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Dance” came out in the States. Within a year, western magicians had incorporated this into an illusion featuring a full-grown woman emerging from a very small dollhouse. Sam was performing this act with his daughter Mina in China the very same year. Alongside them, Neesa was doing traditional Chinese contortions, playing Strauss on the violin while bent over backwards.
    By the early 1930s, the Depression in Europe forced the troupe back to America. These were the dustbowl years for the United States, but people still needed popular entertainment. Sam choreographed a show for his other daughter Mina to perform at Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles for the premiere of Rain . Mina and Neesa were up for parts in features but were considered “too pretty” to play the Chinese roles in films like The Good Earth . Sam forbade his family from taking denigrating roles in movies and made them opt out. Flo Ziegfeld tried to talk Mina into his Follies, but Sam didn’t see that as a positive role for Chinese women either. As daughters of Long Tack Sam, the girls had the double burden of being in show business (which was looked down upon by society) and of being Eurasian. In a time when mixed marriage was illegal in the States, Eurasians were considered the children of prostitutes.
    In 1932, the family played at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre before the ominously named William Powell vehicle One Way Passage . Sam was signed on with impresarios Marco and Fanchon and joined their tour of the West Coast. Back in Asia, the girls had acquired many admirers on their frequent trips around the world. Sam took his family back to Shanghai, but their world was already splitting apart. Mina left to start her own ballet studio and then wentto help the Red Cross with its efforts in the Japanese war against Manchuria. She began to write a column in The China Daily News advocating women’s rights through physical exercise. In 1934, she left the troupe permanently to marry my grandfather, Ernest To, who came from a long line of doctors in Hong Kong.
    Neesa became the troupe’s manager. Sam stayed in Shanghai and ran an ongoing show with more than eighty performers. Neesa later left the show to marry N.C. Yao, a wealthy Shanghai industrialist. For the first time, Sam passed the responsibility for his show on to a nonfamily member, a man named Pang. This effectively marked his retirement.
    In 1938, Sam’s son, Frank, graduated from school in England. Sam and Poldi travelled to take him back to Linz and Villa Long for the holidays. But Hitler’s Germany and Austria invaded Poland, cutting off their path. The family tried to return to England, but they were unable to do so, due to Poldi’s nationality. They eventually made their way to Italy, but Mussolini soon joined the Axis powers, thereby forcing the family to take a boat to the United States.
    In 1940, Sam was interviewed in The World , where he stated his plan to get simple supplies to relatives in Austria. He revealed his intentions to keep his son out of show business and his plans to go back to China. Although he was being feted by the Society of American Magicians for his contribution to magic, he couldn’t stay in America since the country wasn’t letting in any Chinese. The family returned to Shanghai, and Sam came out of retirement to headline his show again. The Japanese had been invading China for years, but they’d been leaving nationals from other countries alone. As one of the remaining free ports in the world, Shanghai attracted exiles from Russia and Western Europe, especially Jews. But timesturned ugly when the Japanese joined forces with the Germans and bombed Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. Sam’s fame and Poldi’s Austrian nationality were the only things that saved them from the Japanese internment camps.
    The end of the war came, but there was more for the family to endure. With the Communist Revolution in 1949 and