The Breakthrough: The Toll of the Sea (1922)

No matter how often I watch Anna May Wong in her first starring role, no matter how much I prepare myself for the, let’s face it, racism, and no matter how much I say “it was a different time” (I refuse to say that’s an adequate excuse), I find myself both moved by AMW’s performance in itself, but also, for what it represents in the broader scheme of her career. It’s a tough little film. 

Essentially, it’s Madame Butterfly transposed to China, but without the “hero” realizing he’d made a mistake and that he truly loved Butterfly, or in this case, “Lotus Flower.” No, Allen Carver here is a dolt whose wife pushes him to see Lotus Flower and clear things up. Let’s be clear; there are so many things wrong and not to just 21st century eyes about this film (and for that matter, Puccini’s opera, and the source material before it). I’ll get to all that in due course, but for the uninitiated, the film’s plot is simple and direct.

An American man is washed up on the rocky shore of the ocean where Lotus Blossom has been sitting and orders some fishermen to come and save him. She is smitten by him and they begin a tryst. He receives a telegram from his father requesting his return and Lotus Flower expected to return to the United States with him. However, he is dissuaded by his friends from bringing his Chinese wife. During this time, local gossips had warned Lotus Flower about the fickle ways of the American “husband” with one declaring she’d had four already.

Allen leaves and upon his return, reacquaints himself with Elsie, who becomes his American wife. In the meantime, Lotus Flower has given birth to a son, named Allen after his “honorable” father, and Lotus Flower continues to wait and pine for her husband’s return. 

When he finally does return with wife Elsie, it is she who prods him to face Lotus Flower and inform her of the situation. In turn, Lotus Flower tells Elsie that the little boy she said was visiting from the American neighbors next door is, in fact, Allen’s and her son. Then, in what remains one of the most gutting sequences of a mother surrendering her child in film history, Lotus Flower tells her son that she is really just his nurse, that she was just telling him “fairy stories” about her being his mother and that he needs to go back with his real mother to America. 

Soon after Elsie and Allen, Jr. leave, Lotus Flower returns to the rocks along the ocean and though we no longer have the footage, we have the intertitle card that let’s us know she has plunged into the sea: “Oh sea, now that life has been emptied I come to pay my great debt to you.”

The Toll of the Sea is a groundbreaking piece of cinema for being the second full-color Technicolor feature using the Technicolor 2 technology, but just as much for introducing the world to Anna May Wong in a performance that showcases her range and how years of preparation paid off. Until now, she had her uncredited bit parts and her background work, but here she is, carrying her first feature. 

Carry it she does. Kenneth Harlan as the elder Allen is dull and disinterested. It’s difficult to have to imagine such a mediocrity wooing someone as sweet and genuinely good as Lotus Flower. He’s somewhat a cad, though it is unlikely he would see himself like that; we can assume he sees himself as just another American getting his rocks off with a local. And here’s the problem, and it is not owing to a change in sociopolitical awareness. Are you taking advantage of a person at home in their culture, well aware that you are going to abandon them (whether you know you got her pregnant is irrelevant)? Why, yes, yes you are taking advantage of them and yes, you are a cad. Or as I prefer to say, an asshole.

To be sure, perhaps Allen does have feelings for Lotus Flower, but Harlan’s performance is so stodgy here, it really is difficult to read his feelings as genuine. Plus, he is fairly easily convinced to leave Lotus Flower behind. To be sure, Harlan was a marquee draw and was an accomplished thespian of his day, but he is so summarily eclipsed by the real lead that he reads as duller than dishwater. 

At seventeen, Anna May Wong seemed to arrive fully formed. What strikes the viewer first is how naturally she moves. She had put in hours play-acting, rushing home from the movies to act out scenes, dissecting them, and digesting what she had seen. If anyone had used cinema as an ad hoc acting course, it was Anna May Wong. Earlier on, when she showed up for her scene as lantern bearer in The Red Lantern, she had arrived having done her own make-up (also, rather ad hoc: “I borrowed my mother’s rice powder rag and fairy kalsomined my face. With the most painstaking effort, I managed to curl my straight Chinese hair. As a finished touch, I took one four Chinese red papers, wet it and rubbed off the color onto my lips and cheeks.”(1). The make-up department took care of that and reset her to fit the picture. That said, it is worth noting that she was thirteen years at the time and had the resourcefulness to ready herself for a part on her own.

Considering that we are now four years removed from Nazimova’s film, and we have a young woman whose determination has already grown stronger. By now, she was well aware that a film set is not glamorous, that film stars are human underneath it all, and that it took many people to come together to create a motion picture. Her apprenticeship was over; she had planned early on to become a star and now, here she was, leading her first feature.

That being said, she was starring in a film that while putting her on the map (and in front of Douglas Fairbanks’ eyes) and advancing her to lead status, we have to ask if the role or the film did her any favors, and here’s the rub. 

I have mentioned that I will return to the issues of racism and xenophobia in the United States repeatedly for a simple reason. They are facts. They are facts that impeded the acceptance of an actress of Anna May’s talent from achieving greater acclaim and fulfilling the promise of that talent. I will be reiterating how frequently she walks off with a scene, if not an entire movie, without effort. However, I will also have to examine where she is in her career in relation to prevailing prejudices of the time. 

