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.
Lotte Jacobi photographed her, as did Carl Van Vechten, Dorothy Wilding, George Hurrell, and countless more. When Alfred Eisenstaedt posed her with Marlene Dietrich in Weimar Berlin, however, Wong had to deflect rumors about her relationship with the openly bisexual Dietrich, and again when the two starred in Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 film Shanghai Express.
Now that glamorous, complicated likeness is going head-to-head on the covers of two new books.
This month, U.C. Santa Barbara English professor Yunte Huang publishes his deeply researched biography Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History, the final installment of a trilogy that began with Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, and then Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with … well, you get the picture. Both books were finalists for National Book Critics Circle awards.
She was proclaimed “one of the most well-dressed women in the world.” But nothing managed to change Wong’s casting as the beautiful, othered “Oriental.”
Daughter of the Dragon’s dramatically red-tinged cover, adapted from a publicity shot taken in 1929, the year Wong surfaced, to glowing reviews, in the English film Piccadilly, reverse-mirrors The Brightest Star’s. A biographical fiction by the award-winning novelist Gail Tsukiyama published in June, it gives us Wong showily drenched in the green-red-and-yellow color scheme of vintage chinoiserie artwork and depicted almost full torso, simultaneously distant and seductive.
Her long fingernails, widely copied in her heyday, are a blazing scarlet, foreshadowing Tsukiyama’s often overheated unspooling of an imagined first-person narrative as Wong travels by train from Los Angeles to New York for the publicity tour for Portrait in Black, the noir-ish outing that would be her final film. She died in 1961, aged 56, of alcohol-related causes, the silver flask that Douglas Fairbanks gave her after her turn as a “Mongol slave” with him in 1924’s The Thief of Bagdad never far from her side.
Breathlessly stringing her novel together with fact upon fact, Tsukiyama strips Wong’s fictionalized voice of a convincing authenticity. But the spicy retrospective journey nicely sets the stage for Yunte’s more subdued academic take. History and its injustices are never far from either author’s mind. Speeding cross-country on the transcontinental railroad, Tsukiyama’s Wong squarely faces the irony that Chinese laborers once toiled under inhumane conditions to give 19th-century America its iron pathways between east and west.
Becoming Anna May Wong
Wong was born in 1905, a daughter of first-generation immigrants, in Los Angeles’s harshly contained Chinatown, into what Yunte, himself no stranger to occasionally melodramatic prose, calls “the steam and starch of her father’s laundry.”
Expected to do well in school and in an eventual marriage to a suitable husband from the same cultural background, young Anna May is hounded on the playground with ethnic slurs, escaping into her ambition to become an actress—and famous—as she watches the era’s silent movies in the local theater, her seat invariably, Tsukiyama points out, “a hard wooden chair in the first row of the balcony where the Chinese sat,” and any Asian characters insultingly played by white actors in yellowface.
She landed her first role at 14, as an extra in 1919’s The Red Lantern, and quickly attracted the romantic affections of its star, the Russian-American actress Alla Nazimova (who was also godmother to the future Nancy Reagan). At 15, playing the mistress of a vice lord in the silent clunker Dinty, she began a lengthy affair with the married co-director, Marshall Neilan, who was 15 years her senior and, because he was white, was ultimately pressured by the studio system to end their relationship, reneging on his promise of marriage—a pattern repeated throughout Wong’s life.
With such disappointments mounting, in the early 1920s Wong followed Josephine Baker’s lead and departed for better opportunities in Europe. She made several moving pictures in Germany, where Yunte presents a fulsome panorama of creative Berlin, if overstaying and overplaying incidents such as Wong’s glancing contact with the philosopher Walter Benjamin.
Yunte’s treatment of 1920s London, Wong’s next stop, is equally detailed, as Wong shoots E. A. Dupont’s Piccadilly, her last silent picture and another tale of crime, betrayal, and lethally forbidden love. Taking to the stage in The Circle of Chalk, which opened at the West End’s New Theatre on March 14, 1929, Wong was savaged by criticisms of her speaking voice and diction, and she threw herself into elocution lessons in response. She shuttled between continents until the outbreak of World War II, when a new paradox lay in wait back home: in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Chinese actors and extras were cast in droves to play Japanese parts.
Even such insensitive developments came too late for Wong’s younger sister Mary and her dreams of following in the actress’s footsteps, her suicide neither the first nor last to cloud Wong’s rise. Her fall, out of the limelight and into increasingly smaller roles on television—The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer—turned her into a “Dragon Lady” Norma Desmond in a world that never ceased being narrow-minded and small. Its boundless tracts of fame and fortune went to white stars. Now Daughter of the Dragon and The Brightest Star have come along to give Wong her due.
Celia McGee is a New York–based arts-and-culture reporter. She writes regularly about books for The New York Times and other publications