CineMedusa

Movie Reviews

by Mara Math

Marion Wong: Chinese Film Pioneer

by Mara Math

First Chinese American Filmmaker a "Liberated Woman" in 1916

The Curse of Quon Gwon (silent, 1916), dir. Marion Wong

This year's Asian American Film Festival, March 15–25, offers audiences their first chance ever to view The Curse of Quon Gwon, the earliest film made in the United States by an Asian American. The 1916 silent film is also the first ever made by an Asian American woman, an historic accomplishment in its own right, and all the more impressive in light of the fact that Oakland native Marion Wong was only 21 when she wrote and directed the film — and only had a formal third grade education. [A scene from the film is pictured here]

"First Chinese Film Drama Written and Portrayed by Girl" reads the headline on a May 11, 1916 Oakland news story, referring to the fact that Marion also played third lead. She also, it should be noted, coached the other actors, directed the shooting, and designed the costumes for the 30 Chinese cast members. Although the newspaper story gets some details wrong, such as the first name of said "girl ," it is one of the only records in which Marion speaks about the film:

"I had never seen any Chinese movies," Miss Wong said today, "so I decided to introduce them to the world. I first wrote the love story. Then I decided that people who are interested in my people and my country would like to see some of the customs and manners of China. So I added to the love drama many scenes depicting these things. I do hope it will be a success."

For a taste of the obstacles Wong was up against, consider the last paragraph of that 1916 article:

"This is not the first time Miss Wong has brought her race to the attention of the Americans [sic]. She recently surprised her white sisters by appearing in concert, singing operatic airs in English and Italian."

Marion Wong was in fact a third-generation American, her family having emigrated to the States during the Gold Rush of the 1850s. The viciously racist Exclusion Act of 1888 and its successor the Geary Act, howwever, forbade Chinese residents from becoming citizens. Due to another provision of the Act , the Wong family trip to China that inspired the film was limited to one year; if out of the U.S. a day longer, Chinese Americans were not allowed to return. [Pictured left: Marion as an adolescent]

Marion and two of her brothers undertook their trip in order to bring home their Chinese-born mates for arranged marriages. Marion refused to go through with hers — "She just didn't like the guy," her niece Gala Wong Davis recounts — and her American-born mother Chin See backed her stance. One brother died of smallpox while the trio was in China; the second, Albert, married Violet, who became Marion's best friend as well as her sister-in-law and the star of her film. Marion and Violet were exceptionally close, and would often go out to teahouses and dance with each other, telling the crowds that they were "foreign princesses," and hence were affectionately nicknamed "the Chinese princesses." [Pictured right: Violet and Marion (left to right)]

The siblings could not have chosen more significant dates for their journey to China had they tried: Traveling from August, 1910 to August, 1911, the trio was privileged to witness the first Chinese Revolution, in which the Dynasty was deposed and the feudal system overturned by Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary Kuomintang. In The Curse of Quon Gwon, Marion used the Revolution as the backdrop and context against which the characters' actions are thrown into relief.

Family members and others hypothesize that Marion may have been inspired to begin moviemaking by meeting members of Charlie Chaplin's film crew: In 1915 Chaplin was filming around the corner from the family's Oakland restaurant, Edwin's Cafe, where Marion worked. (The Oakland Museum displays a copy of a 1913 Orpheum Theater Guide in which Edwin's Cafe is advertised.) The camerawork is smooth and professional, and Wong family folklore says that Marion secured one of Chaplin's cameramen for her shoot. Support for this theory can be seen in the special effects, which are quite sophisticated for the time, as when the heroine's traditional necklace and bracelets turn into a chain and handcuffs.

Gregory Yee Mark, Marion's great-nephew and a renowned Professor of Ethnic Studies now at Sacramento State University, credits his extensive career in Ethnic Studies in part to his grandmother Violet and the film. "I've got an old film in the basement," Violet told him in 1968, instructing him forcefully, "Greg, take care of this film!"

Because Mark had already asked his grandmother several oral history questions, he thinks she may have intuited that studying their heritage would become his life's work: Less than a year later, in 1969, Mark was one of the activists involved in the U.C. Berkeley student strike that succeeded in bringing in Ethnic Studies. "Saving that film was really my first assignment in Ethnic Studies," Mark says. He transferred the film to 16mm to preserve what was left, but says, "I can't really take the credit for preserving the film; it was Grandmother's idea, and she paid for the transfer work."

