A new biography revisits the pathbreaking Golden Age Hollywood actress’s life and legacy.
to America in the eighteen-fifties. Both of her parents were born in the United States, but they were not immune to the antagonism such laws codified. Families like the Wongs, who ran a laundry shop, were often targets of racial animus in Los Angeles. Wong’s classmates taunted her with chants of “Chink, Chink, Chinaman” while tugging at her hair; some would stick pins in her, as if she were a doll.
Undeterred, Wong rechristened herself Anna May Wong, making her name more palatable to her audiences. This was a routine gesture of Americanization that many of the stars of that era underwent. But it marked Wong’s realization that, to make it in the industry, she would have to walk a tightrope between the foreign and the familiar, packaging herself for white American audiences without compromising the mystique that her racial identity carried for moviegoers.
Wong shed her flapper costume and assumed a new air of European sophistication. She learned German and French. Elocution lessons expunged all trace of her American accent. Her début in the talkies came with Eichberg, who directed three versions of the same film, known as “The Flame of Love” in the United States, in English, French, and German, all of them starring Wong as a dancer in tsarist Russia.
It’s a great sound bite, revealing Wong’s psychology and the trap that she found herself in. Huang likes it, too. A version of that choice quote appears again eight chapters later, at a banquet with Chinese officials, to less potent effect. Here, as elsewhere, Huang seems so concerned with meticulously building the world around Wong that his picture of Wong herself starts to dim.
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