Happy Chinese New Year! It is the Year of the Horse!
A fitting time methinks to give a shout-out to the many Chinese vaudeville and sideshow performers we’ve profiled on Travalanche. Or, actually, not so many, thanks (or no thanks) to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
But there WERE some Chinese performers in America back in the times we normally write about, including the beautiful bombshell Anna May Wong and Chang Yu Sing, the Chinese Giant. The field they were most closely identified with was magic, however, thanks to the absolute craze stirred up by Ching Ling Foo. Later popular Chinese magicians in vaudeville included Long Tack Sam, Han Ping Chien, and Che Mah Che Sang.
Read about all these artists by following the handy links above! And don’t forget to check out the Asian American interest section of our blog.
For more on vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
For more on silent and slapstick comedy film history see my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc
(Travalanche) 