Jue Quon Tai: Chinese Princess Says "Gee"

Allow me to introduce Jue Quon Tai, one of the fascinating Chinese American vaudeville performers featured in Krystyn R. Moon's Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s. I'm still trying to uncover a few more facts before I relate her colorful life and career, but I couldn't resist posting this teaser in the meantime.

Miss Jue made her stage debut in 1915 as a headliner on the Pantages vaudeville circuit and, in the accompanying publicity blitz, portrayed herself as a chain-smoking, slang-talking, 19-year-old princess on the lam from an arranged marriage in China. She was the original Chinese flapper, long before Anna May Wong — who was just ten years old at the time. Here's an article from the December 9, 1915 issue of the New York Times.

CHINESE PRINCESS HERE

She Says "Gee" to Reporters and
Smokes Sixty Cigarettes a Day

Miss Jue Quon Tai of Peking, China, who confesses to having been a Princess before the Celestial Empire became a prosaic republic with ballot boxes and suffragists, is staying at the Hotel Astor for a few days. Princess Jue Q. Tai arrived yesterday afternoon from San Francisco, where she had been seeing the fair for four months, and she has achieved her life-long ambition of seeing New York. The Princess is 19 years old and uses colloquial English.

"Gee," she said to a group of six surprised reporters yesterday, "but my father would certainly be wild if he knew I was here in New York all alone. He objected like everything to my coming, but I just came anyhow. You see, I have never been around very much alone. I learned to speak English from a tutor, and oh, yes, I went to a finishing school for girls near Canton. But all I learned there was to smoke cigarettes. I smoked fifty or sixty a day.

"When I first came here alone this time, I had a hard time to get used to newspaper men. I slammed the door in one's face in San Francisco, and he gave me the awfullest roast next day. His paper said I was the most up-stage royalty that had ever come to San Francisco."

"Do you think there is any chance of your country becoming a monarchy?" she was asked.

"All the chance in the world," was the prompt reply. "The royal party has all the money."

The Princess's father is named Jue But Hee. According to the Princess, he is of royal blood, and is a mandarin of the fourth rank.