The Chinese-American Actress

"Some say Anna May Wong was the most photographed Chinese woman of the 20th century."

This is the fourth entry of Know-It-All, a zine about obsession and fandom! Here, Katie Gee Salisbury writes about Anna May Wong’s unique self-presentation. This zine is best read in print. To order a copy, see here.

I first set eyes on Anna May Wong, the Chinese American silent movie star, when I was nineteen. During a college internship at a museum, I spotted a photo of her in the backseat of a convertible at a Chinatown parade, wearing a silk cape over a tailored cheongsam, her hair perfectly curled. It wasn’t the most dazzling photo—Wong wasn’t even looking at the camera—but something about her immediately enchanted me. Who was she? I spent the next twenty years probing Wong’s life and career. My biography of Wong, Not Your China Doll, was published earlier this year. In my research, I spent hundreds of hours watching her existing filmography and sifting through photos. I find new portraits of her all the time.

A

By the spring of 1928, Anna May Wong was fed up with Hollywood’s racism. She had made a name for herself and received top billing, her fan mail exceeded 500 letters a week, and yet studios still constrained her to caricaturish bit parts, often killing her off in the end or sometimes the very beginning. In protest, she accepted an offer from the German film studio UFA to star in a feature that would be titled Song, in homage to her Chinese name. The film made her an overnight sensation in Berlin, and quickly led to a string of successful European films. Artists and photographers across the Continent, infatuated with her exotic look and impressed by her modern style, clamored to add Wong to their portfolio. Unlike the studio publicity stills she was used to sitting for, these renderings presented Wong in a more dynamic and expressive light. This portrait, made by German photographer Steffi Brandl at her Berlin atelier in 1930, is a stunning example.

B

Wong was shrewd at the art of self-presentation. From her first role as an extra in The Red Lantern at age fourteen, she understood that being Chinese was what made her unique in Hollywood—even if that same quality also prevented her from playing leading lady roles opposite white male actors. Once she outgrew her rebellious flapper phase, she came around to the idea that accentuating her Chinese-ness was a way to stand out. “I love American clothes,” she told Picture Play in 1927, “but I realize that I look better if my gowns have a suggestion of China about them. And it’s good business, too!” Here she wears her father’s wedding coat, a velvety jacket with contrasting frog knots down the front. It was one of her favorite pieces, she confessed to philosopher Walter Benjamin at a party, and a staple of her wardrobe during her time in Europe.

C

Wong’s delicate hands and the way she posed them became an enduring trademark of her “Oriental” allure. As a Chinese American who grew up on the outskirts of L.A.’s Chinatown, Wong was somewhat divorced from the culture of her forefathers. She yearned to understand what it meant to be Chinese. Japanese actor Kamiyama Sojin, a friend and frequent collaborator of Wong’s, recalled seeing her carry around a copy of Confucius’s Analects on set. In interviews she sometimes referenced Laozi. Thus, each portrait she posed for became a chance to express a more Chinese version of herself. Her gestures, so effortlessly and gracefully held, read as “exotic” to viewers—but in truth, her pose is merely a simulacrum, an attempt at appearing Chinese.

D

Wong’s meteoric rise had begun six years earlier, with her unlikely breakout role as the “Mongol slave” in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Around that time, photos of the 18-year-old actress modeling furs and posing with cars began popping up in newspapers and fan magazines. Reporters who encountered the teenage Wong soon realized that she was not the delicate China doll they had assumed, but rather a thoroughly modern flapper who could dance the Charleston with the best of them. Her blunt-cut bangs, part of her flapper aesthetic, became a signature feature of her look. Only a smattering of pictures remain from the several years she went bangless in the early 1930s.

E

Despite being a flapper par excellence, Wong only bobbed her hair once. As she told one reporter, her father had “tears in his eyes when he looked at my shorn locks!” Ever after she let her hair grow long and styled it neatly into a chignon at the nape of her neck, sometimes with a fresh cut flower pinned between strands. This allowed her to create the illusion of a bob without fully committing to short hair.

F

Some say Anna May Wong was the most photographed Chinese woman of the 20th century. Having looked at hundreds of photos of her, I can say with some confidence that this portrait is an unusual one. The image evokes a different side to Wong than the fashion spreads of her dressed in sleek gowns or the campy publicity photos she’d later take for her crime thrillers at Paramount. The typical elements of her persona—the bangs, her hands, the Chinese jacket—are all there, yes, but she is neither presented as the saccharine Chinese maiden nor the unattainable celebrity. Wong’s glamour is understated. At this angle, we see her jaw line and the indentation above her lips in stark relief, instead of the soft, rounded face she was known for. A masculine energy radiates from the bulk of her father’s coat. Though she is dressed simply, what you might call plain for an actress, there is a sense that here is someone powerful, someone to be reckoned with. We can’t look away.

Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong. Her Substack is Half-Caste Woman.