GLAMOUR, RACISM, AND CHINA IN HOLLYWOOD

Anna May Wong rose to fame in March 1924 with the release of the silent film The Thief of Bagdad, a silent adventure film loosely based on One Thousand and One Nights. The lead role was played by Douglas Fairbanks, a silent film star and the husband of actor Mary Pickford and known for his portrayals of d'Artagnan, Zorro, and Robin Hood. The director was Raoul Walsh, one of the future co-founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who would later direct numerous classic films featuring Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and Marlene Dietrich, whom we’ll discuss later.

Fairbanks, as the driving force behind the project, intentionally sought to make the film without any stars (except himself, of course). The film's depiction of Baghdad was a fantastical, ornate vision, and he wanted to populate it with equally exotic characters. A young woman named Anna May Wong seemed almost tailor-made for the task. Her appearance seemed perfect for silent films, and as her admirers described her at the time, she had unusually large eyes for a Chinese woman, large ears, a large nose, and a face that resembled a mandarin.

Moreover, despite being only eighteen years old, she was far from being a novice as she had already acted in four films. Wong began working in the film industry as a schoolgirl in background roles, and at the age of fourteen, she played the part of an uncredited extra in the film The Red Lantern. In 1921, she was drawn into acting and seduced by director and actor Marshall Neilan, nicknamed ‘Mickey’, who was one of Hollywood’s top playboys and drunks. According to California law, a relationship with a minor (Wong was only fifteen at the time the anthology film Bits of Life was shot) was considered statutory rape, but Hollywood often followed its own rules. Director Kenneth Anger best captured the morality of that era in his book Hollywood Babylon, though notably, Wong wasn’t mentioned in it. The plot of Neilan’s Bits of Life was also grim: Wong’s character falls in love with a Chinese opium dealer played by one of silent cinema’s greatest dramatic actors, Lon Chaney, also known as ‘the man of a thousand faces’. She would reunite with him in 1927 on the set of Mr. Wu, where Chaney played a Chinese patriarch.

In 1922, Wong landed the lead role in The Toll of the Sea, a Chinese adaptation of Madama Butterfly (referring to the story that inspired Puccini’s opera, not the later Chinese spy parody). However, this wasn't exactly a film but more of a scientific experiment where the makers were testing the possibilities of two-color film. They didn't care much about the box office or the actors, which is why they cast an unknown Chinese girl in the lead role.

Wong’s fourth film was directed by the great Tod Browning (who later became famous for sound classics like Dracula and Freaks). Drifting (1923) also dealt with the opium trade, and Browning, according to rumors, became her lover, though there’s no concrete evidence of that.

Browning, Chaney, Fairbanks, not to mention lesser Hollywood figures riding along—these alliances alone would have secured her a place in film history. But The Thief of Bagdad made Wong a star in her own right. Fairbanks spent much of the movie shirtless, while she, playing a Mongolian slave, appeared on screen in what could be described as a ‘Baghdad bikini’, which was simultaneously both modest and revealing. A hairpin in the shape of a figure ‘8’ made her look like an amusingly dangerous, big-eared dragonfly. The fact that a Chinese actress was portraying a Mongolian slave didn’t bother anyone at the time—after all, a Japanese actor played the role of a Mongolian prince in the same film. Throughout her career, Wong dutifully played Mongolians, Inuit, and Indian dancers (twice even!) and such nuances didn’t matter in the predominantly white, cisgender Hollywood of the era.

However, in China, people did notice these portrayals. Authorities threatened to ban The Thief of Bagdad for its inappropriate depiction of Chinese actors. When Fairbanks took the film to China for distribution, he defended it by admitting that American screenwriters, in general, didn't have a strong grasp of Chinese history. But he excused them by pointing out that the characters in the film were not Chinese but Mongolian.

Anna May Wong’s real name was Wong Liu Tsong. She created her stage name by blending a Chinese surname with a European first name, adding ‘May’ in the middle in honor of her favorite month and the eternal summer she hoped to embody. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she worked in her family’s laundry with her seven siblings. Wong's father started the business in the second half of the nineteenth century, during a time when the overwhelmingly male population of the ‘Wild West’ needed laundry services so badly that miners would send bundles of dirty clothes all the way to Hong Kong, taking four months for a round trip at a rate of $12 per dozen shirts. By 1880, three-quarters of all laundries in California were owned by Chinese as it was a very low-cost business to start.

