Abstract
By 1960 the nightclubs of Hong Kong were at the hub of an international touring circuit. Thousands of artists from different nations proliferated opportunities for contact and collaboration across national borders. This chapter draws on a survey of nightclub notices in newspapers to visualise the itineraries of international artists touring through Hong Kong between 1956 and 1965. Using maps, time-series, and network diagrams, it reveals that international relations between artists appearing in Hong Kong were regionally continuous with the Chinese history of ‘entertainment cosmopolitanism’, and more extensive than either the legacy of European colonialism or the narrative of ‘Americanisation’. Artists touring through Hong Kong amplified the value of national distinction in regional circulation and reached beyond gendered conventions of international relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Stephen Teo, ‘Oh, Karaoke!—Mandarin Pop and Musicals’, The 17th Hong Kong International Film Festival: Mandarin Films and Popular Songs: 40s–60s (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1993), 32–36, at 35; Jean Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 139.
- 2.
Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, 151; see also Sam Ho, ‘The Songstress, The Farmer’s Daughter, The Mambo Girl and the Songstress Again’, The 17th Hong Kong International Film Festival: Mandarin Films and Popular Songs: 40s–60s (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1993), 64–66.
- 3.
Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, 162.
- 4.
China Mail, 31 December 1957, 3.
- 5.
South China Morning Post, 1 July 1958, 5.
- 6.
Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932).
- 7.
On European cabaret, see Lisa Appignanesi, Cabaret (London: Methuen, 1984); Harold B. Segel, Turn-of-the-Century Cabaret: Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Cracow, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Zurich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). On the development of nightclubs in New York, see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 113–45.
- 8.
On the history of cabarets and nightclubs in Tokyo from 1906, see Fukutomi Taro (福富太郎), Showa Kyabare Hishi (昭和キャバレー秘史) (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha (河出書房新社), 1994); on the development of Shanghai’s cabarets, see Andrew David Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010); on the lives of ‘dancing girls’ in Singapore’s amusement parks, see Adeline Foo, Lancing Girls of a Happy World (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2017); on the emergence of ‘dance palaces’ in Sydney in the 1910s and 1920s, see Jill Julius Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005).
- 9.
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1–3.
- 10.
Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 119.
- 11.
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London; New York: Verso, 2005), 1.
- 12.
The data models underlying these methods are discussed in Jonathan Bollen, ‘Data Models for Theatre Research: People, Places, and Performance’, Theatre Journal 68.4 (2016), 615–32; see also Jonathan Bollen and Julie Holledge, ‘Hidden Dramas: Cartographic Revelations in the World of Theatre Studies’, Cartographic Journal 48.4 (2011), 226–36.
- 13.
I conducted a weekly survey of the China Mail (1955–61), the Hongkong Tiger Standard (1962–69; titled Hongkong Standard from June 1965), and the Hong Kong Star (1965–66), and I searched headlines in Ta Kung Pao (大公報), Hong Kong Kung Sheung Daily News (香港工商日報), Kung Sheung Evening News (工商晚報), Wah Kiu Yat Po (華僑日報), and the South China Morning Post (1955–65), using the collections at Hong Kong Central Library and the University of Hong Kong. Nightclub listings begin with an entertainment guide in the China Mail from August 1958. Display advertising for nightclubs in the China Mail is sporadic up to that point, becoming more regular through 1959 and into 1960. Display advertising for nightclubs in the Hongkong Tiger Standard is regular throughout the 1960s. Peter Olaes pens a short-lived weekly column, ‘Where to Go and What to See’, for the Standard from March to April 1962. Alex Serres’s column, ‘Last Night’, in the Star, which profiles individual nightclub acts, is a particularly valuable source for 1965 and 1966.
- 14.
The data set records 7890 events, counted as an artist or company appearing on a given date at a venue in Hong Kong; however, counting appearances by month controls for variations in the number of times an act’s appearance at a venue was advertised in any given month.
- 15.
