1962 - Flower drum song (Flor de lótus)

I don't remember the method I used to choose what films to see or not when I was a lad of 13. Sao Paulo was a big city and it had dozens of cinemas to choose from. Every week there were lots of new movies joining the myriads of older releases already being shown around town.

1962 was a great year to go to the movies. One could see 'West Side Story', 'Guns of Navarone', 'El Cid', 'King of Kings', 'O pagador de promessas' and other great productions.

Of all the films I saw that year 'Flower drum song' stands out as my favourite musical ever. I could not stop singing 'Chop suey'after I left Cine Barão and took tram back to Vila Madalena where I used to live.

As I hadn't seen those 1930s MGM operetas yet - I would only see them in January 1964 - I may well say that 'Flower drum song' was the best musical I had ever seen in my life.

'Flor de lotus' was the Portuguese title of such a gem. I fell in love with the music as well as with various actors. Mainly, Miyoshi Umeki. But I also loved bombastic Nancy Kwan, suave James Shigeta and adorable Juanita Hall singing 'Chop suey' which became an earworm immediately after hearing it on the screen the first time.

Even though the sound-track album was never released in Brazil I knew many of those songs almost by heart especially 'One hundred million miracles' sung by Miss Umeki and Kam Tong who played her father in the story.

23 September 1962 - 'Flower drum song' premiered on Monday, 24 September 1962. I must have seen it on the Saturday, 29 September 1962.

14 October 1962 - 'Correio da Manhã' revieweer of 'Flower drum song' refers to Miyoshi Umeki as 'deplorable' (deploravel) which misses completely the point of informing the reader. This was his/her opinion and should be kept to him/herself. 

Film reviewing in Brazil was a topsy-turvy occupation done by journalists who did not have the least idea what their role should be. If I were the editor of an entertainment-page in a major city newspaper I would hire someone who kept in touch with what was happening in Hollywood and other centres of production but I would make sure he/she would write articles to enlighten the reader about the films he/she intended to see.

Have a read at these two pieces of 'film-reviewing'. To start with most Brazilian reviewers would not have seen any of the movies they were to supposed to write about. Okay, the film distributors didn't care to have a sneak preview so one had to make do with whatever he had at hand. 

Most of the comments were done based on the names that appeared in the credits the journos received from the distributors. Then they figured out what the film must be like and write their 'review' based on assumptions. This is not real journalism. It might be called 'divination' for all that I care.

30 September 1962: even though 'The world of Suzie Wong' was released in the USA on 10 November 1960 when 'Flower drum song' hadn't been shot yet, it appeared in the Brazilian market 2 years late after Nancy Kwan's 2nd feature had premiered.

RKO's Golden Gate Theatre waits to premiere 'Flower drum song' in San Francisco. 

MC Paul Speegel welcomes James Shigeta and Nancy Kwan; Miyoshi Umeki & her husband Wyn Opie, a TV producer at the post-premiere party later on. 

here you'll find everything you always wanted to know about 'The flower drum song':

http://loyd-theater.com/movie-collect-1/20th/flower-drum-song/flower-drum-song.html

James Shigeta & Nancy Kwan. 

Nancy Kwan in her breakthrough role 'Susie Wong'.

Cary Grant dropped in during the shooting of 'Flower drum song' and didn't miss a chance of photo opportunity with Nancy Kwan. 

Nancy Kwan weds Peter Poc.

Comments about the movie version of 'Flower drum song' at YouTube:

sunny chuang (2012)

Everything is in "Flower drum song', 1961 Rodgers and Hammerstein's classic movie musical - a lavish spectacle of campy-and-peppy musical numbers / edifying-and-satisfying narrative / galvanic-and-graphic characters / gushing-and-joshing moments / fad-and-rad stellar-headliners / bubbly-and-gnarly step designs / hefty-and-lofty production designs / hit-and-fit scoring and sound / congruous-and-precocious camera-works / capable-and-palpable scene-executions. This old-fashioned and impassioned musical number - the American-invented Chinese dish "Chop Suey" - is entirely groovy-and-savvy.The succulent song-duet of Ms Juanita Hall and Mr James Shigeta and the ebullient solo-dance of Mr Patrick Adiarte truly stand out. The well-blended "east-and-west" cultures in this musical sequence are brilliantly interpolated and manifested without misfire and disgrace to the moderatists and the modernists. I can't resist but diligently-and-frequently flip through this classic film clip for the reason that it is too chummy and so yummy.

Joe Gomez (2016)

When I was a kid, visiting San Francisco with my parents & sister we went to eat at the Imperial Palace in Chinatown. It had a plaque in front saying: This restaurant was used for some of the scenes in the film 'Flower drum song'; very cool place with lots of pictures of movie starts; old school style.

