There's a nice bit about singer Li Tei Ming, Charlie Low's second wife and also one of the reasons he opened Forbidden City. The description of her singing "Loch Lomond" ("a swing version with Congo rhythms, with an accent partly Scots-Pacific Coast and partly 'Way Down South Cantonese") really drives home the connection between the Chinese American nightclub performers of the 1940s and vaudevillians of the early century like Lee Tung Foo.
It's also interesting to read that "in some of the clubs half the patronage is Chinese". This goes against the general impression I've gotten that the audiences were mainly non-Asian tourists and servicemen.
Finally, let me add my two cents about the oft-repeated assertion, mentioned below, that the reason clubs such as Forbidden City hired all-white bands was because Chinese American musicians just couldn't play Western music. Well, I recently learned that by the 1930s Chinatown already had two dance orchestras: the Chinatown Knights and the Cathayans. In fact, Andy Wong, who opened the Chinese Sky Room, used to be a trumpeter in the Chinatown Knights. Evidently he once hired some of his fellow band members to play at his club, and guess what — they were picketed by the local musician's union, which excluded Chinese Americans from membership at the time. Now, that puts the issue in a new light, doesn't it?
CATHAY HEY-HEY!
BY JIM MARSHALL
It took seventy-five years to break down Chinatown's ban against its daughters dancing and singing for the barbaric whites — but now look at them.
It was a bit confusing until you got the hang of it. This pretty American girl — Li Tei Ming — who was pure Chinese and a philosophy major from the University of Washington, was singing Loch Lomond, a swing version with Congo rhythms, with an accent partly Scots-Pacific Coast and partly 'Way Down South Cantonese.
"By birth and sentiment I'm an American," explained Miss Li, just to clear everything up, "but professionally I'm Chinese, and I can also sing Loch Lomond with an Irish brogue, a Cockney accent or in the South American way."
This made everything as plain as your Grandaunt Emma, but things went haywire again when a Chinese waiter, speaking Spanish with a Texas drawl, came around and served a long Cuban drink to a tiny, gray-haired, feet-bound Chinese woman in a long, black Mandarin gown, who spoke nothing but the Cantonese singsong.... All this was in a night club called the Forbidden City, on Sutter Street in San Francisco, and was part of a scenario titled The Triump of American Folkways over Orientalism.
Until recently the Chinese in America held out pretty well against the mad customs of the Americans. Although, as the years passed, more and more "Chinese" were born here and educated in American schools, the stern family rule of the Orient held sway. The children learned Cantonese and were not allowed to have much truck with the barbaric whites, most of whom couldn't trace back their ancestors more than three generations. Then along came the war, and we became China's ally against the common enemy, and things changed.
It Used to Be Different
Up to three years ago San Francisco's Chinatown — the biggest Chinese city in the Western Hemisphere — maintained its customs and dignities almost untouched by the West. It was — and still is — under the iron rule of the Six Companies, which mete out justice and keep order so well that the appearance of a Chinese in a city court has always been a rarity.
The Chinese had their own theaters and amusements but, as a concession to the tourist trade, maintained occasional tong wars and trick opium dens, many of the former being dreamed up in dull nights in the police-station press room. A tong, actually, is just the Celestial version of the Rotary, or Elks or Moose, but tradition insists that any gunnery or hatcheting in Chinatown is a tong war and that's all there is to it.
There was a lot of critical chatter around the Six Companies headquarters in 1936 when a rebel named Charley Low opened a cocktail bar on Grant Avenue. No Chinese girl was allowed inside, and at first no Chinese came. Tourists did, though, so many of them that in 1938 Charley had Confucius twirling in his grave at the opening of the first Chinese night club on the American plan.
It was tough going, because the ban against Chinese girls in such barbarous places still held and, to top that, no one ever has been able to assemble half a dozen Chinese into a band capable of playing Western music. The boys from South China just can't get those Congo rhythms. Bands in Chinese clubs are white, to this day.
When Charley did succeed in getting a dozen girls as dancers and singers, it still was hard to teach them American dance steps — although they were all American-born and educated. A Chinese-girl dance line still is far behind the Rockettes, but since it is becoming increasingly hard for Americans to discover any rhythm in today's music, nobody minds much.
At first, only tourists patronized Chinese night clubs, expecting to whiff opium smoke and maybe see a hatchet or two flying. All they saw was Miss Joy Ching (Home Economics, University of Chicago) doing a strip tease as The Girl in the Gilded Cage; and Miss Mary "Butch" Ong dancing along with the Misses Ruby Chew, Rose Chan, Ruth Lee, Minnie Yuke, Eleanor Wong and Faye Ying, who were being the Chinese Floradora Sextet at the moment.
Too New for Sophistication
After a while, the San Franciscans themselves began dropping around to Chinese night spots, and finally the older Chinese themselves peeked in to see what was going on and became regulars. In some of the clubs half the patronage is Chinese.
Now, there are more than a hundred Chinese girl entertainers and waitresses in Chinatown's dozen clubs and bars, but many of the old Chinese families still forbid their daughters to appear in floor shows or mingle in cocktail lounges with people from outlandish places like Iowa and New York.
China changes slowly, and the night club idea still is so new that there is, among the girls, none of the hard-boiled sophistication that is the trademark of their white sisters in Eastern American cities. They're more like a bunch of college kids having a good time — and in fact, more than two thirds of them are graduates of Western universities.
The entertainment is happy-go-lucky, and astounded patrons are sometimes enthralled when the lad handling the spotlight lets go all holds and tries out a white searchlight on a fan dancer instead of the traditional misty blue. And Miss Ching, who poses almost n-k-d at times, has a very fine appendicitis scar two and one-eighth inches in length, and thinks nothing of it. No customer has ever complained.
Most of the entertainers are versatile and a favorite amusement of the line girls is translating American songs into Cantonese — in which language they become even more baffling than in the original. Li Tei Ming, who stars as a singer in the Forbidden City show, not only designed the club layout, but painted the murals.
Every Chinese entertainer imitates some American, and the club floors are crowded with Chinese Bing Crosbys, Chinese Sally Rands, Chinese Maxine Sullivans and Chinese Fred Astaires.
Success of the Chinese invasion of the entertainment field has resulted in the making of Chinese talkies in San Francisco. With the usual Oriental economy a Chinese director can take a thousand feet of negative and make nine hundred ninety-nine feet of movie out of it. The result appalls Hollywood, but wows Chinatown, where the kids gather around for autographs when Chinese stars, unknown to the West, attend premieres. And in Los Angeles, where a brand-new Chinatown has been built, there is going to be a theater for producing Chinese plays in English — or as much of an eight-hour Chinese drama as the white race can take at a gulp.
There's one Western custom no Chinese girl entertainer will surrender to, however. She won't bleach her hair. There are no Chinese blondes — and there never will be.
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