Anna May Wong and the mystery of Hollywood’s first Chinese-American star: ‘They wanted to tear her apart!’

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Anna May Wong was Hollywood’s first Chinese-American star, a gifted actor who refused to permit racism and sexism to stymie her profession. She was one of the silent period’s hottest celebrities, however was usually forged in demeaning roles: girls who had been minxy and unique, or doomed, sly and treacherous. Wong was attractive, willowy and insouciant (in phrases of physique sort and perspective, Wong’s modern-day equal could be Zendaya). But Hollywood’s studio heads had been “blinded by their own prejudice”, says Katie Gee Salisbury, the creator of a brand new autobiography of the star. The e book particulars how Wong set off for Berlin, and later London, in search of extra nuanced roles.

The gamble paid off. The European movies Wong made in the late Twenties – Song, Pavement Butterfly and Piccadilly – are politically provocative and fantastically lit, all of them place her centre stage. In close-up pictures, her regularly anguished eyes resemble melting scoops of ice cream. Hollywood, by now making talkies, bought the message. Upon her return to the US, she was supplied (if solely grudgingly) higher elements. In the 1932 basic Shanghai Express, Wong is a sardonic and fearless intercourse employee who enjoys the firm of a libidinous gal pal, performed by Marlene Dietrich. The pair’s chemistry is the stuff of legend.

But a supposed affair between them, Salisbury says, is only one of the narratives surrounding Wong that she wanted her biography – titled Not Your China Doll – to problem. Video-calling from her residence in Brooklyn, New York, Salisbury tells me that the many biographies of the star already in existence fail to seize the actual Wong. For starters, they had been all written by males, and all of them push a concept “that, to me, sounds more like male fantasy than the truth”, Salisbury says.

It provides her no pleasure to put the document, ahem, straight when it comes to Wong’s sexuality. “I think it’s amazing how she’s been embraced by the queer community and I hate to be the one who says, ‘Er, I don’t think that she was!’,” she laughs. “But there just isn’t anything to corroborate it.”

Which is why Salisbury “disagrees” with Graham Russell Hodges and Yunte Huang, the authors of two earlier Wong biographies. “They bring up rumours about Wong and Marlene Dietrich having an affair,” she says. “They ask ‘Did Anna May Wong have affairs with other women?’ As a woman, I’m a bit suspicious of people projecting these ideas of affairs, based on one photo of Wong, Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. Based on that photo everyone decides, ‘Ooh, maybe they’re all sleeping together!’”

Salisbury describes Hodges’ 2004 e book (Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend) as “very dry” and factors out that Hodges is “Caucasian American – he didn’t grow up in Asian culture, so he’s looking at it as an outsider”. She provides that whereas Huang – whose e book, Daughter of the Dragon, was printed 9 months in the past – “is Chinese, he’s also an immigrant to this country, to the US. His understanding of what it’s like to be Asian American, to have been here for several generations, is a little bit different. He doesn’t have that perspective.”

Salisbury was born in California and raised by a Chinese-American mom, which she says supplies her with specific perception into Chinese-American identification and parentage. “I’m coming to this,” she declares, proudly, “as an insider.” This is mirrored in her e book, which regularly hones in on Wong’s twin identification. Anna May Wong was born Wong Liu Tsong in 1905, renaming herself “Anna” at the age of 11. Both of the star’s dad and mom had been born in California, and anticipated their daughter to develop up to develop into a dutiful Chinese spouse and mom. She was decided to carve out her personal future, although. “Don’t think that I stray from my heritage lightly,” Wong as soon as wrote. “It’s something I think about a lot. Am I taking the right path?” This uncertainty fascinates Salisbury. “She knows this is something she has to do – whether it’s something her parents want or not.”

Wong notably scandalised her household in 1930, by not attending her mom’s funeral and selecting to proceed work in a Broadway play – if she had returned residence, she’d have been changed in the present. Touchingly, her father stored her mom’s physique in a vault till Wong was ready to fly to Los Angeles. Later, in 1936, the pair put apart their variations and went on a tour of Chang’an, his ancestral village in China. They had been adopted by a documentary movie crew, employed by the usually media-savvy Wong.

As Salisbury discusses this go to she abruptly stops. Visibly upset, she places her hand over her coronary heart. “You see them walking arm in arm through the countryside and he was so happy,” she says. “It’s hard. Wong’s conflicts with her father just remind me so much of my own relationship with my Chinese-American mother. Talking about Asian parents and expectations makes me get a little emotional… I feel I know very personally some of the things that Anna May felt. It’s hard to explain to people how you can be in conflict with your parent but still love them.” Salisbury’s eyes properly up. “It is very emotional because you know that they want the best for you, but your definitions of what the best is are very different.”