In constructing the time-series, I did not count how many appearances each artist was making within a month or how many advertisements they appeared in. I just counted the fact that they were appearing.
- 16.
The trade slump in 1952–54 followed the end of the Korean War. Nominal GDP grew at an average of 10 per cent per annum, between 1959 and 1965; Catherine R. Schenk, Hong Kong as an International Financial Centre: Emergence and Development 1945–65 (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 4.
- 17.
Chi-Kwan Mark, ‘Hong Kong as an International Tourism Space: The Politics of American Tourism in the 1960s’, in Hong Kong in the Cold War, ed. Priscilla Roberts and John M. Carroll (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 160–82.
- 18.
Schenk, Hong Kong as an International Financial Centre, 4; David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong’s Enduring Global Business Relations’, in Hong Kong and the Cold War, 60–91.
- 19.
There were segregated social spaces in Hong Kong, such as the Hong Kong Club which retained a British-only membership policy until the late 1970s, but these colonial institutions were residual formations, distinct from the international modernity that characterised nightclubs in Hong Kong.
- 20.
Including Helen Mizuta, Hiroko the C Bomb, Cherry Minato, Teruko Tamaru, Ritz Sano, Azuma Kurumi, Betty Maruyama, Kumi Okano, Tazuko Ichinoseki, Tomoko Tanaka, and Keiko Minami (Japan); and Linda Lee (Korea).
- 21.
Including Helene Morris, Donna Kaye, Marta Dane, Linda Fontanette (United States); Chelo Alonso, Yolanda Parolo, Amor Soler (Cuba); Rita Ravell (Mexico); Gina Montez (Brazil); Aida Darling, Anna Lise (Germany); Rahnee Motie (France); Jessie Carron, Zari, Sibrain (England); Martine Molina, Sabrina, Ayla (Turkey); and Vicky Montez (Egypt).
- 22.
China Mail, 26 April 1961, 4; China Mail, 17 September 1960, 3.
- 23.
China Mail, 18 December 1959, 2.
- 24.
China Mail, 13 December 1958, 3; China Mail, 18 August 1961, 4.
- 25.
The average shortest path between any two acts in this core cluster is 3.66. That is, on average, there are 2.66 ‘degrees of separation’ between any two acts, and 46 per cent (or 668,346/1,455,642 pairs) are separated in co-appearance by two or fewer intervening acts. In other words, if two artists had not appeared together at a nightclub in Hong Kong, there is a good chance that they had each appeared with other artists who had appeared together.
- 26.
Meng Yue, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 171–209; see also Wen-Hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendour: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 59.
- 27.
Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire, 199–200.
- 28.
Yeh, Shanghai Splendour, 59; Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire, 192.
- 29.
Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire, 191–92.
- 30.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 326–33.
- 31.
On the industrial dimension of Shanghai-to-Hong Kong migration, see Siu-Lun Wong, Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988); on music, Wong Kee Chee, The Age of Shanghainese Pop, 1930–1970 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2001); on film, Stephen Teo, ‘The Shanghai Hangover: The Early Years of Mandarin Cinema in Hong Kong’ in Cinema of Two Cities: Hong Kong–Shanghai (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1994), 17–24; on publishing, Yung Sai-shing, ‘One Chicken, Three Dishes: The Cultural Enterprises of Law Bun’, in The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–65, ed. Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 150–77.
- 32.
Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World, 188, 191, 256, 274.
- 33.
Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 18.
- 34.
Ritz Ballroom, 4th Anniversary Souvenir Booklet, 1951, Hong Kong University Library, HKC 791 R6, http://hkpop.blogspot.com.au/2008/09/ritz-ballroom.html, accessed 9 July 2012.
- 35.
Wong Kee Chee, The Age of Shanghainese Pop, 1930–1970 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2001), 78.
- 36.
Stephanie Po-yin Chung, ‘Moguls of the Chinese Cinema: The Story of the Shaw Brothers in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore, 1924–2002’, Modern Asian Studies 41.4 (2007), 665–82.
