Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang

Liveright, 400 pp.

By Ann Fabian

A couple of books about the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong appeared two decades ago—perhaps to honor what would have been the film star’s hundredth birthday in 2005. There was a biography by historian Graham Russell Gao Hodges and a critical look at the legal and social barriers that shaped Wong’s career by communications scholar Anthony B. Chan.

Two more books on Wong appeared this summer: The Brightest Star, a novel by Gail Tsukiyama, and Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang, the final installment in Huang’s eye-opening trilogy on the many ways Asia and Asian Americans have shaped American culture—art, literature and Hollywood movies.

Tsukiyama’s novel draws heavily on Wong’s warm correspondence with her close friends Carl Van Vechten—the American writer, photographer and patron of the Harlem Renaissance— and his wife, Russian-born American actress Fania Marinoff. Even with this trove of letters, it is challenge sometimes to find the inner life beneath the beautifully wrought surfaces that Wong crafted as she made her way through the tumultuous racial currents of the 20th century.

Letters, press interviews, scraps of an autobiography, photographs, costumes, hair styles, hand gestures and film roles were all occasions for Wong’s creativity. And these creative occasions are subjects that land right in Huang’s wheel house. Huang teaches American literature at UC Santa Barbara and has written books on Chinese poetry, the literature of the Pacific and, most memorably, on the detective Charlie Chan—the whip-wielding Honolulu cop and his many reincarnations in fiction and film—and on Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese twins who made their way from freak show celebrities to slaveholding gentry.

Each of these “cultural icons,” Huang writes, staged a “rendezvous with American history.” And neither the icons nor American history left those rendezvous unchanged. In Daughter of the Dragon, Huang follows Anna May Wong’s life, tracing the cultural and political contradictions that dogged her career. She was a global celebrity, but for some, she was too American. For others, too Chinese or not Chinese enough.

Laws against Chinese immigration and taboos on romances between races, shaped her life and limited the roles she could play. Those parts, whether she played a victim or a villain, a maid or a prostitute, riled some critics in China, leaving her to perform “a delicate dance between stereotype and imagination, convention and subversion, [that] has made Anna May both revered and reviled in Asian American history. Between Madame Butterfly and the dragon lady, there lies the alluring art through which Anna May continues to haunt us all,” as Huang puts it.

Daughter of the Dragon gives us a sense of how difficult it was for Wong to operate amid the legal, cultural, political and social constraints that restricted the roles she could play in the movies and the choices she could make in her life. Yet Huang also lets us watch Anna May transcend those limits, sending witty letters to friends, welcoming reporters, posing for photographers and campaigning for war relief in China, all the while creating the character that still demands our attention.

Anna May Wong was born Los Angeles in 1905, the second of her family’s eight children. Her California-born father ran a laundromat, where the children helped out. Anna recalled the bullying boys and the racist taunts that echoed behind her as she delivered her bundles of clean clothes. Anti-Chinese racism followed Anna and her older sister Lulu to the local public school. The family found it wiser, finally, to move the girls to the Presbyterian Mission School in Chinatown.

But Anna May’s real education was in Chinatown’s cheap movie houses, where she spent the penny tips she’d pocketed from her laundry deliveries. “At a very young age, I went movie crazy,” she wrote. At home, she staged plays with her dolls and mugged for her bedroom mirror, imitating the actresses she saw on the screen. She skipped school and began to hang around the sets of movies being shot in the Chinatown neighborhoods that had become popular with filmmakers. A touch of the exotic, close to home.

These pictures with a Chinese flair called for extras, and in 1919, fifteen-year-old Anna May landed a small part in The Red Lantern. She later confessed she couldn’t find herself in the crowd, but that movie opened the door to the dozens of roles that followed and led to affairs with older white directors.

She landed a starring role in Toll of the Sea, a melodrama of doomed love. Douglass Fairbanks, Jr., cast her as a scantily-clad Mongol slave girl in The Thief of Bagdad. Fan magazines played up her story, fascinated by this flapper with an Asian face. But taboos around interracial romance stalled her career. When directors cast white actors in “yellow face” in lead roles, they paired them with white actresses and good parts for “a pretty Chinese girl” vanished.

With her career Hollywood at a standstill and imagining more open racial attitudes in Europe, Anna May moved to Berlin with her sister Lulu. The press followed her. It was 1928; she was 23 and very beautiful. She moved through Weimar Berlin, learned German, met her Shanghai Express co-star Marlene Dietrich and charmed philosopher Walter Benjamin.

In England, she was cast in a starring role in Piccadilly, the last of her silent films and the one many critics consider her best. She plays a restaurant dishwasher turned dancer. If you wonder why contemporaries found her so remarkable, just skip to a scene about an hour into the movie and watch Anna May’s radiant face as she reads the reviews of her first performance.

She sailed for home in 1930. Anna May “left America a flapper in chic clothing,” Huang writes, but “returned as a sophisticated woman attired in elegant European fashions and affecting an upper-class British accent and highborn manners.” Back in Hollywood, she appeared in several B-melodramas and, famously, opposite Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, a part that might have won her an Oscar for best supporting actress, had such an award been given in 1933.

Disappointed when she failed to land the lead role in the yellow-face version of Pearl Buck’s best-selling The Good Earth, she sailed for China. “I am going to a strange country, and yet, in a way I am going home,” she told reporters. As war closed in on Asia, she was wined and dined in Shanghai, Peking, and in the village of Chang-on where her father now lived.

Back in the United States, she threw herself into war work. In the 1950s, she picked up television roles, but Hollywood’s cruelty to older women and the death by suicide of a younger sister bit into her spirits, and a long-history of drink finally took its toll. It was too late for Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking or the consolation of a Santa Monica pastor. Sick with Laennec’s cirrhosis, Anna May died in 1961. She was just 56.

Six decades later we are still trying to understand what Anna May Wong left us—both a face to haunt the scenes of murderous anti-Asian violence on a subway platform in New York, at a dance club in Monterey Park or at massage parlors in Atlanta and an incandescent smile to bless the Oscars given in 2021 and 2023 to Asian women.

Ann Fabian has taught American Studies and American History at Yale, Rutgers, and, briefly, at the Komaba Campus of the University of Tokyo.