Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend
by Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Hong Kong University Press
Hong Kong Eurasian actress Nancy Kwan took leading roles in two Hollywood movies in the early 1960s: The World of Suzie Wong opposite American actor William Holden and The Flower Drum Song. Kwan benefited from more liberal times in Hollywood, and as Wan Chai prostitute Suzy Wong was able to play a romantic lead in an interracial relationship. It was controversial at the time, but Kwan's character lived on at the end of the movie with her artist lover.
Now rewind 90 years to 1922, and the Technicolor movie The Toll of the Sea in which a beautiful, sexy Chinese-American plays the tragic role of a Chinese woman spurned by her white lover. He deserts her for a Caucasian wife, and she hands over their son to the couple for a better future, wades into the sea and drowns.
The actress, Anna May Wong, ironically and bitterly commented that they could write 'She died a thousand deaths' on her gravestone, for the number of times she committed suicide or was killed on screen. She made 50 films, was a style and fashion icon, a heroine of the underground gay scene, and in another era would probably have won an Oscar.
But she remains a controversial figure, largely passed over by film historians and the Chinese-American community because her roles were often embarrassingly stereotypical. Hollywood played on her 'American Orientalism', while nationalist and later communist China heavily criticised her as they felt that she did not portray the Chinese woman in a good light and showed too much leg.
The story of Wong's life is a damning indictment of the appalling institutional racism that existed in the US, which makes it impressive that she ever got ahead at all.