Mai-Mai Sze

Mai-Mai Sze, born Yuen Tsung Sze in Tianjin on December 2, 1909, was a Chinese-American painter, writer, and actress. The name Mai-Mai, a nickname meaning "little sister," was the name under which she published all of her books. She died in New York Hospital on July 16, 1992, at age 82.

Sze spent her early years moving between countries as her father, Alfred Sao-ke Sze, held successive diplomatic posts. In 1915, the family relocated to London, where her father served as Chinese ambassador to the Court of St. James's. They remained there until 1921, when Alfred Sao-ke Sze was appointed the first Chinese Ambassador to the United States, and the family settled in Washington, D.C. Sze attended the National Cathedral School until 1927, then enrolled at Wellesley College, where she studied English literature and composition, religion, philosophy, European history, and art, graduating in 1931.

Following her graduation, Sze worked primarily as a painter. She exhibited a landscape at the 1933 Salon d'Automne and also showed work with Marie Sterner Galleries. In addition to painting, she worked as a graphic designer, producing illustrations, advertisements, and designs for packaging, materials, and wallpapers. She also illustrated her own autobiography, Echo of a Cry, published by Harcourt, Brace and Co. in 1945.

Her single Broadway appearance came in 1936, when she played the Honorable Reader in Lady Precious Stream, written by Hsiung Shih-I. It was her first and only performance as an actress on stage.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War and throughout World War II, Sze was an active advocate for war relief in China. She traveled across America lecturing on China and organized the Chinese War Relief Committee in New York. She also wrote and spoke on foreign relations with the Far East and contributed a regular column titled "East-West" to the New York Post during this period. In 1944, at the request of Dorothy Norman, she published a pamphlet titled China as the second volume in the International Relations Series issued by Western Reserve University Press.

Sze's most significant scholarly contribution was her translation of the Jieziyuan Huazhuan, known in English as the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, accompanied by her own commentary. The Bollingen Foundation first published this work in 1956 under the title The Tao of Painting as part of the Bollingen Series. A second edition with corrections appeared in 1963, and a related volume, The Way of Chinese Painting, was published by Random House in 1959. Her novel Silent Children appeared in 1948.

Sze was photographed by several notable artists, among them Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, and Dorothy Norman. Some of these photographs appeared in fashion publications including Vogue.

Sze and the costume designer Irene Sharaff were living together at the time of Sze's death. In 1989, the two coordinated the donation of their personal book collections to the New York Society Library in New York City, where the Sharaff/Sze Collection, comprising nearly one thousand volumes on subjects including Chinese history, philosophy, and religion, remains today. Many of the books contain Sze's own annotations, including copies of sinologist Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China. Sze and Sharaff also made a one-million-pound donation to Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, which funded the construction of a music and meditation pavilion and established two research fellowships: the Alice Tong Sze Research Fellowship, named after Sze's mother, and the Lu Gwei Djen Research Fellowship. Neither Sze nor Sharaff visited the college before their deaths, but both requested that their ashes be buried in the college gardens, where they rest beneath two halves of a single memorial rock near the entrance to the pavilion. Sze and Sharaff also established a trust to support additional educational and research institutions, including the Needham Research Institute. According to historian William McGuire's account of the Bollingen Foundation, both Sze and Sharaff studied under Natacha Rambova, who conducted private classes in comparative religion, symbolism, and Theosophy in her New York apartment during the 1930s.