Fantastic Voyage: In Search of Long Tack Sam
September 26, 2007
Before there was David Blaine, there was Long Tack Sam, the renowned magician, acrobat and vaudeville performer who delighted crowds in the early 1900s. And, oh, what a tangled web Long Tack Sam wove for his great-granddaughter, Ann Marie Fleming, to unravel his tales of old.
Fleming, a filmmaker who recently returned to live in her birthplace in Okinawa, describes her new book as an “illustrated memoir,” which bears the same title as her 2003 award-winning documentary, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam.Piecing together 20 years of the labyrinthine process of interviewing magicians, acrobats, historians, family and friends — Fleming entered the rabbit hole. Driven by curiosity about her Chinese and Australian ancestry, she found herself traveling the globe and blowing away the dust of Long Tack Sam’s amazing, yet forgotten, stories as a famous vaudeville performer at the turn of the 20th century.
Long Tack Sam’s career coincided with a point when the entertainment industry was fraught with negative Asian stereotypes and such fictional characters as Fu Manchu, Chung Lin Soo and John Mulholland, who often wore “oriental” masks to cater to white audiences who savored foreign entertainment.
These Asian depictions became pervasive in Hollywood cinema, creating sinister images of Chinese culture. At the time, Chinese laborers were immigrating to the United States, which eventually sparked what became known as “The Yellow Peril,” the belief that the mass immigration of Asians threatened white wages and standards. The resentment soured Long Tack Sam’s taste for working in the industry he so loved alongside his Austrian wife and daughters.
He eventually expressed disdain towards Hollywood and became outspoken about the racism being perpetuated in cinema. In an old newspaper clipping that Fleming found, Long Tack Sam is quoted as saying: “Chinese are always cast as smokers, villains or figures of the underworld. … There are good people in China, too, but people who see your American movies must suppose we are all despicable. … If I can’t do my people any good, I don’t want to do them any harm, so I won’t play those roles.”
The book is a feast for the senses, featuring an amalgamation of scrapbook-type visuals narrated by a stick figure representing Fleming’s alter ego.
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam offers an array of archival photographs, stills from the film, comic book illustrations, and, happily, a little flip book of simply drawn acrobats in the lower right- hand corner of the pages.
“It was a great challenge to take a time-based 4-D art form and put it down on the page. What the graphic novel afforded was a way of playing with time and space through the layout,” Fleming said. “The film is really a collage of many different styles, and I wanted to have the graphic novel parallel that. My films are all multi-media — Long Tack Sam’s act was multimedia. His act included acrobatics, juggling, magic, comedy, impersonations, music and dancing.”
Having received many accolades for her film, Fleming was eventually approached by an editor at Riverhead Books, a subsidiary of Penguin Books in New York, who saw her film on the Sundance Channel and had the idea of adapting The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam into a graphic novel. “As it is in the world of independent filmmaking, it is not always so easy to see the documentary,” Fleming commented. “I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to create something that could be accessible and that you could hold in your hands and peruse at your leisure.”
Notably, Fleming makes use of a comic book style that can be misconstrued as being stereotypical. Along with fellow artist Julian Lawrence, comic books were created representing Long Tack Sam’s many different histories.
“We designed them to emulate the style of 1930s comics — the golden age of comics — when it was at his height,” Fleming said. “The ’30s style comic books, specifically, have been singled out as perpetuating negative Asian stereotypes. They are authentic to the time. The entire project is to subvert and challenge negative stereotypes, so it is important to see it all in context. Long Tack Sam, his act and the accompanying illustrations to promote it, definitely exploited his Asian-ness, but as a fantastic heritage. He wanted to portray a very positive image.”
Although an enjoyable read, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is a companion book to the film and requires that the reader see the documentary in order to fully appreciate this illustrious story. Nevertheless, it is truly an inspiration for anyone seeking knowledge of their past to help them understand the future.
“Be patient and be persistent,” Fleming advises family soothsayers. “By learning about our families, we learn about ourselves and realize that we are all a part of history. We create it everyday by everything we do.”
For more information, visit www.longtacksam.com.
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