The first Chinese immigrants arrived in the US in 1820, and by 1853, they had become one of the largest diasporas, along with the Mexicans and Chileans. By 1880, their population exceeded 100,000 people, with most living on the West Coast. The gold rush brought a huge demand for a large workforce to build railroads, and with it came the need for support services. Besides construction, the Chinese immigrant population also engaged in agriculture. Despite their significant contributions, they were not granted citizenship. The situation worsened with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US, though merchants were exempt from that law.

Anna May Wong personally encountered the effects of the Chinese Exclusion Act when she traveled to Canada for a film shoot to play an Inuk. She was held at customs for several hours in Vancouver due to the significant risk that she might not have been allowed back into California, even though she was born in the US.

By 1920, as a result of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the population of Chinese Americans had shrunk to 62,000 people (out of a total US population of over 106 million). The number of Chinese women was even smaller as a law from 1875 had banned Chinese, Japanese, and Mongolian women from immigrating, labeling them as ‘potential sex workers’.

The fear of the so-called ‘Yellow Peril’1¹'Yellow Peril' is a racist term used to denote the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as a danger to the Western world. naturally made its way on to the Hollywood screen. Almost all East Asian characters were depicted as opium addicts, gamblers, swindlers, liars, flatterers, or pimps.

Moreover, the very presence of a Chinese actress on screen was not widely accepted. In her debut film, Wong’s name was removed from the credits, though she at least remained in the film. Later, scenes featuring her were sometimes simply cut, as in Why Girls Love Sailors (1927), where her co-stars were, notably, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who would go on to become the famous comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

In addition, under the American laws existing at that time, a woman of color could not marry a white man. Since films were generally expected to have a happy ending and fade away with a grand kiss on-screen, playing the female lead was out of the question for Wong. In Peter Pan (1924), however, in the role of Tiger Lily, she did kiss the hero, but Peter Pan in this film was played by Betty Bronson, and such exceptions were allowed.

Nevertheless, by the age of eighteen, Anna May Wong had achieved milestones no other actress of color in Hollywood had yet reached. At the time, African American characters were portrayed exclusively by white actors in makeup, a practice known as blackface. For instance, in the 1903 film Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tom was played by a white actor, and it wasn't until 1914 that an African American actor took on the title role, causing quite a sensation. Similarly, the ‘yellow face’ method was also widely used, and nearly all the major female Hollywood actors of the era played Southeast Asian women at some point, including Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and Alla Nazimova. For example, in the 1928 film The Crimson City, Wong had a supporting role, while the main Asian character, who was called Onoto, was played by the American Myrna Loy. The pay these actors received also reflected this discrepancy and thus, a full-blooded Chinese actress playing a Chinese character earned less than an American actress playing the same role. Indeed, on the sets, Anna May Wong would personally teach her more fortunate white counterparts how to eat with chopsticks.

And so, Hollywood offered its audience a necessary dose of exoticism but always delivered the same moral lesson. Asian women on screen had no other fate but to die tragically. Wong became the queen of cinematic death: she was strangled, buried alive, drowned in the ocean, poisoned, and impaled on swords. An article in Harper’s Bazaar once commented that the suicides Wong performed on screen were always more dramatic than the films themselves. ‘That was my movie career,’ Wong later quipped. ‘No one really knew what to do with me, so they just killed me off at the end.’

In 1928, Anna May Wong signed a contract with the German film company UFA and moved to Berlin for three months. At that time, Berlin was the most decadent city in the world, where you could find anything—except for Chinese people, especially Chinese women, who were quite rare. Unlike the Americans, the Germans didn’t impose restrictions on Chinese immigrants, likely because there were so few, fewer than 1,000 in all of Germany.

In Europe, Wong caused a sensation. For instance, in Vienna, when she performed in the operetta Tschun Tschi (in German no less), the police had to be called in to disperse her fans. Audiences were particularly amazed by her Hollywood-style ability to cry real tears on screen, rather than relying on glycerin. But unlike most Hollywood starlets, Wong was well-read and quick-witted. Biographers noted that she often carried a book of Confucius’ teachings in English and could recite Byron by heart. At one Berlin party, she spent the entire night in conversation with the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who was thoroughly captivated by her.

In Paris, Anna May Wong attended Sergei Diaghilev's Russian ballets and, thrilled by the performances, often socialized backstage. What struck her most about the city was the casual way ordinary people kissed on the streets, a stark contrast to Los Angeles, where only the most bohemian circles engaged in such public displays of affection.

In London, she filmed her last silent movie, Piccadilly (1929), playing the role of a dishwasher and dancer named Shosho. Speaking of kisses, the film included one between Wong and the male lead, Jameson Thomas, but it was cut to appease the censors in the US.

