Widely considered the first Chinese American Hollywood star, Anna May Wong has only recently begun to get her due after a long period of neglect following her death in 1961. In 2020 Google celebrated her breakthrough role in the 1922 film The Toll of the Sea with a Doodle, and that same year she was featured as a recurring character in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix drama series, Hollywood. In 2022, the US Mint announced her inclusion on quarters – one of the first women to ever receive such an honor – and in 2023 Mattel released a Barbie doll celebrating her. A biopic of the actor is currently in the works.
In the meantime, those curious to know the ins and outs of Wong’s life can enjoy Katie Gee Salisbury’s fast-paced, thoroughly researched biography, Not Your China Doll. Salisbury, who has written and spoken widely on the Chinese-American experience and who grew up not far from Wong’s stomping grounds in southern California, is the ideal author to guide us through the actor’s life. She effectively leverages her personal experience with systemic injustice, as well as her wide-ranging knowledge of Hollywood and cinema, to give Wong the biography that she has long deserved but unfortunately has not yet received.
The decades that Wong was overlooked – not to mention the second-rate roles she was mostly granted in her lifetime – are particularly unjust given the actor’s incredible perseverance and remarkable cinematic presence. At age nine she was nicknamed “Curious Chinese Child” for the way that she persistently lingered around silent movie sets, begging to be a part of the process. At a precocious 11 she had adopted a stage name, declaring herself Anna May Wong, and she went on to earn roles as an extra from the age of 14. Before she had turned 20, Wong was garnering critical attention in supporting roles, becoming known as a flapper, and beginning her relentless climb to stardom.
For the next four decades Wong would keep herself in the spotlight, in part by ably managing the technological transitions from silent movies to talkies to television. “She’s at the forefront of every shift in technology,” Salisbury said during an interview. As with many of Wong’s choices, her embrace of technology was as much a matter of steely pragmatism as anything else. At age 45, for instance, considered old and undesirable by Hollywood standards, she chose to make the jump to TV where she could remain a commodity and get better roles. “A lot of the big name actors didn’t want to do television because it didn’t have the same prestige,” said Salisbury. “But it was people like Anna May who saw it as an opportunity. She became the first Asian American to lead a TV show.”
As with technology, Wong also embraced geography in a way advantageous to her career – she lived and worked for years in Europe as a protest against Hollywood’s discrimination, and she also spent a year touring China, in part to learn more about her roots and in part to lodge a PR offensive against the nationalist government, who made no secret of its scorn for her. These sudden swerves often had amazing consequences: for instance, dismayed at the lesser roles handed to her by the Hollywood studios, Wong went abroad to Europe in 1928 to continue her climb – among other things she rubbed shoulders with an up and coming Marlene Dietrich in the last of Weimar Berlin’s glory days, ending up in an iconic portrait with her and Leni Riefenstahl who had yet to pick up a film camera.
These were canny moves by Wong, reflections of her remarkable determination to lead the life she wanted, in spite of the enormous obstacles continually strewn in her path as a woman of Chinese descent. What makes her story compelling, and particularly resonant today, is the ways in which she managed to become an international starlet despite ongoing battles against racism and sexism.
According to Salisbury, this makes her a role model these many years later, in spite of the darker chapters of her life. “I really hope that people see Anna May in a new light,” said Salisbury. “There are definitely tragic aspects to her career, but there’s so much more joy and inspiration and triumph to be found in her story. I hope that people focus on the things she did and her legacy. That type of determination to just carry on is, I think, really inspiring to people today.” Salisbury added that Wong has become a sort of personal role model, telling me that, “learning about her was a way of learning about myself.”
While Wong experienced incredible amounts of success in her life, her lifestyle and the oppression she faced also brought her to low places. At a relatively young age she was experiencing health impacts rendered upon her body by her lifelong drinking habit, and she died quite young, at 56, of a heart attack. Through her life Wong would experienced intense turmoil, as well as sharp mood swings and bouts of depression.
The picture that emerges through Not Your China Doll is of a woman who propelled herself forward through life via the glamorous world of the movies, and who was amazingly skilled at figuring out how to get the next hit in her lifelong relationship with stardom. “One of the most impressive things about her was her resiliency,” said Salisbury. “It was really important to her to continue to make films. There were so many setbacks and hurdles, but she always found a way around them.” She’s also portrayed as a woman who opened doors for other Asian American actors; Salisbury writes: “Anna May’s final act was to hand on the torch to a new generation of Asian American hopefuls who would carry on the work she’d begun a half century earlier.”
Salisbury showed great resilience herself, as she found some skepticism over her belief that a Wong biography was necessary – in spite of many great meetings with publishers, offers for her book were scarce. “There was doubt – not from the editors but from the publishers – that this person was worthy of a book,” she said. “I felt like I encountered some difficulty there.” We are fortunate that Salisbury remained steadfast in spite of the continued bias against women like Wong – and there is some evidence that, with books like hers, things are changing for the better. “When I first discovered her, nobody knew who she was,” she said. “That remained true until relatively recently. Now more people have heard of her.”
Not Your China Doll by Katie Gee Salisbury (Penguin Putnam Inc, £28.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
