“Maybe It's Time for a Little History Lesson Here” (P
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NOTE: Draft for discussion at HKU Asian American Graphic Narratives Symposium NOT FOR CITATION/CIRCULATION NOTE: Illustrations/photos will be available during the presentation of the paper “Maybe it’s time for a little history lesson here…” Visual Knowledge in The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam Staci Ford (History/American Studies Program, HKU: [email protected]) My paper will be of a slightly different nature than others presented in this symposium as my background is in women’s history/cultural history. Over the past several years I have noticed that my students have come to rely more readily on various graphic narrative‐type representations of history. The “cartoonification” of multiple interpretations of the past has become a way for my students to distill large amounts of information into “chewable bites” as well as to help them remember facts and ideas that they might forget without a visual reminder of meanings. Texts ranging from America: A Cartoon History, and Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism to Understanding Postfeminism (and in between a host of general histories focusing on various events and time periods) are used not only as shortcuts and time savers, but as ways to cut through what students see as unnecessary jargon, complicated chronological narratives or elaborate historiographical exegesis. As one particularly enthusiastic fan of this genre succinctly put it: “I’d like to have the time to complex‐ify but I have to simplify.” Students also appreciate the ways in which graphic narratives are also often revisionist histories where text and image labor together to make visible that which was previously ignored or marginalized. Monica Chiu’s presence at Hong Kong University this year as our Visiting Fulbright Professor has prompted me to think more consciously about the ways various representations of history have gone graphic. As she notes, “while prose memoirs perform political work aesthetically through words, graphic authors can use page space metaphorically and literally.”1 Because, as she notes, graphic narratives produce “visual knowledge” that helps close “gaps between official and private accounts of historical telling…the abstractions of ideology, politics, and nationality are solidified in graphic novels’ sequencing between narrative and images.”2 In this paper, I’d like to use Chiu’s words as a starting point from which to explore and reflect upon visual knowledge, the gaps between various accounts of micro/macro histories, and the solidification as well as dissolution of various abstractions of ideology, identity, and memory in Ann Marie Fleming’s conceptualizations of the story of her great‐grandfather, Long Tack Sam. (I am indebted to Monica for introducing me to the graphic memoir which was published in 2007 ‐and the 2004 film from which it is adapted‐ The Magical Life of Long Tack 1 Monica Chiu, “Sequencing and Contingent Individualism in the Graphic, Postcolonial Spaces of Satrapi’s Persepolis and Okubo’s Citizen 13660,” English Language Notes 46.2 Fall/Winter 2008, p. 1000. 2 Chiu, “Sequencing and Contingent Individualism,” p. 113. Sam.) I offer my take on this engaging text as it links to other work I have written in the domain of transnational American studies and diasporic Chinese film, particularly films that address the US/Hong Kong cross‐cultural encounter. I will argue here, as I have done elsewhere (particularly in my work on Mable Cheung Yuen‐ting’s film An Autumn’s Tale) that “playful” texts can be easily overlooked by scholars even as they exercise significant influence in the ways in which they pinpoint what is missing from more “standard” historical texts. (This is a point that is made repeatedly in the papers that will be presented at this conference and it is taken for granted in the standard texts about graphic narrative as a genre but an idea that my more “traditional” historian colleagues are often reluctant to embrace.) The film and graphic memoir brings previously overlooked knowledge as well as personal stories to light. Fleming’s work constitutes an expanded archive, in the manner Antoinette Burton speaks of in her work on women, memory, and history/material culture.3 In writing this paper I realized that I could think of very few texts that allow for such a range of explorations around identity, memory, diaspora, gender, cosmopolitanism, globalism, narratology, Asian America/n studies, gender, cultural production, displacement, and transnationality better than The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (film and graphic narrative hereafter abbreviated as LTS). Fleming has pieced together – based on five years of travel and research that took her literally across the globe ‐ her great‐grandfather’s