Despite such restrictions, Europe was generally much more tolerant of skin color than the US. In London, Wong faced criticism mostly for her American accent in a theater production. In response, at a party, she proclaimed, ‘If you prefer, I can speak to you in a language that you’ll hardly be able to criticize,’ and switched to Cantonese, earning applause. After one such gathering, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh, known for his sharp wit,iEvelyn Waugh (1903–1966) was an English novelist and is considered the best chronicler of social manners in the first half of the twentieth centurywrote in his diary that Anna May Wong reminded him of a brontosaurus. Whether it was her height or her general exoticism that led to this comparison is unclear, but the remark captured the bemusement Wong often provoked.

Under British law, there was nothing prohibiting interracial marriages, and the worst reaction that one could face was social ostracism. Because of this, Anna May Wong later recalled that during the several months she spent in London, she never once had to pay for herself in a restaurant as there was no shortage of people waiting to do it for her. She was considered, as they say, a style icon. To Londoners, her mannerisms seemed doubly exotic: on the one hand, she was Chinese, and on the other, she was a typical American flapperi‘Flapper’ is a nickname for emancipated American women of the 1920s, celebrated for their free-spirited nature and love for partying and drinking. These women often embodied the heroines found in F. Scott Fitzgerald's work from the Jazz Age: short dresses, short hair, and short-lived relationships.

The result of all these paid dinners and constant attention was a massive nervous breakdown, after which she retreated to a sanatorium in Kent to heal her emotional wounds.

The symbol of that European escapade became a 1930 photograph where Anna May Wong posed alongside Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. At that point, Dietrich had yet to shine in The Blue Angel, and Riefenstahl had not yet become the leading filmmaker of the Third Reich, making Wong the most famous of the trio. Inspired by this photo, the Singaporean writer Amanda Lee Koe wrote Delayed Rays of a Star a few years ago.

Anna May Wong herself fantasized about a bright future in Europe, which is why she returned to America with just one suitcase. The rest of her belongings were scattered across European capitals, awaiting her imminent return.

The news of her mother’s death (she was hit by a car near their home) reached Wong while she was in New York. The Roaring Twenties had ended, and the Great Depression had set in. The actress faced the difficult choice of either returning to Los Angeles for the funeral or performing in a Broadway play. In Chinese culture, a daughter’s absence from her mother’s funeral was unthinkable, yet pursuing an acting career was also frowned upon. Among the Chinese, actors were primarily associated with vagrants and prostitutes, and in traditional Chinese opera, women’s roles were played by men.

The train journey from New York to Los Angeles and back would have taken two weeks. The play she was starring in had just opened, and in her absence, it would either have to close or she would need to be replaced. And so, Anna May Wong chose the play. She later explained her decision by saying that, alongside Confucian teachings, her mother had also instilled in her the Christian faith, which encourages a humble acceptance of death. Perhaps this helped her find peace.

In June 1931, Anna May Wong returned to Los Angeles. She was twenty-six and single. Speaking to reporters, she mentioned that marriage was unlikely for her. A European or American man would likely tarnish his reputation by marrying her, and it was difficult to find a suitable Chinese man in the US. Besides, she doubted any man could measure up to the ideal she saw in her father. However, she admitted she would like to marry a Chinese scholar, move with him to her ancestral homeland, and never return.

That same year, the film Daughter of the Dragon was released. That was a B movie, but it made decent box office returns. Anna May Wong played the daughter of Fu Manchu (the mustachioed Asian villain archetype created by the British in twentieth-century pop culture) and, as usual, met her demise at the end, this time from a bullet.

In 1932, Wong had another shining moment, although she was overshadowed by an even brighter star. Shanghai Express hit the screens, where Anna May Wong co-starred, or better yet, embraced Marlene Dietrich, as if their Berlin photo together had come to life (albeit without Leni Riefenstahl, who had already made Hitler’s acquaintance by that year). Since that photograph, the balance of fame had definitively tilted in Dietrich’s favor. She had become an absolute prima donna, and her Chinese friend was left to play second fiddle, as required by the plot of the film itself. However, racial equality was somewhat achieved as both were playing courtesans, albeit of different calibers.

‘A disgrace to allow such women into first class,’ complains a theologian passenger in Shanghai Express. ‘Every train carries its sins, but this train is clearly overloaded!’

Regarding the overload, it’s quite true as this pair in the compartment with a phonograph looked as decadent and ghostly as the screen standards of the time allowed. In fact, Wong holds her own against Dietrich in the film, except for the amount of screen time she received.

