The True
Life Story of a Chinese Girl
by Anna
May Wong
Part
2,
Published, September 1926
(After developing an appetite for hanging out
with lads and playing baseball) My father decided that something
must be done with so unnatural a daughter, so he made
arrangements for my sister and myself to enter a real Chinese
school. Understand, we were not to give up our studies in the
Mission School, but were to continue these and attend the Chinese
school also.
For the next five years then, I
went to school from nine o'clock in the morning until seven
o'clock at night! The average Chinese father is not so concerned
over the health of his children as is the American father. He
wishes his children to be studious and obedient. Their physical
well being can take care of itself.
The Chinese school keeps open the
year 'round, every day in the week except Sunday. I don't know,
I'm sure, why they gave us that time off. Possibly because we
made up for it on Saturdays, studying right through from ten a.m.
until seven p.m. On the regular school days, we attended the
Mission School from nine a.m. until three p.m., and the Chinese
school from three-thirty p.m. to seven p.m., some ten hours.
The Chinese school was conducted in
a long, narrow room in an old building down in Chinatown. The
teacher sat at his desk, a bamboo stick beside him. If one of the
pupils showed signs of restlessness or disobedience, whack went
the stick across the hands of the offender. Serious disobedience
was punished in a severe manner - and not across the hands
either!
The teacher in the Chinese school
certainly doesn't have it as easy as American teachers do. Not
only did he have to devote nearly every hour of every day to
teaching, but he lived in a small room partitioned off at the
back of the school room. Here he cooked his own meals, and slept.
There certainly wasn't much variety in his life. It's not much
wonder that he was often stern with us and whacked us with the
bamboo stick.
There were some bright spots in our
lives, however. We were always thrilled when a motion picture
company came down into Chinatown to film scenes for a picture. I
would play hookey from school to watch them at work, though I
knew I would get a whipping from my teacher and later from my
father, for it. I would worm my way through the crowd and get as
close to the cameras as I dared. I'd stare and stare at these
glamorous individuals, directors, cameramen, assistants, and
actors in greasepaint, who had come down into our section of town
to make movies.
My determination to act
independently brought a very definite penalty with it, for my
father gave my teacher instruction to whip me every time I missed
school. And believe me, that teacher lived up to his
responsibility. But I would endure the whippings stoically, never
swerving from my determination to go to picture shows whenever I
chose, never doubting that some day I, like Mae Murray, Ruth
Roland and Pearl White, would become a motion picture actress.