When Michelle Yeoh accepted the 2023 Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a motion picture musical or comedy, she could have easily been referencing the legendary Anna May Wong when she said: “this is for all the shoulders that I stand on, all who came before me who look like me.” Other award-winners have made similar kinds of statements. Think of Denzel Washington thanking Sidney Poitier; or Halle Berry showing appreciation for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Diahann Carroll during their respective Oscar acceptance speeches in 2002.
These small acts of generosity are reminders that the achievements of the present are connected to challenges of the past. And as the years roll by, America’s film history continues to reinterpret and appreciate the lives and careers of actors like Anna May Wong. It’s long past due to recognize her journey.
She is having quite a moment these days. The U.S. Mint has included Wong on a new quarter, which is part of a series featuring historically and culturally significant women—the first for an Asian American to appear on American currency. Mattel announced the release of a new Anna May Wong doll as part of its Barbie Inspiring Women series. And some of Wong’s personal effects—a makeup kit, cigarette case, and calling cards—are also now formally part of the collection at the National Museum of American History. It does not get more iconically American than being associated with currency, Barbie, and the Smithsonian.
Anna May Wong’s story gives us an opportunity to consider not only her successes but also her struggles. At the heart of her story is a uniquely Asian American woman’s journey.
Anna May Wong was born in Los Angeles on January 3rd, 1905. Her birth name was Wong Liu Tsong. Her father was Wong Sam Sing, and her mother was Lee Gon Toy. Anna was the second of 8 children. From a young age, Anna was captivated by filmmaking. She started work as an extra, but earned attention and acclaim for her beauty, style, and naturalistic acting. Before long, she landed her first starring role in the 1922 Technicolor film The Toll of the Sea, a retelling of Madame Butterfly, set in China instead of Japan. She was all of 17 years old.
In 1924, Wong played the role of a “Mongol slave girl” in The Thief of Baghdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks, one of the biggest stars in the world. By this time, Anna was a major celebrity herself, the first Asian American female film star and an in-demand fashion model who helped shape the “flapper” look. However, in her film roles, she found herself increasingly typecast as the mysterious and malevolent “Dragon Lady,” the doomed lover of a white man, or the exotic and sensual concubine—a limited range that embodied harmful stereotypes about Asian women. Frustrated with Hollywood, Wong headed for Europe in 1928 and found work in Berlin, Paris, and London. How did this American-born girl prepare for Europe’s many languages? Easy: She learned to speak German and French.
In 1930, Wong returned to the United States, and starred on Broadway before returning to Los Angeles the following year to sign a contract with Paramount. And yes, the parts she continued to find were still stereotypically narrow, although they included the films she’s best remembered for today, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931), and Shanghai Express (1932), starring alongside Marlene Dietrich. Shanghai Express was a commercial success in the United States, but Chinese government officials banned the film for what they understood as negative portrayals of Chinese persons.
In her films of this era, Wong transcends the typecasting, exhibiting the acting skills and screen presence that would have made her a perfect leading lady, but Hollywood failed her. Beyond simple racist myopia, the Hollywood production code prohibited depictions of mixed-race love on screen, making it nearly impossible for Wong to play a romantic lead.
She lobbied hard for the role of the sympathetic Chinese woman O-Lan in the major MGM feature The Good Earth (1937), but once the white actor Paul Muni was cast as the male lead, producers instead hired white actress Louise Rainer for the role. Rainer went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, and the entire episode was a major disappointment for Wong that soured her on Hollywood.
Wong made another major overseas trip—this time to China in 1936—to visit her family. This was a complicated journey, and it was also fairly well-documented, with a Chinese government wrestling with the fact that stereotypical roles were being performed by a widely recognized superstar with a global platform.
In 1937, Wong was cast in Daughter of Shanghai, opposite Korean American actor and friend Philip Ahn, marking the earliest instance in American cinema of an Asian American couple on screen together. After World War II, Wong was considering moving to the smaller screen - to television - as she was cast in the lead as a detective in The Gallery of Madame Liu Tsong in 1951. Unfortunately, no copies of the program survived. What a loss to our collective imagination - those scripts, costumes, and props - that could remind us of what it means to see the first U.S. television series with an Asian American in the lead role.
If we retrace some of Wong's steps, we begin to understand some of her life choices and challenges.
Her travels to Europe in 1928 and China in 1936 mirror how many U.S.-born Asian Americans and other people of color have tried to make sense of their place in the world. By the time Anna arrived in Europe, she was only three years behind the legendary African American entertainer Josephine Baker. James Baldwin would eventually show up in Paris in 1948. Consider all those American artists, poets, philosophers, and musicians who found a sense of community and support there for decades in the middle of the 20th century—from Richard Wright to Isamu Noguchi—wondering if their nation’s promises could ever be fully extended to all her residents.
And what about Wong’s trip to her father’s homeland in the 1930s? Again, American minorities have long grappled with forging connections and developing a sense of home in the lands of their ancestors. Travelers like her carry pieces to complicated puzzles. Legends and lore are not the only things handed down in Asian American families. There are also silences, gaps, rumors, and mysteries. More than just a daughter’s search for her ancestral roots, Wong’s journey anticipates a uniquely Asian American identity that is born in the diaspora and has multiple anchors in the world.
It is no surprise that in a career that spanned decades and from her own personal journeys, Anna May Wong developed a critical perspective on race and representation that still resonates. In 1933, Wong wrote an essay titled “I protest…” where she asked some tough questions of her profession: “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?”
Anna May Wong was born during a time when multiple federal exclusion laws targeted Asians in the United States while their labor had been actively recruited on plantations, in shipyards, and in the military. In her pointed questions to the film industry, Wong knew that the fullness of what it meant to be an Asian person in the United States was much more than what was being offered to her and to audiences.
On February 3, 1961, Anna May Wong died at her Santa Monica home. She left behind a body of work on film that continues to delight critics and audiences. But more importantly, she lived a life that offers important lessons about empowerment, place, and identity—wide shoulders for us to take in a complex view of America.
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