Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend

In Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, Graham Russell Gao Hodges examines Wong’s film career, arguing that “she was caught between caustic denunciations of her career and the hegemonic power of Orientalism” (pg. xviii). Despite this, “she became a unique actor whose transnational life and career crossed political, racial, and sexual borders” (pg. xviii). Hodges structures his biography around Wong’s film career, drawing upon archival records, published accounts in the press, and more, though he acknowledges that her complicated legacy has led her own relatives to withhold access to family archives. Despite this, her letters in other collections and her candor in interviews makes it possible for show more Hodges to forefront Wong’s own voice in his account.

Describing her upbringing, Hodges writes, “Although she always identified herself as Chinese, her personality was open to and partly shaped by other Americans. Eventually her search for identity pushed Anny May into travel and the transient reality of film” (pg. 5). Turning to her early film career in her teens, Hodges argues, “While Anna May lived in a Chinese home, she worked in a western industry, one whose product further alienated her from her birth culture. Parental tensions, domestic grief, youthful rebellion, and celluloid fantasies pushed Anna May far into hidden racial and personal grief” (pg. 23).

Hodges argues of Wong’s input into her on-screen persona, “By using her emotions, hairstyles, choice of costumes, gestures, and words, she was staging a Chinese persona on the screen in ways that the Western director and screenwriter were unlikely to understand. As a teenager, Anna May manipulated the western myths of Madame Butterfly to represent Asian cultural currents. In the midst of this newfound glory, there were troubling signs. Her role as a sexually available Chinese woman, ready to be exploited by an older American businessman, would eventually earn her resentful criticism in China” (pg. 34). He continues, “The dilemma for Anna May Wong was increasingly obvious… her chances of moving up from supporting or featured player to star were improbably. Production codes against interracial kissing meant that she could not graduate to star billing, even in film with Orientalist themes” (pg. 57). Discussing her interactions with the public, both press and fans, Hodges writes, “Studious respected her professionalism, noting that she was always prepared, and never muffed her lines. Journalists found her charming, accessible, and witty… It is not too much of a jump to argue that Anna May Wong, the laundryman’s daughter, was one of the most sophisticated women in the world” (pgs. 116-117). Hodges argues, “Anna May was a consummate professional. As a Chinese American woman who had pondered her identity for years, she had the talent and intelligence to portray a good wife, mother, worker, and, unquestionably, the victim of her husband’s pomposity and deceit” (pg. 137). Despite her skill, the studios declined to cast her in the feature adaptation of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, though the film made excessive use of yellow-face and so she inadvertently avoided the type of work she was then looking to grow beyond. After developing a career in Hollywood, Wong turned to Europe for new opportunity. Hodges writes, “Anna May’s acting gave her special freedom to fashion her own story. Coming to Berlin was her first big step in making her own transnational identity, which surpassed the keen, city-bound observations of the flaneur” (pg. 70). Though she found greater freedom in Europe, she still had to contend with centuries of imperialist stereotypes and racism in the film industry (pg. 80).

Meanwhile, in China, her roles had earned the ire of the Nationalist Government, though she still appealed to a mass audience (pg. 111). Her connections with respected Chinese film and theatre stars as well as the Chinese ambassador, coupled with her relief work in the U.S. for the Chinese affected by Japanese imperialism, helped to earn her greater respect in the country of her ancestors (pg. 166). She continued to support the Chinese cause in the war against Japan throughout the 19402 in interviews and even promotional cookbooks advertising Chinese cuisine (pg. 185). Despite this, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek’s snub of Wong resulted in “the injection of elitist Chinese Republican attitudes about Anna May Wong into American thought. Soong Meiling’s ill regard of Anna May was later adopted by left-wing scholars in the United States and is largely responsible for the eclipse of her reputation in America” (pg. 188). Hodges concludes, “Because Anna May’s legacy is Janus-faced, with meaning inside and outside of Asian American society, recasting her memory requires more breadth and subtlety than is needed for the worthy men and women who were pathbreakers in other fields” (pg. 211). Only recently have scholars and the public begun to appreciate the nuance of her career and her place in society. Hodges work is instrumental in refashioning that legacy and, with Gemma Chan and Nina Yang Bongiovi’s forthcoming Anna May Wong biopic based on Hodges’ book, hopefully her career will continue to receive the attention it deserves. show less

