Olive Young’s Great Depression Blues

On October 11, 1929, Olive Young departed Yokohama on board the Asama Maru, returning home to the “Good Old U.S.A.” after a seven-year sojourn in the Far East. One of her fellow passengers, a young traveler by the name of Hall Lippincott, wrote in his journal about meeting her. She’s “a petite Chinese girl… who says she is going to Hollywood to be a film star. I call her Flaming Youth because she is just that — bubbling over with pep, full of the devil, not bad looking but has a rather harsh laugh and voice…”

Born in 1903 in St. Joseph, Missouri — that place where the Pony Express began and Jesse James ended — Olive was the daughter of Dr. Mon Fung Young, an American-born Chinese who settled down in Kansas City around 1898 and opened a medical practice, dispensing traditional Chinese herbal remedies to the general public.

When the world looks blue, and you get up in the morning with no appetite and with a coated tongue, look to your stomach and liver. These two organs have been overworked, and are now standing still, crying for help.  — from a 1908 newspaper ad for Dr. Young’s practice

During the early years of Chinese immigration, a child born in the U.S. was a rare occurrence, even more so in the Kansas City area, where the community was quite small. In fact, Olive may have been one of the first. When the Kansas City Star profiled the city’s Chinese in 1911, there were only about sixty persons, among them just three women and one girl.

That lone Chinese girl could’ve been Olive, but it wasn’t. It was her 10 year-old cousin Summy. Olive and her parents weren’t living in the States at the time of the article. Three years previously they had returned to China, where her father “played a prominent part in recent political affairs” — that is, in the nationalist revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China.

However, things didn’t turn out so well for the new republic. Founding father Sun Yat-sen was compelled to relinquish his position as provisional president to the überwarlord and former Qing general Yuan Shikai in exchange for the support of his powerful army. Yuan quickly proceeded to fulfill his own king-size ambitions, making back-room deals with the imperialist powers and assassinating political rivals until eventually he felt bold enough to declare himself Emperor of China.

By this time, Olive and her parents were back in Kansas City. Dr. Young continued his medical practice, while Olive continued her schooling. In the fall of 1919, her father enrolled her in Christian College, a women’s college in Columbia, Missouri. He wanted her to become a doctor. But she herself wanted to become a writer.

Miss Young says that her ambition is to be a short story writer. She is studying along that line. Her father, she says, has promised that she may go to Columbia University in New York City after she finishes her course at Christian College. — from a 1919 article in The Evening Missourian

Maybe she would have become a writer if her family had stayed in China. Maybe she would have been swept along by the surging tides of the New Culture Movement that had grown out of the failure of the new Chinese republic to take root in what was increasingly seen as the barren soil of traditional culture. Instead she spent her teenage years in a hothouse city that would soon become known as the “Paris of the Plains”.

After completing a year of courses at Christian College, Olive ended up enrolling not in Columbia University but in the School of Hard Knocks. At the time she was living with her parents in Excelsior Springs, a quiet resort town not far from Kansas City. One Saturday in September of 1920 she told them she was going to take the train to K.C. to visit friends. When Olive failed to return home, her father discovered that she had never arrived at her friends’ house. He immediately notified the police and announced a reward for information leading to her whereabouts.

The following Friday night Olive was found by plainclothes officers. According to an article in the Kansas City Star, she “resented returning to her parents, and said she was married a few days ago to a man named Jack Lehman. She refused to give her husband’s whereabouts. Still resisting, the two patrolmen carried Olive to a waiting motor car in the street.”

Come on over to my house, baby / Ain’t nobody home but me / I’ve got a lot of kisses I can’t stand / Come on and get ’em cuz I don’t care / I never knew a man could be so sweet / I dream about you when I go to sleep / Now won’t you come over to my house, baby / Nobody home but me. — Kansas City blues singer Julia Lee

It turned out that Olive had eloped with her twenty-year-old lover to Topeka, Kansas. Needless to say that Dr. Young wasn’t too happy about what had transpired. He sent Olive off to a private boarding school in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a month later had Jack Lehman arrested on charges of violating the Mann Act, popularly known as the White-Slave Traffic Act. Originally intended to combat forced prostitution by making it a federal offense to transport across state lines “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose”, the act was sometimes used against consenting couples as a means of persecution or revenge. The charge against Lehman was eventually dropped when it was proven that he and Olive had in fact applied in Topeka for a marriage license, which they were subsequently denied.

