Fleming, Ann Marie - The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam: An Illustrated Memoir

[oyceter]

Ann Marie Fleming found a few reels of old film when she was recovering from a car accident, and portrayed in those reels was Long Tack Sam, magician extraordinaire and her great-grandfather. After researching his life a little, she left with even more questions: who was Long Tack Sam? How did he negotiate being Chinese while touring worldwide during the turn of the century? And why was this world-famous magician almost completely forgotten today?

The graphic novel is actually based on a film Fleming wrote and directed, albeit adapted to take advantage of the different format. It's a combination of memoir, biography, and cultural history, as Fleming ties together the story of her own search and how it affected her with the not-always-factual story of Long Tack Sam and the history of the world at the time. Long Tack Sam lived through the fall of the Qing dynasty and the rise of the Republic of China, two world wars, the rise of movies and the downfall of vaudeville and other travelling acts like his. His story is particularly interesting because it is so international; he married an Austrian (I think) woman and raised three biracial children, two of which ended up marrying Chinese (I forget about the third). And he was travelling at a time when it was just as common to see a white man playing a Chinese man than an actual Chinese man.

I'm not sure if you get a cohesive story out of this book, but I also don't think that's the point. Information about Long Tack Sam is piecemeal and untrustworthy; Long would tell different peopel different stories, his advertisements would say something else, and all of it had to be rediscovered. What we see is what Fleming had to puzzle together, and as such, I think the patchwork nature of the story works.

Fleming doesn't go as into issues of race and racism as I wanted. It's perpetually there in the background, but I suspect that one of the ways Long Tack Sam dealt with it was to use it to his advantage and capitalize on his own "exoticness" to the non-Chinese world. He also incorporated his daughters in his act later, changing their names to more "Chinese" stage names. I wish there had been more about Fleming's grandmother and what she thought of all this, but I suspect that would have been difficult, given that her grandmother had passed away before she started the project.

Still, an interesting look at an interesting life lived during an interesting period.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of a book I read as a child, the title of which currently eludes me, about a Chinese man who becomes a juggler (and later acrobat) travelling with circuses in Europe and N America, marries a German woman, has several children whom he turns into an acrobat troupe, they are trapped in Germany during WWII but survive.... I think it was based on a true story.

[oyceter]

Oh interesting, that does sound very similar to Long Tack Sam's story! Fleming also notes that he probably trained as an acrobat in his youth as well, since that was the background most of the Chinese performers at the time came from.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I think it was Circus Train (1956) by Joan Selby-Lowndes, a prolific children's writer who also appears to have been a serious historian of circuses. The date would be right as my copy was the 'Beaver Bookclub' edition - and my parents subscribed me to that around the late 50s.