Anna May Wong: An Introduction to Her Films, Her Life

Anna May Wong, 1937/source unknown

This has been a long while in coming. For the past decade or so, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around about how gender-based inequity and systemic exclusion of women from the American workforce changed rapidly in the years prior to the Great Depression. The emphasis in this blog, of course, is cinema; but I think what we see in the early years of film in the United States is a mirror to the overall westward expansion of the late nineteenth century and how the lack of regulation of the business of filmmaking allowed for more voices, and a greater, more equal distribution of power and profit. 

What I hope to accomplish in this series is a kind of case by case examination of the overall trends in the industry in the years leading up to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, more or less the last year when women exercised any power of note in film production beyond editing, continuity, or acting. This is the backdrop/context to the industry when Anna May Wong entered it as an extra in Alla Nazimova’s The Red Lantern.

As I write this, I have a number of people I want to write about, many of whom have only been recently rediscovered, some of whom may have some degree of name recognition still, but all of whom have contributed greatly to the art form of the twentieth century, and will factor into the narrative of Anna May Wong’s body of work and her life.

Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Mary Pickford, and Germaine Dulac all come to mind. But there are others, like Nazimova, whose star power and stage prowess were massive, but whose control over their productions was fragile, either through a lack of experience or through being undercut by other players in the industry. Her story is cautionary. 

I also want to recognize figures who bridged the silent to sound transition like Anna May Wong, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Carole Lombard come to mind. All of these women made the transition successfully, as did AMW, but they had an advantage she did not have; they were caucasians. The issues that many women actresses encountered in the early years of the Sound Era echoed throughout society at large, and it would be disingenuous to aver that the Hayes Code didn’t curtail potential and possibility in performances on the one hand, while oddly enough, acting as a kind of discipline for directors, writers, and actors to work with. 

However, the Code also stanched ideas of feminine agency to a large degree and it is difficult to assess whether the impositions on how women were portrayed reflected social mores or whether, given the times, people had ceased to recognize that women were neither just madonnas or whores. Well-written female characters weren’t unusual or difficult to find but in many genre films, they weren’t as easy to decry as in more well “respected” releases.

Wong is found at the intersection of race relations, celebrity, and gender roles well into the first half of the twentieth century. The concomitant prejudice that came with being Asian American and more specifically, Chinese American, coupled with being one of the biggest and most lauded celebrities in the world was hobbled by both racism and the patriarchal attitudes then current.

For all intents and purposes, women in positions of power were pretty much gone by the 1930s, a situation that has only marginally improved in this century, adjusted for numbers of women relative to percentage of people in executive decision making positions overall. Women in cinema remain underpaid compared to their male equivalents and in reviewing the past, I’m hoping to uncover trends that have shifted and might be leading back to the pre-1929 status for women as power-holders. History rhymes rather than repeats, but I hope to see if approaches to writing new stanzas is proving to be more effective in achieving parity than not. 

That said, Anna May Wong did exercise her considerable clout, both to advance visibility for Asian Americans, Sino-American relations, and frankly, support for women in general by dint of herself being one. 

She was one of the most fascinating people of her era and for those of us who knew she was, it has been inspiring to see the amount of research and resurgence in interest in her since at least 2005, the year of her centenary.

I’m calling this series an “introduction” to her films and her life because I don’t know that I really have the time or the capacity to do justice to her as well as other authors have. This series will be structured by following Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane’s book “Anna May Wong: a Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work.” My hope is to follow their chronology, watch and review the extant films available to me and not necessarily provide recaps and analyses of just the films as films, but as documents of where she was in her life and what informed various choices she made over time in relation to where she was as an artist and as a woman. I will certainly be engaging in some degree of historical location and contextualization of necessity. 

