Book Review: The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

Ann Marie Fleming was curious. She wanted to know more about her great-grandfather Long Tack Sam. Her grand mother and great aunt had, as children, visited him and their grandmother Poldi in their NYC apartment for Christmas one year. Or every Christmas. Memory being what it is, this point, and many others in the story, are not settled. The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is “an illustrated memoir” after all, and it is about memory and story as much as it is about the most famous magician you’ve never heard of—for all of the reasons.

Magic is out of fashion. As a Chinese performer in the West, Long Tack Sam was constantly marginalized. When Hollywood wanted to cast Chinese actors as laundry workers and bad guys, Long Tack Sam, who seems to have eschewed politics as a showman, refused on the grounds that it was racist and would harm his people. His daughters, who with their white Austrian mother were biracial, were deemed “too beautiful” to play Chinese parts. The family rejected Hollywood, which had become the way forward for performers. They were subsequently to a large extent written out of history, a point Fleming does not belabor but one that her work seeks to remedy. Long Tack Sam mentored Orson Wells. Long Tack Sam brought Chinese magic to the West. Long Tack Sam performed alongside the greats of the day.

This history did not live on in Fleming’s family, a family scattered around the world, descendants living in many the places where their ancestor once performed. Still, it was easy enough for Fleming to determine that Long Tack Sam and Poldi had been hit by a car and moved back to Austria, where Poldi was from and where they had a villa, to recuperate. That is where they died. She finds that he was born in 1885 into a time of famine in Northern China, and from there, the details of how he learned magic diverge, a point illustrated delightfully in the graphic novel by a series of classic comic tales of Long Tack Sam. Fleming, a film maker, has fun with the graphic form creating a collage montage of photographs and clippings and illustrations in different styles. If it all sounds confusing, don’t worry, she includes a character of herself, Stick Girl, to guide you through. A time-line of events runs through the book, adding context from what is happening in WWII to what is happening in entertainment.

In pursuing her grandfather’s story, she ends up in the world of magic, from Chinese acrobatics to Vaudeville, from China to Australia to Austria to Canada. Fleming traveled everywhere, talking to magicians, searching personal archives of magic, talking to her relatives. She created a film and then a graphic novel, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam to share the story—the stories, some contradictory—of Long Tack Sam.

I imagine that this would be a great read for people with a prior interest in magic. It’s definitely well worth reading for those interested history and graphic memoir, in the way peoples’ lives are threaded through world events, in the challenges of being an international family, in who is remembered.