Playwright Philip Chung on Asian American Hollywood Histories
If you ask Philip Chung how he ended up writing two plays about Asian Americans working in old Hollywood, he’ll tell you it all happened by chance. This isn’t entirely unlike the subject of Chung’s most recent production, My Man Kono which tells the story of Toraichi Kono, a chauffeur in Charlie Chaplin’s employ who one day found himself playing a chauffeur on-screen.
Premiering off-Broadway at the Mezzanine Theatre through March 9 and presented by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, the drama follows the true story of Toraichi Kono, a Japanese immigrant, through his 20 years of service as Chaplin’s valet and confidante. It also documents their eventual falling out and the tragic consequences that followed when Kono was no longer associated with a powerful Hollywood figure. Set during WWII, Kono finds himself in the crosshairs of the US government’s witch hunt for Japanese spies. Though he was never convicted (nor were any other Japanese American residents or citizens), the effects on his reputation and livelihood were devastating.
This is not Chung’s first time mining Hollywood history for forgotten Asian American figures. His play Unbroken Blossoms, which was presented by East West Players last summer at the David Henry Hwang Theater, tells the story of James B. Leong and Moon Kwan, the two Chinese American consultants who worked on D.W. Griffith’s 1919 silent film Broken Blossoms. Still smarting from the accusations of racism that trailed his most famous work, The Birth of a Nation, Griffith decided to adapt a sympathetic tale of a Chinese immigrant’s love for a young British girl who is battered by her abusive father. The problem? The film’s Chinese lead was played not by an Asian actor, but by Richard Barthelmess in yellowface.
During rehearsals for My Man Kono, writer and Anna May Wong biographer Katie Gee Salisbury spoke with Philip Chung about his two plays, Asian Americans in Hollywood today versus a hundred years ago, and why so much of this history often gets forgotten.
Philip Chung: I’ve always been interested in Hollywood history, and in cinema and film. Growing up in the eighties and nineties, you didn’t see a lot of Asian American representation. There were a few people from classic Hollywood that I started discovering, like James Wong Howe and Anna May Wong and that made me more interested. But I have to be honest, a lot of it was just stumbling onto it by accident.
For My Man Kono, what ended up happening was I moved to LA in the nineties after college. The old LA County Museum of Art used to have a theater where they would play classic films on the weekends. They had a Charlie Chaplin retrospective, and they showed a couple of shorts before whatever the main feature was. One of them was the 1917 film, The Adventurer. I saw an Asian guy in the movie playing a chauffeur. And it wasn’t just a cameo. He’s pretty significant in it. And it wasn’t a stereotypical role. There’s no reference to race.
I wondered who that guy was. After researching, I found out that he was Toraichi Kono, Chaplin’s real-life chauffeur who got hired to play a chauffeur. Eventually, Kono made his way to become Chaplin’s personal valet and his right hand man for the next 20 years. I was just fascinated.
With a few producer friends, my original idea was to do a documentary on him. I ended up doing a lot of research—everything from interviewing his daughter to going to Japan and interviewing people he knew there. But the problem was, because he was such a behind-the-scenes guy, there’s no real footage of him. We found a 12-second b-roll clip. There’s a few pictures we got from various family members, but there really wasn’t enough to do a documentary. But I did all this research, you know? [laughs] So the idea for the play came about.
PC: Both plays are about Asian American figures who were in close proximity to power. One with D. W. Griffith, one with Chaplin, who were probably the two biggest figures at the time. They founded United Artists together. Had these Asian American figures been in different circumstances, they probably would’ve been in those positions of power themselves because they were so ambitious. Someone like Kono, he probably would’ve been a producer or studio head. If you can survive 20 years with Chaplin, that’s a talent. It’s just impressive how he was able to manage things. In a different era, or if they hadn’t been Asian, their stories probably would’ve been very different.
Kono worked with Chaplin for a long time, but none of that was helpful to him. In the play, after Kono leaves Chaplin, a white businessman rejects him for a job, saying, “You take away the fancy suit, he’s still a Jap.” I think what I’m drawn to is imagining what it must have been like at that time. Even now it’s hard, but at least we have a support system and there are more artists and there are more opportunities. But imagine doing it back then. The fact that all these characters got as far as they did. Anna May Wong is another example. It’s just so impressive that despite the obstacles and things she couldn’t do, she still had a career that lasted decades.
KGS: With the right director and the right support. You’re absolutely right. She is fantastic in Shanghai Express. The irony is that her contract ended after that film with Paramount. They didn’t renew it. A lot of people think that Marlene and Anna May had this lesbian relationship, which I’ve found no evidence of. In fact, I found evidence to the contrary. I see them as professional rivals. The interesting thing is, in Marlene’s own memoir, she doesn’t even talk about Shanghai Express. Can you imagine that she wouldn’t mention the film where she wears the most fabulous costumes? Every frame is dedicated to her image. It’s my personal feeling that Marlene didn’t want to talk about the one film where there’s another strong female actress who might upstage her.
I want to go back to the research that you did for My Man Kono. As you mentioned, there wasn’t a lot of footage of him, but you did end up connecting with the family. What were some of the most interesting things that you learned about him in that process?
