Anna May Wong: Race, Sex and Politics in the Silent Era to the Golden Age of Cinema

Posted: March 22nd, 2009 | Author: CB | Filed under: art | Tags: celebrity industrial complex, class fisticuffs, god save the patriarchy, race matters | 1 Comment »

This post is just one bastard’s humble contribution to the considerable efforts of my sweet pals over at RaceBending.com, which boasts a great visual essay titled “A History of Yellowface.”

La plus ça change, comrades…

Born Wong Liu Tsong (Chinese: 黃柳霜; pinyin: Huáng Liǔshuāng) in Los Angeles, California on January 3, 1905, to laundryman Wong Sam Sing and his wife, Lee Gon Toy. The family lived on Flower Street in a neighborhood dominated by Irish and Germans, one block from Chinatown.

Located near a noxious gas plant and the L.A. River, Chinatown had been built on private property, so there were no sewers or running water. In 1900, the population of 2,111 was 90% male, since U.S. immigration law of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would not allow a Chinese woman to immigrate unless she was already married to a U.S. citizen. Nineteen Chinese had been lynched in a Los Angeles race riot instigated by Caucasians in 1871, who also looted Chinatown of tens of thousands of dollars worth of their belongings and business assets. There were later riots in 1886 and 1887. The state also targeted the Chinese in 1850 with a Foreign Miners’ License Act that put a $20 tax on each “foreign” miner. (The Act was repealed a year later, as it had a deleterious effect on the mining industry by creating labor shortages.) When the gold mines started sputtering out in California in the mid-1850s, there was a general economic recession, where opportunistic, racist politicians managed to divert the blame towards the Chinese. Chinese were blamed for taking away jobs from “Americans” and white immigrants from Europe who were equally as “foreign,” but who had been enfranchised with the vote by political machines. The California Supreme Court even extended a statute that prohibited “negroes and Indians” from testifying against Caucasians in court to the Chinese, for the “logical” reason that in Christopher Columbus’s time, Oriental countries were called “Indian.”

In 1868, the U.S. and China signed a treaty in Burlingame, California, which mandated that every Chinese citizen in the United States should enjoy the privileges enjoyed by American citizens in China, naturalization exempted. The Burlingame Treaty was met with a storm of protest in the western states and territories, with agitators denouncing it as a sellout of the American laborer. The U.S. subsequently entered into a treaty with China in 1880 that allowed it to exclude Chinese laborers, a treaty backed up by Congress when it passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

Discriminated against in a way exceeded only by the racism directed towards African-Americans, the assimilation of Chinese-Americans was impossible, and so they bought property to create their own communities. Boxed out of the American culture, their ties to China remained important and, forbidden by law to intermarry with whites, there was little chance of assimilation in the world Wong Liu Tsong was born into.

Los Angeles’s Chinatown already was teeming with movie shoots when she was a girl. Liu Tsong would haunt the neighborhood nickelodeons, having become enraptured with the early “flickers.” Her father strongly disapproved of his daughter’s cinephilia, as it distracted her from scholastic pursuits, but little Liu Tsong was determined to be an actress. The film industry was in the midst of relocating from the East Coast to the West, and Hollywood was booming. Liu Tsong would haunt movie shoots as she had earlier haunted the nickelodeons. She would skip school to watch movie shoots in her neighborhood. She made tip money from delivering laundry for her father, which she spent on going to the movies. Around the time she was nine years old, she began entreating filmmakers for parts, behavior that got her dubbed “C.C.C.” for “Curious Chinese Child.”

Liu Tsong’s first film role was as an uncredited extra in Metro Pictures’ The Red Lantern (1919) starring Alla Nazimova as a Eurasian woman who falls in love with an American missionary. The film included scenes shot in Chinatown. Retaining the family surname “Wong” and the English-language “Christian” name bestowed on her by her parents, Liu Tsong dubbed herself “Anna May Wong” for the movie industry, though she would not receive an on-screen credit for another two years.

The movie magazine “Pictures” published a memoir of Wong in 1926 in which she complained, “A lot of people, when they first meet me, are surprised that I speak and write English without difficulty. But why shouldn’t I? I was born right here in Los Angeles and went to the public schools here. I speak English without any accent at all. But my parents complain that the same cannot be said of my Chinese. Although I have gone to Chinese schools, and always talk to my father and mother in our native tongue, it is said that I speak Chinese with an English accent!”

Though her family had been in California since 1855, as a Chinese-American, Wong was considered “foreign” both through social prejudices of the time, and by law. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in California until 1948. Wong’s career was especially affected by the anti-miscegenation rules in the Code, since they prevented her from playing romantic roles with non-Asian actors. Racial taboos meant that Caucasian actresses were cast as “Oriental” women in lead parts opposite Caucasian leading men, such as the 1915 movie version of Madame Butterfly starring “America’s Sweetheart,” Canadian-born Mary Pickford in the title role. When MGM was casting for The Good Earth (1937), she was passed up for the lead female role of O-lan because Paul Muni, an actor of European descent, was to play Wang Lung, O-lan’s husband. Even though Muni was to wear heavy make up to look Asian, industry regulations prevented her from playing romantic roles opposite actors of different ethnicity.

Instead, the role Wong hoped for went to Luise Rainer. MGM offered Wong the part of Lotus, but Wong refused to be the only Chinese American playing the only negative character, stating: “…I won’t play the part. If you let me play O-lan, I’ll be very glad. But you’re asking me – with Chinese blood – to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters.”