During his arraignment, Jack Lehman told the federal commissioner, “It was hanging around Twelfth Street that got me into this trouble.”

I’ve got those lonesome Twelfth Street blues / Just longing for some hometown news / I never get no sympathy / No one pities me / My explainin’ ain’t no use / That Twelfth Street Rag, I long to hear / Missouri town, I’m drawing near / I run till my puppies get hot / Just shouting, “Look out, I’ve got / Those lonesome Twelfth Street blues”. — Rosa Henderson.

Two years later, in September of 1922, Olive left the United States with her father to return to China. Dr. Young headed north to Peking, where he served as an advisor to the Chinese government, while Olive remained in Hong Kong, working as a teacher at St. Paul’s Convent School.

It was there in Hong Kong that Olive got her start in show business. At a dinner party she met producer-director Lai Man-wai, manager of the China Sun Film Company, who was impressed by her fashionable style and vivacious personality. He told Olive that she looked like a Hollywood star and playfully asked if she had ever thought about becoming an actress. Olive confessed excitedly that she was indeed a huge movie fan — her idol and inspiration was Gloria Swanson — and replied in earnest, “Would you really make me a star?”

The next day Lai offered Olive a one-year contract with the promise of a lead role in China Sun’s next picture. However, that next picture never happened. In 1923 the company had bought a three-story building in Hong Kong for use as a studio and equipped it with brand new cameras and equipment imported from the United States. Unfortunately, the British colonial government refused to issue them a license, and they were forced to move their studio to Canton. The unplanned move and the production costs of their first feature, Rouge, had put a financial strain on the company and future productions were put on hold.

Filmmaker Moon Kwan, who was working for China Sun at the time, got Olive a two-month gig teaching ballroom dancing to members of the Canton government. Upon learning of Olive’s predicament, one of them asked around and was able to arrange an introduction to William Jansen, who ran the film department of the British American Tobacco Company in Shanghai. Originally established to produce cartoon advertisements, the BAT studio subsequently expanded into the production of newsreels and scenics and now wanted to make fiction films for the Chinese market. They set up a Chinese advisory board and hired Chinese writers, directors, and actors — among whom was now counted the aspiring film star Olive Young.

The first two films, One Dollar and The Magical Monk, were released in March of 1925. The films were well received by the Western press in Shanghai, but the local Chinese intelligentsia saw the films as products of cultural imperialism. They alleged that scenes of gambling and theft portrayed Chinese in a bad light and warned the studio not to make these kinds of “harmful” films or else the Chinese people would rise up against the foreigners making motion pictures in China.

These words turned out to be quite prescient. Two months later the May Thirtieth Movement erupted after British soldiers fired on demonstrators protesting the killing of a worker at a Japanese-owned factory in Shanghai. In the nationwide demonstrations that followed, BAT was singled out and boycotted more than any other foreign company. In early June all 15,000 of the workers at its Shanghai plants went on strike. Throughout the country, BAT products were confiscated and destroyed. Local merchants and street hawkers caught selling the company’s cigarettes were regarded as national traitors and often beaten, fined, or imprisoned. In the face of such public anger, BAT’s Chinese advisory board and many of its employees quit the company, leaving the studio temporarily shut down. It was not an auspicious beginning for Olive Young’s career.

Olive decided to return to Canton and lay low until things had settled down. It could have been the end of her career, but instead Olive rose like a phoenix, determined more than ever to project herself onto the silver screen. The circumstances of what happened next are perhaps lost forever to time, but at the end of 1925 Olive Young appeared suddenly — and dramatically — in the pages of newspapers all across the United States.

Above is pictured Miss Olive Young, an American Chinese girl of Kansas City, MO., who is the first girl motion picture photographer to start producing films in China. She is shown at her camera grinding a scene in Canton. — International Newsreel photo caption (November 19, 1925)

Somehow Olive had made the acquaintance of Ariel Varges, International Newsreel’s “Famous Daredevil Camera Correspondent”. He was a fellow Midwesterner, born in Chicago — a shared connection that must have provided a bond. Olive was probably also attracted by the 35-year-old photographer’s lust for life and adventure. Varges had accompanied Pancho Villa, who more than once postponed a battle until Varges could arrive to film it; he served as a captain in the British intelligence service while taking footage on the front lines during World War I; he shot the first moving images of Pope Benedict and Leon Trotsky; and throughout much of the 1920s he traveled up and down China documenting the endless civil strife that plagued the country.

