Meet Madam Mosquito!
Madam Mosquito, what a fabulous name. In this interview with Dr Nat Fong, she explains the origins of this amazing Chinese freedom fighter from World War II, from her humble beginnings in a Chinese village to star of several war time comic books. Not to mention almost having a movie made of her life.
Hi, this is Kelly Chase and you are listening to History Detective, a podcast where I delve into the past to uncover the mysteries of history. Before I get started, I wanted to let you know that I have just released a book called History, Her Story, Our Story, Inspirational Women Who Shaped Our World. You can find a link to the Kindle or paperback in the show notes.
Today I have something special for you. It is an interview with historian and teacher Dr Nat Fong, who has written several academic articles on the role of Chinese women in history and has recently appeared in the SBS television show Who the Bloody Hell are You. Not only that she is currently the Head of Humanities at a school in Brisbane and she is not afraid to dress up in the name of history!
Kellly: Welcome to the podcast Nat!
Nat: Thanks for having me on your podcast, Kelly.
Kelly: Now in my research, I've come across some amazing women, but you introduced me to a remarkable woman with a fabulous name or a fabulous nickname, Madame Mosquito. Would you be able to tell me a little bit about who Madame Mosquito was, where she was from, and what did she do during the war?
Nat: Yes, Madame Mosquito, she was really a remarkable woman, as you said. That wasn't her real name. That's her nickname. She was born Hung Nguyen Cuo. That's her maiden name in Mandarin. In 1881, in a part of China which used to be called Fengshan Province, which is now called Liaoning in the northeast of China, and some people might know that region of China used to be called Manchuria. So it was sort of on the border between Russia and Mongolia and included parts of Russia and Manchuria. They kind of had their own identity. And there's an ethnic group there called the Manchu. So they had a strong sense of their own identity. And so she grew up in this really interesting region. And as a teenager she lived through some really big events. So, for example, the first Sino-Japanese War, which was fought between China, then the Qing dynasty and the Japanese Empire. And so seeing that might have influenced her views at a young age to see the Japanese in a negative light. Then when she was 18, she married a man called Zhao Young. So then she took on his name, Zhao, which is in the Cantonese romanization Chao. So that's why sometimes you'll see her referred to as Chow Yu Tang. They had a lot of children. There's different reports, whether they had five sons and three daughters, or eight daughters and four sons. They lived in this village and they were known for working really hard. And so in the 1930s, it looked like there's going to be another conflict between Japan and China, which is what we now know as the second Sino-Japanese War. So that's between 1937 to 1945. So that overlaps with World War two. And she starts selling the property, and they train their family as like an army to resist the Japanese occupation. And in China, it's very much about the clan. So it could be not just your immediate family, but also your extended family as well. And there's various myths about whether she herself learned to shoot guns. She apparently later said she couldn't, but she became known as the woman with two guns, or the mother of the army or the mother of the guerrillas, and they build this force up to, they think, as many as 25,000. This resistance army in the hills of Pei Peng, which is now Beijing. And again various differences in numbers, that they killed thousands of Japanese and also captured thousands of Japanese. She became quite well respected too, so she traveled to places like Hong Kong and Singapore to raise funds in 1942. She gets invited to have dinner with Madam Chiang Kai shek, Chiang Kai shek, one of the big leaders in China at this time, and Madame Chiang calls her one of the bravest women, which is quite a remarkable achievement where the name Madame Mosquito comes from. Apparently, that's what the Japanese army called her, because she was elusive, because she organized this really effective fighting force. The Japanese kept trying to capture her. Apparently they captured her twice, but she managed to escape, according to some accounts, dressed as a vegetable hawker. So because she seemed like a very unassuming old lady that they let her go and the Japanese put a bounty on her head of, I think, around 10,000 us. And, you know, figures vary between 10,000 and 50,000. They were that keen to capture her.
Kelly: Wow, that's fascinating, isn't it?
Nat: Yeah it is.
Kelly: I know when I try to google Madam Mosquito, it's really, really slim pickings in the search results. So how did you stumble upon her and her remarkable story?
