The Wide and Wild World of Nancy Kwan

Upon the publication of her memoir, "The World of Nancy Kwan," acting legend Nancy Kwan was interviewed, party in Cantonese, by Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show. Noting that she worked with and hung out with some of the top Hollywood icons of the 1960s, Chieng asked her, "What kinds of drugs were they doing back then?"

The 85-year-old actress cleverly turned the tables on Chieng, asking him, "What drugs do you do?" When he said he didn't do drugs, she assented, "Well, I don't do drugs either." Chieng joked that she could tell him the answer later in Cantonese, and she laughed.  

Kwan Tells the Opium War Tale

Born into a prosperous Hong Kong family with a British actress and model as her mother, Kwan begins her book by describing the Opium Wars, by which Britain gained control of Hong Kong and forced the importation of opium to balance trade. 

"The island's natural harbor made it a convenient stopping place or British trading ships (the ones from other Western countries) sailing to and from Southeast Asia," she writes. "These merchants were unhappy about their commercial dealings with China because they were at the wrong end of a trade imbalance. There was a high demand for Chinese imports such as tea, silk, and porcelain in European countries, but the Chinese were less interested in Western goods. The British East India Company solved the problem by licensing private traders to operate a market guaranteed to become a booming business: the opium trade."

"Opium was used for medicinal purposes in China but not for recreation until these foreign merchant ships provided a steady supply—and collected hefty payments in gold and silver. Predictably and as planned, a large percentage of the Chinese population became addicted to the drug. When the emperor saw the negative effect that opium addiction had on his country, he tried to ban it and destroyed a large shipment, causing British merchants to lose a fortune. They cried foul, and and the first of two 'Opium Wars' ensued in 1839. England was a stronger military power than China and easily won the war, then demanded more favorable trade terms."

As a child escaping the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII, Kwan writes that she contracted an unspecified illness and, lacking access to a doctor, was treated by her aunt with traditional, medicinal herbs, and recovered. 

Advancing Asian Representation

As a young woman, Kwan studied with the London Royal Ballet and acted with Judi Dench and Laurence Olivier, playing a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream on the London stage. But her main goal was to become a ballet dancer. She was spotted at a casting call for the 1960 film "The World of Suzie Wong" which, for the first time, cast an Asian actress to play a major Asian character. 

At the time, Asian film roles went to white stars. In 1935, MGM refused to consider film star Anna Mae Wong for the leading role of the Chinese character O-Lan in the film version of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth. Instead the role went to German actress Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for her performance. When Jennifer Jones played Eurasian physician Han Survin opposite William Holden in the 1955 film "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," Kwan hadn't thought anything of it. But producer Ray Stark, who championed Kwan's career, had the vision to conduct a search for an Asian actress to play opposite Holden as Suzie Wong, a Hong Kong prostitute who falls in love with his character.

To try out for the part, Kwan moved to Hollywood and took acting classes, while living at The Studio Club, an all-female dormitory designed by Julia Morgan, where Marilyn Monroe lived when she posed for her famous nude shot for $50 to pay her rent (that photo appeared in the first Playboy magazine). Initially the film role of Suzy Wong went to French actress France Nuyen, who had played the part on stage in New York, and was famously having an affair with Marlon Brando. Kwan went to New York to appear as a bargirl and understudy to the actress who replaced Nuyen. 

When Nuyen's turbulent affair with Brando lead to a breakdown that caused her to lose the film role, and the director Jean Negulesco, who'd expected Kwan to visit him on the casting couch, left the film, Kwan stepped in. Arriving in Hong Kong for the shooting, she met with prostitutes to better understand their character and motivations. Many were refugees who worked as prostitutes because they had no other option. Suzy matter-of-factly tells of being raped at 10 years old by an uncle, which made her unmarriageable.

The tabloids had a field day with Kwan's sudden fame, making up stories about her.  A photo of her in a Chinese cheongsam dress with a leg-revealing slit on the side appeared on the cover of Life magazine, cementing the sex kitten image the media portrayed her as, and starting a fashion trend. 

She soon signed to play Linda Low, a showgirl in "Flower Drum Song," which was to be the first film with an all-Asian cast. Kwan had to turn down Elvis Presley when he asked her to play his love interest in "Blue Hawaii" because she had committed to the film. Anna Mae Wong was to play Madame Liang in it, but sadly she died just before filming began. 