Anna May Wong had known the film’s director, Josef von Sternberg, long before Dietrich, though they were not lovers, unlike the relationship between Dietrich and von Sternberg. Von Sternberg created his chaotic version of China in California’s San Bernardino, bringing in stray dogs, chickens, and other animals, draping everything in paper lanterns and inscribing it with hieroglyphs. Hundreds of local Chinese also participated as extras, meant to portray the bustling station scene. One complication was that the locals spoke Cantonese (as did Wong), while in Beijing, they spoke Mandarin. Von Sternberg was known for his extravagant reinterpretations of history, and similarly, in The Scarlet Empress (1934), he reconstructed the Russian imperial court with both wildness and fascination and featured Dietrich as Catherine the Great.

But no one could take offense internationally regarding the Russian imperial court, while China was once again outraged by Shanghai Express, both for its ridiculous set design and its politically incorrect message (the film is set during the civil war between the nationalists and communists). However, they did not blame director von Sternberg, since he was Austrian. All the criticism fell on Wong instead. One newspaper headline read: ‘Paramount Uses Anna May Wong in Film That Defames China’. Her previous roles were also recalled, including the part of a nearly naked servant in The Thief of Bagdad: ‘When have you ever seen half-naked servants in China?’ the publication questioned, and the film was banned in China even before it was released in the US. The unforgettable Ayn Rand, however,iTooltip: Ayn Rand (1905–82) was an American writer and the creator of Objectivism, which asserted the primacy of self-interest and paved the way for libertarian values admitted at the time that no film had ever made such a strong impression on her. Indeed, Rand, who had worked in Hollywood herself as an extra and later as a costume designer, knew what she was talking about.

In 1933, Anna May Wong returned to London, this time with a solo cabaret singing program (the very one they tried to depict in Babylon). Her role with Marlene Dietrich might have helped her craft the right image (they were, of course, rumored to be romantically involved, though neither spoke on the matter). Whatever the case, Anna May Wong had never before radiated such carefree allure on stage. She wore a golden dress with intricate Chinese patterns and gold finger caps from the old London jeweler Asprey, and sang songs with telling titles such as ‘Street Girl’.

If her appearance was influenced by her duet with Dietrich, her musical sensibility was likely honed at the legendary Harlem venue Cotton Club, which she frequented with writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten and his wife, the Odessa-born actress Fania Marinoff. When Anna May Wong performed there, the orchestra of the famous Cab CallowayiCab Calloway (1907–94) was a famous American jazz singer.played in a special Chinese tempo, though what this tempo was, history does not reveal.

Wong’s musical performance caused another sensation, and during this trip to London, one of the censorship bastions fell. Thus, in the historical drama Java Head, Anna May Wong was filmed kissing her partner for the first time. However, despite this erotic concession, the story's ending remained unchanged and her character traditionally died by suicide by poisoning herself with opium.

In 1931, American writer Pearl Buck published The Good Earth and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her monumental epic about the lives of Chinese farmers. The realistic story about the battle for crops in northern China greatly impressed American readers during the Great Depression, and by 1934, talks about adapting it into a film began. In 1935, the film project was approved under the title The Good Earth, and the casting finally commenced.

Anna May Wong spoke highly of The Good Earth as one of the most wonderful books ever written about life in China, and the role of the main character, O-Lan, was indeed tailored for her. She was genuinely considered for the part, but the recently enacted Hays CodeiThe Hays Code was a set of ethical restrictions in Hollywood adopted in 1930 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, essentially a censorship code that tried to promote high moral standardsspecifically prohibited interracial sex on screen, thus requiring the actress to be white. It was a truly tragic miscasting. Should Wong have received that role, her name might have been much more widely recognized today. At the same time, she found herself in the crossfire once again as the ever-vigilant Chinese government also opposed Wong’s candidacy in retaliation for her past unsavory portrayals on screen.

In the end, her role was once again given to a European actress (similarly, the lead Chinese male character was played by the American Paul Muni). Wong was offered a secondary role as a Chinese dancing mistress from a teahouse. She declined this role (which was eventually played by an Austrian actress), and in 1938, Pearl Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature, while the actor who took the female lead role in the film, the German Jewish actress Luise Rainer, won an Oscar. Incidentally, Luise Rainer, who was only five years younger than Wong, lived until 2014, passing away at the age of 104. During this period, Anna May Wong could only boast of her role in Daughter of Shanghai. This time, she played the lead role, but the film was a rather typical crime melodrama of the era, where she dramatically screamed at the sound of gunshots, raised her eyebrows in an exaggerated manner up to her fringe, and performed a dance with her back bare before a frenzied crowd of men fanning themselves with their hats.