Although the exact nature of their relationship is unknown, during the next year and a half Varges created a series of iconic photographs of Olive, many of which ended up in American newspapers and Chinese pictorials. Some of them, like the one above, portrayed Olive as a motion picture photographer. As it turns out, the camera in the photo is Varges’s own Debrie Parvo camera. It shows up again six months later in a photograph of Olive decked out in flight gear filming the arrival of Spanish aviators in Shanghai. And another time in a photo of her on a boat in Suzhou. Was the story about Olive becoming a film producer just a gimmick created for International Newsreel? A lark to relaunch her film career? Or something more?

While there is no concrete evidence that Olive ever produced a film in China, a tantalizing piece of hearsay was printed in the scholarly journal Asia around this time. In an article entitled “The Changing Theaters of Asia”, a similar photo of Olive in Canton posing behind Varges’s camera appeared alongside the following anecdote:

“The Wild West films are also in great favor [in China]. A journalist friend of mine claims to have seen a Chinese attempt at producing a film from the great open spaces. The Chinese cowboy would swing on a donkey and trot off to attack bloodthirsty Indians, with queues hanging down their backs, hiding behind a Confucian temple. The captions explained that the scene was Kansas City, America, which they evidently regarded as the heart of the cowboy belt. Kansas City consisted of a few block-houses, and a troop of heartless redskins from Independence charged down upon it to kill and scalp every man, woman and child in the settlement. I cannot vouch for the truth of this yarn!”

Whatever the truth, by May of 1926 Olive was back at the British American Tobacco studio, which had resumed film production after the May 30th demonstrations of the previous year had died down. She was cast in the leading role of Filial Piety, a new picture about the conflict between the modern practice of free love and the tradition of arranged marriage. That month she appeared on the cover of Shanghai’s newly launched pictorial magazine The Young Companion in a photograph taken by Varges. Olive had finally become a star.

Within the next few months Olive’s career skyrocketed. She completed work on Filial Piety, which ended up being BAT’s final production. The studio was closed down for good and the equipment sold to Tianyi, the inaugural film company of the now legendary Shaw Brothers. Cinematographer/director William Jansen left Shanghai for America in June, taking with him the films he had shot, including Filial Piety. When the film finally screened in Shanghai in September, it was met with critical acclaim — at least from the expatriate community. The North China Herald singled out Olive for her excellent performance, with the writer concluding, “Surely, she is deserving of the title, the Chinese ‘Mary Pickford’.”

In July, Olive appeared in American newspapers again, in another photo from Varges. This time she was shown standing on a flatboat with bamboo pole firmly in hand, looking straight at the camera. The headline read “Paddles Way to Fame”:

Miss Olive Young, Chinese film star, has paddled her way right into the Mack Sennett Studio at Hollywood. When not emoting, Miss Young keeps fit by rowing and other athletic sports.

Jack Root, a Sennett studio representative, was traveling in Asia around this time. Root was a former prizefighter from Chicago who bought a dime museum after retiring from the ring and parlayed its success into the acquisition of vaudeville and movie theaters. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he became manager of Mack Sennett’s Mission Theatre. Did Root offer Olive a chance to break into Hollywood? The Young Companion reported that she was chosen from several dozen local actors and actresses to appear in one of the studio’s forthcoming films and would be leaving for the United States soon.

Meanwhile, Olive was also approached by the Great Wall Film Company. Originally founded in New York City in 1921 by overseas Chinese students and local Chinese Americans upset by Hollywood’s racist portrayals, Great Wall had moved to Shanghai in 1924 to take part in China’s burgeoning film industry. There they quickly established a reputation for producing high quality films that addressed social issues from a progressive perspective.

Great Wall offered Olive a leading role in their next feature, Ways of Youth. Studio publicity for the film claimed that she had postponed her return to the U.S. to make one last film in China — for “a good Chinese-owned movie company” — as a parting memory for local audiences. Ways of Youth opened in Shanghai that December. It was essentially a star vehicle for Olive, who played the successful founder of a women’s sports academy — a shining example of the modern Chinese woman. She appeared on the cover of the film’s printed programme wearing a fashionable but modest full-length, loose-fitting cheongsam, sporting a “Colleen Moore bob”. A review in the North China Daily News proclaimed that Olive was “the particular bright star of the film and, not only in her appearance but in her acting as well, [stood] out from the group of competent actors.”

