Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend

Three: Europe

Three Europe Anna May and Lulu arrived in Hamburg, Germany in April 1928. Their arrival there occurred at a time when the nation’s film industry was trying to challenge the dominance of American moviemakers. To German filmmakers, Anna May was a major star who would guarantee attention for any production. Berliners were passionate moviegoers, attending films for the newsreels and to be entertained by beautiful women such as Anna May. Germany’s largest cinemas were on the Kurfürstendamm and near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. There were regular screenings throughout Berlin’s suburbs and in thousands of small movie theaters around the country. Attendance was so constant that cinema owners regularly scheduled morning shows. Berliners were ready for Anna May’s appeal. While later film critics and scholars would hail Fritz Lang’s direction in Metropolis or Marlene Dietrich’s starring role in The Blue Angel, the average Berliner preferred, as Alexandra Ritchie has put it, the “light entertainment” created by UFA, the largest German film company. Other popular themes included dramas about the dangers of Berlin or cross-sections of its society, such as in The Adventures of a Ten Mark Note. The American films Anna May had taken part in were always popular, and Berliners did not demand high art of her. In particular Anna May appealed to modernized working-class females who saw in her a pioneer in raising hemlines, smoking cigarettes, driving and wrecking cars, and in demanding as much personal freedom as a movie star could secure.1 At the time, Berlin was perhaps the most modern city in the world. Its theater was unquestionably the best in Europe and offered spectacular plays and performances . Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera was the big hit of 1928 along with Franz Lebar’s Friederike with Richard Tauber as Goethe. Musical revues were 66 Anna May Wong common and widely patronized. At the Kurfürstendamm, Marlene Dietrich lay on her back on stage and pedaled in the air with her gorgeous legs. Berliners were accustomed by now to what they considered exotic. Black performers introduced jazz to the metropolis after 1924. The Americanization of Berlin culture began after World War I and was powerfully influential by the mid-1920s. Berlin was crazy for jazz and fox-trots. At the same time, Berliners were capable of the worst sorts of stereotypes and demanded routines by black performers to match their own racial fantasies. Germans frequently used derogatory words to refer to blacks and reveled in racial fantasies about their sexual capabilities. At the same time, black performers, of whom Josephine Baker was the greatest, subverted these racial images and often parodied Germanic mores. Baker first arrived in Berlin in 1925 and divided her time and performances between there and Paris for years. Not all black performances were permissible, however. The police quickly closed two nude shows involving black men with white women. If interracial sex was off-limits, Berlin offered sexual pleasures for other predilections. Prostitutes mobbed the streets. As Anna May walked around the metropolis or went to clubs at night, she could easily see hundreds of young women dressed flapper-style and available for the choosing.2 Yet Anna May Wong and Lulu entered into a society in which Chinese people were rare. Germany’s capital city may have been a world center for an artistic avant-garde, but not even sophisticated Germans had much contact with Chinese people. While small numbers of Chinese had visited Germany for centuries , they came as seamen and street vendors and made little impression on the country. There were few Chinese institutions in Berlin. The city’s first Chinese restaurant had opened only in 1925. Unlike American Chinatowns, in which sizable numbers clustered together against a hostile society, Europe’s Chinese neighborhoods were more integrated into the urban world. There were only a handful of Chinese in all of Germany. The census for that year counted only 747 Chinese in the entire country, of which 312 lived in Berlin and only 30 of those were female. Anna May was not only enhancing Germany’s film reputation, she greatly enlarged its national public comprehension of China.3 Anna May’s first job was to act in Song, a movie produced and directed by Richard Eichberg. Film production began in the first week of May 1928. Barely remembered today, Eichberg was the most popular and successful German Europe 67 director...