Fred Astaire's choreographer Hermes Pan choreographed "Flower Drum Song," and Kwan's performances in the film are knock outs. She is particularly remembered for the song, "I Enjoy Being a Girl," in which she's practically wrapped in just a towel, celebrating her femininity. 

At the time, the studio system was crumbling, and the European avant-garde and Young Hollywood were taking hold of the film industry. Kwan traveled to England where she starred in the hip "The Wild Affair," wearing Mary Quant clothes and sporting a Vidal Sassoon bob that became known as The Kwan Cut, starting another fashion trend. She took some flack for taking a part that should have gone to an English girl, and the irony of that was not lost on her. 

After divorcing her Austrian husband from whom she had grown apart while pursuing her film career, Kwan moved with her young son Bernie to Laurel Canyon in 1967. There, she discovered it had become like London of 1963, "an incubator for a brand new sound and the maverick lifestyles that went with it. The Canyon's signature scent, a blend of jasmine and eucalyptus now included the headier aroma of marijuana," Kwan wrote. She lived near Mama Cass, who "true to her name, was a den mother and kept her front door open to her musician friends."

     Sharon Tate, Bruce Lee, and Nancy Kwan in training

Bruce Lee and Other Co-Stars and Projects

Kwan trained with her fellow Hong Kong native Bruce Lee for a fight scene with Sharon Tate in Tate's final film, "The Wrecking Crew." The training session is re-created in Quentin Tarantino's film, "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood." Lee enjoyed marijuana, but Kwan wasn't interested in using it herself. She had issues with her second husband David Giler using marijuana and cocaine, especially around her young son.

Meanwhile, her beautiful "Flower Drum Song" co-star Reiko Sato also succumbed to Brando's brutal charms. He left her on a deserted island and she escaped, only to die too young at age 49 of a brain aneurysm. The other female star of the film, Miyoshi Umeki, couldn't find acting work, even though she was the first Asian to win an Oscar, for Sayonara (1957). A singer, she performed on variety shows, such as when she did an impression of singer Billy Eckstine on the Merv Griffin Show. She ultimately took the role of Mrs. Livingston on the TV show, "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," for which she had to speak only pidgin English. She advocated for Asian casting on the show, and later, according to Kwan, bitterly scratched off her name from her Oscar and retired in seclusion. 

But Kwan was a survivor. She moved to Hong Kong and started a film company, working as a director, among other tasks, and producing an instructional video about T'ai Chi with her son. There she saw Bruce Lee one day for lunch, and gave him a hard time about having an affair. He said he loved his wife, and promised to end the affair. The next day she heard that Lee had died, at the home of his mistress. "I want to believe he went there to do the right thing," she wrote. Later, she played a restaurateur who similarly gave Lee motherly advice in the biopic "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story," starring his son Brandon Lee. 

When asked about the controversy surrounding English actor Jonathan Pryce appearing in yellowface in "Miss Saigon," Kwan saw it from more than one point of view: Pryce was a famous and skilled actor whose involvement with the show would bring in viewers, and employ Asian actors. Should Asian or Black actors be banned from playing Shakespearian or other roles? she wondered. The best person should always get the job, she concluded, but Asians and others should be given a chance to represent themselves. Ultimately she worked with the East West Players theater company, where Asians could tell their own stories.  

Kwan was offered a role as one of the mothers in "The Joy Luck Club," based on Amy Tan's book that presented the Chinese/American generational divide much as "Flower Drum Song" had. But she objected to a line in the script, in which someone's white boyfriend's mother uses Suzie Wong as a racial slur. When the filmmakers wouldn't change the line, she turned down the role. 

Her (distant) cousin Kevin Kwan, who wrote the novel "Crazy Rich Asians," provides the forward to "The World of Nancy Kwan." The film version of his book was the first film with an all-Asian-cast since "Flower Drum Song." 

"I wish we would have more Asian directors, writers, and producers, telling Asian stores," she told Chieng. When he asked her about the current "civilization clash between East and West," Kwan replied, "I think there will always be political clashes; that's what makes the world interesting....it's just going through changes, like life."

"Aren't you changing? " she asked Chieng, adding, "And what are you smoking, and what kind of drugs are you doing?" He said he would tell her later in Cantonese.  

Taft playing golf

The U.S. Turns Tables on China Over Opium

Meanwhile, the Spanish-American War of 1898 made the United States a colonial power in Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Future President William Howard Taft, a man so obese he had to have a bathtub specially made for him, studied the opium problem in the Philippines, and "decided the whole issue presented a great opportunity for the United States in the Far East, especially in China," writes Journalist Jill Jonnes in her 1996 book Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe-Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs. 