I’m sitting on top of the world / I’m rolling along / yes, rolling along / And I’m quitting the blues of the world / I’m singing a song / yes, singing a song / Glory hallelujah, I just phoned the parson / Hey par, get ready to call / Just like humpty dumpty / I’m going to fall. — Al Jolson

Whatever the reason, Olive ended up not going to Hollywood to work for Mack Sennett Studios. Perhaps she saw a brighter future for herself in Shanghai. The next year, however, proved to be not so bright. February of 1927 saw the passing of Olive’s father, who had returned home to Kansas City, disillusioned by the political turmoil in China. For the past 10 years, ever since the death of first president Yuan Shikai, the country had been divided by competing warlord factions. The KMT had launched a military expedition to unite the country the previous summer and was now battling its way northwards across China. In late March the KMT army — which comprised an uneasy coalition of nationalist and communist forces — entered Nanking without resistance from the retreating warlord army, however the occupation suddenly turned violent and sparked an international incident when rioting broke out against the city’s foreign residents. British and American gunships retaliated against the rioters, among whom were KMT army soldiers. By the end of the day Nanking was bombed out and burning. The KMT army acted quickly to regain control of the situation, placing the blame on deserting solidiers of the warlord army and undisciplined communist solders within its own ranks.

Right around this time Mack Sennett released Broke in China, a two-reeler starring cross-eyed comic Ben Turpin as an American sailor in Shanghai. “Lots of fun all the way”, said The Film Daily. Meanwhile in real Shanghai, communist leader Zhou Enlai launched an armed uprising of union workers against the warlord forces controlling the city. Back in the U.S., theatergoers learned, courtesy of International Newsreel, that Shanghai’s Chinese residents were still flocking to the horse races in spite of the dark clouds quickly forming above them. Where was Olive amidst all this? Judging by a photo of her that appeared in American newspapers — showing her sitting merrily on a plank carried by two British soldiers across a muddy road on the Avenue Haig — she was still gallivanting with Ariel Varges and his camera.

The political situation, however, was growing worse by the hour. The communists had taken control of Shanghai and were organizing student protests and worker strikes daily, demanding the transfer of all foreign concessions to Chinese control. In early April the KMT army arrived in Shanghai and quickly established their authority. After the anti-foreign incidents in Nanking and Shanghai, the KMT realized that they were in danger of losing control of their makeshift alliance with the communists and decided that the time had come to purge them.

KMT general Chiang Kai-shek immediately started planning a white terror with the help of Green Gang boss “Big-Eared” Du Yuesheng. On April 12, before the break of dawn, Du’s gangsters attacked the offices of the communist-controlled unions. In the following weeks and months communists were hunted down, arrested, and executed all across the country. Many of them simply disappeared, never to be seen again. The crackdown was brutal, especially towards female activists whose corpses were often sexually mutilated and placed on public display. A new morality was in the air.

That August saw the release of Olive’s second film for Great Wall: Downfall of a Flapper. It was a foreboding title and indicative of the changing atmosphere in Shanghai. In the wake of the nationalist’s white terror, audiences developed an insatiable hunger for movies about chivalrous heroes and heroines standing up against their oppressors. In response Great Wall abandoned their original commitment to contemporary social melodrama and jumped on the martial-arts bandwagon. Where did this leave Olive, who had rose to fame on the novelty of her westernized Chinese image?

She could have played one of the righteous swordswomen who were becoming all the rage on the Chinese silver screen. Olive had a certain toughness and a daredevil streak that suited her for such roles. But it proved difficult to reinvent herself. Great Wall’s martial-arts pictures were slanted more towards male heroes. This only left damsels in distress and femmes fatales. As a modern woman, Olive got slotted in the latter category. While the mythological nature of some of the films offered her great villain roles, such as the evil goddess Shiji and the cantankerous Princess Iron Fan, there were also unrewarding roles like the woman who cheats on her husband with the oppressive landlord.

By the end of 1927 Olive had signed with a newly established company called New Century Film. Her career in Shanghai was beginning to fizzle out. During a visit to the Philippines that December, she gave an interview to the local press. “I realize how hard any work is if one desires to succeed. But I enjoy it to the utmost degree all the same, because I love my profession. I intend to go to Hollywood not long from now to perfect my art.”

The following year saw the release of Olive’s last two films for Great Wall. She also made one film for New Century, which folded after its first production, and another for the China Sun Film Company, the studio that had first signed her in 1924. Olive had come full circle. It was time to move on.

