The Fortunes (23 page)

In 1940 her younger sister, Mary, will hang herself in her garage—out of despair at her stalled acting career, it's rumored. Another butterfly killing herself for unrequited love.

“She always wanted my roles.”

“She always wanted to
be
you,” her father accuses. It's true, she thinks (even though she's always suspected that Mary took her name from Mary Pickford to spite her). Once, tipsy in Berlin, the girl had crashed the car and given her famous sister's name to the
polizei.

“I'll never forgive you for encouraging her,” her father says.

“For once,” she tells him, “we agree.”

They bury her next to her mother, the same gravesite where Mary took her part years earlier.

“How can you bear it?” Mary asked her once.

“What?”

“Any of it. All of it.”

Mary waves her arms about too much,
she thought critically.

She sighed. “You know when you're doing a scene and it's near the end, and the take is a good one, and you need to sneeze or you have an itch, or you think you might corpse?”
Corpsing
being British theater slang for breaking character, laughing.

“Oh yes! That happens to you?”

“No. I just tell myself I can get through it for another few seconds. And I do. That's how I bear it. One take at a time. You can always make it to the end of the scene.”

Mary, almost wailing: “And the next and the next?”

So melodramatic; no wonder she fails.

“That's acting, darling. That's
art.
It's why what's unbearable in life—loss, heartbreak, despair—is bearable on the screen: because we know the picture will end.”

But if Mary was just playing her, who was the worse actress?

It's just another scene, she tells herself at the funeral, another scene that will eventually—

Mary, she recalls suddenly, had always wondered about their mother's death. How could she just step in front of an automobile? Why would she?

 

EXCLUSION

After her trip, partly by choice but also because China is now an ally, she starts to take “better” parts in lesser movies. No more dragon ladies, no more butterflies, no more prostitutes. Partly by choice, partly as a function of her increasing age and receding fame, she wears longer gowns that cover her legs—those great gams. She wears her hair in the traditional styles of married women, like
lid of teapot,
combed forward in a smooth dark slab.

She collects money for China relief, appears at fundraisers, donates her salary, auctions her dresses for orphans and medicine.

At New Year's 1941 she stands under a sign:
YOUR NAME IN CHINESE 10¢.
A calligrapher writes out the names she bestows on tourists. Lotus Moon. Lucky Flower. Sage Tiger. (
Are you naming people or restaurants?
the calligrapher cackles in Chinese.)

“And what does
your
name mean?” a square-jawed fellow asks, laying a dime in her palm, and she smiles, leans in to tell him. “Phew!” a heavy young woman interjects, taking his arm. “I bet she could help us with baby monikers.”

Her smile freezes as if in a photo. “Congratulations,” she offers, and then, with a little bow to the mother-to-be, “Golden Peach.”

She is the guest of honor at the Moon Festival parade of 1942, which marks the opening of the new East Gate of Chinatown, the Gate of Maternal Virtue, riding in an open-top car beside the Chinese consul, lantern-bearers and a corps of Chinese majorettes to the front of them, camels and even an elephant to the rear.

But in 1943, when Madame Chiang Kai-shek, American-educated, third wife of the successor to Sun Yat-sen, the Nationalist generalissimo (the
Missimo
to his
Gissimo,
as they're popularly known), tours the U.S., speaks to a joint session of Congress, and holds a benefit rally at the Hollywood Bowl, she isn't invited. Rita Hayworth is there, Barbara Stanwyck and Greer Garson, Ingrid Bergman and Loretta Young are there. Even Mary Pickford, despite having retired ten years earlier, at the end of the silent era. Thirty thousand people in total. But the closest she'll get is a newsreel.

It's another grand snub, but she takes it in stride. “It's of no consequence.” Even though she has raised funds for the general, defended him against those who call him “Cash My Check,” say China will never repay its debts. Even though she has expressed her admiration for Madame Chiang in interviews, privately lobbied producers to play her in a biopic.
The role of a lifetime. Born to play it.
But she knows how the Nationalists feel about her, how the Chinese elite look down on the overseas Chinese. Besides, there's room for only one Chinese star in Hollywood at a time.

