The Fortunes (16 page)

It thrills her fellow passengers, she can see, that they know her and she knows Carole Lombard, and it dismays her too, this reflected starlight that dims her own pallid glow.

Instead she makes a joke of it. It starts to do the rounds.

“Fifty million seagulls can't be wrong,” someone kids at the rail; a flock hovers off the stern, taut as kites.

“Fifty million snowflakes can't be wrong,” says another, flapping at his face, though snow hadn't featured in any of their imaginings of Japan. But then it is January. If you squint, offers a wag, they look like cherry blossoms.

“Fifty million Japanese,” says someone else, staring out over the city, but what
they
can't be is left unsaid, out of deference to her, perhaps. Fifty million Japanese can't conquer China, she thinks to herself.

“Fifty million waves,” she offers gamely. In the steel-gray distance they seem as still as a photograph, waiting to be counted.

But most often she finds herself returning to those fifty million American moviegoers left in her wake. What can't they? she wonders. See her kiss.

 

DARKNESS, INVISIBLE

She bought her first movie ticket at ten, with the tips she earned making deliveries for her father's laundry. This was Los Angeles—
Lo Sang
in Chinese—her birthplace. Cutting school, she walked for miles in the heat to avoid being seen by anyone she knew. Only when she hadn't passed another Chinese face for blocks did she duck into a theater—a Biograph, she later recalled. The ticket-seller gave her a narrow look, inspected the Indian head on the coin she held out as if it were a passport (this when Nickelodeons still cost a nickel), and waved her through. The ticket stub is preserved on the inside cover of her scrapbook.

At first she felt self-conscious, being the only Chinese, and a young girl at that, in the audience. She hid in the bathroom, terrified and lonely, tracing the pattern on the tin ceiling, until she heard the organist start up, and then she slipped in and took a seat. But in the cool darkness she found herself relaxing, laughing with the rest at the short subjects, weeping with everyone else during the feature, emotions she would never have betrayed on the street and which even here she glanced around furtively before giving vent to. But no one was watching her; all their faces upturned toward the screen, each one lit with the same silvery glaze. No one, not even she, could tell the difference. It was the first place she felt like an American.

When he found out her father made her kneel and beat her with the broom.

But she kept going, sometimes seeking out movie houses so far from home that the intertitles were in Spanish. Pearl White in
The Perils of Pauline
was a favorite—perils that included villains called Wu Fang and Long Sin. Her own villainy included forging notes from her father to give to her teachers in an English he couldn't write, getting whipped first by him and then by them when discovered.

In the beginning it was the theaters' thrill of invisibility that she craved, that she couldn't get enough of, tired as she was of being stared at in the street, picked on in school. Outside, even the sun seemed to glare at her; inside, it was all chill shadows. The flickers were the one place she didn't feel watched, the one place where she could watch others. Later, though, she came to envy those faces and figures on the screen before her. Not to be stared at was one thing, but to be stared at as they were stared at, with love and awe, was something else again. She wanted to be like them. Every face on the screen was white, but in the dreaming darkness anything seemed possible. At home in the mirror she practiced their expressions and poses awkwardly. But in the dark she made their faces her own.

 

ORIENTALLY YOURS

She turns heads on the boat deck. She turns heads on the lido deck, reclining beside the saltwater pool. She signs autographs in the beauty shop, at the soda fountain, at the bar. “Orientally yours,” she writes, then her name, Anna May Wong, in English and Chinese, Wong Liu Tsong. She's the only Chinese in the First Cabin. She turns heads at the captain's table. She turns heads in the salon. The ballroom is as big as a soundstage. Men scramble to pull out chairs for her. She's a dab hand at quoits.

A woman in furs is reading
The Good Earth
on the promenade deck. Would she sign it? A passing steward proffers a pen. She pushes up her sunglasses, fogged with salt rime. “I heard Pearl Buck wanted you for the part,” the woman says, and she nods as if this matters. “Good Earth, Better Sea!” she inscribes gaily on the flyleaf.

