Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Katie Gee Salisbury. Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong. (New York: Dutton, 2024). 460pp.
31st Edition.
As Katie Lee Salisbury demonstrates in Not Your China Doll: Anna May Wong, her biographical subject achieved many firsts in a life Salisbury calls “shimmering,” among them being the first Asian American movie star. Despite her considerable popularity, though, Wong never achieved full A-list status. She came into prominence in an era when Hollywood’s racist attitudes kept her from the kinds of roles that went instead to white performers made up to resemble Asians, even when real Asians played background roles.
Wong’s story is essentially that of all Asian actors working in Western movies and theater of her period, when even heart-stopping looks and histrionic talent weren’t enough to convince producers to cast Asians in Asian roles. Instead, they chose non-Asian stars like Renée Adorée, Myrna Loy, Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, Luise Rainer, Paul Muni, Helen Hayes, and Katharine Hepburn! As one report had it, “Anna May Wong says a Chinese actor hasn’t a Chinaman’s chance in Hollywood.” (For an important contemporary play that looks at related issues in more recent terms, see the revival of Henry David Hwang’s Yellow Face now on Broadway.)
Just as serious for an aspiring Asian actor was how often even the best Asian leading roles were little more than stereotypes. Wong found herself playing one variation of the same “Oriental” femme fatale over and over, her moon-shaped face framed by shining, perfectly cut, midnight black bangs, nearly always with her character dying at the end. Often, as in Madame Butterfly, this was by the woman’s own hand when a romance between an Asian woman and a white man was prevented from a happy ending because of social or legal restrictions against miscegenation. She also played other people of color, such as an Indian nautch dancer, a Native American, and an Eskimo. Mainly, though, she was so often typecast as seductive, shady Chinese women that important Chinese leaders, rather than take pride in her accomplishments, criticized her for the negative impression her characters made.
In recounting the details of Wong’s eventful life, author Salisbury, herself of European and fifth-generation Chinese ancestry, provides reams of fascinatingly readable background history on the issue. I was surprised to learn, however, that before she wrote it there were perhaps six other Anna May Wong biographies, a couple of them published only recently.
I’m unable, of course, to compare the bestselling Not Your China Doll to its predecessors—most of which Salisbury, a thorough researcher writing her first book, dutifully documents—but I can state unequivocally that she does a first-rate job of describing the details of Wong’s private and public life. At the same time, she evokes, both carefully and colorfully, the societal circumstances surrounding the rise of this beautiful Chinese American girl of limited formal education and social position to a place of international recognition and respect in the silents of the 1920s and the talkies of the 1930s and beyond. Wong, happily, for whom English was her first language, had a good speaking voice; eventually, her frequent stays in London refined her American accent.
Wong’s personal and professional peaks and valleys of the 20s and 30s are covered in detail, as are those of the 1940s, when her career came close to running on empty before she found the comeback trail in the 1950s, mainly via TV. What might have been the highlight of these rebound years, however, came to a sad conclusion when, cast in the quality role of Mrs. Liang in the lavish movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song (1961), with—in a Hollywood breakthrough—Asians playing all the Asian roles, she died of a heart attack in her sleep, at 56, before filming began. (Black actress Juanita Hall replaced her!)
Wong, born in Los Angeles, was the daughter of a family that owned a successful Chinese laundry; her conservative parents, though attached to their traditional roots and ways, were both American-born as well, but Anna May (her Chinese name was Wong Liu Tsong) was a decidedly assimilated Chinese American who rejected the patriarchal Chinese path that would have had her marry a Chinese man and, like her hard-working mother, become socially secondary to her husband. (Her own father had two wives, one—with a son—in China, for whose support he sent money.) She was an imperfect, American-accented speaker of Cantonese, but later learned Mandarin. She also learned German when she began making movies in Berlin in the early 1930s, where—over a two-and-a-half-year expat sojourn—she was offered better roles than were available in Hollywood.
