LISTEN · EPISODE 4
Anna May Wong: A Thousand Deaths
This episode discusses racism, including the racist bullying of children, anti-Chinese immigration laws, and a description of foot-binding.
"When I die, my epitaph should be: I died a thousand deaths. That was the story of my film career." Anna May Wong was Hollywood's first Chinese American movie star, and on screen she almost never made it to the end.
This episode of Witches, Bitches, and Sluts asks how a third-generation Californian became the face of Hollywood's most lasting stereotypes of Asian women, and why the label outlived her.
An American childhood
Wong was born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles in 1905. Her family had been in the U.S. since the gold rush, and her father ran a laundry. She was bullied at school for being Chinese American, and under the Chinese Exclusion Act she needed a Certificate of Identity just to travel abroad and come home to her own country. When the film industry moved to Hollywood, she skipped school to watch the shoots, and crews nicknamed her the "Curious Chinese Child."
Two boxes
Her breakout, The Toll of the Sea (1922), cast her as the devoted Asian woman destroyed by love for a white man: the Lotus Blossom. Two years later, The Thief of Bagdad made her the scheming slave girl: an early Dragon Lady. Rules against on-screen interracial romance meant she almost never got a happy ending. Sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen has said both stereotypes were "pretty much started by Anna May Wong."
What the label cost her
She left for Europe, where she gave what many consider her best performance, in Piccadilly. Back in Hollywood, she got top billing in Daughter of the Dragon and half the pay of the white actor playing her father in yellowface. MGM gave the lead in The Good Earth to a white actress, who won an Oscar for it, and offered Wong the villain. She refused. When she visited China for the first time, critics there called her too American.
Why it stuck
Her most visible years were her most stereotyped ones. The films that broke the pattern, like Daughter of Shanghai and King of Chinatown, came later and reached smaller audiences. And the one role that could have replaced the image went to someone else.
The last role
In 1961, Wong was cast in Flower Drum Song, the first major Hollywood film with a majority Asian American cast. She died of a heart attack before filming began. Her part was the one role in the film that went to a non-Asian actress.
Today she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and her face on a U.S. quarter. As she put it early in her career: "I represent one considerable spot of yellow that's come to stay on the silver of the screen."
Sources behind the episode
Read or download the Episode 4 source list (PDF).