The ship is the SS
President Hoover,
named for the thirty-first president, a one-time manager of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company. Mr. Hoover served honorably in the defense of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Later he helped ship fifty thousand coolies to South African mines. It is said the president and first lady spoke Mandarin in the White House whenever they wanted to communicate privately. Their portrait hangs over the grand staircase of the steamliner.

Out of Yokohama she visits steerage and finds it filled with Chinese, stacked in bunks, many of them old, their faces freckled and pouchy, on their way home after a lifetime away. She tells them she is visiting her father, who has moved back to his ancestral village, and they smile toothlessly, nod in approval. They are bringing home treasures. They show her radios, bicycles, wristwatches. They show her the prized canaries they are bringing as gifts for family, the birds cowering mutely on their perches like their owners on the edge of their bunks. Through the hull she can just make out the dull reports of first-class passengers shooting skeet off the stern. One younger man clutches a box tightly to his chest, and when she asks what's in it, he tells her the bones of his father. She signs autographs for them but omits the “Orientally yours.”

Later, alone in her suite de luxe, she sips her nightcap, lies back on satin pillows plumped by the maid, loses herself in the lustrous grain of the burled, inlaid ceiling, while her fingers trace the mazy scrollwork of the dado rail.

Wong Liu Tsong means “Frosted Yellow Willow.” Her father asked her once what Anna May meant. “Me,” she said simply.

 

RUBBERNECKS

Her father still remembered the excursion buses, horse-drawn and open-topped, that had toured Chinatown at the start of the century. Sightseers in straw skimmers led by a talker with a horn for a mouth calling
Lookee here, lookee there,
directing their attention hither and thither, earning them the name “rubbernecks.”

It was a racy fad, she learned later—a vogue started in San Francisco and New York that had spread to Los Angeles, driven by exotic photographs and the seamy, salacious reputation of Chinatown. Yet as a child she never believed her father's stories. A man with a horn coming out of his mouth? She pictured a single arcing tusk, like an elephant's. Besides, and almost as improbably, when were Chinese so interesting to whites? She wasn't sure they were so interesting to her, even.

But at eleven she'd spotted a crowd on a street corner presided over by a man with a megaphone (the “horn” her father referred to was a speaking trumpet, of course) and hurried up to see if the rubbernecks had returned, only to find it was a movie crew. She tarried to watch the stars emerge from their parked limousines for a take and then retreat back to the curtained splendor of their gleaming automobiles. The leading lady, Mae Murray (from whom she would later adopt part of her English name), wore a fur, shrugging it daintily on and off her shoulders between takes like a cape, but beneath it she was dressed in diaphanous rags. It was a costume, of course, but the girl was disappointed, thought a star should dress like those at the premieres she'd seen in newsreels. This was
acting,
she told herself. Even in rags Mae Murray was beautiful, her skin and hair lustrous. And how she moved! Stalking gracefully from car to scene, gliding in the midst of so much busy energy. Just from her walk you could tell she was something.

The girl tried to walk home like that, on the balls of her feet like a dancer, one leg reaching out in front of the other as if on an invisible tightrope.

Within two months, already tall for her age, she had begun to model fur coats in newspaper advertisements for a customer who'd been impressed by her posture when she delivered laundry. She tried to give the money to her father, but he didn't like the pose she struck. He was ironing. “A disgrace,” he called her. “Do you know no shame?” He doused the linen with his brass sprayer. She tried to tell him it was acting, but the distinction was lost on him. “Who acts like a whore? I ask you. Whores, that's who!” He pushed the money away. “I'm no pimp.”

He was wrong; she knew all about shame. Hadn't she'd grown up washing and ironing other people's “unmentionables”? She once told an interviewer she changed the spelling from M-A-E to M-A-Y “to give myself permission.” “Permission for what?” “Why, everything!”

