Lee Tung Foo

Three great Oriental sleuths, far from their ancestral homelands, solved untold numbers of crimes in the 1930s. Who knows what America – or the world, indeed – would have done without the crime-fighting talents of these extraordinary men.

The most celebrated of the three was, of course, the Chinese American family man, Charlie Chan, who met any situation, no matter how deadly, with a little folksy wisdom that he would dispense via an appropriate Confucian aphorism. Second to Chan was the Japanese master of disguise, Mr Moto, an international detective who was partial to decidedly more violent methods of investigation than the avuncular Chan. The least renowned was Mr Wong, the soft-spoken San Franciscan private detective of refined tastes, who hid a razor-sharp intelligence behind a humble, self-effacing manner.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Chan, Moto and Wong, however, was that the actors who were most associated with the roles were, respectively, Warner Oland (Swedish), Peter Lorre (German-Hungarian) and Boris Karloff (English). But it doesn’t matter; you’d never guess they weren’t Asian:

Asians might not have been allowed to star in these pictures, but there were plenty of supporting roles available, like Mr Wong’s butler, although he wasn't given much to do beyond opening the occasional door. Here he is in Mr Wong, Detective (1938), opening the door to a chemical manufacturer who’s going to be murdered the next day:

 

In this still, from The Mystery of Mr Wong (1939), he’s opening the door to the secretary of a wealthy jewel collector who was murdered just the day before:

Here, in Mr Wong in Chinatown (1939), he opens the door to a Chinese princess, who’s going to be murdered in this very same scene:

And, in Phantom of Chinatown (1940), the final film in the Mr Wong series, he’s opening the door to Mr Wong himself. He might be surprised at how Asian his boss seems all of a sudden. That’s because Karloff had left the series and had been replaced by Keye Luke – the first Chinese person to play a Chinese detective in American cinema!

The man with the talent for opening doors is Lee Tung Foo, and these scenes are part of the low-key final phase of a career in show business that started in the early years of the 20th century. Here he is around 1910, when he was known as “the most remarkable China man in the United States”:⁽¹⁾ 

 ⁽²⁾ 

The poster behind him proclaims him to be "a great novelty", and the one beside it supplies the reason for his novelty, which is that he's "the only Chinese vocal entertainer". The only one? Apparently so -- at least, the only one known to non-Chinese audiences.

In turn-of-the-century America, Tung Foo was considered to be something of a freak of nature, as he was "the first Chinaman with a singing voice".⁽³⁾ The woman who taught him to sing, Margaret Blake Alverson, viewed Tung Foo's ability to sing professionally as the greatest achievement of her teaching career, because "it is a known fact that the Japanese and Chinese are wholly unmusical." To begin with, however, she was reluctant to take on Tung Foo as a pupil, saying that she "was not particularly fond of the Chinese and never employed them in any way." Eventually, she relented, partly because she was told that Tung Foo was broken-hearted with disappointment, but mostly because she was attracted by the challenge of training a member of a race whose unsophisticated musical scale was composed of only "[f]ive discordant ... unmusical and untrue chords".⁽⁴⁾

Tung Foo was 22 when he started his lessons, which continued for the next eight years, during which time he supported himself by working as a household servant or railroad cook. The training was hard. Alverson initially judged him to have a "dull, unmelodious, unmusical voice", but she was impressed by his "indomitable will and determination to succeed", and, by 1904, decided that his voice had reached a satisfactory level (although it went without saying that he would never have "the clear, ringing tone that is in the gift of the white race") and that, with his repertoire of 75 songs in English, German and Latin, he was ready for the stage.

