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The following is a bonus chapter from Anne Helen Petersen's Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema. You can read previous installments — on everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Marlon Brando — here.
In a December 1933 issue of New Movie Magazine, society reporter Grace Kingsley described her visit to screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s famed costume party, where the who’s who of Hollywood showed up dressed, as the year’s theme dictated, as other Hollywood stars. The actress Fay Wray described the scene to Kingsley, cooing over each of her friend’s excellent costumes (“There’s Jack Gilbert as Lionel Barrymore in Rasputin!”) but really losing it when she sees “a little Chinese lady dancing about.”
But that lady wasn’t Chinese: She was the (white) comedienne Polly Moran. “I’m Anna May Wong!” she said, running over and brandishing her hands. “And my fingernails cost me a dollar and a half!”
New Movie Magazine / Via lantern.mediahist.org
As the picture that accompanied the article shows, Moran was decked out in full yellowface — including makeup to darken her skin, a wig, Chinese-style dress, and approximations of Wong’s signature long, pointed nails. In the picture, she makes a face intended to simulate a “Chinese” expression, and if you look closely, you can see that her eyes are taped up in an exaggeration of the Asian facial structure.
Moran, and whoever dressed her, would be familiar with this makeup technique (often achieved by using fish skin as an adhesive) because so many non-Asian women had been made up to play the role of Asian women. These were leading roles that could’ve been (but were seldom) given to classic Hollywood’s first and only Chinese-American star.
Anna May Wong, like other Hollywood actors of color, was not allowed in society, and would not have been invited to Stewart’s party. She couldn’t hang out with the very stars who exoticized and imitated her. In classic Hollywood, not only was it OK to act Asian, it was celebrated. And even though Stewart’s soiree was just a party, the behaviors modeled there bespoke the dominant understandings of Hollywood and America at large: White people can play at other races, and other races can play at very little.
Anna May Wong never scandalized Hollywood with her string of fiancés, like Clara Bow, or an outré sex philosophy, like Mae West. Ultimately, the scandal of her career had little to do with her, or her actions — it’s the way that Hollywood, and the audience that powered it, remained so hideously stubborn about the roles a woman like her could play, both on and off the screen. Wong was a silent-film demi-star, a European phenomenon, a cultural ambassador, and a curiosity, the de facto embodiment of China, Asia, and the “Orient” at large for millions. She didn’t choose that role, but it became hers, and she labored, subtly, cleverly, persistently, to challenge what Americans thought an Asian or Asian-American should or could be — a challenge that persists today.
Wong was born in 1905 in Los Angeles, just off Flower Street on the outskirts of Chinatown. Fan-magazine renderings of Wong’s childhood didn’t shy from evoking the discrimination she faced, especially in her integrated elementary school. One boy would stick needles into her every day, to which she responded by simply wearing a thicker and thicker coat. A group of boys pulled her long braids, shoving her off the sidewalk and yelling, “Chink, Chink, Chinamen. Chink, Chink, Chinamen.” Sometimes the profile would admit that such children were of “lesser parents,” but the anecdotes were framed as a simple trial of childhood: no different than a white star getting teased as a child for an embarrassing name or pair of glasses.
Profiles also labored to reconcile an identity that was at once wholly Chinese yet also American. She worked in a Chinese laundry, but that laundry wasn’t in Chinatown. Her parents forced her to go to Chinese school after American school, but she skipped it to go to the movies. She had a Chinese name (Wong Liu Tsong) that meant “Frosted Yellow Willows,” but she opted for the Americanized Anna May Wong. Her parents were skeptical of the moving image — her mother purportedly believed that cameras could steal a bit of the soul — but Wong eschewed Old World superstition. She was, in many ways, a classic child of immigrants, incorporating the behaviors, beliefs, and vernacular of her homeland with the heritage of home.
As Wong grew, she became increasingly fascinated with the Hollywood pictures that would film in Chinatown, which, in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s, studios would regularly use as a visual substitute for China — a conflation that made it even more difficult for Americans to understand that Chinese-Americans were a distinct culture from the Chinese.
To make Chinatown seem like the bustling streets of China, directors needed Chinese faces — which is how Wong first appeared, as an extra in Alla Nazimova’s The Red Lantern at the age of 14. She had asked for her father’s permission, but he was reluctant: As one profile explained, “Of course, many Chinese girls had played extra, but there are many Chinese girls who are not nice.” It was only after her father made sure that other “honorable” Chinese extras, all male, would guard her that he agreed to let her participate.
