The Politics of Celebrity in Madame Chiang Kai-Shek's
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China’s Prima Donna: The Politics of Celebrity in Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s 1943 U.S. Tour By Dana Ter Columbia University |London School of Economics International and World History |Dual Master’s Dissertation May 1, 2013 | 14,999 words 1 Top: Madame Chiang speaking at a New Life Movement rally, taken by the author at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Taipei, Taiwan, June 2012. Front cover: Left: Allene Talmey, “People and Ideas: May Ling Soong Chiang,” Vogue 101(8), (April 15, 1943), 34. Right: front page of the Kansas City Star, February 23, 1943, Stanford University Hoover Institution (SUHI), Henry S. Evans papers (HSE), scrapbook. 2 Introduction: It is the last day of March 1943 and the sun is beaming into the window of your humble apartment on Macy Street in Los Angeles’ “Old Chinatown”.1 The day had arrived, Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s debut in Southern California. You hurry outside and push your way through a sea of black haired-people, finding an opening just in time to catch a glimpse of China’s First Lady. There she was! In a sleek black cheongsam, with her hair pulled back in a bun, she smiled graciously as her limousine slid through the adoring crowd, en route to City Hall. The split second in which you saw her was enough because for the first time in your life you were proud to be Chinese in America.2 As the wife of the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, from February-April 1943, Madame Chiang, also known by her maiden name, Soong Mayling, embarked on a carefully- crafted and well-publicized tour to rally American material and moral support for China’s war effort against the Japanese. In an effort to strengthen the U.S.-China alliance and secure military aid, she traveled from coast to coast, giving speeches to influential politicians and crowds of adoring fans. She dined at fancy restaurants, hosted tea parties for American and Chinese politicians and their wives, and traveled in a motorcade with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secret service.3 Wherever she went, a flurry of reporters trailed her, detailing everything from her oratory skills to her wardrobe. An article from Vogue magazine featured 1 Details on Madame Chiang’s Los Angeles Chinatown debut found in: Daniel Marshall Haygood, “Uncovering Henry Luce’s Agenda for China: A Comparative Analysis of Time, Incorporated and other Media Coverage of Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s Trips to America (1943-1948),” PhD Dissertation, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2004, 133. 2 Historians mention that Madame Chiang’s visit made Chinese Americans feel proud of their heritage: K. Scott Wong, “From Pariah to Paragon: Shifting Images of Chinese Americans during World War II,” in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Sucheng Chang and Madeline Hsu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 164; Karen Leong, “The China Mystique: Mayling Soong Chiang, Pearl S. Buck and Anna May Wong in the American Imagination,” PhD Dissertation in History, University of California, Berkeley, 1999, 432; see Figure 1 for a picture of the crowd in San Francisco’s Chinatown from: Harry Thomas, The First Lady of China: The Historic Wartime Visit of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek to the United States in 1943 (New York: International Business Machines Corp., 1943). 3 As described by Chinese Ambassador to the U.K., Wellington Koo: Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library (CURBML), Reminiscences of Wellington Koo. 3 a spread of Madame Chiang in her various cheongsam ensembles while the reporter praised how she spoke in an “un-Chinese pitch and tempo”.4 So while Chinese fashion was in vogue, Chinese accents were not. Important changes occurred simultaneously in the realm of popular culture in America and China in the 1930s that set the stage for this warm reception. These were the shift towards more positive representations of the Chinese in America and the process of Americanization in Republican China (1912-49). Images of the Chinese as villains and scoundrels such as in the popular Fu Manchu novels eventually gave way to images of the Chinese as honest and industrious.5 In The Good Earth (1931), Pearl S. Buck, who was raised in China, provided a more human dimension to the image that many Americans had of masses of Chinese peasants by letting her readers sympathize with the protagonist, Wang Lung.6 Moreover, the fictional character of Charlie Chan in the television detective series was one of the first favorable portrayals of Chinese people, representing them as being assimilated into mainstream American culture.7 The character of the “Dragonlady” in Milton Caniff’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates offered another positive image of Chinese women being smart and attractive.8 These representations, although caricaturized and tailored for American audiences nevertheless exposed mainstream America to “China”. Chinese celebrities increasingly became a fixture in the American landscape. Writing about Peking opera singer Mei Lanfang’s 1930 U.S. tour, Joshua Goldstein demonstrated how Mei’s tour was a “spectacle within a spectacle” because the Chinese media watched the American media watch him; although some reporters felt that Mei was betraying his country, 4 Talmey, “People and Ideas: May Ling Soong Chiang,” 36; See Figure 2: “People and Ideas: Time’s-Eye View of Vogue,” Vogue 101(8), (April 15, 1943): 33. 