When I wrote an article in 2022 on the significance of the U.S. Mint producing a quarter in her honor, I found some people asking why she mattered and being fairly dismissive. This tells me, sadly, that the attitudes that continued to reduce her to a stereotype during her lifetime still circulate. The incredulity surrounding recognizing a woman for her achievements and rescuing her from obscurity reflects the lack of understanding about historical processes, and frankly, seeing the culturally other as not worthy of that recognition. Thus, people who question why she should be so honored may not realize it, but they are the answers to their own question.

I suspect I’ve seen most of the existing films of Anna May Wong, but I’m more than happy to revisit the ones I’ve seen and looking forward to watching new those I haven’t. I can’t recall her ever turning in a bad performance and very often, even in B-movies, she was nearly incandescent, visually and in her performance. I will remark on specific elements to her approach to her craft repeatedly, so I humbly and kindly ask forgiveness and understanding of the repetitions when they will inevitably occur.

The title of this series puts her films before her life in that order because this is a movie blog, but also because we can only know her through her works and words that she left behind in articles and interviews. Also, we often approach biography as explaining something about performance or directorial or authorial choices, but I would like to propose that the relationship is isomorphic. We may learn as much about her through her performances as we would from hearing her speak about her life or reading her articles or letters. It’s an approach that might yield some insight that might not come to light otherwise.

I will, wherever possible, append a bibliography, and footnotes as necessary. Regular readers are probably aware that when I put on my Serious Hat, I employ traditional scholarly apparatus. 

Her first appearance is as an extra in Nazimova’s work mentioned above. I have an entirely other series that I want to devote to that woman, but that will begin later. Currently, I am juggling the series 30s Hitch, regular posts about past and current films, and now I am embarking on this, a labor of love. 

I want to thank in advance, the Anna May Wong Facebook Group who in addition to posting remarkable finds relating to AMW has begun to amass a substantial knowledge base of documents for ease of retrieval. Specifically, thanks to Tom Shane, John Rambo, and Saigon Joe for providing such a great forum/meeting place.

While I actually own a number of Anna May Wong films, I will also be drawing on the film archive of the YouTube channel The Gallery of Anna May Wong (a play on AMW’s television show’s title, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong - Liu-Tsong being, as well, Anna May Wong’s Chinese name.) There are documents to be found around the Web and I’ve availed myself of those. I have a few dozen articles ranging from the scholarly to the more pop cultural and lastly, a number of the major tomes available about her life and work.

I have no time frame for this project. 30s Hitch takes precedence as I hope to be working on a book by the same name beginning in December. I don’t think that will be the result with AMW because so much better work has been done and is being done on her. Truly, I am building on the shoulders of giants like Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Karen Leong, Shirley Jennifer Lim, and Yunte Huang, among others.

I will likely be pulling from other socio-political sources, as relevant, and hope that I don’t get too bogged down in scholarship to remember to have fun! I think Anna May Wong had a great wit and enjoyed her life fully and frankly, I’m not the best at being serious and dour, anyway. Welcome along for the ride, all.

Bibliography

Barrett, John. “Flipping a Coin: The Significance of Anna May Wong’s Quarter”. The Arts Fuse. February 4, 2023. https://artsfuse.org/268082/flipping-a-coin-the-significance-of-anna-may-wongs-quarter/

Gao Hodges, Russell Graham. Anna May Wong - From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend, Third Edition. Chicago Review Press Incorporated. Chicago, IL. (Electronic publication). 2023.

Huang, Yunte. Daughter of the Dragon. Liveright. New York. 2023.

Lee, Rebecca. The Gallery of Anna May Wong. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@thegalleryofannamaywong.

Leibfried, Philip and Lane, Chi Mi. Anna May Wong: a Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work. McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers. Jefferson, North Carolina and London. 2004.

Munden, Kenneth W, editor. The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures - Volume F2 Feature Films, 1921-1930. R.R. Bowker and Company. New York and London. 1971. pp. 784-785

Table of Contents to the Related Entries of This Series

Before the Toll; Uncredited and Early Roles, Part 1

Before the Toll; Uncredited and Early Roles, Part 2

The Toll of the Sea