 

Guy Takamatsu (2016)

I only found out through a YouTube post with another video that James Shigeta had passed away in 2014. For some reason, I missed the story of his passing. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems as if his death did not get that much coverage as other celebrities. This may be a little late but James Shigeta R.I.P.

John Province (2020)

The great silent film star Anna Mae Wong was supposed to come out of retirement to play the Aunt role but died unexpectedly.

Ron (2020)

Juanita Hall is African American and Irish. Not Asian at all.

Victoria Grace (2020)

It blew my MIND when I learned as a teen that the actress Juanita Hall here was a Black American! She was so utterly, thoroughly convincing as a person of Asian heritage, even Polynesian as well, as her Bloody Mary role in "South Pacific" showed. What a chameleon! And super talented.

AsiaMs (2020)

I love that the square-dance guy is calling in Chinglish, specifically Cantonese and English.

Margaret Bohls (2015)

My mom would play this entire album when she would make her chop suey. 

C.Y. Lee, ‘Flower Drum Song’ author, is dead at 102

C.Y. Lee in 2002. Mr. Lee, the author of “The Flower Drum Song,” about life among new arrivals in Chinatown in San Francisco, was one of the first Asian novelists to find commercial success in the United States.

C.Y. Lee in 2002. Mr. Lee, the author of “The Flower Drum Song,” about life among new arrivals in Chinatown in San Francisco, was one of the first Asian novelists to find commercial success in the United States.

By Katharine Q. Seelye for The New York Times

11 February 2019

The manuscript had been rejected by more than a dozen publishing houses. Finally, an elderly man who was screening new books for what was then Farrar, Straus & Cudahy read it and liked it.

Too ill to write a full critique, he just scrawled, “Read this.” And then he died, the manuscript beside him on his bed.

“Without those two words, the novel would have never been published,” C. Y. Lee, the manuscript’s author, told The Associated Press in 2002.

The novel was “The Flower Drum Song,” a story of generational and cultural conflict among newly arrived Asians in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was published in 1957 and became a best seller. It was adapted as a Broadway musical, which received six Tony nominations, and then as a movie, which was nominated for five Academy Awards.

With “The Flower Drum Song,” Mr. Lee, who died on 8 November 2018, at 102, became one of the first Asian novelists to find commercial success in the United States.

Mr. Lee’s daughter, Angela Lee, said he died from complications of kidney failure under hospice care at her home in Los Angeles. Word of his death appeared at the time in Chinese-language newspapers; Ms. Lee said the family did not think to reach out to the English-language news media. The Washington Post recently learned of the death and became the first English-language news outlet to report it.

Mr. Lee, who was born in China, wrote other books, including “China Saga” (1987) and “Gate of Rage” (1991), about the 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square. But none achieved the fame of “The Flower Drum Song,” which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II turned into a musical, directed by Gene Kelly.

The first big Broadway show with Asian-American actors in leading roles, “Flower Drum Song,” as the adaptation was known, ran from 1958 to 1960. The next year it became a movie, with a cast that included Nancy Kwan, Miyoshi Umeki (who also starred in the stage version), Jack Soo and James Shigeta. It was among the first major Hollywood productions with a mostly Asian-American cast.

But for all the commercial success of the play and the movie, and the pride felt by many Asian-Americans at seeing Asian actors, the reviews were mixed. Critics complained that the story line — more nuanced in the novel — was simplistic and dated in the adaptations, and that all three versions perpetuated stereotypes about Chinese immigrants. As time went on, the story was also seen as sexist. And some dismissed the music as second-tier Rodgers, not on a par with “South Pacific” or “The King and I.”

The criticism did not bother Mr. Lee, as he said in an interview published in 2004 for the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He said he had been writing about a particular period, when people were more traditional. And he was happy with changes made for the dramatic versions; his real desire, his daughter said in a telephone interview, was to be successful.

“Dad really liked being popular,” Ms. Lee said. “He wasn’t trying to be a highbrow literary author. He just wanted to reach the widest audience possible.”

The playwright David Henry Hwang, best known for “M. Butterfly,” was a longtime fan of Mr. Lee’s novel and spearheaded a revival of the musical in 2001. He updated the original libretto, written by Mr. Hammerstein and Joseph Fields, and tweaked the characters and the plot. He felt the novel had a bittersweet tone that had been lost in other adaptations.

“C. Y. brought complexity and humanity to Chinese-American characters and stories during a period when American culture portrayed Asians as caricatures: oversexualized women and men to be ridiculed or killed in battle,” Mr. Hwang said in an email.

After opening successfully in Los Angeles, the revival moved to Broadway in 2002, where reviews were mixed. It received three Tony nominations and ran for 169 performances.