history via “bits” of evidence ranging from playbills and newspaper clippings to old 16 mm footage, theatre backdrops and 3 See Antoinette Burton, “Memory Becomes Her” (complete reference to follow). costumes, oral history, and family photos. It is history as collage and scrapbook (and is different aesthetically from the other texts we will discuss in this conference although there are some common elements) and an important addition to the histories of vaudeville, immigration, transoceanic links in popular culture (particularly between the U.S., Europe, and Asia) as well as Asia (n) American history. Long Tack Sam (also known as Tack Sam Long and Sam Tack Long) was born in Wuqiao, Shandong Province in the early 20th century. Although details of his early life are few and contradictory (something Fleming uses to artistic advantage in her work) he joined a troupe of acrobats there and went on to tour the world, eventually starting his own performing company and becoming one of the best ‐ known figures in vaudeville during its heyday. As Fleming proudly (and playfully) reminds us, her great‐grandfather shared the bill with the Marx Bros “on the 2nd‐ ever show at the Palace Theatre, Broadway’s preeminent vaudeville house. He played there seven times! That’s more than Harry Houdini (okay, so Houdini died prematurely), the point is…Long Tack Sam was big!”4 An internationally known acrobat, magician, entertainer, and entrepreneur he was performer, manager, investor, and restaurateur. When he returned to China, he did so as a cosmopolitan performer and entrepreneur who became a major shareholder in five theatres in China. As Fleming declares, “Sam brings western glamor back to the Orient. Everyone loves it.” On tour in Austria, he met and fell in love with Fleming’s great‐grandmother Poldi, whom he married between 4 Fleming, LTS, 35. performances. The couple had two daughters and a son and the daughters became part of his stage act. In addition to working with some of the most famous of vaudevillians and Hollywood celebrities, Long Tack Sam has been memorialized by the likes of George Burns and Orson Wells. A mediator, an operator, and self‐appointed ambassador of Chinese culture in several Western countries and of the West in China, Sam was an enterprising soul who knew something of playfulness himself. He played on –and arguably fed‐ Western notions of the “exotic Orient” while also pushing audiences to greater understanding of the beauty and depth of various aspects of Chinese material and performance culture. Yet for all of his early international fame and his own energetic promotion of Chinese acrobatics, magic, and culture, as Fleming reminds us, he himself was forgotten. In trying to explain Sam’s final disappearing act – his own – Fleming writes : I think he was forgotten in the West because of the death of vaudeville. Because he didn’t go into the movies. Because he was Chinese. But he was also forgotten in China, perhaps, ultimately, because he did not make it his home. But what puzzles me is why he was forgotten by his own family. (Okay, we did celebrate his birthday, his death day and his anniversary, in good Chinese style – while Granny was still alive – but we knew nothing about his accomplishments). Is it a show business thing? (Yes, children of show business parents are often resentful.) Is it an immigrant thing? (Yes, immigrants often don’t take their old stories into their new lives.) Is it because we all keep moving, keep busy? (Yes, that, too!) Maybe we just weren’t listening.”5 Even today, nearly a decade after Fleming’s film appeared, Long Tack Sam’s story is still virtually unknown among most historians and there has been little scholarly follow‐up on Fleming’s work. The work that exists focuses on the film rather than the graphic narrative. There is no mention of Sam in Robert Lee’s volume on Asian American popular culture or in any of the general histories written by scholars in Asian American history and studies such as Gary Okihiro and Ronald Takaki, and I have yet to find a mention of him in the monographs and somewhat more narrow cultural histories of Asian American history or American studies although Sam enjoys the odd cameo appearance in some histories of vaudeville.6 One film studies colleague refers to it The Magical World of LTS as “a fun little film,” but says nothing really has been written about it and while it has been noted as an important text by scholars in ethnic studies, it is mined more for its use as a gateway text to the discussion of identity than a text worthy of critical exploration in its own right. To be fair, Roccio Davis considers the film in her work Relative Histories, but it is one of many texts in an ambitious line‐up of memoir/ family auto/biography and as such, is not considered in depth in its own right. However, Davis’ opening 5 Fleming, LTS, 156‐57. 6 Robert G.