Anna May Wong? Try Anna May Goddess. What a fantastic and informative read this was, about an actress I really admire. She was a pioneer, and I had no idea just how much unfairness she faced. There was the racist backdrop of course, which was particularly bad against Chinese-Americans from roughly 1870 to 1940, and author Graham Hodges provides excellent context with the laws and attitudes of the times. In Hollywood there were limits on roles she could play, and she was often confined to stereotypes, not allowed to kiss a white actor onscreen, and almost always needing to die at the end, which Hodges shows us again and again as he marches through her filmography. Her ironic and casual comment about it was that her epitaph should read show more “She died a thousand deaths,” but she internalized her disappointments.

Because Hollywood was producing movies that contained overt or subtle racism against Asians, and often had white actors in ‘yellow-face’ playing them, Wong also faced a lot of scorn and backlash from China, and with overseas Chinese intellectuals. She was also Cantonese, which was a negative with the Nationalist Chinese government, and they were also shocked and critical of her outward displays of sexuality, her flapper lifestyle, and how much skin she showed. Early on, her father also thought she was ‘disgracing the family’, and pushed her to get married. She faced a triple whammy of racism, sexism, and cultural conservatism. Wong rejected Rudyard Kipling’s line, oft-quoted in movies of the day about the dangers of racial mixing and miscegenation, that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” and herself drew the best from both worlds, but was judged harshly in both.

It’s all a bit heartbreaking to read, because she carried herself with such dignity and grace, often incorporated subtle elements of Chinese culture into her films, and always fought for better parts and better movies. She was cheerful, charming, and endearing, both publically and privately. She spent years in Berlin and London, and travelled all over Europe, learning multiple languages and moving in elite circles. She was fashionable, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated, and yet pragmatic and self-effacing. She was a third generation American, and one of the great events of her life was returning to her ancestral home in China in 1936, despite the criticism and in one case, getting rocks thrown at her.

Anna May Wong’s biggest disappointment of her professional life was when the lead roles for the film version of Pearl Buck’s ‘The Good Earth’ were given to white actors, as casting director Albert Lewin argued that “despite their ethnicity, they [Asian-American actors] did not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like.” Good Lord. And so, despite frequently garnering rave reviews from critics in America and Europe, she was never quite able to take the next step into being a superstar.

Hodges does a good job with taking us through her life, in chapters that align well to its phases. It was fascinating to me that she had fallen in love with movies at an early age, playing hooky to go the cinema, hanging around film shoots at age 9, and, showing her persistence early on, getting her first uncredited part at age 14. As her career developed she played many small roles, servants, mistresses, and prostitutes, but she put effort into learning aspects of even the smallest roles before performing, and made the most of them. She broke through in the ‘The Toll of the Sea’ (1922) at age 17, and then later in ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ (1924). She played with major stars and stood up well to them, e.g. with Marlene Dietrich in ‘Shanghai Express’ (1932). I love how Hodges lists her entire body of work in the appendices, and it gave me plenty of films to explore.

He also covers her personal life in respectful ways that are honest, and not sensationalistic. Anna May Wong was sexually free and had affairs with several white Hollywood directors, Tod Browning among them, and the ‘love of her life’, Eric Maschwitz. She also may have had a dalliance with Marlene Dietrich, and as Hodges puts it “if anything, the tryst demonstrates Anna May’s adventurous character and willingness to cross boundaries.” She was athletic; swimming, skiing, riding horses, and playing tennis. She loved carousing, and often returned from nights out at 7 a.m. Unfortunately, she drank too much, and starting at the age of 43 would have liver trouble, leading to a tragically early demise at 56.

Whew. Someone really should make a movie about this woman.

Hodges’ book is meticulously researched and very well annotated, and it’s clear a great deal of effort went into it. The photographs included are wonderful, and it would have been nice to see a lot more, particularly as others are alluded to regularly in the text. He also could have done with better editing; there are places with repetition and a level of detail which could have been excised. With that said, you can see how inspiring his subject was to me, and I really appreciated how much information he gathered about her, and from such a wide range of sources. Not my usual type of read, but maybe it ought to be. show less

nonfiction/biography - American-born Chinese filmstar in the totally racist 1920s, written by Caucasian author who married a Chinese-American woman (in case you were confused about his last name).

