Her striking heart-shaped face, almond eyes, fashion-changing hairstyle, and sinuous curves confirmed her groundbreaking star power on posters for many of the 60 movies she made during Hollywood’s golden era. Still, when Anna May Wong turned to real-estate investing part-time, the racist covenants of early-20th-century property ownership excluded her business from Beverly Hills and other enclaves that the industry she worked in called home.
Her image, atop gossip columns, in clothes discerningly selected from Parisian haute couture houses and the Chinese cheongsam tradition, got her proclaimed “the world’s best-dressed woman.” But neither those publications, nor the reported pieces she would write to elucidate the Chinese-American experience and the perpetual insults that birthright exposed her to, ever managed to change Wong’s casting as the beautiful, othered “Oriental,” her love life and marriage prospects restricted by anti-miscegenation laws onscreen and off. They didn’t change her scripted destiny, either—as self-sacrificing paramour, noble taxi dancer, or compromised daughter of Fu Manchu who dies in the end.
