Feeling Like an Outsider: Harold Acton, Anna May Wong, and Decadent Cosmopolitanism in China

Abstract

In his Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), the decadent modernist Harold Acton (1904-1994) chose to include a photograph of himself in his home in Beijing with the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961) [fig. 1]. Wong, known for her roles in The Toll of the Sea (1922), The Thief of Baghdad (1924), and Shanghai Express (1932), was at the time on a year-long tour of China, during which she hoped to study Chinese theatre and acquire a deeper understanding of her heritage. She went with the hope of locating roots and a cultural home, but she also carried with her a deep ambivalence about these aspirations. ‘Perhaps upon my arrival’, she said, ‘I shall feel like an outsider. Perhaps instead, I shall find my past life assuming a dreamlike quality of unreality.’ Acton resided in Beijing from 1932 to 1939, and in his life-writing and fiction related to this period, he represents himself as perpetually working to come into communion with the culture of China and perpetually frustrated in these attempts. In the image Acton chose to include in his memoirs, the two sit beside one another in the moon gate of Acton’s home. In the words of Kun Xi, Acton has ‘modelled himself after a Manchurian nobleman’. Wong wears a patterned gown and holds a fan. These cosmopolites, raised in Florence and Los Angeles, who lived hybrid and peripatetic existences, longed similarly for connection with China, and they appear here staged in a manner that allows them to perform a sense of embeddedness within a culture from which they often felt disconnected.