The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [110]
If even Wong could not gain a major role in a film about China, then other Chinese actors faced even slimmer prospects. Only a few worked in the film industry, most of them as extras who rarely had speaking roles. The majority of them did little more than provide exotic background for films set in Asia. The work was sporadic; months, even years, could elapse between calls for jobs. Whenever a major film with a Chinese story line went before the cameras, some Chinese extras dared not venture far from the phone for fear of losing a rare chance at work.
A few enterprising individuals realized that they could make far more money in Hollywood as agents than as actors. As in other industries, entrepreneurial Chinese Americans assumed middleman roles in Hollywood, matching white capital with Chinese labor. Actress Bessie Loo started her own talent agency in Los Angeles. Tom Gubbins, the Eurasian owner of the Asiatic Costume Company, earned money both from the Chinese actors and the studios. As an agent, he placed extras in movies like The Good Earth (1937) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), charging the standard 10 percent commission on the actors’ pay. He also made a fortune from the studios by renting out rickshaws, costumes, and props. And because he spoke both Cantonese and English fluently (he was born in Shanghai and reared in Hong Kong), Gubbins earned a third income as an interpreter, translating the director’s instructions for the extras.
As these middlemen helped Hollywood package images of the Chinese for mass consumption, fiction replaced reality even for some Chinese Americans. A movie set was “the closest we would ever get to China,” journalist Louise Leung observed in an article for the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine in 1936. She described a typical day for a Chinese American extra, when “youngsters, Hollywood-stylish in gaucho shirts and berets, stood alongside Chinatown grandfathers who had never become reconciled to American shores.” The extras walked through a replica of a south Chinese village: “The mingled odor of dried ducks, incense, preserved ginger, scented rolls of silk gave the marketplace a most authentic Chinese aura, the smell of Chinatown, the smell of China. The native Chinese looked at it all with a yearning nostalgia; even the young one with the movie eyelashes murmured, ‘Gosh, this must be just like China.’ ”
To many American-born Chinese, the nation of China represented an ideal, a utopian world in which they would be fully accepted. According to Victor Wong, who spent his childhood in San Francisco Chinatown during the 1930s, “the older people, they were always talking about going back home. All the time. ‘When we go back to China we’ll have this and we’ll have that; there won’t be any more discrimination.’ ”
Even before the depression, some Chinese immigrant parents had encouraged their American-born children to straddle both countries: to obtain their education in the United States but build their careers in China. This was the message that Sam Chang, a southern California farm pioneer, passed down to his son in 1925. In the course of urging his brother—who held a medical degree from Georgetown University and a position at Beijing Union Hospital and was contemplating a return to the States—to stay in China, Chang wrote to his son, “If your uncle comes back to America, he might make a little money, but his reputation and social rank will be low; and his knowledge will be wasted. He will never become a respected man as America is the most racist society and very prejudiced against the Yellow race of people.”
The Great Depression seemed to ratify those