Over the next two years, Wong appeared in bit parts in various films, still attending school, before quitting in 1921 to focus full-time on her career. She was immediately cast in her first leading role in The Toll of the Sea, a nonoperatic take on Madame Butterfly that blew up the screen for two very simple reasons: It had Technicolor (two-strip, which meant only tones of reds and greens, but no matter, COLOR, that was sick), and Wong was actually a decent actress.
Wong’s acting was subtle and unmannered; her eyebrow game was on point. She had a piercing stare that made you feel as if she saw the very best and very worst things about you, and her signature blunt-cut bangs made her face seem at once exquisitely, perfectly symmetrical. Given the quilt work of exotic roles she’d played on the silent screen, audiences expected her to speak with a broken, accented, or otherwise un-American English. But her tone was refined, cool, cultured, like a slap in the face to anyone who’d assumed otherwise.
Her early success, like that of Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa, can at least partially be attributed to the global market for silent films. Yet to truly understand Anna May Wong’s unique place in Hollywood — and the particular type of racist role available to her — you have to understand both the rampant fetishization of the “Orient” by the West and the place of Chinese-Americans in California in the early 20th century.
In very broad terms, “Orientalism” refers to the overarching tendency of the “Occident,” or the Western world, to fetishize and exoticize the “Orient” (“The East,” or civilizations and cultures spanning the Asian continent). Scholar Graham Huggan defines exoticism as an experience that “posits the lure of difference while protecting its practitioners from close involvement” — and that’s exactly what Westerners wanted: a taste of “difference,” usually in the form of an evocative song, poem, or painting, without the actual immersive and possibly challenging experience thereof.
Mediated through the lens of Orientalism, members of distinct Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures are grouped together into one vast sultry and quasi-backward “Orient,” replete with heathens, pungent spices, snake charmers, mysticism, and all sorts of other offensively stereotypical renderings. For the Occident to reify its position as potent, masculine, and dominant, it had to figure the Orient as diffuse, feminized, and passive. It’s bullshit, but it pervaded everything from political speeches to children’s bedtime stories. Think Madame Butterfly, think the entire oeuvre of Rudyard Kipling, think "Rikki Tikki Tavi," think Aladdin.
When Anna May Wong rose to stardom in the 1920s, the “great” empires of the West were in decline — but that simply made it all the more important to shore up the ideas and attitudes that were under threat. Which explains why every. single. article. I found about Anna May Wong somehow manages to sexualize and exoticize her while also placing her — her upbringing, her family, her heritage — in diametric opposition to “American” and Western practices.
“Anna May Wong symbolizes the eternal paradox of her ancient race,” wrote one fan magazine. “She reminds us of cruel and intricate intrigues, and, at the same time, of crooned Chinese lullabies. She brings to the screen the rare comprehension and the mysterious colors of her ivory-skinned race.” That sort of rhetoric — directed to an almost entirely white audience — that’s Orientalism. That Wong was American, however, complicated the normal Orientalist discourses: She forced magazines to perform a lot of tricky rhetorical maneuvering where they acknowledged that she was somehow, magically, almost inconceivably, at once American and Chinese.
Wong was also opposite of what many had come to associate with Chinese-Americans, which, at least in the late 19th and early 20th century, comprised a subculture that was conceived of as being segregated, unknowable, and almost entirely male. The reasons for that reputation were complicated: When Chinese laborers first came to America in the mid-19th century, men traveled to make money, while women mostly stayed at home. With the passage of the Page Law in 1875, Chinese women with even a hint of “immoral character or suspect virtue” were banned from entering the United States, which resulted in even more gender imbalance.
Because Chinese lived in these nearly all-male configurations that didn’t match with American understandings of what community should look like, it was easy to further stigmatize and exclude them, both socially and legally. See, for example, the 1882 passage of the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which prevented Chinese from entering the U.S. based on claims that as a people, the Chinese were immoral, unhealthy, and posed distinct threats to the American way of life and labor force (rhetoric that may sound familiar to anyone following contemporary immigration debates).
That was the environment of systemic racism in which Wong was operating in the early ‘20s, when her turn in the Technicolor Turn of the Sea was such a novelty that all of Hollywood saw it — including Douglas Fairbanks, then-ruling King of Hollywood, like Tom Cruise meets Brad Pitt only with a swashbuckling mustache. Fairbanks needed a dastardly “Mongol slave” for his production of The Thief of Baghdad, and immediately wanted Wong for the part.