"The Curse of Quon Gwon was definitely a family project," Mark says. Not only was Marion's sister-in-law Violet the lead, but Marion herself took the role of villainess; the heroine's mother-in-law is played Marion's mother, Chin See, Violet's real-life mother-in-law; family friend Harvey Soo Hoo serves as the hero; the baby in the film is a young cousin; and the toddler pictured at the end of the film is Violet's first child, Stella. A coolie who appears only briefly may have been played by Marion's brother Albert. In addition, Marion's sister Alice Lim was responsible for hair and makeup.

Due to disintegration of the silver nitrate over the decades, only two to three reels of Marion Wong's original four to seven remain, amounting to approximately 35 minutes, so the nature of the plot beyond the love story is open to question. Marion's nieces Wong Davis and Marcella Wong Yahashiro, Violet's daughters, watched at least portions of the film on home projectors a few times in the 1970s, and recall a drama or melodrama. "It was a very, very sad film but with a happy ending," remembers Wong Yahashiro. "My mother, the heroine, is turned out in the snow by her mother-in-law because of lies by Marion['s character], and a live animal comes along, a sheep, and she cuddles with the sheep to stay alive. It made me cry! Then her husband finds her in the snow and carries her into the house, and the lies of the bad woman are exposed‍…"

Another synopsis of the film suggests that the plot concerns the gods cursing a Chinese family for their Westernization (Quon Gwon, sometimes spelled Kuan Kung, being the god of war and monetary wealth).

Greg Mark offers a different analysis, that Marion chose the Revolution as the background for her film because she wanted to show the changes in culture in China and at home.

"East really met West in Marion," Mark declares, pointing to her independent nature and refusal of an arranged marriage. He remembers his great-aunt as a standout, more flamboyant than the average Chinese woman of the time because she wore noticeable makeup and elegant clothes. Gala Wong Davis also remembers Marion as "stylish," and her sister Marcella echoes that assessment. "Marion was the glamorous aunt," Wong Yahashiro recalls with a slight dreaminess in her tone. "She had beautiful Chinese dresses, and she wore mink coats." [Pictured right: Marion in midlife]

In another example of Marion's modernism, she and her husband Kim Seung Hong, who married in 1917, were strong supporters of Sun Yat-sen. The revolutionary leader was born in the same area as Violet, and his son attended U.C. Berkeley with Kim Seung Hong, a fact of which the couple are said to have been quite proud. (Marion's sister Rose married Dilly Ah Tye, son of the progressive businessman Yee Ah-Tye, who was unusual in educating his daughters as well as his sons; the pioneering Ah-Tye family is the subject of two histories, Lani Ah Tye's Bury My Bones in China as well as Howard Ah-Tye's Resourceful Chinese.)

Marion met her husband at one of the musical events she coordinated at Edwin's Cafe; by all accounts Kim Seung Hong was as entranced by her beauty and her lyrical soprano as by her magnetic personality. As a precedent-setting Chinese-American himself, Hong was a good match for Marion: He was the first Chinese student to graduate from U.C. Berkeley, and the first Chinese electrical engineer in the U.S., and is said to have invented the degaussing process so vital to American success in World War II.

Marion eventually took up the family restaurant business, founding and running the Singapor Hut restaurant in Richmond, California, each incarnation of which was larger and more successful than its predecessor. At this restaurant, too, Marion held musical cabarets, sometimes including an early version of karaoke.

Sid Grauman, of the famed Grauman's Chinese theater, heard Marion sing and hired her to sing professionally in vaudeville productions. "All her life, Aunt Marion loved to sing," Wong Yahashiro recalls, "She played different Chinese instruments, she sang Chinese opera, she'd always sing at family gatherings. She had a beautiful voice." [Pictured left: Marion in traditional Chinese costume]

"You see in some of the early newspaper reports that my mother went to Stanford," Marion's daughter Arabella Hong-Young says, "that she graduated from Sarah Lawrence, all that stuff. None of it's true — my mother only had a third-grade education, which was typical for Chinese girls then, but she was self-educated and she was the smartest woman I knew, My father was the college grad, but he always listened to her advice about business and everything else."