In 1936, while The Good Earth was being filmed without her, Wong undertook a long-awaited journey to China, having arranged with the New York Herald Tribune to write a series of five reports on her trip. She did write them, praising the modern, emancipated Chinese woman (in contrast to the oppressed Japanese woman). However, she also argued that Chinese women in Shanghai enjoyed much greater freedom than those in Europe. Observing the glamorous women of Shanghai, it was hard for her to imagine anything further from life than the caricatured, oppressed Chinese wife depicted in The Good Earth, a point she made vehemently. While in China, she also conceived the idea of creating a series of detective films with a female lead in the style of Charlie Chan,iCharlie Chan is a fictional heroic detective of Chinese descent known for his Confucian aphorisms but with a female protagonist.

The Good Earth premiered on 29 January 1937, and the Japanese-Chinese war began later that same summer.

Anna May Wong had previously publicly expressed support for the Kuomintang, and with the onset of the war, she became a fervent political activist, participating in rallies, raising funds for Chinese refugees, and contributing to boosting China's morale. By December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America itself, Wong could only revel in the correctness of her earlier criticisms of Japan. In a frightened California, a new problem, however, emerged. How could you distinguish a Chinese person from a Japanese person on the street? Time magazine even published an article with exactly that title, and Chinese people began wearing ‘I Am Chinese’ ribbons to avoid being attacked. James Cagney, one of the most recognizable actors of the era, also wore such a badge in solidarity, despite his impeccable appearance as an all-American gangster.

In the 1940s, Anna May Wong appeared in very few films, except for a couple of wartime propaganda pieces. Notably, she was not cast in the adaptation of another Pearl Buck novel, Dragon Seed (1944), being deemed, once again, too authentic for the role. Instead, she worked as a technical consultant on films about Chinese life, gave lectures on the Chinese beauty industry, wrote forewords for cookbooks, and promoted a perfume with a ‘Shanghai’ fragrance.

In 1948, at the age of forty-three, she was diagnosed with cirrhosis, a consequence of the Prohibition era’s gin fizzes. The following year, her father died, and Wong suffered another nervous breakdown, leading to a hospital stay of several weeks. The cirrhosis transformed her once-brilliant face into a pallid, swollen mask. In December 1953, she was hospitalized again and then transferred to a rehab facility for an extended period, though she never completely stopped drinking.

With Hollywood no longer offering any hope for the future, Wong returned to Europe, which had frequently rescued her career in the past, having last visited London in 1937. Despite her eighteen-year absence, the London audience remembered her well. Thus, she signed autographs in both English and Chinese and dined with Somerset Maugham at the Dorchester. According to her, the British public was far more loyal to past idols than the Americans. However, her British sojourn brought her nothing but pleasant memories.

Once she returned to Los Angeles, Wong sold her house and attempted to restart her career in television. She found some success with various series (including a documentary about her 1936 trip to China). While major roles were no longer forthcoming, she was actively offered stereotypical character parts, like a businesslike Chinese matron with a cigarette holder in Adventures in Paradise, or a killer named Madame Chu in the detective series Mike Hammer (1957–59). She continued to portray various Eastern values on screen, explaining, for instance, the concept of yin and yang in Mike Hammer. But her eyes seemed to lose their former luster and vitality, as though a spark had been quenched in them.

In 1959, Anna May Wong made her final appearance in a major Hollywood film with the melodrama Portrait in Black, alongside the incomparable Lana Turner, who by then had also seen her own star fade. That same year, Wong received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and that was her last accolade, which, to be fair, had been few and far between.

On 3 February 1961, Anna May Wong lay down for an afternoon nap and never awoke again. Her epitaph had been prepared well in advance as she had once asked a journalist to write that she had already died a thousand deaths on screen.

As a French novel puts it, ‘She died, her death, like a balsam flower, scattered around it wonderful seeds.’ Her wonderful seeds are the images that paved the way for hundreds of Southeast Asian actors on the American screen who continue to make their mark. Her name is engraved on coins, and she is featured in both documentaries and dramatic films (including Babylon). There is even a Barbie doll made in her honor. Strangely, her story is more about the future; as predicted in the final chapter of her last biography, Anna May Wong never received an Oscar, but sooner or later, someone will win an Oscar for portraying her.