Jonnes continued, "American businessmen had been eyeing the Chinese multitudes hungrily for years, but the British and the Europeans dominated the scene. Now American businessmen and reformers saw a natural opportunity to advance their respective causes by actively supporting China's desire to end all opium imports.” So as the British had conquered the East by pushing an addiction on them, the U.S. would do so by fighting that same addiction.

The State Department proposed an international conference in Shanghai to tackle the issue. The problem was, the U.S. didn't have its own house in order. Dr. Hamilton Wright, an M.D. who made his name by finding a pathogen that "caused" beri-beri (before it was discovered to be a vitamin deficiency), was appointed as U.S. Representative of the International Opium Commission and set about to pass domestic legislation banning addictive drugs. 

The 1909 Opium Exclusion Act forbidding importation of smoking opium was passed to show that the U.S. was serious about the Shanghai Convention. In 1914 the Harrison Narcotics Act passed, forbidding doctors to prescribe to “addicts,” and the underworld moved in. Not long afterwards, as the DEA museum demonstrates, tincture bottles were replaced with submachine guns as emblematic of drugs in the U.S.

Today, Chinese-Americans often vociferously oppose licensed cannabis shops in their neighborhoods, equating it with opium. And the world is in the throes of a more dangerous drug brought to us by the drug war: fentanyl. 

At Its 40th Anniversary, "The Breakfast Club" Cast Says Pot-Smoking Scene Was Improvised

The reunion of all five "The Breakfast Club" cast members on the 40th anniversary of the film is kind of hilarious, because they were still the characters they played.

In the iconic 1985 film that was said to define Generation X, Molly Ringwald played Claire The Good Girl against Judd Nelson as Bender The Rebel. Ally Sheedy played The Freak, Emilio Estevez The Jock and Anthony Michael Hall The Brain. Forced to serve high school detention together, the disparate characters bond after they smoke a joint together. 

Speaking of the film's writer/director John Hughes, Nelson said, "He was the first writer who could ever write someone who was young, without them being less," Nelson said. "Except less old." 

Telling the story of watching Hall perform his hilarious, stoned, "chicks can't hold deir smoke" routine, Nelson said that, "In the middle of close-camera coverage of the routine, the camera runs out of film but Hughes doesn't say, 'Cut.'... It's something I've never seen since. It's a reflection of his affection for the characters that he created."   

When the interviewer asked Hall how he managed to play being stoned because, "Surely, you'd never been stoned at 16 years old," the actor was quick to quip, "If I may, don't call me Shirley," an Airplane reference the crowd appreciated. Then in true Brainy fashion, looking down, he said, "Uh, was I stoned at 16, yeah maybe." Bender chimed in, "Some people start late." 

"The whole sequence when we were getting high, that was all improvised," Ringwald said. Hughes was so impressed with her performance that he took her mom to watch the dailies. "So she was sitting there watching her 16-year-old daughter pretend that she was high for 20 minutes." Yeah, that's a story Claire would tell.

There was much interesting talk about the filmmaking process, such as it being shot in sequence, since it was all on one set. Ringwald noted that the volume of film that Hughes used was "a little bit daunting" for the film's editor Dede Allen, who all agreed did an incredible job. Reds, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico were mentioned as her other credits. Also mentioned was Annie Lebowitz, who shot the film's iconic poster (shown). Several in the audience who asked questions said the poster was displayed in own their dorm room or their mother's. 

Asked if hearing songs from the soundtrack brought back memories of the film to them, Hall said that the Simple Minds song from the movie "seems to follow me around....The takeaway from the film for me is this idea of commonality, that we're more alike than different. And that that's really powerful," he said, with Estevez thoughtfully nodding along. "And I think as time has progressed, it resonates as an anti-bullying message" and more, for successive generations, the audience confirmed. Ringwald agreed that the message was, "Someone who you think is your enemy isn't; people are the same and feel the same emotions and heartaches and fears. Maybe if we understood this we could all get along better." 

Asked if the cast watched the movie lately, Ringwald said she did a piece about watching it with her 10-year-old daughter for "This American Life." "It changed my parenting, watching it with her," she said. "How it spoke to her, which characters she identified with any why, it opened up this incredible conversation." Later she watched it with her 15-year old daughter and her friends and, "They didn't pick pick up their phones once." 

