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.