The Trials of Anna May Wong

The early days of Hollywood produced some distinguished women, but Anna May Wong — the Asian-American actress whose “wild, sparkling life” was told in Katie J. Salisbury’s “Not Your China Doll” — was in a class of her own.
Wong was the first non-Caucasian Hollywood star, and for decades the only star of Asian background. Born in 1905 in Los Angeles’ Chinatown to hard-working parents who owned and operated a laundry business, she began her career as an extra and quickly rose through the ranks. She shot to fame when she was 19, when she appeared in the lavish fantasy film The Thief of Bagdad (1924). The camera loved her, as she moved gracefully between moments of comedy and moments of high emotion.

But instead of showcasing Wong, 1920s Hollywood wasted her in supporting roles, where she had to play second fiddle to white actresses — mostly white actresses in “yellowface.” European attitudes were different, at least, so when she had the opportunity to play more prominent roles in films shot in Germany and London, she took it. The most notable of these films are the romantic drama Song (1928), for which she was written, and the proto-film noir Piccadilly (1929).
As an actress who began her career in the last decade of the silent film era, Wong first had to confront the advent of talkies, and then the shift of focus away from movie screens to television. Fortunately for her, she was one of the first to encourage innovation, and fame was not her driving force.

Instead, as Salisbury, a magazine writer and photographer, explained, Wong was driven by the desire to practice her art and the awareness that she was in a unique position to represent her race on the big screen. As a fellow Asian American, Salisbury is particularly concerned with Wong’s self-image. The actress once described herself as “an American-born Chinese girl—proud of her parents and her race, but so thoroughly Americanized that she demands independence, a career, and a life of her own…But though I love my parents very much, and I’m proud of my people, I can see their faults.” This is the cause of so much conflict within me. “The conflict wasn’t the fact that she was Chinese and American…no, it was the contradiction of other people’s insistence that she be one thing or another, and live up to their expectations rather than the expectations she clearly had,” Salisbury explains. She set for herself.”

Off screen, in the 1920s, Wong was a bright young girl, who viewed herself as an American girl, but was always “different” in the media as an alien and exotic being. An early example of this was an article in Movie Weekly that asked the rhetorical question: “Does she become, like a chameleon, fully Chinese when she is among her own people? Is her Americanism just part of a clever attitude?” Throughout her career, Wong was criticized for not being As people expected her to be: in England, she didn’t sound Chinese enough; in China, her Cantonese had too much of an American accent.