It took years before her old-fashioned parents accepted her career choice, even after she gained fame. She herself struggled with the conflict between her Chinese heritage and her overt Americanization, one of Salisbury’s running themes. Wong had several serious lovers, of course, all of them white, including the already married (to Hermione Gingold) British entertainer and songwriter Eric Maschwitz (“These Foolish Things”), but she never married, partly because of laws against racially mixed marriages. As a budding star, she became a Jazz Age baby, a flashy flapper invited to all the best soirées, where she was appreciated as a free-spending, fashionably dressed, witty conversationalist.
Regardless of her insufficient education, she read serious books voraciously and could hold her own with intellectuals like her friends, writer Carl Van Vechten and his Russian-born actress wife, Fania Marinoff. A business venture in which she planned to produce Chinese-themed movies tanked when her financier proved to be a con man. In 1936, she made her first trip to China, an extended one during which she shot enough film of her experiences for what later became a documentary. Unfortunately, like too many others in her circles, she was a heavy drinker, which would haunt her later in life when her liver became diseased.
A lover of movies since childhood, she left high school in her teens to take extra and bit parts in Hollywood films; she continued working in her parents’ laundry, even after gaining some recognition. Her first impact on moviegoers’ eyes was as a scantily clad Mongolian slave girl in Douglas Fairbanks’s spectacular, still watchable, 1924 epic, The Thief of Bagdad, when she was 19. A willowy 5’ 6”, she was also in demand as a model.
Salisbury is selective in her discussion of Wong’s films (many of them B-movies) and her roles, but those she describes, like Shanghai Express (1932), which gave her one of her best parts, and in which she starred opposite (and befriended) Marlene Dietrich, are captivating.
Salisbury also spends much space contextualizing the world of Anna May Wong with substantial background on the remarkable evolution of Hollywood and Los Angeles; the early movie business; the history of Chinese immigration to America; anti-Asian racism; the Wong family history; Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese characters; Wong’s relationships with white Hollywood stars, but also with leading Asian artists with whom she was involved (like cameraman James Wong Howe and actors Sessue Hayakawa, Kamiyama Sōjin, and Philip Ahn); and, among many other provocative subjects, yellow face casting.
Anna May Wong also built a modest stage career, acting on the West End, Broadway, in Vienna, and elsewhere. She toured in vaudeville, had a cabaret act in London, and not only was active performing for the USO on American bases during World War II, but was a tireless fundraiser for the war effort. Her Broadway show, British playwright Edgar Wallace’s satirical melodrama, On the Spot (1930), was a minor hit about Chicago gangsters, one of them the lover of Wong’s floozie character, Minn Lee. It was a role that mirrored Wong’s typical celluloid work.
Most egregious of Wong’s filmic letdowns was the casting of The Good Earth, based on Pearl S. Buck’s bestselling novel about a peasant family in rural China. Its major role, the self-sacrificing farmer’s wife, Olan, who endures her selfish husband’s disregard, was tailor-made for Wong. It went instead to the widely lauded German actress Luise Rainer, who won an Oscar for it, even without resorting to standard makeup methods.
Salisbury spends many pages on the making of this once-acclaimed film, even though Wong was not in it. Aside from its casting controversy, where ethnically authentic Chinese played supporting roles opposite European actors playing Chinese, much of this might be considered irrelevant to Wong’s biography. It is, however, among the most intriguing parts of an already absorbing book, largely because it’s so enlightening about the entire nexus of Asian actors in the white-dominated film world of the mid-1930s.
As Salisbury makes clear, Anna May Wong opened the door, but it took many decades for Asian actors (not to mention other artistic contributors) to become increasingly present and respected on stage and screen, to the point that yellowface was disgraced and actors of Asian ancestry began to win major stage and screen roles and awards. Even during Wong’s heyday, it should be noted, representation was widely discussed, if implanted only sporadically and inconsistently. The still-simmering battle continues but, without groundbreakers like Anna May Wong, it might have taken even longer to reach this point.
Coming up. Michael Coveney. Maggie Smith: A Biography.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
