Perhaps the impulse to revisit her childhood and family had arisen from the other important book Watanna published in this period: 1914’s Chinese-Japanese Cookbook.Co-written with another of her older sisters, Sara Eaton Bosse, this cookbook acknowledged the evolving popularity of Chinese and Japanese restaurants in the early 20th century United States and advanced a bold goal in response: “There is no reason why these same dishes should not be cooked and served in any American home.”
Amidst the ongoing discriminations of the Chinese Exclusion Act era, and with the more recent “Gentleman’s Agreement” having extended the exclusions to Japanese arrivals, Watanna and Bosse’s cookbook wasn’t simply a culinary innovation: it represented an inspiring attempt to use food to change the prejudices behind such policies. “The Westerner” who cooks these dishes, they write, “will cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land.”
Not long after the cookbook’s publication, inspired in part by the silent film adaptation of Nightingale, Watanna began to write “scenarios,” treatments for potential films. Much of that early screenwriting work went uncredited and was apparently poorly compensated at best, treatment about which Watanna wrote passionately in her 1928 Motion Picture Magazine article “Butchering Brains: An Author in Hollywood Is as a Lamb in an Abattoir.” If Watanna’s sole contribution to Hollywood were this article, it would be more than enough to justify better remembering her as part of film and entertainment history; she notes in her opening that not all authors who experience such mistreatment “go silently,” that “many fare forth shooting verbal fireworks behind them.” Few have ever shot off such fireworks more eloquently than Watanna does here.
But Watanna’s dedication and talent meant that even this frustrating reception did not keep her from making her own mark on early Hollywood history. Indeed, five of her six credited screenplays, all for Universal Studios, were produced in the two years after that article’s publication. Many of them brought together Watanna’s enduring interests in both romance stories and Asian American histories, as illustrated by films like Shanghai Lady (1929) and East Is West (1930). The latter film particularly reflects the complicated cross-cultural currents of early Hollywood, with Lupe Veléz (a groundbreaking Mexican American actress known as “the Mexican Spitfire”) playing Watanna’s Chinese American heroine Ming Toy, a woman torn between Edward G. Robinson’s “Chop Suey King” gangster villain Charlie Yong and the film’s romantic hero Billy Benson (played by All Quiet on the Western Front’s Lew Ayres).