The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies

Author:Peter Ho Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

DIM SUM

In Hong Kong, perhaps drunk, perhaps feeling the strain, she forgets that the birdcage microphone is on, insults the delegation that comes out to welcome her. A near-riot ensues. A banner proclaiming her “the flower of film” is torn down. Garlands are crushed underfoot; their heavy scent rises over the jostling crowd.

Chicken! the mob bays (in Cantonese now, so she knows they’re calling her a whore). Rotten cunt!

It’s Newsreel who pulls her away and hustles her into a cab.

“Thank you,” she tells him. For just a moment she had seen he was torn, debating whether to keep filming.

“It’s nothing. I’ve been in worse scrapes. In this business you learn to move fast. To protect your camera.” He cradles it in his lap. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

“The mob. The name-calling.”

“Oh, that. I’ve been calling myself names since I was ten.”

“Nicer ones, I hope.”

The taxi hurtles through the streets, scattering bicycles.

She sings a little ditty to herself.

“What’s that?” Newsreel asks.

“Just a silly number I used to perform at parties: Anna May Wong / From Olde Hong Kong / She Can’t Be Wrong!”

“I didn’t know you’d been to Hong Kong before,” he says politely.

“I haven’t.”

He offers her a cigarette, snaps his lighter in her face, snips it closed.

“They say you got your nickname in Jinan,” she tells him, exhaling. “Covering the massacre?”

He nods.

“I saw that footage. Two thousand Chinese civilians, by the Imperial Japanese Army.” She shakes her head. “And now you’re filming me.”

Outside, coppery light filters through the banyans. In the breeze their leaves shimmer like sequins on a dress.

Subsequently she is warned by the Nationalist authorities not to travel inland to see her father until tempers cool. He is warned not to receive her, on pain of deportation.

Her friend and costar in several pictures, Warner Oland, is also in town. He played her father, Fu Manchu, in Daughter of the Dragon years earlier, and still calls her daughter (though when he played her coercive lover in Shanghai Express he observed, “This is all getting a bit incestuous, no?”). If she can’t see her real father, she tells Newsreel glibly, she’ll settle for her movie father. The show must go on.

But she hopes Oland will help her too. He is the star of the Charlie Chan series, the most popular movies in China, and has been feted on his own tour, despite—an irony that pierces her to the quick—playing his most famous role in yellowface; he’s a Swede, among friends goes by Jack, short for his real name, Johann. But the Chinese don’t seem to mind, or even to notice. They love Charlie Chan, as a positive portrayal of a Chinese, no matter by whom, and in Oland’s case it doesn’t hurt that he stays in character for interviews and appearances, answering to “Mr. Chan” and speaking of his pleasure “at visiting home of venerable ancestors.” My bloody line, she thinks viciously.

She should resent him, but he’s been kind to her in the past, run lines with her and helped her hit her marks, and she respects him.

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