How Anna May Wong Became The First Chinese American Movie Star
In March 1929, when 24-year-old Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong appeared on stage in London's West End in a play called The Chalk Circle, critics disagreed with one aspect of her character. Result: espresso. Prior to this, the five-foot-tall, dreamy-eyed Wong had primarily appeared in American silent films that promoted stereotypes of submissive Asian women. His immediate audience might expect a nice monotony. Instead what I was proposing to them was, in the eyes of the critics, "flagrant" and "impolite". Wong grew up in Los Angeles' Chinatown and spoke Cantonese and English. He had a clear Californian accent. After eight weeks of Chalk Circle ended, Wong had lunch with reporters who asked him about his negative reviews. He initially answered their questions in English. And then, to his surprise, he switched to Cantonese.
The episode takes place in the midst of Yunti Hwang's academic research for the star's new autobiography, "Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Encounter with American History," as proof of what Hwang calls "challenge and Joy" by Wong. In the language of his predecessors, Wong didn't want to play with audience expectations. With one of the few means at her disposal, she would bravely refuse to distinguish herself before the gaze of the white public. Wong was the first Chinese-American movie star in world cinema. His forty-year career in film, theater and television in the early and mid-20th century included a series of difficult negotiations. She had to kneel down to the cartoons that the industry often asked her to portray while maintaining self-respect and protecting herself from the humiliation she faced due to her ethnicity.
Huang's book comes at an extremely opportune time for Wong's legacy. Wong's public deification has seldom been stronger: The reappraisal of his work is consistent with the larger restoration of Asian American history in recent years. In 2022, the face of the United States will appear on the country's currency, making her the first Asian-American woman on the country's currency; Earlier this year, Mattel introduced a Barbie doll to its Inspiring Women collection. Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh's historic win at this year's Academy Awards for her diverse role in Everything, Everywhere, At Once has brought Wong back into the cultural dialogue. And in June, writer Gail Tsukiyama's historical novel Bright Star was released, which tries to put herself in Wong's shoes through fiction; Another autobiography by Katie Salisbury, Not Your China Doll, will be published in March.
Daughter of the Dragon is the final part of Huang's triptych of Asian American history. As with the first two films, Charlie Chan and Inseparable, it uses its theme as an alternative to the larger story of the exclusion of Asian Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The actress, born Wong Liu Kong, was born in 1905 in Los Angeles' Chinatown and grew up during a time of intense hostility toward Chinese Americans. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, barred almost all Chinese immigrants, especially Chinese workers, from entering the United States. Wong's paternal grandfather came to the United States in the 1850s. Both parents were born in the United States, but were not immune to the hostility sanctioned by these laws. Families like the Wongs who ran the laundry were frequent targets of racial animosity in Los Angeles. Wong's colleagues taunted her by chanting "Chink, Chink, Chinese" while pulling her hair; Some stuck pins into them, like dolls.
Wong found refuge in cinema and became, in her words, "obsessed with cinema" at the age of ten. He was soon relaxing during the outdoor shoot in Chinatown. Her presence was so stubborn that one of the crew members nicknamed her "CCC", which means "Chinese Curious Girl". She decided to become an actress and started stretching her facial muscles by standing in front of a mirror and crying. For dramatic effect, he would sometimes place a handkerchief across his chest before ripping it off in a fit of sympathy.
At the time, American cinema was making films that exploited the “Yellow Peril” by playing on the appeal of Chinese-born characters portrayed as drug addicts, slave traders and criminals. Yellowfaces - The practice of white performers posing as East Asians was common. Actors of Chinese descent have struggled to establish themselves in this hierarchy, especially in leading roles. As a teenager, Wong played an extra in the 1919 film Red Lantern. . offspring. Two sisters were played by the Yalta actress Alla Nazimova, one of whom, thanks to makeup, had a yellow face and almond-shaped artificial eyes. Wong, who played the role of the girl with the lamp, eagerly gathered her friends for the screening, only to find that she hardly appeared in the film.
Undeterred, Wong renamed herself Anna May Wong, making her name more palatable to fans. It was a common gesture of Americanization from which many stars of the time suffered. But Wong knew that to succeed in the industry, she would have to walk the tightrope between the foreigner and the familiar, presenting herself to white American audiences without compromising the ambiguity of her racial identity reserved for viewers.