- 37.
Wong Ain-ling, ‘Foreword’, in Hong Kong Filmography, Volume 4 (1953–1959), ed. Kwok Ching-ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2003), x–xvii, at xii.
- 38.
Field, Shanghai’s Dancing World, 306–07; Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, 161.
- 39.
Americanisation was not only a post-war phenomenon. Capital investment, cultural communications, and foreign policy from America had been influential in the emergence of ‘entertainment cosmopolitanism’ in early twentieth-century Shanghai. Besides the American interests investing in Shanghai’s economy of finance, insurance, and real estate, Meng Yue traces how a movement, originating in San Francisco and Honolulu, opposing discrimination against overseas Chinese in the United States, was incorporated into Shanghai’s ‘unruly urban festivity’ through translations, adaptations, and performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Meng, Shanghai and the Edges of Empire, 119–35). But the United States’ military engagements in the Asia Pacific region—from the occupation of the Philippines and the Pacific War with Japan to involvement in Japan’s post-war reconstruction and the Korean and Vietnam wars—extended the reach of American influence into the 1950s and 1960s.
- 40.
Yoshimi Shunya, ‘“America” as Desire and Violence: Americanization in Postwar Japan and Asia During the Cold War’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4.3 (2003), 433–50, at 440.
- 41.
Shin Hyunjoon and Ho Tung-hung, ‘Translation of “America” During the Early Cold War Period: A Comparative Study on the History of Popular Music in South Korea and Taiwan’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 10.1 (2009), 83–104, at 94.
- 42.
Michael Ingham, Hong Kong: A Cultural History (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 58.
- 43.
Mark, ‘Hong Kong as an International Tourism Space’, 163; see also A Touristic Guide to Hong Kong, Department of Extramural Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1968; The Hong Kong Visitors Survey: A Pre-Publication Summary and Analysis, prepared for the Hong Kong Tourist Association, 20 February 1963.
- 44.
Wong Kee Chee, The Age of Shanghainese Pop, 1930–1970, 174.
- 45.
‘Big audience hails Louis Armstrong’, South China Morning Post, 6 April 1963, 7.
- 46.
Nicanor G. Tiongson, An Essay on Philippine Theatre (Manila: Cultural Centre of the Philippines, 1989), 80; Doreen G. Fernandez, Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater History (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996), 20.
- 47.
Lee William Watkins, ‘Minstrelsy in the Margin: Re-covering the Memories and Lives of Filipino Musicians in Hong Kong’, PhD thesis (University of Hong Kong, 2004), 11–17; Stephanie Ng, ‘Filipino Bands Performing Hotels, Clubs, and Restaurants in Asia: Purveyors of Transnational Culture in a Global Arena’, PhD dissertation (University of Michigan, 2006), 45–59.
- 48.
Peter Olaes, ‘Where to go and what to see’, Hongkong Tiger Standard, 3 March 1962, 14.
- 49.
Advertisement for Hotel Miramar Restaurant and nightclub, Hongkong Tiger Standard, 13 January 1962, 13.
- 50.
In the montage of nightclub neon signs, which precedes the performance, the last sign is 麗池夜總會, the Chinese name of the nightclub. Further evidence provided by publicity photographs of Chelo Alonso, a dancer from Cuba who also performed at the Ritz, reveals enough of the décor and stage to confirm it as the location for Margo’s performance in the film.
- 51.
Grace Chang, ‘One Big Happy Family: Grace Chang’s Cathay Story’, in The Cathay Story, ed. Wong Ain-ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002), 191–95, at 192.
- 52.
Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, 168, quoting Andrew F. Jones, ‘Circuit Listening: Grace Change and the Dawn of the Chinese 1960s’, in Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 66–92, 73. As Ma notes, both Cugat and Puente toured cities in Asia in the 1950s.
- 53.
