Anna may wong biography book

Anna May Wong? Try Anna May Goddess. What a fantastic and informative read this was, about an actress I really admire. She was a pioneer, and I had no idea just how much unfairness she faced. There was the racist backdrop of course, which was particularly bad against Chinese-Americans from roughly 1870 to 1940, and author Graham Hodges provides excellent context with the laws and attitudes of the times. In Hollywood there were limits on roles she could play, and she was often confined to stereotypes, not allowed to kiss a white actor onscreen, and almost always needing to die at the end, which Hodges shows us again and again as he marches through her filmography. Her ironic and casual comment about it was that her epitaph should read “She died a thousand deaths,” but she internalized her disappointments.

Because Hollywood was producing movies that contained overt or subtle racism against Asians, and often had white actors in ‘yellow-face’ playing them, Wong also faced a lot of scorn and backlash from China, and with overseas Chinese intellectuals. She was also Cantonese, which was a negative with the Nationalist Chinese government, and they were also shocked and critical of her outward displays of sexuality, her flapper lifestyle, and how much skin she showed. Early on, her father also thought she was ‘disgracing the family’, and pushed her to get married. She faced a triple whammy of racism, sexism, and cultural conservatism. Wong rejected Rudyard Kipling’s line, oft-quoted in movies of the day about the dangers of racial mixing and miscegenation, that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” and herself drew the best from both worlds, but was judged harshly in both.

It’s all a bit heartbreaking to read, because she carried herself with such dignity and grace, often incorporated subtle elements of Chinese culture into her films, and always fought for better parts and better movies. She was cheerful, charming, and endearing, both publically and privately. She spent years in Berlin and London, and travelled all over Europe, learning multiple languages and moving in elite circles. She was fashionable, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated, and yet pragmatic and self-effacing. She was a third generation American, and one of the great events of her life was returning to her ancestral home in China in 1936, despite the criticism and in one case, getting rocks thrown at her.

Anna May Wong’s biggest disappointment of her professional life was when the lead roles for the film version of Pearl Buck’s ‘The Good Earth’ were given to white actors, as casting director Albert Lewin argued that “despite their ethnicity, they [Asian-American actors] did not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like.” Good Lord. And so, despite frequently garnering rave reviews from critics in America and Europe, she was never quite able to take the next step into being a superstar.

Hodges does a good job with taking us through her life, in chapters that align well to its phases. It was fascinating to me that she had fallen in love with movies at an early age, playing hooky to go the cinema, hanging around film shoots at age 9, and, showing her persistence early on, getting her first uncredited part at age 14. As her career developed she played many small roles, servants, mistresses, and prostitutes, but she put effort into learning aspects of even the smallest roles before performing, and made the most of them. She broke through in the ‘The Toll of the Sea’ (1922) at age 17, and then later in ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ (1924). She played with major stars and stood up well to them, e.g. with Marlene Dietrich in ‘Shanghai Express’ (1932). I love how Hodges lists her entire body of work in the appendices, and it gave me plenty of films to explore.

He also covers her personal life in respectful ways that are honest, and not sensationalistic. Anna May Wong was sexually free and had affairs with several white Hollywood directors, Tod Browning among them, and the ‘love of her life’, Eric Maschwitz. She also may have had a dalliance with Marlene Dietrich, and as Hodges puts it “if anything, the tryst demonstrates Anna May’s adventurous character and willingness to cross boundaries.” She was athletic; swimming, skiing, riding horses, and playing tennis. She loved carousing, and often returned from nights out at 7 a.m. Unfortunately, she drank too much, and starting at the age of 43 would have liver trouble, leading to a tragically early demise at 56.

Whew. Someone really should make a movie about this woman.

Hodges’ book is meticulously researched and very well annotated, and it’s clear a great deal of effort went into it. The photographs included are wonderful, and it would have been nice to see a lot more, particularly as others are alluded to regularly in the text. He also could have done with better editing; there are places with repetition and a level of detail which could have been excised. With that said, you can see how inspiring his subject was to me, and I really appreciated how much information he gathered about her, and from such a wide range of sources. Not my usual type of read, but maybe it ought to be.