ANNA MAY WONG

Dandizette

Sunday Swift on the first Chinese actress to break into Hollywood, and the problems she then faced being accepted on either side of the Pacific Ocean

he 1920s saw an explosion of cinematic

Tdandies. And no wonder: in silent films, one had to project a character and a personality effectively without being able to speak. Dandies like Josephine Baker, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Brooks and Zelda Fitzgerald have remained in the public memory even a hundred years later, because they created such unforgettable personas. But one name is regretfully absent when people consider the glamorous dandizettes of the era: Anna May Wong. The first Chinese-American to make it big in Hollywood, she did it entirely on her own and against all the odds. Wong Liu Tsong was born on 3rd January 1905 in Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents. In her formative years, Hollywood was only just developing as the hub of the entertainment industry. Until then, New York was the place to be. Suddenly surrounded by the glitz and glitter, Wong started touring the film sets and begging for roles when she was just nine years old. Without her parent’s knowledge, she was occasionally successful, too. At 11 years old, she’d already chosen a stage name: Anna May Wong. She skived off school

“Asian women were cast in films in only two roles: the innocent ‘Lotus Blossom’ who loses her white lover to another woman, or the manipulative femme fatale ‘Dragon Lady.’ “Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain?” Wong lamented. “And so crude a villain – murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?”

“Nothing upset her more than being turned down for the film The Good Earth (1937) about a family in China. The reason? She was ‘too Chinese’ to play a Chinese woman! The role went to an Austrian woman, Luise Rainer in ‘yellow-face’, something that is still a problem in Hollywood almost a hundred years later”

frequently to queue up for casting calls in studios, and begged for roles from every director she met. She started as a background character in random films; the directors were charmed by her and, little by little, she grew closer and closer to the camera lens with bigger parts. Casting directors let her slip into the background because they believed she was “too Chinese” ever to be really famous. Her family, especially her father, agreed. But they all underestimated just how ambitious Wong was to carve a path for herself as a modern woman.

Roland Barthes said, “The dandy would conceive his outfit exactly like a modern artist might conceive a composition using available materials.” In the television programme Hollywood, actress Michelle Krusiec played a fictionalised version of Anna May Wong. “She was a very modern actress,” Krusiec said. “Very natural, very fluid – she was not melodramatic.” Rebecca Johnson argues that because Wong “began as a star of the silent screen, the clothes she wore became nothing less than a tool of visual expression.” Trying to avoid a stereotypical fetishisation of Chinese culture, Wong started with a look and a persona not unlike Louise Brooks and Josephine Baker: the playful, frivolous, rebellious, camp flapper.

In 1922, Wong got the lead in her first big film, The Toll of the Seas, a silent drama loosely based on the classic tragedy Madama Butterfly. This was groundbreaking not only for her part, but it was also the very first colour film shot in Hollywood. The New York Times praised her: “She has a difficult role, a role that is botched nine times out of ten, but hers is the tenth performance. Completely

unconscious of the camera, with a fine sense of proportion and remarkable pantomimic accuracy... She should be seen again and often on the screen.”

She had excellent reviews, both on her abilities as an actress as well as her beauty. Time Magazine declared, “Tall, pretty and sinuously graceful, Wong had a smoldering effect on people, especially men; they could be driven to a purple passion trying to describe her beauty.”

Although she found herself famous and working, Wong realised she was being typecast into roles with very negative stereotypes not just for women, but also for Asians. She didn’t want to be a professional Chinese American, she wanted to be a professional actress. The few Asian women who managed to get cast in films at all were only given two opposite roles: the innocent ‘Lotus Blossom’, who loses the white lover to another woman, or the manipulative femme fatale ‘Dragon Lady’.

“Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain?” Wong lamented. “And so crude a villain – murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?”

Like Josephine Baker, Wong was fetishised but not accepted because of her ethnicity, and the solution seemed to be to travel further afield. Like Baker landing in France, Wong found comfort in Germany, where she had intimate relationships with Marlene Dietrich, Cecil Cunningham and Leni Riefenstahl. Europe gave her projects America would never have allowed, such as romantic scenes with Caucasian actors. She taught herself German and French, travelling all over the continent to work. She even starred with Sir Laurence Olivier in The Chalk Circle. One film, Flame of Love, was filmed three different times, in German, French and English – each time a different leading man playing against Wong as the star. She even played a surgeon, something the US censors would never have permitted. She was no longer the Lotus Blossom or the Dragon lady.