As recently as 1938 she was acclaimed as “The World's Most Beautiful Chinese Girl” in the pages of
Look.

She sits instead in a restaurant in Chinatown. She's a regular; they know her usual, keep a table for her, though tonight she could have any. Chinatown has emptied to see Madame Chiang at the “Rice Bowl,” as the wags are calling it. Her siblings have even taken her father, a great admirer of China's first lady. The old laundryman woke early to press his suit fresh, even though she pays to send his laundry out. She would go with him herself, but she's afraid she'll be recognized, afraid she won't be. Afraid, most of all, of seeing her father applauding another.

She orders chop suey. A dish invented in America for Americans, she knows. But made and sold by Chinese. Which surely should count for something. It's not that she represents the Chinese badly, she thinks. It's that she represents something else entirely. Chop suey!
Chinese American.
That's the new name she's started to hear. A gift of the war, now that boys from Chinatown can fight for America.

Madame Chiang's visit is credited for paving the way for the end of Chinese exclusion in December of that year. It will take five years for California to repeal its anti-miscegenation laws. The Supreme Court will finally rule all such laws unconstitutional in 1967.

Anna May Wong will die in 1961, aged fifty-six, of cirrhosis, two days after her final TV appearance, on
The Barbara Stanwyck Show.
She'd been looking forward to a big screen comeback as Madame Liang in
Flower Drum Song.
She will never have married, never had a child, though she will have finally played a mother on TV in
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,
and her youngest brother, Richard, will still be living with her at the time of her death. He'll bury her beside her mother, her father, and her sister Mary, under her Chinese name. (She'd reassumed it, after a fashion, a decade earlier for the lead character of a short-lived series, a Chinese detective named Madame Liu Tsong. No episodes survive, and thus no copies of the title sequence with its circular credit: “Anna May Wong as Madame Liu Tsong.”)
Time
's obituary will note that she “died a thousand deaths” onscreen. Several others will quote her father's apocryphal advice to her: “Don't be photographed too much or you'll lose your soul.”

She'll live to see Newsreel one more time—in a photo, kneeling beside Madame Chiang in September of 1945 to film her reading a newspaper account of the Japanese surrender. Madame once said of herself, “The only thing Oriental about me is my face.”
Life
called her “the most powerful woman in the world,”
Liberty
“the real brains and boss of the Chinese government.” Hemingway dubbed her “the empress.”

Just another dragon lady after all.
Newsreel's pose, she notes, is one of supplication, kowtowing—no,
proposing,
the camera proffered like an oversized ring box.

Four years later the Missimo will retreat to Taiwan, renamed the Republic of China, her husband's Nationalists, spent from their struggle against the Japanese, no match for the Communists now. Newsreel himself will eventually retire there. Madame Chiang will never set foot in mainland China again. Instead she'll move to the United States after the generalissimo's death (he was eleven years her senior) and live in New York until her own passing, aged 105. She and Luise Rainer will have kept up a correspondence for seventy years.

The first Chinese American to win an Oscar will be James Wong Howe, in 1955, for black-and-white cinematography. “Life's a heckuva lot simpler behind the camera,” he told her once, way back when, on the set of
Peter Pan.

And somewhere in there Anna will realize what's finally made them Chinese American. It's the revolution, the victory of the Communists over the American-backed government of General Chiang. After which no sojourner can make his fortune on Gold Mountain and take it home. Not if he wants to keep it. They—all of them—are Chinese American now, not just because America has finally, begrudgingly, allowed them to be, but because China has closed to them.

The closest she'll get is a newsreel . . .

And yet there in the dreaming dark, watching Madame Chiang waving through the ticker tape, doesn't she recognize something in the cock of the Missimo's head, the set of her shoulders, the turn of her wrist? Gestures copied from the movies.
Why, that's me,
she'll think.
There I am after all.

