Earlist Surviving Asian American Movie Poster

For the Freedom of the East [Poster]

Betzwood Film Company

Publication: New York: Greenwich Litho, [1918].

Notes: A landmark of Asian American popular culture: probably the earliest surviving movie poster featuring an Asian American actor. For the Freedom of the East is a lost silent WWI melodrama about a Chiinese princess working against the Germans in China who thwarts an assassination plot against the American man she loves.

The lead actor in For the Freedom of the East was the vaudeville entertainer Lady Tsen Mei (1888–1985), whose real name was Josephine Moy. She was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of a Chinese laundry worker, Moy Shoo Chong, and an African-American woman, Jessie Whitehurst. Her mother died when she was an infant and she was raised by one of her father's Chinese immigrant relatives and his white American wife.

During the silent film era, a number of Asian American actors appeared and starred in films, but I am not aware of any other Asian American actor of the time born in the United States. The origins of "Lady Tsen Mei," who claimed to be from Canton, China, in publicity for her stage shows and films, might have been lost to time except for the fact that the US government, under Chinese Exclusion laws, thoroughly investigated Moy's background, her birth parents, and the couple that raised her, when she applied for a passport in 1916 using both her real and stage names (a common practice for entertainers). The investigative reports are now in the National Archives. Immigration officials concluded that under the birthright principle Josephine Moy was a US citizen.

The reference books The Chinese in Hollywood (by Jenny Cho) and Hollywood Chinese (by Arthur Dong) reproduce printed ads for From the Freedom of the East, but no poster. Still images and advertisements exist for the handful of other films with Asian actors produced before 1918, but no history of early film that I have found reproduces a movie poster for any of them. A low-res image of copy of the poster can be found on the IMDB website.

For more on Moy's film career, see Hollywood Chinese, pp. 122–123. For the fascinating upbringing of the first Asian American movie star, see Three Tough Chinamen by Scott D. Seligman, chapter XVIII.

One-sheet poster, 27 by 41 inches.

[The following does not really belong in this description, but your cataloger does not know where else to relate this anecdote. The woman who raised Josephine Moy was white, born and raised in Delaware. She applied for a passport at the same time as Moy, but was denied. The immigration officials decided that when she married a Chinese man, she assumed her husband's citizenship. They informed her that were she able to obtain a Chinese passport, she would be allowed to return to the United States (Chinese immigrants who left the US were typically not allowed back during this era) because the rules governing the Chinese applied to their ethnicity not to their nationality. A white Chinese national could come and go as she pleased. This decision is hard to understand. Many American-born women married first generation immigrants—I have never seen reference to a case where the wife lost her American citizenship because she married a *European* immigrant.]

Edition + Condition: A near fine copy, missing a small piece the white border at the lower right corner. Unmounted and unrestored.

Item No: #362104

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