The journey home, however, was neither immediate nor straightforward. The next turn of Olive’s unusual life landed her the leading role in Resia Boroboedoer, one of Indonesia’s first feature films. Olive arrived in Java in February of 1929 to begin work on the ambitious production. Produced by the fledgling Nansing Film Corporation and written and directed by Max L. Haasmann, who had worked for M.G.M. as a technical adviser on Across to Singapore and Wild Orchids, the movie boasted location shooting at the largest Buddhist temple in the world and never-before-filmed scenes of Indonesian black magic. Reading very much like a jungle adventure serial, it told the story of a young woman from China who travels to Java in search of the ashes of Gautama Buddha and ends up relinquishing her desires and becoming a guardian of the temple.

Although Resia Boroboedoer was slated for distribution throughout Asia, it didn’t fare well at the box office and failed to recoup the costs of building a new studio and paying for Olive’s allegedly extravagant salary. The Nansing company was forced to declare bankruptcy that September, just months after the film’s release in Indonesia. One month later, Olive was on board the Asama Maru sailing for the United States. It had been seven years since she left home with her father.

On October 24, 1929, the Asama Maru sailed through California’s Golden Gate. Upon her arrival in San Francisco, Olive immediately telegrammed the Commissioner of Immigration in Seattle, Washington, requesting that copies of her Chinese Exclusion Act case file, which contained proof of her status as an American citizen by birth, be sent to the immigration authorities at the port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, her final destination.

The Asama Maru docked in Los Angeles on October 29. Olive had finally made it to Hollywood. So what if it was Black Tuesday, the beginning of America’s Great Depression.

After checking in at the Rosslyn Hotel, Olive arranged a meeting with the press. She told them that she was in town to visit the studios. “I am going to investigate the condition of the talkies, then visit my parents in Missouri and then return to Shanghai, China, to continue my work.” That Friday she appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. On Monday the Associated Press ran the story under the headline “U.S. Born Chinese Girl Wins Fame as Actress in Shanghai”. In the coming weeks her photo would appear in newspapers all across the country.

On November 8, Olive arrived in Missouri to visit her family. Although her father had passed away several years ago and her mother was living in Shanghai, she still had her brother and his family, as well as an uncle and aunt. In an interview with the St. Joseph Gazette, Olive announced that after visiting her relatives she was going to stop in Hollywood again and try for a role in the American talkies.

Back in Hollywood, Olive was asked to be leading lady in Hoot Gibson’s latest Western talkie, Trailin’ Trouble. Gibson was one of the biggest cowboy stars of the 1920s, and although now well past his prime, he was determined to survive the industry’s transition to sound. It wasn’t exactly a big splash for “China’s Mary Pickford”, but when opportunity comes knocking, only fools refuse to open the door. Production started that December, and the film was released the following spring. The trade papers regarded it as an okay piece of hokum more suited to the silent era, but it scored well with Gibson fans and Olive was noted for her “highly amusing and appealing performance”.

Her success in Trailin’ Trouble resulted a couple of months later in a small part in Jack Perrin’s Ridin’ Law, another Western talkie by another fading cowboy star from the silent era. However, Olive’s inexplicable role as a Chinese flapper in this south-of-the-border tale of vengeance garnered significantly less notice in the press.

While waiting for her next film role, Olive tried to keep busy. When Peking opera superstar Mei Lanfang arrived in Los Angeles on the final stop of his 3-month U.S. tour, she was there to greet him at the train station with a bouquet of roses. In photographs of the occasion Olive looks like a shy schoolgirl meeting her idol for the first time. During Mei Lanfang’s stay, Mary Pickford threw a luncheon in his honor at her bungalow on the United Artists lot. The guests included Maurice Chevalier, Dolores del Rio, and Gloria Swanson. Was “China’s Mary Pickford” also on the guest list?

Breaking into Hollywood was proving to be a difficult endeavor. Olive found work where she could. On several occasions she was engaged by the Pacific Geographic Society: performing a one-act solo play at the organization’s board dinner; playing the butterfly harp and singing Chinese songs for a travelogue lecture at May’s Department Store. It wasn’t glamorous, but it paid the bills.

That fall she finally landed some film work — a part in The Man Who Came Back, the latest Fox pairing of box-office darlings Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. It was an implausible melodrama about two lovers from opposite ends of society forced apart and reunited by chance in an opium den in Shanghai. If only Olive had been given a juicy role as romantic interloper, that at least would have been better than the paltry bit she got playing Janet Gaynor’s maid. It was a definite drop down the rungs of the Hollywood ladder, a slide from which Olive was never able to recover.