When Arabella's high-school music teacher recognized Arabella's talent and advised her parents that she should attend Juilliard, Kim Hong was not impressed. His response was along the traditional lines of, "She's only a girl‍…" It was Marion who took up the battle and changed her husband's opinion, making sure that Arabella was able to attend the most prestigious music school in the country.

Marion's advocacy on her daughter's behalf paid off. Of Marion and Kim's five children, Arabella is the one who has enjoyed a stellar career of the kind Marion might have pursued for herself if possible: Arabella Hong established the role of Helen Chiao, the Sewing Lady, in the original Broadway production of The Flower Drum Song, and appears on the 1958 cast recording singing the song that Richard Rodgers wrote especially for her, "Look Away, My Love." She laughs when describing why she left the production: "I was five months pregnant, and I could not see showing any more and singing, "Love, look away! Love, look away from me‍…" [Pictured right: Arabella Hong-Young in The Flower Drum Song]

Rodgers and Hammerstein asked Arabella to resume her role for the movie version of Flower Drum, but she was due shortly to give birth to her first child — an earlier pregnancy having miscarried — and felt unable to take up the offer. Hong went on to teach singing and acting at Herbert Berghof Studios for 30 years, as well as teaching privately. She has won seven major vocal awards for her classical concert singing, and has toured internationally.

Like her mother, Arabella is a woman of great vigor and independence, and even as she prepares to turn 80 next October, she maintains a thriving career, which includes lecturing at Juilliard, teaching Master Classes, conducting entertainment industry workshops for actors and singers, recording the narration for the audiobook of Diki Tsering's My Son, the Dalai Lama, and appearing in numerous commercials and print ads. If you've seen an insurance or medical ad featuring seniors recently, it's probably Arabella who is representing the Asian demographic. [Pictured left: Arabella Hong-Young today]

Arabella's daughter, Lisa Kumaradjaja, herself the possessor of numerous degrees, adds, "My mother always looked at my grandmother with great reverence, as a liberated woman, because Marion took the initiative. She was a strong, independent woman."

Sadly, although the family loved the movies — Greg's mother, Clara, so revered the iconic Chinese actress Anna May Wong that she took the middle name "May," and in fact named her son after Gregory Peck — Marion did not seem to realize the importance of her own accomplishment in creating The Curse of Quon Gwon. She died at 75 without ever having been been interviewed or written up in later life as the pioneering filmmaker she was.

Marion's family members all agree that Marion never mentioned the film other than to occasionally acknowledge that she'd made it. Her sister-in-law Violet, star of the film, was equally taciturn on the topic: "We'd ask Mother about it, and she'd just shrug," recounts Wong Yashahiro, who says the term "bankrupt" was also used, with the implication that the film's costs had bankrupted the family. "It didn't make money, so it was considered a failure. And Chinese don't talk about failure."

Financial bonanza or not, Marion Wong's creation of the film is of great significance, and will be celebrated as such when The Curse of Quon Gwon screens at the Oakland Museum on Saturday, March 24. After a private screening for family members, the Museum will present a public showing at 2:00 p.m., followed by a panel discussion featuring Prof. Mark, film historian Steven Qong, Marion's niece, poet Mai-Lon Wong Gittelsohn, and journalist William Wong [no relation]. A tea and fortune-cookie reception will be held after the panel. The film is free with admission to the Museum, but seating is limited, so come early.

The screening of his great-aunt's film is for Mark "a journey, a coming full circle. I've concentrated on my father's side of the family and the Chinese immigrant experience in my career, and being involved with saving the film has made me want to explore the American-born Chinese life, an important facet of our history."

Mark's seven-year-old daughter hears him mention Marion as he is being interviewed for this article, and interrupts her father to ask his help in laying out the Chinese suit she will wear to the film's premiere, two weeks away. "Alexa and her brother have always heard my father's story, and they are very proud of him, and now Alexa is very proud of her famous Aunt Marion," Mark explains, with some pride of his own, "and she can't wait for the show."

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For more information:

Asian American Film Festival:

http://www.asianamericanfilmfestival.org/2007/

Arabella Hong-Young:

http://www.arabellahong-young.com/

(Check out the her live performance of her Flower Drum number on the Ed Sullivan Show!)

Nanying Stella Wong:

Chinese Historical Society of America Museum and Learning Center —

Nanying Stella Wong: A Tribute

Chinese Exclusion Act/Geary Act:

http://sun.menloschool.org/~mbrody/ushistory/angel/exclusion_act/

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