He was an immediate hit. The public were not only amazed that a member of a race that was undeniably genetically unsuited to the world of music could sing as well as any performer they'd seen, but were impressed that “he had a large English vocabulary and most of the ways of an American”, although that shouldn't have been too surprising, given that he'd been born in California.⁽⁵⁾ Obviously, there were lessons to be learned by his fellow Chinese: “Lee Tung Foo … is an example in progress to all his countrymen. Had his race possessed in common some of the assimilating qualities which he possesses in particular, the Chinese would never have dropped behind in the march of civilisation.”⁽⁶⁾

Clearly, one of the attractions of Tung Foo’s performance was its novelty aspect -- like a talking dog act -- but it also seems to have been an entertaining bit of vaudeville theatre involving a variety of well-performed songs, ethnic caricatures and comedy routines. His signature piece was his impersonation of a Harry Lauder-style Scotsman:

 ⁽⁷⁾

“I don’t sing as well as Harry, but I can sing Louder”, he joked. He would also say that, although people might not believe it, there was some Scotch in him -- nearly half a pint.⁽⁸⁾

Tung Foo toured all the vaudeville circuits, playing to thousands-strong audiences in all the major cities in the USA and Canada, and even travelled to Europe (although Scotland seems to have been denied a glimpse of him in a kilt, which is a pity).

His schedule kept him away from California for years at a time, but he kept in touch with Alverson, who appears to have grown genuinely fond of her pupil in spite of his unfortunate ethnic handicap. On one occasion, she marked his return to California after a year's absence by performing a song that she'd written for the occasion. She obviously meant well, but the lyrics show that she still struggled somewhat to strike quite the right tone on matters of race:

"He can sing you any song, the old and the new,
And while he is a chink, he doesn't wear his queue,
And the state of California, he claims as well as you,
This well known Chinese singer,
Just Lee Tung Foo."⁽⁹⁾

I'm sure he appreciated the effort.

Tung Foo started to withdraw from vaudeville by the mid-1910s, and stopped performing entirely in 1919, at the age of 45. “I quit vaudeville before it died,” he told a journalist, decades later, adding, “I was tired of hearing my voice alla time.”⁽¹⁰⁾ There was more to it than that, though. He'd always had an idea that he might have the chance to play serious dramatic roles in the theatre, rather than just sing songs and perform skits in vaudeville, but that seemed as distant a possibility after his success as it had before. There simply weren't the roles.

So he did what thousands of Chinese Americans, rich and poor, had done before him, and opened a Chinese restaurant. He called his Jung Sy, and declared it to be "the most select Chinese dining place in New York City"!

 

Soon after, it was doing so well that he opened another, the Imig Sy, and settled down in New York as a restaurateur. And so passed Tung Foo's 1920s.⁽¹⁰⁾

By the 1930s, however, he’d returned to the stage, appearing in minor roles in plays on Broadway (to which his restaurants were strategically close). In 1932, while on a trip to California, he appeared in a short film called The Skull Murder Mystery, but nothing seemed to come of that, and he returned to New York. Four years passed before Lew Milestone, who was casting supporting Chinese roles in a Gary Cooper film, The General Died at Dawn (1936), remembered seeing Tung Foo in a play called Roar, China and tracked him down and persuaded him to return to California.⁽¹²⁾ This time, Tung Foo decided to stay on in Hollywood, and immediately began to secure small roles, such as Mr Wong’s door-opening servant.

One of his first bit-parts was in Thank You, Mr Moto (1937). He obviously hadn’t been typecast yet, as, instead of a servant or other menial character, he got to play a Mongolian camel-trek guide who looks on in a detached sort of way as customs police arrest Mr Moto (Peter Lorre, of course, further confusing ethnic boundaries by playing not only a Japanese detective but one who is in disguise as a Mongolian merchant):

By the time Tung Foo appeared in Laura (1944), following the Mr Wong films, he was firmly established as a quiet, unobtrusive servant:

And in Calcutta (1947), he was busy opening doors again:

It’s not as if these jobs came easily, either. Even getting the tiny role of a cook in The Thing from Another World (1951) took a surprising amount of effort:

“When Producer Howard Hawks put out a call for a Chinese to play that part, sixteen applicants answered, either in person or through their agents. But Lee stood out from the throng like a lighthouse in a fog when he arrived at the studio, precisely at noon, and opened negotiations by placing on Hawks' desk a huge tray, loaded with a full-course Chinese dinner. Hawks ate enthusiastically, and having eaten, could scarcely do less than offer the man who had furnished his meal a test. Only after he’d landed the role did Lee Tung Foo confess that he’d bought the meal in a nearby restaurant.”⁽¹³⁾

His ingenuity wasn’t wasted, as he was rewarded with two whole words -- "Coffee, captain?" -- spoken as the hero walks out of the room:

At least the captain could open doors for himself.

