Lee Tung Foo: Not Your Average Hollywood Chinese Servant

I recently watched Phantom of Chinatown (1940), the final entry of the Mr. Wong film series — mostly to see Chinese American actor Keye Luke in what I believe was the only leading role of his career. While it was undeniably a step forward to cast a Chinese actor rather than another white actor in the role of detective Mr. Wong, Phantom of Chinatown is certainly not the vehicle I would have chosen to showcase the charming Keye Luke (who would have been fantastic in something like a romantic comedy).

Anyway, all of this is a roundabout way of saying that for me the real standout of the film was the fellow who plays Keye Luke's servant. Just look at the way that he owns the stage in the following scene.



My curiosity piqued, I was surprised to discover that this plucky servant was played by none other than Lee Tung Foo, a pioneering Chinese American vaudeville performer that I had the pleasure of learning about in Krystyn Moon's must-read book Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s.

Lee was the first Chinese American (born in Watsonville, California in 1875) to perform in the American idiom on the vaudeville stage. Making his debut on January 30, 1905, at the Empire Theater in Oakland, California, he challenged Chinese stereotypes and long-held notions that the Chinese were unwilling, and indeed unable, to become American. It must have been quite a shock for white audiences, accustomed to thinking of Chinese either as uncivilized heathens or bizarre "celestials", to see Lee dressed in a tuxedo singing light operatic arias only to switch to a kilt for his famous Scottish impersonations. As he liked to tell audiences, while speaking in a brogue, "[you] may not believe it, but there is some Scotch in me, honest, nearly half a pint". Besides all that, Lee could also "sing Gregorian chants, cowboy ballads, hillbilly groans, French chansons, German lieder, Italian opera, and ... Cossack battle hymns" (Oakland Tribune, June 27, 1936).

By 1920 Lee had stopped performing on the vaudeville stage, married a lady named Alice Pitch, and settled down in New York as a restaurateur. At some point he returned to the stage, appearing in minor theatrical roles on Broadway. In 1936 director Lewis Milestone remembered seeing Lee in a play called Roar, China and persuaded him to take a role in his film The General Died at Dawn. Lee ended up moving to Hollywood and playing bit parts in 67 films over the next 36 years. His last appearance on the silver screen was in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Four years later, he died on May 1, 1966 at the age of 91.

Lee Tung Foo was truly a man ahead of his times. While I'm tempted to feel sad about the trajectory of his performing career from vaudeville pioneer to Hollywood stereotype, I'm also curious to check out all his bit roles for that brief — but unmistakable — glimmer of America's "Original Chinese Entertainer".



References and Further Reading

• The Unsung Joe: Lee Tung Foo


• Krystyn Moon, "Lee Tung Foo and the Making of a Chinese American Vaudevillian, 1900s-1920s" (Journal of Asian American Studies, Feb 2005)