5 Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 113. 6 Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 27. 7 Haygood, “Uncovering Henry Luce’s Agenda for China”, 76. 8 Daniel Paul Lintin. “From First Lady to Dragon Lady: A Rhetorical Study of Madame Chiang’s Public Personae Before and During her 1943 U.S. Tour,” PhD Thesis, University of Minnesota, 2001, 127. 4 the astounding media coverage that he received in America boosted his reputation in China.9 Political activism by Chinese Americans also influenced American attitudes towards the Chinese. Groups such as the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York aimed to improve the Chinese image in America and win American sympathy to support China’s war against the Japanese. 10 Furthermore, the rise of the Chinese American Press such as the China Tribune, China Daily News and Chinese American Weekly in New York, helped to spread these views.11 Thus by the 1940s, Americans had been exposed to a certain extent, to positive portrayals of Chinese people. At the same time China, especially Shanghai, was experiencing an infiltration of American mass culture. Gone with the Wind was remade into a Chinese version, and women were wearing more revealing cheongsams with higher slits.12 New ideas were disseminated to the rest of the nation through the booming print culture in Shanghai.13 It was during this time that the concept of the “modern woman” (modeng funu 摩登妇女) emerged. The modern woman of the treaty ports was beautiful, educated, cultured, intelligent and independent, very much like Madame Chiang herself. While retaining tokens of Chinese culture such as the high-slit cheongsam, the “modern girl” look was heavily inspired by Hollywood actresses.14 They expressed a new international type of modernity, representing the tumultuous world of capitalist Shanghai while feeding into Western fascination with the exotic Orient. These iconic modern women who signified a new vogue middle-class were essentially “the female 9 Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 277. 10 Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 100. 11 Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics (Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 2010), 119. 12 Nicole Huang, Women, War Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005), 12. 13 Stephen MacKinnon, “Toward a History of the Chinese Press in the Republican Period,” Modern China 23(1), (1997): 7. 14 Madeleine Dong, “Who is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?” In The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization, ed. Alys Eve Weinbaum et. al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 204. 5 face of a progressive China”.15 Foreign correspondents relayed these images back to America. Edna Lee Booker, reporting for the International News Service of New York, described China as a “Flowery Kingdom” that was “struggling toward Democracy…with eyes looking westward”.16 She saw Americanized treaty-port women as the harbingers of modernity and democracy. American perceptions of China were highly feminized despite the fact that China was fighting a bloody war against the Japanese. It was largely through this process of feminization that Americans were able to accept Chinese people because they were different enough to be intriguing, but not too different to be threatening. The topic of Republican-era Shanghai glamour has long fascinated historians. Stella Dong commented on the vice and corruption by detailing how the city was “rapacious because greed was its driving force; strife-ridden because calamity was always at the door; licentious because it catered to every depravity known to man…decadent because morality…was irrelevant”.17 Chang-tai Hung described the city as “a place brimming with artistic achievement and a newfound sophistication”, and a “pacesetter of modern popular culture”. 18 Similarly, Nicole Huang’s writing reflects much fascination with Western influence in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Through an examination of women’s literary journals, she argued that “the travels of Scarlett O’Hara in wartime Shanghai were indicative of the powerful presence of Hollywood images in day-to-day life in the besieged city”.19 This imagery is noteworthy because Laura Tyson Li depicted Madame Chiang as being “small, dark, fiery and photogenic” and “reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara”.20 15 Antonia Finnane, “What Should Chinese Women Wear?: A National Problem,” Modern China 22(2), (1996): 111.