Around this time, Anna May Wong had returned from her successful European sojourn and made her Broadway debut in On the Spot, a melodrama inspired by Al Capone, who in real life was sentenced for tax evasion just weeks before the play opened in New York. Paramount Pictures rushed to offer Anna May the lead role in Daughter of the Dragon, their lavish production of Sax Rohmer’s new bestseller Daughter of Fu Manchu.

The return of Anna May Wong effectively signaled the end of Olive’s Hollywood dreams. There was no way Olive could compete against Anna May, whose beauty was more exotic and business sense more savvy. Not to mention the fact that Anna May, despite the limitations she faced throughout her career, was nonetheless something of an insider. Besides, there were plenty of bankable white stars eager to hone their acting chops with a yellowface role.

In the fall of 1931, while Anna May Wong was working with Marlene Dietrich on Shanghai Express, Olive was participating in a charity performance for victims of the devastating Central China floods, which claimed the lives of some three to four million people.

China was drowning in sorrow. Japan had invaded Manchuria that September and was looking for excuses to further expand its dominion. In January of 1932, anti-Japanese protests in Shanghai turned violent, resulting in the beating of five Japanese monks. This was the perfect opportunity for Japan to test its power in southern China. A tense showdown between Japanese and Chinese forces began to develop. At midnight on January 28, Japanese marines launched an attack on the city’s Zhabei district. Hours later Japanese planes started bombing Shanghai, terrorizing the population and setting off destructive fires.

That February Olive was working again with Pacific Geographic Society, providing the accompanying entertainment for an illustrated lecture about China. Along with members of the Kwak Sing Club, she performed an episode from the Cantonese opera about the imperial concubine Yang Kwei-fei, who was both blamed for causing the fall of the Tang Dynasty and idolized for her self-sacrificing love of the emperor.

Meanwhile back in Shanghai, after a month of fighting between Japanese and Chinese forces a ceasefire was brokered with the help of the League of Nations, freeing up the Chinese KMT army to resume its campaign against the communists.

In the United States, the Great Depression was in full swing. More than 13 million Americans had lost their jobs since that Black Tuesday of 1929. One out of four were unable to find work. Olive however was making ends meet and, amazingly, still managing to get her face in the papers — although no longer in the most glamorous way. In October of 1932, a pea-eating contest was staged at the San Kwo Low restaurant in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo “to settle an age-old question as to whether a Chinese or Japanese is more proficient with chopsticks.”

The peoples on the highway is walking and crying / Some is starving, some is dying / You know it ain’t nothing in rambling, either running around / Well, I believe I’ll marry, oooo, wooo, Lord, and settle down / You may go to Hollywood and try to get on the screen / But I’m gonna stay right here and eat these old charity beans / ’Cause it ain’t nothing in rambling, either running around / Well, I believe I’ll marry, oooo, wooo, Lord, and settle down. — Memphis Minnie

Around this time Olive also landed some film work with an uncredited appearance in M.G.M.’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. Nope, that wasn’t her playing Fu Manchu’s diabolical daughter. That was Myrna Loy with slanted eyelids made from fish skin and spirit gum. Olive was the singer performing a Cantonese ditty in Fu Manchu’s underground speakeasy. It was her last film role and the symbolic launch of her new career.

A week after the release of The Mask of Fu Manchu, Olive was performing with Mischa Guterson’s International Revue at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel’s Blossom Room, venue of the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. The following March, Olive was mentioned in the Los Angeles Times as being coached by stage and dance director Bud Murray in “American songs and dances to be used in her homeland cinema productions.” Actually, she was just in training for her appearance in Murray’s stage show Hot from Hollywood, which brought a little Hollywood glitter to farm towns like Bakersfield and Covina. Besides singing and dancing, Olive also participated with vaudeville veteran Val Harris in a comedy routine:

“Val Harris, as his favorite character, the seventy-year-old cut-up with rube whiskers, gets a liberal Chinese education from the Chinese Mary Pickford, whose novel act is to sing a torch song in Chinese: the effect being like turning on firecrackers. The oriental maiden also does a Chinese rumba.”