Salisbury factors out that, throughout the similar journey to China, Wong was additionally beneath fierce strain from the Chinese press. In one of the e book’s most gripping chapters, Wong arrives on board the SS President Grant, solely to have a mysterious, discombobulating encounter with a fellow passenger. As a consequence, Wong fumbled all the subsequent glad-handing, alienating the crowd of press and well-wishers to such an extent that there was a mini-riot (somebody cried, “Down with Wong Liu Tsong – the stooge that disgraces China”). Wong was overwhelmed. All involved bought to see the usually poised Hollywood film star lined in “tears and snot”.

“It gives you a sense of the impossible expectations that were put upon her,” says Salisbury. “People felt that she represented all of China. She was meant to humble herself, to give credit to her heritage. The press, during this visit, were so mean. They said things like, ‘Whether Anna May Wong can be counted as Chinese is still a question.’ They wanted to tear her apart!”

Just to be clear, America was all the time a hostile surroundings for Wong. Even after her return from Europe, she continued to be marginalised by Hollywood, getting handed over for elements that went to white actors in yellowface. Screen kisses with white co-stars had been additionally forbidden. Off display screen, she was reminded at each flip about who she might and couldn’t marry. “Miscegenation, inter-racial marriage,” notes Salisbury, “was only made legal, in California, in 1948”. It might be carried out, however Wong’s fame made that choice tough. “For Wong to have married someone of another race would have caused a publicity frenzy.”

Wong was conscious of all these cultural tensions and usually wove them into her work. As half of a cabaret act that she carried out all through Europe in 1933, Wong sang the tune “Half Caste Woman” by Noel Coward. “That song” says Salisbury, “is about a woman who’s half-Asian, half-white, who lives in a poor Asian city and the only thing she’s good for is to be a prostitute for the foreign men who come in. I think that Wong viewed herself in that way; she was both things and not fully accepted in either arena.”

In 1940, Wong’s youthful sister Mary, who was additionally an actress, died by suicide. For varied causes, together with worries about work and cash, Wong was quickly ingesting closely and, in 1953, was identified with cirrhosis. Researching this half of the e book, says Salisbury, was “painful”. For some time, she even hoped to discover proof that Wong wasn’t an alcoholic – “that the doctors got it wrong”. But no. “The smoking gun was a letter talking about a disastrous get-together with friends in New York,” Salisbury says. “It was in 1955, when she was about 50. She arrived so drunk they had to carry her out of the restaurant.” Wong died from a coronary heart assault in 1961 at the age of 56.

Still, Salisbury doesn’t need to dwell on the negatives of Wong’s life. She’d slightly concentrate on the star’s achievements. In the late Thirties, Wong insisted on being the lead in a quantity of pulpy crime thrillers, amongst them Daughter of Shanghai, the place she and Korean-American actor, Philip Ahn (her homosexual, childhood buddy), are the heroes. “Two Asian-American leads!” marvels Salisbury. “She really flipped the script. I don’t know if anyone at the time realised how revolutionary it was.” Salisbury additionally hopes readers will fall in love with Wong’s erudition (she wrote sensible essays), her curiosity in present affairs (she was associates with the performer turned political activist Paul Robeson), in addition to her wit. Wong as soon as signed a publicity shot, “Orientally yours.”

In a deliberate biopic, Wong might be performed by Gemma Chan, however Salisbury says she isn’t certain the star’s life could be precisely represented in a standard movie. “I don’t know how they’ll do it,” she says. “Gemma Chan is a little bit older. Anna May Wong started as a teenager, so it doesn’t seem realistic for Gemma to play those periods of her life… I don’t know if they’ll have a different actress for the early years.” She’s delighted that David Henry Hwang, who wrote the celebrated play M. Butterfly, is engaged on the script. “He’s like the foremost Asian-American playwright – I couldn’t think of a better person to write it.” That stated, she doesn’t envy his job. “It’ll be very difficult to condense her life into a two- or three-hour film. I should know. I had trouble doing it in a book!”

Salisbury hasn’t bought her personal future mapped out (“maybe I’d like to write about mixed race identity in the US”). In case you’re questioning, Salisbury’s father is Irish-American, which creates its personal points. She doesn’t, it seems, see herself as a real insider and says she’s “bracing” herself for awkward questions when she does face-to-face press. “I’m just waiting for someone to ask me, ‘Why did you decide to write this book if you’re not Chinese?’”

Salisbury’s e book is a few girl who was endlessly being advised she was too Chinese, or not Chinese sufficient. But regardless of all the hardships she confronted, Wong all the time discovered a approach to embrace her standing as an in-betweener. After you’ve learn Not Your China Doll, watch her movies. Wong Liu Tsong was her personal greatest creation and – even in her silent films – in some way nabs the final phrase.

‘Not Your China Doll’ by Katie Gee Salisbury is launched by Penguin Putnam Inc