What do these two roles have in common? In one, Wong plays a Chinese “Lotus Flower” who falls for a white man who loves her but can’t possibly be with her; in the other she plays “the scheming handmaiden” who tries to prevent the love between the handsome, swashbuckling lead and his princess (the daughter of a caliph who is unaccountably white). So: a victim who can’t have love, or evil temptress who prevents a white woman from having love — these are the two roles that Wong would play again and again, with slight variations for ethnic specificity, time period, and plot, over the next two decades. A victim or a villain, with very little, in most cases, in terms of character development, ethnic specificity, or anything else to suggest that the depth, charisma, or worth of white counterparts.
Wong’s roles may have been shit, but the fan magazines loved her, unlike black actors, who were either relegated to even more demeaning bit parts and/or ghettoized in black films shown only in black theaters for black audiences. For various complicated reasons that have a lot to do with American racial history and the way that Orientalism actually weirdly celebrates the people and civilizations it fetishizes, it was OK for the fan mags to profile her, run pictures of her, and generally acquaint American audiences with her — but not put her on the cover.
In these profiles, you can see the press continuing, with extreme awkwardness, to reconcile the idea of a star who is at once American and Chinese:
To prove that she was Chinese:
From Crown to Sole, Anna May Wong is Chinese. Her black hair is of the texture that adorns the heads of the maidens who live beside the Yang-tse Kiang. Her deep brown eyes, while the slant is not pronounced, are typically Oriental.
But oh, wait, she’s totally American:
Improbable as this sounds, it is absolutely true. Anna May Wong, among Americans, is so thoroughly one of us that her Oriental background drops completely away.
No, seriously, guys, she’s Chinese:
She is as Chinese as kumquats and the lotus. ... She is of centuries ago and yet of today. ... Animation scarcely ever ruffles the tranquility of her round face.
NO, SERIOUSLY, SHE’S AMERICAN:
Anna May Wong has never even been to China, and you might just as well know it right now. Moreover, she has seen NY’s Chinatown only from a taxi-cab, and she doesn’t wear a mandarin coat … her English is faultless. Her conversation consists of scintillating chatter that any flapper might envy. Her sense of humor is thoroughly American. She didn’t eat rice when she and I lunched together, and she distinctly impressed it upon the waiter to bring her coffee, not tea.
NEVER MIND, HERE’S A POEM, SHE’S TOTALLY CHINESE:
Motion Picture Magazine / Via lantern.mediahist.org
You can see how Wong would grow weary, both of this treatment in her publicity and the relative dearth of roles, especially complex ones, available to her. She was also understandably pissed that when an Asian role did come along, directors found an actor of basically any other ethnicity — Latino, Eastern European, Irish — to cast as the Asian character.
In 1928, when an opportunity came along to go to Europe, she jumped at it. There she could make films that might exoticize her slightly less. She’d be able to do things like hang out with her white co-stars. She'd maybe even be able to have a romance, which, to that point, had been wholly unavailable to her, at least publicly.
Making her home in Berlin, she not only got to star in all of her own films, but was celebrated as a great beauty. She hung out with Leni Riefenstahl; she palled around with Marlene Dietrich; she sparked a few vague sapphic whispers. She appeared in five British films, and while she didn’t get to kiss the white co-star, she did get a chance to shine, especially in Piccadilly (1929), her last silent film and widely believed to be her best performance.
Across Europe, Wong inspired very explicit adulation: Composer Constant Lambert wrote Eight Poems of Li Po and dedicated it to her; Eric Maschwitz wrote “These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)” to commemorate the end of a rumored romance. “They were all so wonderful to me,” Wong said upon her return to America. “You are admired abroad for your accomplishments and loved for yourself. That made me an individual, instead of a symbol of my race.” The extent to which Wong’s European films refused to make her a “symbol of her race” is questionable, but it’s certainly true that Wong, like Josephine Baker, Nella Larsen, and Langston Hughes, was celebrated in a way she had never experienced in America.
According to an American gossip columnist visiting Europe during Wong’s tenure, she was “acclaimed by nobility,” “the toast of the continent,” with “attendant stories of princes and even kings being madly in love with her.” This veneration was, at least in part, self-congratulatory: cultured Europeans’ way of showing just how much more sophisticated they were than those silly, racist Americans, even as they reproduced much of the same fetishizing rhetoric and narratives, just while letting the stars sit with them at dinner and waltzing cheek to cheek afterward.
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