 

III

There was funky Billie Chin and little Sammy Chong . . .

—“Kung Fu Fighting,”
Carl Douglas

Soon it'll be three decades. A ceremony is planned, a memorial. A plaque to be unveiled. It's more than a year away yet, but I already have an invitation. To attend, to say a few words, to share my recollections. It's tucked in the frame of my dresser mirror, his yearbook picture looking back at me.
Never forget,
it says.
Always remember. Keep his memory alive.
And at the bottom, in italics:
Save the day.
A typo, though I must have read it three times before I even noticed. Now it's all I can think of, that malapropism. Maybe it's why I've not written back yet to decline, as I've declined all such invitations for years. It's a mistake my father might have made, his mother, anyone of their immigrant generation. I wonder if the letter writer is older, or, more likely, someone still hearing an elder's voice in his head.

In the photo he is still young. In the mirror my face could be his father's.

What do I remember? What does anyone remember after all this time?

If you remember it at all, if you were around in the eighties, say, what you remember is a Chinese guy being beaten to death in Detroit by two white auto workers who mistook him for a Japanese. This at the height of the import scare, when Japanese manufacturers were being blamed for the collapse of the Big Three U.S. auto companies.

Maybe you remember it happened outside a club where the Chinese guy—actually a Chinese American named Vincent Chin—was celebrating his bachelor party. Maybe you remember he was buried on what should have been his wedding day.

But perhaps you thought it was just an urban legend, a bad joke come to life.

Chinaman and a Jew walk into a bar. They order drinks, get to chatting, then out of nowhere the Jew turns round and sucker-punches the Chinaman.

“What the hell was that for?” splutters the Chinaman, and the Jew tells him, “Pearl Harbor.”

“But that was the Japanese—I'm Chinese!”

“Oy! Sorry,” the Jew goes. “You've all got that black hair, those slanty eyes. It was an honest mistake.”

(Stop me if you've heard this one before.)

“Well, all right,” Chinaman says, dusting himself off, and they shake, order another round.

Only five minutes later the Chinaman rears back, cold-cocks the Jew.

“What the hell was that for?” the Jew asks, picking himself up.

“Titanic,” Chinaman says sternly.

“The Titanic!” the Jew cries. “That was a fucking iceberg.”

“Iceberg, Goldberg, Steinberg.” The Chinaman shrugs. “Honest mistake!”

Only that night it wasn't a Chinaman and a Jew, it was two Chinamen, Vincent and me. And it wasn't a bar but a strip club. And we were with a couple of white friends, Mike and Jerry. But still.

I don't know about an honest mistake, but it was an easy one. It was dark in there, filmed with smoke, lit only by the snowy static of glitter balls. One of the girls used a fog machine in her routine; another flickered in a strobe. I'm not sure
I
could have told Chinese from Japanese in that light. But I knew the pair across the stage—one silvering, the other mustachioed—were white. And they knew we weren't.

He wasn't a saint, Vincent, though he always figured he might have been named for one. The newspapers all reported he was there for his bachelor party, and sure, that was the occasion, but “bachelor party” makes it sound like a one-off, like
we
took
him
there, when it was his idea and a regular haunt of his, his
turf
. The Fancy Pants Lounge in Highland Park. The girls all knew him; he was a favorite. Contrary to the stereotype—which is why I say it—he wasn't a eunuch.

The only thing that was different about that night, then? It was supposed to be his last time. He told me his mother had given him the ultimatum (
she
knew about the club, his mom, though not his fiancée, Vicki; for her it was almost as shocking as his death). He'd promised he'd quit going after he married.
It's the last time, Ma.
I remember because he said she didn't like that, him saying
last time.
She was superstitious that way, said it was bad luck. “Can't win,” is what he shouted over the music, his breath warm in my ear. Me, I didn't believe him anyway, figured he'd be back the week after the honeymoon.