Cell phones was the consensus response when an audience member asked, "What would you change back to the way it was in the '80s today?" "There's no putting that genie back into the bottle," said Ringwald, "but it's kind of sad our kids are missing out on a world without cell phones. You saw a lot more, and learned a lot more." 

"We spent more of the time looking up, rather than down," Estevez added in agreement.   

Nelson lamented that Hughes wasn't around to direct more films, to complete the arc and help his actors navigate their age today. "But what he taught us is, "'Think for yourself,'" he said. 

Easter/Ishtar Falls on 4/20 Once More

Once again, as in 2014, Easter Sunday falls on 4/20. This time, cannabis retailers seem to be co-celebrating the dual holiday, with Easter-themed decorations and events. 

Easter, the celebration of Jesus's resurrection, is the most sacred day of the Christian year. In ancient Babylon, around the spring equinox, people celebrated the resurrection of their god Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother the fertility goddess Innana, known in Akkadia as Ishtar, pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects. Flowers, eggs, goats and rabbits, among other agricultural products and animals, were the symbols of the holiday then, as now.

Ostara (1884) by Johannes Gehrts

Ishtar/Ostara and Her Connection to Easter

"In ancient Sumeria, Ishtar was held in high esteem as a heavenly monarch," writes Jeanne Achterberg in Woman as Healer. "Her temples have been found at virtually every level of excavation." The Ishtar Gate to the inner city of Babylon was considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

Also called the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar was a compassionate, healing deity. Her medicine kit likely included plant allies, and one of them, known as the "aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar," was likely cannabis. 

As the land of Sumer became a perpetual battlefield, Ishtar
became the goddess of war and destiny, and became more
sexualized, even as women were restricted from education
and the healing arts.

In mankind’s first written story The Epic of Gilgamesh
(circa 2000 BC), the cruel king Gilgamesh calls Ishtar
a predatory and promiscuous woman, and rebukes her
advances, just before taking off with his buddy Enki-
du to chop down the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh’s
repudiation of Ishtar, some scholars say, signifies a rejection
of goddess worship in favor of patriarchy in ancient times.

One of the interpreters of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in tablets at the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in the 1850s, was Leonidas Hamilton, who published a translation in 1884 that gives Ishtar top billing over Izdubar (Gigamesh), subtitled "The Babylonian Goddess of Love and the Hero and Warrior King." Hamilton writes, "Ishtar... may be identified with Eostre of the Germans, or Easter. To this goddess our Saxon or German ancestors sacrificed in April...from thence arose our word Easter, which the Saxons retained after their conversion to Christianity, so that our Easter-day is nothing more nor less than Ishtar's day." Hamilton cites the Hebrew and English lexicon from John Parkhurst. 

Some have tried to debunk the Ishtar/Easter connection, saying the holiday is named only after the German goddess Ostara (pictured), "the divinity of the radiant dawn" (Grimm), doubtlessly a reincarnation of Ishtar, who the Babylonians called "the morning star" and "the perfect light." 

 

Scottish author Steff V. Scott, in From Ishtar to Eostre: Reframing the Near Eastern Origins of an Anglo Saxon Goddess, finds such debunking racist and ill-informed. He writes, "A rigid academic investigation into the subject shows that Ishtar-Astarte’s worship was prevalent not just in Mesopotamia but down the Levantine Corridor, into Egypt, across Northern Africa, into ancient Greece and Rome, across Europe, and even into the British Isles." Scott presents as evidence writings of Virgil, the Venerable Bede, and Germanic academic sources linking Ishtar/Astarte with Ostara, as well as archeological evidence found on Hadrian’s Wall and "seven altars and inscriptions to Ishtar-Astarte found in Britain under various forms, titles and epithets, all dating to the Roman Period."

Ishtar's Connection to Cannabis

Babylonian period Queen of Night relief,
often considered to represent Ishtar

In the bible, Ishtar or her (sometimes) mother Asherah are called Ashtoreth, the supreme goddess of Caanan and the female counterpart of the gods called Baal or Bel.

Among those pagan, idolatrous practices was the burning of incense. Polish anthropologist Sula Benet, whose 1936 doctoral thesis ''Hashish in Folk Customs and Beliefs'' won her a Warsaw Society of Sciences scholarship for graduate study at Columbia University, theorized that the biblical incense kaneh bosm, meaning "sweet or good cane" was cannabis, mistranslated as "calamus" in the modern bibles.