Apart from that scene, Tung Foo appears only as a silent presence in the deep background, calmly regarding the excitable Caucasian crewmembers with his well-practised, wide-eyed, unemotional gaze:

It's difficult to say whether Tung Foo saw the movies as a pleasant way of passing his old age, or whether he turned up at each casting call in the hope that this role might be the one that would lead to the serious dramatic roles that he'd dreamed of as a young vaudeville star. I hope it was the former, because the latter never happened. He spent the rest of the 1950s playing cooks, waiters and servants -- more or less the same jobs he'd done to pay his way through his training with Margaret Blake Alverson.

It's interesting, then, that Tung Foo's last role should have been such a departure. It's still just a face-in-a-crowd role -- it only lasts a few seconds, and he doesn't do anything but sit there like a wax dummy -- but, at the age of 87, he appeared as one of the sinister Communist espionage chiefs who observe the brainwashing demonstration at the start of The Manchurian Candidate (1962):

 

That's him at the bottom right. Here’s a close-up:

 

At least he went out on something of a high.

I think it would be appropriate to close with a verse (happily, without ethnic slurs, this time) of the song that his old music teacher sang for him more than half a century earlier. It doesn't make too bad an epitaph.

"And now my dear young singer, I've sung my song to you,
I'm glad that you are with us, we greet you fond and true,
You have made your own successes, and battled bravely through,
And now your state may honor,
Just Lee Tung Foo."

Tung Foo died in 1966, at the age of 91.

Sources: (1),(3),(5)San Antonio Daily Express, Aug 9, 1908; (2), (7)California State Library; (4)Alverson, Margaret Blake, Sixty Years of California Song (San Francisco, Sunset Publishing House, 1913), chapter 19. All quotes directly attributed to Alverson are from this chapter of this book; (6)Janesville Daily Gazette, Sept 23, 1914; (8), (9), (11)Moon, Krystyn, "Lee Tung Foo and the Making of a Chinese American Vaudevillian, 1900s-1920s", JAAS Feb 2005; (10)Big Spring Herald, July 21, 1940; (12)Waterloo Daily Courier, May 3, 1936; (13) The Evening Standard, Uniontown PA, Nov 7, 1950;

Comments

[DU]

Love this site. Keep up the good work.

[diarmid mogg]

Thanks very much for saying so, I'll see what I can do.

[450e52nd]

yes, don't ever stop. seriously, i love this site. can't believe there isn't a bigger following, or you know, more than two comments.

[diarmid mogg]

It's really, really great of you to let me know you've dropped by! Thanks for the kind words.

[Maxwelton]

I too love this site. Thank you for the humorous and touching story of Mr. Foo.

[Diarmid]

Thanks to you, too. It's brilliant to hear from people who've enjoyed the site, so I really appreciate your comment.

[D Cairns]

I'm glad those Motos came in handy! Great post!

[diarmid mogg]

They certainly did -- there's a couple more pretty intriguing Chinese bit-part guys in Think Fast, Mr Moto, too. I ended up reading an awful lot about Chinese immigration to California in the 19th century as a result of the DVDs you gave me, and it's a really interesting area. If I had time, I'd set up another blog (The Unsung Cho, perhaps) that would tell the history of California from the goldrush to the post-WW2 period through the stories of the random blokes who show up in supporting roles in Hollywood movies. Maybe that's a job that's better done by a Chinese American, though...

[Nemogbr]

Thank you for this webpage. It is amazing.
I'm currently overhauling the "yellowface" entry in wikipedia and decided to include some examples of Asian Americans actors in Hollywood during the 1930's.

Your entry of Lee Tung Foo is very helpful and I will definitely link this to the page I set up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowface

Are the photos under copyright or are they public domain?

Regards,
Obi

[diarmid mogg]

Thanks, Obi! The Mr Wong films are in the public domain, so theyre okay to include in Wikipedia. The other ones are still in copyright, though. Looking forward to seeing the all-new yellowface entry when youve finished with it -- keep up the good work!