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1. Introduction: A Life of Passing
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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On June 25, 1859, a woman with two young children stepped off a steamship onto the dock of Singapore, island city and British colony at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. The family was arriving from the small island of Penang in the British Straits Settlements, a convenient port up along the northwest coast of the peninsula. The woman was no one important or famous , just a woman, a nobody. She was one minor member of that vast underclass of traveling Victorians outside Britain who are now almost impossible to trace. Their personal histories have vanished because neither their genealogy nor their activities were of high enough status to be more than randomly recorded. But, quite by accident, this particular unimportant woman’s arrival in Singapore was recorded in the weekly newspaper shipping news, which listed passenger arrivals at the port of Singapore. At the moment Anna Leonowens disembarked, she reinvented herself. She simply made up a new “history” of her origins and identity, a new biography. Never discovered, never unmasked, Anna went on to perform that new identity for the rest of her life, actually becoming the character she had made. On the basis of her self-invention, Anna led a wildly adventurous and influential life. A world traveler, she became a well-known travel writer and public lecturer at a time when most women stayed home. She remains the one and only foreigner to spend years inside the royal harem of Siam. She crossed all of Russia on her own just before the revolution. She emigrated to the United States, mingling with the rich and famous, the literary, and political abolitionists in the Northeast, and in her seventies settled down to raise eight children. Hers was a vigorous, intense, and inspiring life. But Anna’s extraordinary achievements are not why most of us know about her. Anna was reinvented not once but twice, the second time by a woman living in the twentieth century. Anna’s arrival in Singapore that June 1 one Introduction A Life of Passing day would turn out to be not only the beginning of a new life for her but also an originary moment in American culture and history. Her influence on American culture and international politics has been profound. The second rebirth of this forgotten woman created for American audiences a powerful public myth. Anna’s first metamorphosis shaped the personal fates of Anna and her descendants. Her second, at the hands of Margaret Landon and Hollywood , played a part in shaping the fate of nations as well. Anna’s personal history challenges our notions of biography as well as our notions of identity. First, is her life significant to us now only because of the fantasy idol twentieth-century America made of it? Clearly, the very existence of this book suggests that the answer is no. Perhaps my main point in writing this biography is to present to my audience a woman who was extraordinary in her own right. Anna’s story is about the always courageous and often downright fabulous experiences of a woman who, whatever her flaws, knew how to live. Second, how do I tell the life story of a person who stepped off a boat, erased her past, and reinvented herself? Do I simply label that created self a lie and search behind the creation for the “real” person, the “truth,” measured by resurrecting the buried facts of an abandoned identity? The problem with that is that Anna’s inventions, her lies if you will, were the foundation for her successes. We understand this quite well in America. After all, do we want to claim that the “real” Cary Grant was actually Archibald Leach all along, or that Bob Dylan inevitably remains Bobby Zimmerman? Do we, in other words, raise as sacred the identity narrative that exalts origins, beginnings, the shaping domestic truths of parents, childhood, and domestic life? Life is too complicated, and identity too often in dynamic motion, to narrate the story of a life as no more than an act of factual revelation. Biography is not exposé; it is more than a journey in search of the facts. Which is not to say that we can simply invent who we are, and that is the story to tell. I do offer the hidden facts of Anna’s background and activities. But I use those historical facts in the service of exploring what to make of Anna’s tossing facts aside in...