But that didn't shield the performers from racial taunts from a mostly white audience.
The club was even profiled in major media outlets, including Life magazine. Sing, now 91 and living in Hawaii, recalls Forbidden City had it all - dancers, comedians and singers like Larry Ching, who was billed as the Chinese Frank Sinatra. “It's low-grade - dancing, showing your legs and everything. "Because it's not a high-class job,” she said. Mai Tai Sing followed her show business dreams by starting out as a dancer in the 1940s, at a time when conservative Chinese parents did not want their children to become entertainers. So I think the Chinese community really wanted to forget about these clubs."ĭancer, actress and nightclub hostess Mai Tai Sing, now 91 (H. “You know, the whole notion of women wearing scanty clothing, showing their legs in public, was taboo for the conservative Chinese community at that time. “They were ashamed of the clubs,” he said.
In 1989, Dong captured that little-known chapter of entertainment history in his documentary “Forbidden City, USA.” The film has now been digitally remastered and Dong has turned his research into a new book, Forbidden City, USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936-1970.īack when Dong decided to make a documentary about the Chinese-American nightclub scene, few people wanted to talk about it. It was part of a flourishing Chinese-American nightclub scene in the 1940s and 50s that paved the way for future Asian-American performers who defied racial and cultural barriers to pursue their showbiz dreams. The club, which opened in 1938, was called Forbidden City after the imperial palace in China. “And I had never seen Chinese dressed like that." "I remember distinctly looking at the glass display case with all these wonderful black and white photos of Chinese people, but dressed in zoot suits and 1940s kind of gowns and tuxedos,” he said. When Arthur Dong was growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s, he used to walk by a nightclub just outside of Chinatown.
0 kommentar(er)
