Anna Chan Chennault: Pioneer Chinese American Autobiographer

Anna Chan Chennault¹ is well known for her long career as an internationally prominent socialite, a journalist on the renowned radio show "Voice of America," and the diplomatic wife of the famous World War II Lieutenant-General and founder of the Flying Tigers Squadron, Claire Lee Chennault. This article will place her in an entirely different context. Chennault's two English-language autobiographies, A Thousand Springs: The Biography of a Marriage (1962) and The Education of Anna (1980), form one of the earliest examples of a multivolume life writing project by an Asian American woman.² These narratives document a colorful life: Chennault's courtship and marriage in the glamorous and heady environment of Shanghai in 1947, her cosmopolitan young adulthood in Hong Kong and China, her early journalistic career against the backdrop of World War II, and her lively and high-profile time as a Washington political hostess and political figure who, among other things, facilitated Asian American diplomacy under Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.

Despite the prototypical nature of her life writing, Chennault's work is markedly absent from the established canon of Asian American women's life writing as we currently understand it. Yet in her production of an autobiographical diptych, published in the 1960s and 1980s but spanning the twentieth century and earlier, Chennault's work predates, foreshadows, and even provides a model for many later Asian American women life writers. Thus, Chennault should be seen not only as a pioneer in this sense but also in that she provided a uniquely innovative and inspiring literary and cultural template for many of her contemporaries and writers who followed, including the best-known Chinese American autobiographer, Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts [1976] and China Men [1982]), Han Suyin (The Crippled Tree: China, Biography, History, Autobiography [1965] and others), Diana Chang (The Frontiers of Love [1956]), Helena Kuo (I've Come a Long Way [1942]), Jade Snow Wong (Fifth Chinese Daughter [1950]), Nien Cheng (Life and Death in Shanghai [1986]), and Adeline Yen Mah (Falling Leaves [1997]). In her life writing, Chennault uniquely and engagingly demonstrates the adeptness and ease with which she learned to step from old world to new, China to America, and private to public. Chennault's rightful place in literary history is as part of a wider tradition of Chinese American women writers who were also prominent public figures. The intrepid and entrepreneurial Chennault also deserves recognition as one of the first Chinese American women of note in the twentieth century. She is a woman who not only played a significant part in international political and public life in the 1950s and beyond but also skillfully and engagingly reflected on and recorded it in prose.

Both of Chennault's life narratives underscore the idea that remembering is never solely a private act but also one couched in the public sphere. She almost always appears in her own records rather coyly peering around the theater curtain of history: both watching the performance and participating, but mostly in a behind-the-scenes capacity. In this sense, Chennault is no easy—or easily accessible—subject to research. While she appears in the auto/biographical and historical accounts of all the major post-war US political giants, including Kennedy, Kissinger, Hoover, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, the references to Chennault are often fleeting and are couched in the Washington political language of casual allusion, which is not an easy discourse to decipher. This is further complicated by Chennault herself, who often writes with a distinctive blend of half-disclosure and self-conscious, publicly enacted self-effacement about her various diplomatic and public roles. She also frequently garnishes her stories with a flamboyant yet gracious discourse of reminiscence, with details of lavish Washington parties, sumptuous dinners at the White House, and high-end trips abroad.³ There is, though, no self-doubt to be found here, and Chennault writes with both the certainty of her memory and the assuredness of a confident public figure in the United States. All of this means...