Chin Yang Lee was born on 23rd December 1915, in Hunan Province, the youngest in a family of eight boys and three girls. Ms. Lee and her brother, Jay, said that his father was essentially a feudal lord.

“The family called our grandfather a ‘philosopher king’ because he never worked,” Jay Lee said. “He walked around the property writing poetry and contemplating nature.” The family was well off until the Communist revolution in 1949, when they lost everything.

C. Y. Lee, who had enrolled at Shandong University in Jinan, was often on the run from military clashes that took place during the second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. He graduated from National Southwestern Associated University, in Kunming, in 1942.

He worked for a time as a secretary for a maharajah on the border between China and Burma, now Myanmar. He said in the interview published in 2004 that this was the best year of his life. In China, he said, “I was a refugee all the time,” escaping bombing, war, bandits and famine, but on the border, “life was so relaxed, the countryside so beautiful.” In that job, he translated letters, but he mainly entertained the maharajah’s bored young wife by playing badminton with her.

Mr. Lee came to New York in 1943 after fleeing the Japanese on the Burma Road on foot, with a pen and a typewriter, his children said.

He enrolled at Columbia University and studied literature but had a hard time because of the language barrier. He transferred to the Yale School of Drama, where he felt liberated when a professor told him not to worry about using proper English and to focus on telling his story.

His final project at Yale, from which he graduated in 1947 with a master of fine arts degree, was a play about working with the maharajah. It became a series of short stories for The New Yorker, then a book called “The Sawbwa and His Secretary: My Burmese Reminiscences” (1959).

Later, while living in California, he met Joyce Lackey, an American, at a writer’s group that also included Ray Bradbury. Ms. Lackey and Mr. Lee married in 1963; she died in 1997. Mr. Lee’s son and daughter are his only survivors.

Mr. Lee struggled as a writer for many years in San Francisco, working for Chinese-language newspapers and barely making a living when he began “The Flower Drum Song.”

When no one would publish it, his agent suggested he try another profession. And, as the often-recounted story has it, his career as a writer might have ended then, if not for the unnamed man who read the manuscript on his death bed.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 12, 2019, on Page A20 of the New York Times edition with the headline: C. Y. Lee, 102, who wrote ‘The Flower Drum Song’.

 

C.Y. Lee, Chinese-born author of bestselling novel ‘The Flower Drum Song’, dies at age 102

Book shot up the bestseller list and was adapted for stage by the Broadway team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein; a 1961 movie adaptation received five Oscar nominations

4 February 2019

Washington Post

C.Y. Lee, a Chinese-born author whose bestselling 1957 novel 'The Flower Drum Song' explored conflict among first and second-generation immigrants in San Francisco’s Chinatown, provided the source material for two Broadway productions 43 years apart and sparked a cultural debate about Asian stereotypes, died on 8 November 2018, at his daughter’s home in Los Angeles. He was 102.

The cause was complications from kidney failure, said his daughter, Angela Lee. The family did not publicly announce the death.

Over a career spanning seven decades, Lee wrote nearly a dozen volumes of historical fiction, but his best-known work was his debut novel, 'The Flower Drum Song', which brought instant literary stardom upon its release.

He was called an overnight sensation, but in fact he had spent years toiling in obscurity after having arrived in the United States from China on a student visa during WWII. 

He wrote 'The Flower Drum Song' while renting a room above a Filipino nightclub in San Francisco’s Chinatown and working as an editor and columnist for one of the city’s Chinese-language newspapers.

The book concerned Wang Chi-yang, a first-generation Chinese immigrant struggling to accept the cultural and generational gap he had with his American-raised son, Wang Ta, particularly in matters of love and marriage.

Lee’s agent was turned down by nearly every major publisher in New York and was about to give up after a year, when Farrar, Straus and Cudahy made a bid.

Lee said the book’s salvation came from an elderly man who had been paid by the publisher to screen manuscripts and had scrawled two words on the book before dying: “Read This”.

In a review for The New York Times, novelist Idwal Jones said Lee “writes with no omission of slang and sex and every regard for the popular taste”.

The book shot up the bestseller list and caught the attention of screenwriter Joseph Fields, who persuaded the Broadway team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to adapt it for the stage. The three simplified Lee’s narrative, and the musical comedy 'Flower Drum Song' had a two-year run on Broadway, starting in 1958.

The musical, which Lee said was “funny and more commercial” than his book, was directed by Gene Kelly and received several Tony Award nominations. It was the first mainstream play about Asians featuring a mostly Asian cast.

Japanese-American actress Miyoshi Umeki portrayed Mei Li, the “picture bride” intended for Wang Ta, in both the Broadway musical and its 1961 movie adaptation.