In 1922, he landed his first major role in the film Sea Duty. She played a Hong Kong girl who falls in love with a white man who impregnates her and leaves her. The film ends with his suicide. The character was the spiritual descendant of Madam Butterfly, a stereotypically submissive Asian woman who was tragically abandoned by an overbearing white man. The role required Wong to cry constantly. “Someone is throwing a raft at Anna May Wong,” one of the crew shouted. Her performance received rave reviews, but she had a hard time finding leading roles, at least in the United States. Fortunately, in 1927, the German director Richard Echberg offered him a contract for five films, impressed by his work. And even though he knew little German and had never crossed the Atlantic, Wong said yes.
The change of scenery gave Wong the freedom to experience her own personality: after arriving in Germany dressed as an American, she began to feel more connected to what she called her "Chinese spirit" and signed "Oriental for you, Anna" autographs. . "Mae Woon," the photo in front of her winked cheekily. Subsequent films with Eichberg took her out of the world she had encountered in Hollywood. In Butterfly on the Sidewalk (1929), she played a Chinese dancer who, despite her title, looked more like a reserved vampire than a passive yellow-haired beauty.
Wong sheds her flapper dress and embraces a new kind of European sophistication. I learned German and French. Public speaking lessons had erased all traces of his American accent. His film appearance was with Echberg, who made three versions of the same film, Flame of Love (1930), in the United States in English, French and German, all with Wong as a dancer. In Tsarist Russia. Though critical response was mixed, Wong, unlike many silent film stars, survived the transition to sound.
But after two and a half years abroad, the Nazis rise to power and the Weimar Republic becomes increasingly xenophobic. Nostalgia brought her to the United States. Upon his return, Wong found that overseas success had increased his fan base in Hollywood. In 1931, she starred in her first American talk show, Daughter of the Dragon. She plays an exotic dancer who slowly transforms into a bloodthirsty vixen, breaking one stereotype and finding herself trapped in another. According to Hwang, she underwent "a radical transformation that transformed Madame Butterfly into Lady Dragon", an evil, tasteless and incorrigible stereotype that has become synonymous with the name Wong in the popular imagination. The critical and public acclaim he received for this role and for his performance opposite Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express the following year was not enough to land him a studio contract. Time and time again, Wong has proven her ability to bring an edge to the roles she plays, but Hollywood has been reluctant to acknowledge her talent.
Although Hwang places Wong's burgeoning career in the context of widespread anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, he largely avoids reducing her to a mere symbol of emancipation or object of pity. He also doesn't condemn her for the compromises she made in choosing roles. At the time, many Asian Americans criticized Wong for perpetuating stereotypes. Huang deftly juxtaposes similar critiques directed at heirs to Wong's legacy such as Michelle Yeoh and Asian-American actresses Nancy Kwan and Lucy Liu to highlight the current tension between a society that demands to be seen and artists like Wong who need to see . . . representation fee. Wong clarified why he had to accept the roles he took on: He was in no position to turn down roles. “When a person tries to establish himself in a profession, he cannot choose roles. He has to accept what is offered to him,” reader Wong told The Hollywood Reporter.
This is a great soundtrack that reveals Wong's psychology and the trap he finds himself in. And Juan loves her too. A version of this quote reappears eight chapters later at a banquet with Chinese officials, but to less effective effect. Here, as elsewhere, Juan seems so interested in carefully constructing the world around Wong that his idea of Wong herself begins to wane. As a result, Wong is sometimes seen less as a flesh-and-blood figure than as the hub through which Huang conducts his research on Asian-American history.
Juan gets to the point, getting to the heart of the emotions, documenting the anxiety that gripped Wong's career three years after the Shanghai Express. He planned to star in a film adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Ground, the story of two Chinese farmers, Wang Lung and Ou Lang, who swing between filth and riches as they overcome the hardships of their marriage. In the 20s of the XIX century. Star Paul Muni, a Jewish actor born in what is now Ukraine, got the lead role of Van Lung and agreed to play Yellowface. In 1934, the industry passed the Production Code, colloquially known as the Hayes Code, which officially outlawed miscegenation and interracial romance on the screen. The Hays Code's ruling against interracial romance (and, more importantly, against the fragile sensibilities of American moviegoers, who, according to Huang, would prefer a yellow-faced white actress as a counterpart to a white actor) meant that Mooney's choice was actually the decisive one. factor. the likelihood of Wong getting the role. in front of him. His situation worsened when a Chinese technical consultant hired for the film claimed that Wong's acceptance of the clichéd role had damaged his reputation in China and that his casting would be anathema to the film's financial success there .