Throughout the Old Testament, prophet after prophet warns the children of Israel that God will bring misery upon them unless they cease to worship Baal/Bel and Ashtoreth, to whom “burnt offerings” were made. In Jeremiah 44, the women tell him they will continue to secretly burn incense to the Queen of Heaven. One who did so was King Ahab's wife Jezebel (whose name meant "worshipper of Bel" but still means "harlot" to many today).

Author Chris Bennett and others connect Ishtar with Ishara, the prototypical Semitic goddess of love and medicine dating back to the third millennium BC. “Ishara” is the Hittite word for “treaty, binding promise” and so could connect with hempen rope, as other ancient goddesses do. “Ishtar was often depicted as a bundle of reeds, known as the ‘knot of Ishtar,’” writes Bennett in Cannabis and the Soma Solution.

Assyriologist Erica Reiner writes in Astral Magic in Babylonia, "the herb called Sim.Ishara 'aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar,' which is equated with the Akkadian qunnabu, 'cannabis,' may indeed conjure up an aphrodisiac through the association with Ishara, goddess of love."

This Easter, it's time to resurrect Ishtar, and all that our healing goddess stood for, including cannabis. 

ADDENDUM: I was remiss in not pointing out that 4/20/25 is also the final day of Passover. According to NBC News, in New York City, the cannabis brand Tokin’ Jew is advertising a kosher-style THC gummy line, “Tokin’ Chews,” designed to meet dietary restrictions for Passover.

I don't know a goddess connection to Passover, but the biblical heroine Esther, whose holiday is Purim, takes her name from Ishtar. 

Art Show Kicks off San Francisco's 4/20 Week "Space Walk"

The “Higher Visions: Art of the Plant” and “Keep Glowing” blacklight poster exhibition at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco served as a fine and fitting opening party for this year's SF Space Walk today. 

A High-light is the brilliant “Stoned Wars” poster series from Emek, who I am told designed the poster for the concurrent Coachella Music Festival this year. Emek’s work includes take-offs on Star Wars characters and the Peter Tosh “Legalize It” album cover. I also liked the clever, feminist-minded digital collages from Alexe Reyes.

Female-run Moon Made Farms and Sonoma Hills Farm were collaborators on the exhibit. Plants grown by Moon Made are presented as in a herbarium, beautifully pressed and framed. In the blacklight poster exhibit, my favorite was the irreverent “Pink Jesus” poster designed for Sonoma Hills, featuring a female figure and the banner, “SHE HAS RESIN.”

Outdoors on the patio, stunning portraits of female growers from the Emerald Triangle are presented as part of “The Farm and Feminine” project from GrupoGreenlit. 

Inside, the wonderful documentary Tending the Garden was shown. It interviews couples practicing regenerative agriculture to grow cannabis and other crops in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, bucking the trend of corporatization that is squeezing out craft cultivators in California and elsewhere.

The exhibit, I am told, will be up through mid-May. The Center is open Thursday–Sunday, 12-6 PM.

The party kicked off a week's worth of daily events in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. On Wednesday 4/16 Snowtill will drop their living soil indoor "Mirage" strain drop at 7 Stars in Richmond. And on Thursday 4/17 is a hand-picked sun-grown flower showcase at Solful in Irving St. in SF.  

The event will culminate in a 4/20 (Easter Sunday) reception at Mirus Gallery in SOMA featuring 10 brands. While you're in the city, you might want to check out the annual "Hunky Jesus" contest from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.  

The Great Gatsby at 100

Let's raise a glass--and a J--to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, the jazz-age classic from F. Scott Fitzgerald that may be the first novel about a drug dealer. 

Fitzgerald had a distant cousin, Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But he was named for his ancestor Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” 

Raised in a middle-class family with an alcoholic father in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN, he excelled in the Catholic schools he attended and became one of the first Catholics to attend Princeton University.

Apparently, he was a bit of a rebel. The protagonist of his second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) has this exchange with a friend:

“Did they ban cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”
“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”
“I blush for him.”

Anthony Patch, who stands in for Fitzgerald in the story, is the grandson of Adam J. Patch, a reformer in the mold of Anthony Comstock (for whom Patch is named). In 1873 Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public Patch speaks disdainfully of the “shocked and alarmful eyes” of “chroniclers of the mad pace of America.” 

Fitzgerald wrote his third novel,  The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, while living in Europe and friendly with fellow Lost Generation authors Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others.  Known to be a serious drinker, in 1929, he contributed to the New Yorker an autobiography of a life spent drinking. Since while he was partying and writing marijuana "reefers" will still legal and available, I wonder if he did more than drink, and if The Great Gatsby reflects this.