard this Chinese nightingale, shoved a contract at her, on which she affixed curious Chinese characters, and Tsen Mei was a "big-time" vaudeville star. Her act included songs and imitations, of birds and animals. Which reminds us of the occasion on which the gave her most faithful imitation.
It was in Washington, before the murder of the women and children on the Lusitania rent the mask of the Prussian menace. Tsen Mei was headlining at Keith's. She was concluding her offering with a number introducing her imitations of birds and animals. She then announced that she would give a vocal imitation of any bird or animal suggested by the audience.
In a box was a party from the German embassy Von Bernstorff, with his aides. One of the aides leaned forward and said, "Make a noise like me."
Lady Tsen Mei had and has an antipathy for the German royalists It was that imperial Prussian, the ex Kaiser, who referred to China as "The Yellow Peril."
While the crowded house waited in silence, Tsen Mei took a step towards the box and, holding the gaze of the aide, said slowly, “I said birds and animals. You are decidedly not a bird. You ask for the sound of your cry. It is also your master's voice. Listen."
And she gave, with flawless feeling and indubitable accuracy, the grunt and terrified squeal of — a pig.
It was one day when Lady Tsen Mei was becoming dissatisfied with herself for having made so little of her public life, that a motion picture director met her. "Would you,” he said, "care to become a movie star?" "Why yes," said the China doll.
Again, no sooner said than done. From her first test under the lights Tsen Mei made good. Under Ira Lowry's direction, for the Betzwood Film Company, she is playing the leading role in a feature-drama called For the Freedom of the East. She is the first Chinese star on the screen.
The China doll serves tea every afternoon on the set. In the studio. So are the traditions of the Far East preserved by this little Oriental with a Yankee flavor.
Photos by: Lumière
Above: a speaking likeness of Lady Tsen Mei, a black-banged China doll from Canton, with a Made-in-America tag.
At left, a scene from her first picture, called For the Freedom of the East.
Below: in the costume of a mandarin's daughter. Lady Tsen Mei is a professor of medicine, a musician, a mimic, and now a movie star. You have to hand it to China.
Collection: Photoplay Magazine, February 1919
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, October 1918