Ma, Sounding the Modern Woman, 167–68, citing Richie Quirino, Mabuhay Jazz: Jazz in Postwar Philippines (Manila: Anvil, 2008), 16–17.
- 54.
This is not to underestimate the rhythmic continuity between drumming and dancing, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that knowing a drum rhythm is to know how to dance to it, and to know it well enough to teach the dance to someone else.
- 55.
Jean Ma incorrectly identifies Margo the Z Bomb as Lolinda Raquel (Sounding the Modern Woman, 162), apparently repeating an error made by Paul Dickson in War Slang: American Fighting Words and Phrases Since the Civil War, 1st ed. (Darby, PA: Diane Publishing Company, 1994).
- 56.
She is introduced as Margarita Mercado in San Francisco, December 1953, where she is soon billed as ‘Margo the Mexican Z Bomb—The Absolute End!’; see ‘Ze people, they like Margo, no?’, San Francisco Call Bulletin, 26 December 1953, 8; advertisement for the Sinaloa Club, San Francisco Call Bulletin, 23 January 1954, 10.
- 57.
San Francisco Call Bulletin, 24 July 1954; South China Morning Post, 12 November 1954, 9.
- 58.
The destinations of Mercado’s touring, 1954–57, are derived from a diary and ephemera kept by her tour manager (1955–56) (http://web.archive.org/web/20101230220328/http://www.negihama.net/wp/), publicity materials in the Tivoli Theatre collection at the State Library of Victoria (MS 11527, Box 33), and newspaper reports in San Francisco Call Bulletin, San Francisco Chronicle, The Post (San Mateo), and Variety in the United States; Manila Times in the Philippines; the Hong Kong Kung Sheung Daily News (香港工商日報), Kung Sheung Evening News (工商晚報), Wah Kiu Yat Po (華僑日報), and South China Morning Post in Hong Kong; Singapore Free Press and Straits Times in Singapore; Pix, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age in Australia; and The Stage in the United Kingdom.
- 59.
‘South American Margo the Z-Bomb arrives in Hong Kong to dance the mambo at the Ritz nightclub’ (南美炸彈馬高小姐抵港將在麗池夜總會表演蒙巴舞), Wah Kiu Yat Po (華僑日報), 2 July 1955, 6.
- 60.
San Francisco Call Bulletin, 30 January 1954, 10.
- 61.
See, for example, F.D. Ommanney, Fragrant Harbour: A Private View of Hong Kong (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 96–107, 150–54; Peter Loftus, The Earth Drum: An Experience of Singapore and Malaya (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1972), 31–44; John Ball, Dragon Hotel (New York; Toronto: Walker/Weatherhill, 1969) in Taipei; Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975) in Tokyo.
- 62.
Mark, ‘Hong Kong as an International Tourism Space’; Ingham, Hong Kong, 86–90.
- 63.
China Mail, 14 November 1960, 4; 25 July 1961, 4; 28 February 1961, 4.
- 64.
‘Australian acrobats at Clover theater’, Manila Times, 16 September 1960, 7B; advertisement for Clover Theatre, Manila Times, 23 September 1960, 5B.
- 65.
Dong Kingman Jr, ‘Slapstick humour’, Hongkong Standard, 29 January 1966, 8.
- 66.
Advertisement for Mocambo nightclub, Hongkong Standard, 5 March 1966, 3; advertisement for Highball and Mocambo nightclubs, Hongkong Standard, 28 November 1966, 8.
- 67.
Advertisement for First Theatre Restaurant and Nightclub, China Post, 28 February 1970, 5.
- 68.
Nellie Harr, ‘Well folks, you don’t know what you are missing’, Straits Times, 7 November 1970, 6.
- 69.
Frances Yip, Discovery (Hong Kong: Cathay Pacific and EMI, 1974).
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Bollen, J. (2020). Transporting Variety Through the Nightclubs of Hong Kong. In: Touring Variety in the Asia Pacific Region, 1946–1975. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39411-0_2
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