PC: His family, his daughter, and other people who knew him—no one really knew much about him. I found that in Unbroken Blossoms too, because I also met the families of Moon Kwan and James Leong. Even the direct descendants, much less the grandchildren, knew nothing about this history. Kono’s daughter didn’t really know anything about that part of his life. She only knew him as Dad. Maybe it’s a little bit of an Asian thing where we don’t share our burdens.
The other shocking thing was finding the FBI files. I had no idea about that part of his life.
PC: There was a naval officer named Tachibana who came over from Japan to America, ostensibly to study English at USC. And somehow Kono got involved with him as an interpreter. The US government ran a sting operation using an ex-navy guy named Al Blake, who knew Kono because he’d supposedly worked on Chaplin’s movies as a background actor. They gave Blake fake naval office information to pass on to Tachibana and Kono was there in some capacity.
There was no evidence he did anything that would suggest this conspiracy or espionage. My interpretation is that he had left Chaplin in a bad situation. His wife passed away, he had two kids, and he had all these different jobs. He was doing import-export with Japan and he got caught in all of that. Later, I learned more about Al Blake. He was definitely an opportunist. There’s FBI files about him saying “we can’t really trust this guy, but we’re still gonna do this.” They really wanted to nail someone—to get a Japanese spy.
PC: That’s why I think this case was the closest it got. They saw a germ of something here and thought, let’s really invest in this. And it’s weird because we don’t know this history. I’m not sure why it’s buried. Is it something that we, as Asian Americans, don’t want to remember? Because it’s not a positive portrayal. But at the same time, there was no due process. Kono got let go.
Wayne Collins, the civil rights lawyer, he really was a white savior. We throw that term around, but if you talk to many Japanese Americans, their families are only here because of him, including George Takei. There’s a short documentary about Wayne that came out last year, and George narrates it. He saved George’s mother from getting deported. Wayne was really the only person on Kono’s side. A lot of people who are ashamed of that history don’t want to remember it on both sides. But it was a major case. If you look at the news clips at the time, it was in Look magazine, TIME magazine, it was everywhere.
One of the secondary sources was Yuji Ichioka who was a professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA. He and his wife Emma Gee, in the sixties in Berkeley, were the ones who coined the term Asian American. He wrote a piece about Kono and the Tachibana case, exploring the reality that Tachibana was involved in this thing. And he got slammed by the community. For him, this was scholarship and part of Asian American Studies. That’s the only thing I’ve been able to find from a community point of view about the case.
PC: So that was what I set out to discover. What is this gap between working for Chaplin and then this? When he left Chaplin’s employ after 20 years—that’s in the late thirties, around the time of Modern Times—there was no communication after that. According to Kono, he left because Chaplin had started a relationship with Paulette Goddard, who was his co-star in Modern Times. She wanted more control over his life. I think the way that Kono described it was that she wanted to be Kono’s co-conspirator when they were looking over Chaplin’s finances and taking care of his business. Kono got offended. Like, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, you’ve only known Charlie for a month, and now you want to come in and do everything. So he gave Chaplin an ultimatum, you pick her or me. I don’t know what Kono was thinking, maybe after 20 years of service Chaplin would have some loyalty to him, but I don’t think that’s the type of guy Chaplin was.
Kono did work for United Artists, the studio Chaplin started, in Japan for six months. But it doesn’t sound like he did anything there. It just felt like, “Okay, you’re leaving so I’ll give you the equivalent of a severance.” It was six months of employment in Japan pushing papers. After that, he came back to the US, and as far as we know, he never interacted with Chaplin again. The Japanese American community rejected him because his case was the closest thing to real espionage. And I think they felt like, “We’re in a good place, but now you’re throwing fuel on the fire of suspicion.” You look at these articles in the Rafu Shimpo and they were like, “It’s all because of you we’re screwed.” That was the attitude.
Kono was in this very difficult and interesting position. He moved to Japan after all of this and lived out the rest of his days there. It’s funny, the last trip that Chaplin made to Japan was in 1961, and he visited Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima where the atomic bomb had dropped. Kono was living there at the time. His office was right across the street from Peace Park. So he must have known. In my play, I imagine what might have happened had the two of them reunited there.
PC: That’s an interesting question because both Unbroken Blossoms and My Man Kono were written years ago. I think I started writing Unbroken Blossoms in 2015, definitely before the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s set in 1919 when there was an influenza pandemic. I remember the first reading we did in 2015, there’s a scene where Griffith makes Lillian Gish wear a mask after she comes back because she had the Spanish flu and she almost died. People were like, “Why are you having Lillian wear a mask?” I don’t think people quite understood it. And so when we produced it last year, obviously after 2020, it has a whole different meaning.
Same thing with My Man Kono. A big part of the play is this idea of the foreign enemy and deportation—“We’re going to send you back because you’re criminals.” And again, that had a very different connotation when I started writing this play, even though it’s an issue that’s been around. But with 2025, that’s one of the first things Trump said he was going to do. Round up “criminals” and deport them. But again, that was pure coincidence.
I’m not interested in writing about history for history’s sake. I want to say something about our times today, but at the time I was writing both plays, I thought they were going to say our status in Hollywood hasn’t changed much. This is still true, but obviously we’ve made a lot of progress in the past few years. That doesn’t feel quite as relevant as it did then. I couldn’t imagine that things like a pandemic or mass deportations would be the things that would be relevant now in 2025.