James Shigeta starred in the film as Wang Ta, who is beguiled by the seductive showgirl Linda Low, played by Nancy Kwan.

It was the first major Hollywood film about Asian-Americans featuring a fully Asian cast and received five Oscar nominations.

As with the play, some critics viewed the film as an exotic stereotype of Chinese Americans that did not match the musical or dramatic standards of the Pacific Rim-set Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals South Pacific and The King and I.

In The New Yorker, critic Brendan Gill called the movie an “elaborate fraud”, bloated with “pseudo-Oriental intricacies … every bit as authentic as Fu Manchu.”

More than a half-century later, in an interview with literary scholar Andrew Shin, Lee said he wrote the book for a broad American audience in the hope of windfall success, and he defended the way he depicted Asian-Americans.

“I have received criticism, you see, saying that even the novel is a little stereotypical,” he said. “But it was the period. I have written novels with characters who have bound feet and pigtails. But this is an accurate portrait of people during the period I was writing about … So people who criticise the novel in that way forget about when the events take place. They just rush to say that I am stereotyping Chinese culture.”

Lee’s book fell out of critical favour and went out of print, in large part because it was so identified with the hit stage play and film.

In the late 1990s – after Lee had written several other Chinese-inspired novels that received little fanfare – there were stirrings of a revival of interest in the 'Flower Drum Song' musical, championed by Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang, author of the Tony Award-winning drama M. Butterfly.

Hwang had long called the film version of Lee’s novel a guilty pleasure.

“It was the only place on television where you could see Asians acting like Americans,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, noting that he often watched it despite its reputation as dull, sexist and “inauthentic”. It also led him to the source material.

In 1996, Hwang received permission from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organisation to proceed with a “revisical”.

He wrote a new libretto to better reflect the nuances of Lee’s work – which Hwang said for the first time in American popular culture portrayed Asian women as “complex, fully human characters.”

He tinkered with the conflict at the centre of the plot: it would now hinge on whether to turn the father’s failing opera house into a nightclub.

The musical was a high-profile hit when it opened in 2001 in Los Angeles. The show moved the next year to Broadway, where it was nominated for several Tony Awards and ran for 169 performances.

Hwang was also central to the 2002 reissue of Lee’s novel by Penguin Books.

In a foreword, Hwang said his introduction to the book was like “discovering a long-lost ancestor, a forgotten branch of my family tree, a missing piece of literary history for which I felt particular affinity”.

Chin Yang Lee was born on 23rd December 1915, in Hunan province, the youngest of 11 children of a rice farmer.

He moved with his family to Beijing at 10. Amid the Japanese occupation, he left school to flee for safety on China’s southern border with Burma.

He spent a year and a half working as a secretary for a municipal chief – a self-proclaimed maharajah – in the Burmese border city of Mangshi. His job was to write English-language letters and entertain his bored wife.

“The maharajah needed somebody to play badminton with her every day,” Lee told the Chronicle. (The experience inspired his book The Sawbwa and His Secretary: My Burmese Reminiscences, published in 1959).

After Lee graduated from a university in Kunming, China, he said his oldest brother – the de facto head of the siblings – ordered him to flee the war-torn country for his own good.

“When my eldest brother told me: ‘Get out!’ I said, ‘Where to?’ ” he recalled to the Chronicle. “America,’ he said. I was surprised.”

He hocked all his possessions to pay for his passage to New York in 1943, and he never saw his parents again.

He briefly enrolled at Columbia University to study comparative literature, but his ambitions were to study playwriting at Yale’s graduate programme with a professor who had once mentored Eugene O’Neill, whom Lee idolised.

He received a master of fine arts degree in 1947 and was the only Asian in the drama school at the time, he said.

He won a short-story contest sponsored by Writer’s Digest magazine in 1949, applied for permanent residence in the United States and later gained citizenship. His wife of 34 years, Joyce Lackey, died in 1997. In addition to his daughter, survivors include a son, Jay Lee; both of them live in Los Angeles.

After 'The Flower Drum Song', Lee published 10 other novels and a collection of short stories, many of which were translated into Chinese from English.

They include 'Lover’s Point' (1958), about a Japanese-American woman’s love affairs in San Francisco, and 'China Saga' (1987), a multigenerational family drama.

'China Saga', critic Carolyn See wrote in The Washington Post, left readers “happily overdosed on rapes, double murders, banners, kites, concubines, daring rescues and – at one notable banquet – a fish made out of wood.” She also praised Lee’s “clean and literate” prose style.

In Hwang’s foreword to the 2002 reissue of 'The Flower Drum Song', he called the novel an “Asian-American classic”.

But Lee said in his interview with Shin, the literary scholar, “I never thought of it that way. I was just delighted if I could sell anything.”