Chapter Four focuses on the Decadent modernist Harold Acton’s time in China and argues that Acton relies on the concept of kinship as he theorizes cosmopolitanism and transnational contact. Inspired in part by Decadent precursors, such as Vernon Lee, he insists that coming into true communion with other nations requires the eschewal of forms of heteronormative domesticity that might delimit mobility or inhibit openness to foreign experience. However, his work is haunted by anxieties about the slippage between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism, and he turns to kinship metaphors, to the figure of transnational adoption, to think through that slippage. He simultaneously suggests that extrication from conventional familial arrangement facilitates transcultural communion and worries, in his figuring of cultural appropriation as unsuccessful transnational adoption, that true transcultural communion is impossible. In examining the manner in which Acton thinks through and against the concept of kinship while theorizing cosmopolitanism, I highlight the influence on his thinking of women writers and artists, such as Vernon Lee, Nancy Cunard, and Anna May Wong, who shared with Acton a vexed relationship to family and marriage as well as the aspiration to move across national and racial boundaries.

This chapter studies Anna May Wong’s active construction of her international star/celebrity status through “greetings” to the world. My goal is to understand how she mobilized such “greetings” to retool the film and media apparatus into an empowering relation-building vehicle. I argue that her relation-building stems from multi-registered audience address in her “greetings,” which elicit divergent responses depending on the viewers’ lingua-cultural knowledge and sociopolitical consciousness. I dwell on two categories of “greetings”: scriptural “greetings” as illustrated in her signature in gifted photos, in Piccadilly (dir. E. A. Dupont 1929) and in a lithographic visual map showing the European cities she performed in from 1933 to 1934; and performative “greetings” as seen in her reiterative dialect performances in Hollywood on Parade A-3 (June 5, 1932) and the “China Mary” episode of an ABC Western TV show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (aired on March 15, 1960). Methodologically, I depart from simply tracing Wong’s empirical reception to develop strategies of taking cues from Wong’s “greetings” so as to reactivate and parse out her ability to speak to audiences of disparate stances across history. This alternative lineage of performer-spectator dynamic deconstructs the race-gender ideology underpinning mainstream film and media, and harbingers a more self-reflexive interstitial identitarian position.