I am very interested to learn more about AMW as well as her genealogy, but the writing so far in this book is just ok--fairly dry. The author pats himself on the back a lot ("This book remains the best source about her family, headed by matriarch Lee Shee" p. xii) and to be fair, it is true that other books focus on her American family vs. her father's first family left behind in China. Doubtless he has put a lot of time in researching the subject (~1999-2004) spurred on by his discovery of an autographed photo of the actress that caught his show more eye (author is not Chinese but coincidentally or not coincidentally he has married a Chinese-American scholar who has been very helpful), but you would hope that by the publication of this 3rd edition, there wouldn't be such basic inconsistencies as these two conflicting statements re: Lee Shee's age at death--
---Lee Shee died in 1942 at the age of seventy-four. (preface to 3rd edition, p. xii)
---Lee Shee....had lived to the age of seventy-eight in Chang On, (p. 7).
Granted, it's often difficult to know for sure exactly when Chinese people from this era were born, particularly when relying on memories of dates from the lunar calendar (my own grandmother chose to celebrate her birthday on the same day as her eldest child, and the year of her birth was really a guess), but maybe don't pat yourself on the back so much if you're going to print inconsistencies like this.

So, I guess take all the facts with a grain of salt? The sources listed in the back appear to be mainly English-language articles and writings, but he also does mention his contact with AMW's half-brother's descendants in Taishan, China (who are an immense help in providing information about AMW's family roots in Chinese genealogical records), as well as a visit to the ancestral village, and his knowledge of Chinese-American history appears to be comprehensive and consistent with what I know, although he probably could learn a lot more about discriminatory US policies against other minorities:
---A series of laws starting with the Burlingame Treaty in 1868, through the Page Law of 1875, and culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882...amplified...over the next twenty years in a series of measures that specifically curtailed the rights of Chinese Americans. Such discriminatory laws made the Chinese the only ethnic group in the history of the United States to suffer restrictions aimed directly at them. [emphasis mine] (p.3) -- the endnotes cite three sources for this paragraph of information but even a 4th grader with an overly simplified education in US history could tell you there's something wrong with that statement, and really as a professor that teaches African American studies (at Colgate University in NY) you'd think the author would know better too? I just can't figure out any way to interpret that statement, in any century, that would make it true.

Descriptions of film plots go on for pages, and drag somewhat (not the best way to experience 1920s cinema, perhaps, and I do recommend watching at least one of her films if you can to put all these film studies notes into context) but I did like when it focused on what roles AMW had to work with and what influence she was able to wield in terms of her dialogue, the depth of her characters (huge improvements to the flat caricatures the roles were originally written as). There is a comprehensive and thoroughly researched look at the different ways in which AMW was received by France, Germany, England, and China, but be prepared to slog through plenty of pages that may be somewhat dull, especially in the beginning and middle.

Recommended instead:
Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History by noted Chinese-American historian/author Yunte Huang, which gives careful and thorough attention to the forms of racism that were present in AMW's time and which affected her family and others.
Agent Josephine (2022 biography of the great Ms Baker)
The Doctors Blackwell (2021 nonfiction about the pioneering women who fought for their right to attend medical school)
and especially Lon Chaney Speaks (2020 graphic nonfiction about this talented silent actor and child of deaf parents) show less

I'm currently reading this biography and it's fascinating. I really appreciate the photographs of her and her family in the middle of the book, though I wish there was more. Anna May was such a novelty at the time being one of the only Chinese actresses in Hollywood during the earlier half of the twentieth century. I've never watched her films, but I first heard of her when I saw part of "Piccadilly", a silent film made in the 20s which I believe propelled her to stardom. It's mentioned in the biography as well. The book reflecting on Anna May's life is sort of bittersweet. Her desires and success in her career was confined by the social norms of the day and also by the cultural ambiguity of being Chinese American. Though Anna was from show more a completely time, I think she's still very relatable to the modern woman. I think it's a perfect book for someone who is interested in classic films and Asian American culture. show less