Another time her father caught her applying “makeup.” She had collected her lucky red packets from New Year's, moistened the paper, and rubbed it against her cheeks as rouge, used burnt matches for kohl. He scrubbed her face with a cloth until her cheeks were raw. “Our business is
cleaning
! How do you think it looks if the laundry girl is dirty?”

But she didn't want to be in the family business.

“It's my fault,” her mother whispered later. “He always wanted a son. He didn't come home for days after you were born.”

Her mother dressed her as a boy for early baby photographs. She was a tomboy as a girl. Years later, in cabaret, she'd perform in top hat and tails.

Chinese Rubbernecks
was also the name of an early short set in a laundry—she saw it once as a child—featuring a fantastical tussle between two Chinese during which one grabs the other's head and stretches his neck across the frame before releasing it to snap back into place.

 

TEN DOORS

The family laundry—home until she was six—was on Flower Street, a block north of Chinatown, the Laundrymen's Association having decreed that laundries had to be at least ten doors apart to regulate competition. The new family home on Figueroa was three blocks further removed from the bachelor society of Chinatown in a mixed neighborhood of Mexicans, Irish, and recent Eastern European immigrants. She grew up, she later told friends, with one foot in Chinatown, one foot in America.

“Everyone comes to Los Angeles to be a star,” she said once. “I was born there, but you could say I still came farther than most.”

 

THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

Turned down for the role of a lifetime—O-lan in
The Good Earth,
a Chinese female lead; how many of those will she ever see?—and turned down for a white actress. It's a public humiliation, a famous snub. A loss of face, she's still Chinese enough to think.

She'd been tipped for the role in the press for years; “born to play it,” they said. It was what she'd be waiting for all this time. But she'd known she wouldn't get it as soon as they cast Paul Muni,
Scarface
himself, in the lead. The Hays Code forbade the portrayal of interracial relations onscreen, even when white actors were playing in yellowface. “You're just not the type” was how producer Irving Thalberg explained in awkward apology. “You're
too
Chinese.” (By contrast, Muni, when Thalberg offered him the role, joked, “I'm about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover.”) The part of O-lan went instead to the German actress Luise Rainer.

“I'm in the business of creating illusions,” Thalberg added. As if she weren't.

At parties she made light of it. “The role of a lifetime? Horsefeathers! Besides,” she added coquettishly, “isn't that what Doug Fairbanks used to promise all the girls? The
roll
of a lifetime? It wasn't true then either!”

But a public humiliation requires a public response. Which is why she's sailing to China. If she can't have the role of a lifetime, she'll take the trip of a lifetime, a visit to the homeland she's never set foot in. Her father moved back two years earlier, after selling up, and her plan is to meet him in the family village. He has never approved of her career—it's hard to escape the suspicion that he left the U.S. to get away from her notoriety—and their estrangement was cemented when she failed to return from New York, where she was appearing on Broadway, for her mother's funeral five years ago. She had fought for her little sister, doe-eyed Mary, to be her understudy—she balked at a yellowface stand-in—but if they had both attended the burial, the theater would have gone dark. There was a moment when they both realized it, and she saw her sister's face flicker with the understudy's avid gleam.

“
You
must go for both of us,” she told Mary. “You'll regret it forever if you don't.”

“But what about you?”

It's the bigger part,
she wanted to say,
the grieving daughter. You'll be taking over from me in
that
role.
Instead she declared tightly, “The show must go on.”

Mary had always been their father's favorite anyway, born after he already had sons. It was why she'd promised to aid Mary in her acting career: to spite him. He'd hoped the younger sister would chaperone the older, but she'd bribed Mary to look the other way with walk-ons and bit parts.

Now, as she circles the deck of the
Hoover,
she's hoping for a prodigal's return of sorts, a reconciliation. Never mind that her father has moved back in with his first wife and son, her mother being technically the “little wife,” the concubine.