Nat: A few years ago, I was researching for a book chapter I was writing, which was about Chinese business women in Darwin in the early 1900s. And I don't know why, but I kept coming up in true, which is amazing online newspaper archive kept coming up and true. I love to go, oh, who doesn't love it? Keep funding it. These articles about this Madam Mosquito just in the Australian newspapers. And I was really intrigued. Who is this madam mosquito. So all these accounts about her. Yeah. Being this brave woman who led this guerrilla army against Japanese resistance. So I kind of collected those, and I put them to one side for, you know, one future day, maybe when I finish my PhD to go and research her further. So that's what I did for the Australian Historical Association conference last year, 2023. I decided to research her and present a paper about her as part of this panel of amazing women in history. And as I started searching for her, I just kept finding more articles about her in the American press, comic book strips about her, this incredible woman that we don't hear much about or know much about. But at the time, she became quite iconic, not just in China, but even in the West.
Kelly: So beyond trove, how did you go about your research?
Nat: There is a bit of a trick to researching Chinese history or Chinese people in history, which is knowing sort of multiple versions of their name, because, as you say, there's the Mandarin name, there's the Cantonese name, there's various anglicised versions by the Western media. So trying a few different combinations. For example, I'd find one article about her that referred to her by this variation of the name, which if you search, that might then lead you to this other source gradually building up, starting with the Australian newspapers, but then finding in other archive newspapers such as America or magazines. I can't remember how I came across the comic book strips. I think it was mentioned somewhere, and then I managed to find digital copies of those comic book issues online. And then what was really helpful was. Because I was presenting this paper at the Aha conference, I decided to do a practice run for some of the students. So we run this International Humanities Research Symposium for youth, which is our school school in Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea. We get together every year for a week. So I presented my paper at this conference as a practice, and one of the students from our sister school in Singapore, he came up to me afterwards and he said, I'd really like to help you with researching this woman. So what he was able to do was translate her name into the Chinese characters, and then he found even more sources about her, for example, I didn't know, but there is Chinese Wikipedia that had more stuff about her, but it was in Chinese, so this student helped me to translate it, and then he actually found out what happened to her in the end, hadn't found any reports about that up to that point. But he found out that after World War Two, she defected to the Common Tang, the nationalist party in China, and they fought against the communists, which is a People's Liberation Army. And so she was arrested and executed by the Communists in February 1950 at the age of 69 because she refused to surrender. So although that was a bit of a sad ending, at least I found out what happened to her at the end.
Kelly: Wow. That's fascinating. You mentioned it just before that she popped up in some comic books during World War two. How is she portrayed in these books, and can we trust these pop culture portrayals of her?
Nat: I think as is always the case with pop culture, they take elements of history and then they twist it because it's going to make a good story, right? So she appears in two comic books. One is called Top Notch Comics in 1940, and the other one is True Comics in October 1942. And in the top notch comics, um, she appears as a character in this. They have this regular strip called Shanghai Sheridan, and he's this. Young white American guy grows up in China and he meets her, and, um, she takes him on some of his adventures so you can see elements of the truth there. For example, her in the village training people and escaping from the Japanese. But in this comic strip, they kind of make out Shanghai Sheridan to be the hero rather than her. And the way that she's portrayed is quite stereotypical. She's got the the broken English, and the way she's drawn is a bit animalistic sometimes how Chinese people are portrayed in Western texts, whereas the other one, true comics, she's given her own strip. So the strip is called Mama Mosquito, and it's a little bit more faithful, I think, to her as a person, but also some of the facts that we do know. I mean, close enough, I guess. But it does put the focus on her and what she did in terms of mobilizing her own army. And, you know, even includes this bit at the end where she meets Madame Chung, who honors her in a way, you know, this comic book is called True Comics. And I guess maybe they made more of an attempt to tell a truthful story rather than a good story.
Kelly: That’s really fascinating. And it's interesting that they took her story and then made a white male the star of it in the other comic book.
Nat: Yeah, I think that was typical of Hollywood at the time as well, where Chinese people weren't normally the main characters in Hollywood movies, they are often a side character, like a sort of exotic add on.
Kelly: and sometimes not even played by Chinese people. Which is disturbing.
Nat: No, no, I mean, this was the time of white actors and actresses playing Chinese characters or Japanese characters. And in fact, and this is how well-known she became in America, that Madame Mosquito was meant to be a character in a Hollywood film, and she was apparently going to be played by Bette Davis. So, this is in a film directed by Howard Hawke, and we laugh about it now. But at the time, there were well known Chinese actresses like Anna may Wong that they could have asked to play. It's hard to imagine Bette Davis playing.
