Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History
Depicted as dangerous and exotic, the East, especially China, was the subject of many pulp stories and Hollywood movies in the early 20th century. With an undertow of forbidden alure, those depictions of China often pointed to a decadent culture that nonetheless posed a threat to the West. In Hollywood, Asian actors were restricted to playing extras or supporting roles. Even Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto were performed by non-Asians.
Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s most famous Asian actress of that era, is the subject of the much-needed biography, Daughter of the Dragon. Needed because even ardent TCM viewers probably know of only one among the 48 entries in the book’s filmography, Shanghai Express (1932), where she was cast alongside Marlene Dietrich.
The era’s routine prejudices aside, Daughter’s author, Yunte Huang, points to the restrictions of the Hollywood Production Code, punishing any suggestion of miscegenation and hampering cross-racial romance. She was often left to play a pair of stereotypes, the passive Madame Butterfly or the sinister Dragon Lady, the former emblematic of subjugation and the latter a potent symbol of Western anxiety over race-based revenge.
Wong was born in 1905 down the road from Los Angeles’ Chinatown. She worked in her father’s laundry, the stereotypical occupation for Chinese Americans in those years. Trading tip money for tickets, Wong went to the movies from age 10, “becoming obsessed with the movies and the glamor of being an actor,” Huang writes. Because so many Chinese-themed flicks were churned out by the early Hollywood studios, she found work as an extra. By 1920 her face became more visible on screen. Wong was a beautiful girl and turned the heads of producers and directors; she was also diligent, ambitious and eager to learn.
Her career was both based and limited by her ethnicity. She probably had some of her best years during a European sojourn in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Prejudice was real there as well, but the industry was less regulated by Puritanical hypocrisies. Huang theorizes that Wong deliberately overacted in some roles to subvert cultural stereotypes. But the tidy 21st century idea is only a guess without much evidence. What he does document is her frustration with the restricted parts offered her. Wong’s response was to travel to China in the ‘30s, where she was greeted as a star and sustained herself by filing reports on her travels to U.S. periodicals.
Although famous, and probably America’s best-known person o Asian descent, by World War II Wong was reduced to B movies on Poverty Row—often potboilers staring brave Chinese women fighting the Japanese. After war’s end, she faced another prejudice, one still prevalent today, ageism, especially applied to women.
Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History, is published by Liveright.