Still, critics tended to focus on her ethnicity, and very often attacked her for her AmericanChinese accent. Determined to silence them and transition from silent to talkies, she paid a fortune for elocution lessons, developing a lower voice with a touch of Received Pronunciation. This became a signature for her 1930s screen persona.

She had the name, and now she had the voice. Academic Hanying Wang argues that “Chinese women wearing Western clothes signal a cultural transgression that Western men seem unable or unwilling to tolerate.” Because of this, the flapper

image didn’t work as well for Wong as it did for Louise Brooks. Anyway, Wong’s circles were now more intellectual and cultured; she needed a new aesthetic to match this more mature version of herself. She had a new voice and a new demeanour; one not dissimilar to Dietrich – cool, masculine, haughty and detached.

Madam Wellington Koo introduced Wong to a silk shop, Laou Kai Fook’s. Wong adored his designs, and gave him so much work that she quipped, “Mrs Koo had to find herself another tailor.” These simple Chinese gowns were slightly high on the sides to reveal lace of pleated pantalettes, and inventions of her own combining the old with the new in Chinese fashions. This self-reinvention worked: in 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her the “world’s best dressed woman” and in 1938 Look Magazine named her the “world’s most beautiful Chinese girl.”

Brilliant costumers like Travis Bandon (who designed for Dietrich) also emphasised her Chinese heritage in film costumes. One of the more famous designs was a qipao-style dress in Limehouse Blues (1934) featuring two dragons in gold sequin on either side of the dress, the tail wrapping around the train. This outfit is so iconic it now stands in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Wong’s new, more self-confident dandy persona was complete. Wong was certainly very happy with this new look, explaining that “I was no longer restless.” A contract with Paramount Studios lured Wong away from Europe with the promise of leading roles, but they still didn’t know what to do with her. She had hoped her new identity and success in Europe would give her agency and respect in America, but this was not the case. She spent the rest of the 1930s shuttling back and forth between Europe and the US, being promised that things would change, only to suffer disappointment that they didn’t. In 1959, Wong said, “When I die, my epitaph should be: ‘I died a thousand deaths.’ That was the story of my film career. Most of the time I played in mystery and intrigue stories. They didn’t know what to do with me at the end, so they killed me off.”

One standout film during this period was Shanghai Express (1932), co-starring with Dietrich. The chemistry between them was undeniable and, given Dietrich’s reputation for seducing the world’s most beautiful women, rumours started to swirl about a scandalous affair between them. This hadn’t been a problem in Europe, but America used it against her.

But nothing upset Wong more than being turned down for the film The Good Earth (1937) about a family in China. The reason? She was ‘too Chinese’ to play a Chinese woman. The role went to an Austrian woman, Luise Rainer in yellow-face, something that is still a problem in Hollywood almost a hundred years later.

Wong was devastated, especially since Rainer won an Oscar for the role. If Wong was too Chinese for Hollywood, perhaps she’d find acceptance in China? She started planning a trip with her family to China. Ever the self-promoter, Anna used this as an excuse to turn it into a sort of press junket and made sure a news reel team accompanied her everywhere. The trip was filmed and later broadcast on television in the 50s

It would be an understatement to say that the trip didn’t go as planned. People in China didn’t realise how ground-breaking it was that Wong had made it to stardom. Like Wong herself, they felt the characters for whom she had become famous were too stereotypical and negative. Wong said, “It’s a pretty sad situation to be rejected by the Chinese because I am too American, because I’ve already been rejected, pigeon-holed and fetishised because I am too Chinese.”

Wong was a modern woman held back by the old-fashioned mindset of those around her. Not unlike that beautiful Travis Bandon dress with a dragon on either side of her, Wong was always in the middle of two entities, belonging to neither, a stranger to both. But this very quality is precisely what made Wong’s dandyism so unique: she subscribed to no binary, belonged to no-one but herself.

When actress Lucy Liu received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019, the only other Asian American who had done so before her was Anna May Wong in 1960, a year before her death. In Liu’s speech, she mentioned Wong as an inspiration, saying, “People talk about my mainstream successes as ground-breaking for an Asian, but Asians have been making movies for a long time.” n