Kelly: I know you couldn't get anyone less Chinese. That's crazy. I absolutely love the story of how that student helped you to find more interesting research, because he had access to Chinese Wikipedia, which is fantastic. One last question. Do you have a favorite interesting thing or something interesting you wanted to share about Madame Mosquito?
Nat: I think just she's an example of how history can be difficult to determine. What is the truth about someone and what are myths and propaganda. As we say, we look at the word history and you see story in it. And of course, as historians, we want to tell a good story. But sometimes I guess what is perceived, you know, whether by Hollywood or whatever, is a good story. But I think what it helps us to see is just like you focus on with your work, there's so many. Great stories of women in history that we don't know much about, and how we can tell more of these untold stories from history. They add to our understanding of big events that we do know a lot about.
Kelly: You focus a lot on Chinese women in Australian history? And I would imagine that those stories would slowly fade away from the historical archives and records, and you really have to go looking for them.
Nat: Definitely. And that kind of history about the Chinese in Australia, it's still, you know, it's not that far in the past. We still have some of the last few surviving people who've lived through some of these times, like World War Two. And that's why oral history is a big part of the history of Chinese people in Australia, and why it's so important to try and capture their stories while we still can. And now that we have the benefits of technology and National Library of Australia has got some big oral history projects where they're going around and recording stories even of people like me. So you don't have to be necessarily an old person who's lived a long time. But recording the stories while we have the people now for, you know, future generations and future researchers, because you might think your story is not that interesting, but one day in the future, someone might want to know what was everyday life like during Covid or events we're living through now.
Kelly: That’s right. Everyday people's stories are so important. It's not just about the famous people or the incredibly significant people, it's about everybody. So I think you hit a bit of a life goal when you went on the SBS TV show. Who the bloody hell are you? What was that experience like for you?
Nat: Producers of the show contacted me, so initially just to do research for them, and then they said, would you like to be in the show? And I think I always fancied myself to be a TV historian, because I grew up watching people like, you know, Simon Schama and Bettany Hughes and Mary Beard, those sorts of people, and you want to be like them, I guess. How can you share some of these stories from history in an engaging way? And that's a challenge as well. How do you boil down this academic work into something that anyone can watch on TV and understand, and that it's entertaining because who the bloody hell are we specifically? We're trying to be entertaining as well as informative, which I think they did well. So I got to go there for a couple of days. I spent a whole day filming with Adam Liao, and I took him basically around Darwin Chinatown, and we talked about what it would have been like, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the different businesses, what happened to them, why doesn't exist anymore. And then we went to the Chinese Museum and took him around some of the exhibits there. And we also did an interview. Not not a lot of it made it into the show between me and another lady, Joyce Artois. So my great grandfather, he was a merchant who came to Australia in 1882, but he brought two young girls to be maids for the family. And Joyce Artois is descended from one of those maids. So it was really nice interview that we recorded, you know, a descendant of the master and the descendant of the maid meeting up and having a chat, so I wish more of that had made it into the show. But anyway, it's recorded somewhere.
Kelly: What a fascinating experience.
Nat: Yeah, it was great. I really enjoyed doing it
Kelly: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I really appreciate it. Madame mosquito's story is fascinating and I can't wait to share it with my listeners.
Nat: Thank you for having me, Kelly.
Kelly: If you would like to hear more stories of women's involvement in World War Two, I have several other episodes about women during World War Two, including Russian Sniper for the Red Army, Roza Shanina, the first Australian War artist Nora Haysen, and Sophie Scholl, a member of the white Rose resistance Group. Make sure you scroll back in the feed to find their fascinating stories, and don't forget to grab your copy of my new book, History Herstory Our Story Inspirational Women Who Shaped Our World. There is a link in the show notes. Also, I now have a History Detective YouTube channel and there are more than 20 History Detective videos now available, so make sure you head on over there to subscribe. You can follow me on Instagram at History Detective nine, or email me at History Detective nine at gmail.com. If you are a teacher and would like supporting teaching resources for any of the History Detective episodes, you can head on over to Teachers Pay Teachers or Amped Up learning to find more accompanying resources. Or you can buy me a coffee using a link in the show notes. But the best thing to do to support the podcast is share it with a friend and write a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. Because this is a completely independent podcast. Your support helps me to keep producing episodes. See you next time!
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is being recorded today. I pay my respects to the elders and knowledge holders past present and emerging.