Hollywood films of the silent era and early 1930s pre-code era sometimes flouted the more conservative social mores of the time, but these restrictions were codified when the studios adopted the Hays Code in 1930, and began enforcing it in 1934. The code expressly forbid “portrayals of miscegenation.” A decade earlier, Congress had passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which ordered that Americans would be stripped of their citizenship for the transgression of marrying Chinese immigrants. The act was the culmination of a progress some historians call the “negroization” of the Chinese that began after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, which legitimated slavery. Nativists feared “amalgamation” (intermarriage) of Caucasians with African-Americans and Chinese, which would lead to a “mongrelization” of the “white race,” seen in Darwinian terms as an evolutionary catastrophe, as it would pervert the doctrine of the “survival of the fittest,” i.e., the survival of the hegemony of white America.

While all this may seem incredible to some people, the power of the segregationists at the box office was real (theater circuits in the Southeastern U.S. threatened to boycott integrationist films well through the 1960s, and they even successfully boycotted the films of Marlon Brando, a noted civil rights activist, in the mid to late ’60s; indeed, Bob Jones University banned interracial dating up until the year 2000 as being contrary to the Bible).

Facing near-insurmountable odds, Wong obtained a number of significant film roles. Her first starring role was in Hollywood’s first feature film shot entirely in Technicolor’s two-strip color process, The Toll of the Sea (1921) opposite Kenneth Harlan. By appearing top-billed in this romantic melodrama, Anna May Wong became the first American-born ethnic Asian performer to star in a major Hollywood movie. Even so, in “The Toll of the Sea,” Anna May Wong’s character perpetuates the stereotype of the Asian “lotus blossom,” a self-sacrificial woman who surrenders her life for the love of a Caucasian man.

The film was a hit, and it showcased Wong in a preternaturally mature and restrained performance. It made Anna May Wong a known quantity and thus a marketable commodity in Hollywood. She became the #1 actress when a young Asian female part had to be cast, but unfortunately, lead roles for Asians were few and far between. Instead of becoming a star, the woman who was among the “best-dressed in the world,” with “the loveliest hands in cinema” and a complexion described as “a rose blushing through old ivory” continued to be stuck in supporting roles, as in Tod Browning’s melodrama Drifting (1923) and the western Thundering Dawn (1923). She even played an Inuit in the 1924 flick The Alaskan and appeared as Tiger Lily, “Chieftainess of the Indians,” in Paramount’s prestigious production of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1924).

Wong’s biggest breakthrough finally came when Douglas Fairbanks cast her in a supporting role as a treacherous Mongol slave in his Middle Eastern/Arabian Nights extravaganza The Thief of Bagdad (1924). The $2 million blockbuster production made her known to critics and the moviegoing public. For better or worse, a star, albeit of the stereotypical “Dragon Lady” type, was born. The supporting characters (everything from A-list movies to two-reel comedies and serials) she played typically were duplicitous or murderous vamps who often reaped the wages of their sin by being raped.

Later, when she left Hollywood and moved to Europe, she told journalist Doris Mackie, “I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain–murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass.”

In Europe, she obtained one of the leads in the British film Piccadilly (1929). In Java Head (1934) she starred opposite actor John Loder as a Chinese princess married to a 19th-century English gentleman. She also made films in German and French. In addition, she co-starred with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932) and with Lana Turner in Portrait in Black (1960), though she typically earned far less than her billing would indicate. For her work in Shanghai Express, in which Dietrich and Wong played a pair of prostitutes, she received $6,000 while Dietrich’s salary was more than $78,000. Many critics, however, believed that she stole the film from Dietrich with her intense performance, despite playing a supporting role, and the two actresses never worked together again. She toured extensively on the stage throughout Europe and the U.S., including opposite Vincent Price in Princess Turandot, a stage version of Giacomo Puccini’s opera.

European directors appreciated Wong’s unique talents and beauty, and they used her in ways that their Hollywood counterparts would not or could not. Wong learned German and French and began to develop a continental European attitude and outlook. According to her biographer Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Wong hobnobbed with “an intellectual elite that included princes, playwrights, artists and photographers who clamored to work with her.”

According to Hodges, “she was the one American star who spoke to the French people, more than Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford or Mary Pickford, the top American actresses of the time.” But ironically, “she’s the one who’s now forgotten.”

Though Wong was vocal in her opposition to stereotypes and typecasting, she was considered socially suspect by her own people. The roles she was forced to accept in order to have an acting career, as well as her status as a single woman, disgusted many Chinese in America and in her ancestral homeland, where actresses were equated with prostitutes and where women were still played by men in classical opera. On a trip to China in 1936, Anna May Wong was welcomed by the country’s cultural elite in cosmopolitan Beijing and Shanghai, but she had to abandon a trip to her parents’ ancestral village when her progress was blocked by a crowd of protesters. Someone in the crowed denounced her with “Down with Huang Liu Tsong–the stooge that disgraces China. Don’t let her go ashore.”

Wong never married, largely because of the Chinese custom of the time for a wife to stay at home, coupled with miscegenation laws. British writer and broadcasting executive Eric Maschwitz was romantically linked to her, while working in Hollywood, and the lyrics of These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You) are evocative of his longing for her after they parted and he returned to England.

She died at 56 from a heart attack while battling liver cirrhosis in Santa Monica, California. Her cremated remains were interred in her mother’s gravesite at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, anonymous and unmarked nearly 47 years later.

In 2003–2004, two biographies and a book on her career appeared, and extremely comprehensive retrospectives of her films were held at both the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City (the latter in 2005).

For her contribution to the film industry, Anna May Wong was given a star on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame, located at 1708 Vine Street. She is also depicted larger than life as one of the four supporting pillars of the “Gateway to Hollywood” sculpture located on the southeast corner of Hollywood Bl. and La Brea Ave.

Bio culled from and IMDB and Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend.

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