By the end of 1933, Olive had left California and returned to the Midwest. In November she was performing in Joplin, Missouri, at the Korean nightclub. The following January she sang the blues at the opening gala of the Midnight Frolic in Omaha, Nebraska, where she was billed as Olive Young Lum. Yes, Olive had gotten married — to a Hawaii-born Chinese studying at the Kansas City Western Dental College — but she was still rambling and running around. She was, as she once told reporters, a rolling stone and would be throughout the remainder of her days.

That summer Olive performed at the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair. A centennial celebration of the city of Chicago, the fair was dubbed a Century of Progress and loftily aimed to renew the public’s faith in the American dream with the motto “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”. On its shiny surface it was a corporate wonderland, bringing “dream cars” and “homes of tomorrow” to the hungry masses. But the most popular attractions were the beer gardens — where many were able to drink in public for the first time in thirteen years — and the undeniable star of the fair, Sally Rand and her infamous fan dance. As for Olive, she was singing at the Streets of Shanghai concession.

WHERE EAST MEETS WEST — At the center of the new Beach Midway, a few short steps through the pagoda gates, and you have entered the Celestial Land! The progressive spirit of New China blending with the glamour of the Imperial past to make a gay, colorful and exotic atmosphere in which anything might happen! — newspaper ad for the Streets of Shanghai.

In March of 1935, Olive’s older brother Bo Sing passed away. Like their father had been, he was a leader of Kansas City’s Chinese community. More than 150 persons attended his funeral. Olive’s husband was among the pallbearers. The obituary in the Kansas City Times eulogized him thusly: “there were those… who knew Bo Sing, the keeper of a restaurant in the Country Club plaza, and his unceasing effort to please without reserve every whim of his guests; those who knew him as a collector of art objects, and were attracted by his cultural and artistic appreciation; and still others who knew just Bo Sing, the man who desired to be a good friend to all.”

For the next five years Olive sang the blues as she worked her way through the nightclub circuits of America’s Midwest and East Coast.

In 1935 she performed with burlesque dancer Ramona Ray — “The Living Beauty in Gold” — and her “Maids of the U.S.A.” musical comedy revue. During an engagement in Sandusky, Ohio, she was noted in the local paper: “Second only to Miss Ray in novelty is Olive Yum Ling [sic], talented Oriental who wins favor with her Oriental chants as well as renditions of popular music in a distinctly diversified offering.”

In 1936 she headlined at McVan’s Club Padio in Buffalo, New York. She shared the bill with such acts as girl wrestlers Joyce Brown and Ruth Wilson, blackface comedian Paul Romaine, and Paul Green the Human Pretzel.

In 1937 she joined the Imperial Hawaiian Revue, traveling everywhere from Bluefield, West Virginia, to Regina, Saskatchewan. “Olive Young, svelte Chinese mistress of ceremonies, keeps the show moving and contributes her own specialty by singing ‘St. Louis Blues’ in alternate Chinese and English.”

I hate to see the evenin’ sun go down / I hate to see the evenin’ sun go down / It makes me think on my last go‑round / Feelin’ tomorrow like I feel today / Feelin’ tomorrow like I feel today / I’ll pack my grip and make my getaway. — Bessie Smith

In August of 1937, Japanese troops marched on Shanghai while Japanese ships and planes began bombing the city. The long-simmering conflict between Japan and China had exploded into full-scale war. Three months later, the Japanese army captured Shanghai and proceeded to march towards Nanking, where they committed civilian atrocities on such a massive scale that the still ongoing debate of exactly how many were killed has become a pointless exercise in arithmetic.

In 1938 Olive’s uncle passed away. The following year, after graduating from Kansas City Western Dental College, Olive’s husband enlisted in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Honolulu as a dental officer. Olive was still performing with the Imperial Hawaiians, but by 1940 she was living in New York City at the Hotel Somerset and singing at Hi-Hat Club in nearby Bayonne, New Jersey.

On Sunday, September 29, after performing that evening, Olive collapsed in her dressing room. She was taken to Bayonne Hospital, where she remained in a coma for the next five days. When it became apparent that her condition was worsening, the local police detective who was handling Olive’s case tracked down her husband, who immediately sent a telegram of encouragement and money to cover the hospital expenses.

I love you, darling. Please get well and come home. Have already sent check. You can’t leave me now.

But it was too late. That Friday morning, October 4, 1940, Olive passed away from pneumonia. She was just 37 years old.

You are as the yellow leaf / The messengers of death are at hand / You are to travel far away / What will you take with you? — The Dhammapada

by David Wells