By 1922, when The Toll of the Sea was released, the needle had not moved for minorities across the United States. Despite their contributions to the country, people of color were, at best, patronized as being “good examples” but mostly such compliments were code for “even though they’re not white.” These issues still obtain today, more than many (white people) would like to admit. However, at least (the very least?), people of different ethnicities can still fall in love, have sexual relationships, marry, and/or raise families and so on. The would be denied Anna May on screen and even in her private life, as long as the Chinese Exclusion Act remained in effect and as long as anti-miscegenation laws were still in force. 

The orientalism that permeated Puccini’s opera is in full view here, too, though interestingly, to my eyes not playing quite to the idea of the inferiority of Asian people as perhaps the filmmakers might have had it. The costuming for the Chinese people in The Toll of the Sea is quite frankly, amazing; the colors are vibrant and frankly, swirl with life, particularly when juxtaposed to the drab monochrome of the American expatriate figures. This is particularly apparent when we see the penultimate act where Lotus Flower has asked Elsie to take little Allen with her back to the United States. Beatrice Bentley as Elsie comes across as an almost sepia toned relic from an earlier period placed against Anna May’s Lotus Flower in full Chinese wedding garb. 

Yunte Huang notes that “while applauding Anna May’s acting, the reviewers also spilled much ink on the new chromatic medium, especially the relation of color to racial and cultural differences.”(2) Huang notes the disappointment voiced in Variety that the Technicolor process was unable “to differentiate the skin color of Chinese actors from that of Caucasians, calling the tint spillover ‘ a noticeable defect’ and ‘a freak.’(3)

Nor is it merely that Chinese Americans were regarded as “less-than”; there is a colonialist sensibility to the film that others have picked up on and examined at length. At our historical remove, art from previous eras provide its own cultural critique of those periods. I tend to use this approach when watching film from earlier times; it does not lessen the embarrassment or even shame I feel for those stretches of history, but it helps locate and center where we are, living with racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and the othering that reduces human beings to mere cyphers or not even that, systemically and through our institutions. 

As I write this, it appears a new expansionist period may be upon us, and no less virulent, damaging to all concerned - not the least of which, would be the United States, seeming bereft of the ideals and values it is known for espousing. Shirley Jennifer Lim, in A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930 -1960, presents a critical reading of The Toll of the Sea that exemplifies this approach and that serves to identify aspects of the film that contemporary viewers may not be immediately aware of. It is necessary to probe deeper into the cultural matrices of the early 20th century. It’s not enough for contemporary viewers to dismiss any given work by saying “well, it was a different time”, particularly when confronted with the various tropes of American exceptionalism and frankly, racism, that are still embedded in the fabric of the United States over a hundred years later.

The imperialist and expansionist dimensions addressed in Lim’s critique are coming back into vogue. This should both give us pause and refrain from merely dismissing dated elements in works from these earlier times. Where Anna May Wong, a continuous sense of the challenges that confronted her is endemic to an analysis of much, if not all, of her work. This sense of the “adventitious historic” will loom larger over her appearances where she is the first or second lead of the film. That said, other angles will obtain even where she may not be a principle.

And why Anna May Wong and not another person of color? Because quite frankly, she was also the first such person who achieved wide exposure name-recognition in the film medium. She precedes other non-white figures like Paul Robeson, and even Josephine Baker (the only other woman who comes to mind whose career trajectory matches Anna May’s), although both were certainly well-regarded on the live stage and music hall. In some ways, Anna May would become the “test run” for how other minorities would be received in the popular performing arts.

But bear in mind, that at no point in her career was she allowed to “get the guy” or even share a genuinely impassioned kiss, at least, not to the degree that her caucasian contemporaries would. One of the most beautiful women to grace the silver screen was condemned, let’s be clear, not by the Chinese Exclusion Act, but by the racist roots of the power structure that enacted it.

Lim begins the chapter "“I Protest” : Anna May Wong and the Performance of Modernity" recapping the opening of King of Chinatown, where Anna May plays a well-regarded surgeon, speaks in articulate English, and represents a departure from the roles she had been relegated to for much of her earlier career. A late work, King of Chinatown could be considered part of a trilogy, along with Daughter of Shanghai and Island of Lost Men where Anna May Wong was allowed to play a competent, independent professional woman. By this point in her career (1939), she had played the ingenue in The Toll of the Sea, various “dragon ladies” in too many films to count, cunning villains of the “yellow peril” type, nad in a few cases, a genuinely heroic if almost always tragic figure. 

That she very often was too good for the material was often noted in reviews and we have only to think of Michelle Yeah at the turn of the 20th to 21st centuries, finally getting a chance to explore and express her range and be accepted as the great actor she is. The difference is that Yeoh was more accepted in the boys club of Hong Kong cinema and would build a CV as a “serious” dramatic actor beginning with The Soong Sisters and of course, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Given her pedigree and coming up during the late 20th century, Yeoh might have had to confront a degree of prejudice as a woman in Hong Kong cinema (though given her marquee value, that may have receded sooner than later), but the other mitigating factor in this comparison is that Michelle is ethnic Chinese and began her career in Asia where the idea of not getting a role because of her ethnicity would likely not factor in.

Back to 1922, in the United States, we have a vey different reality. Lim’s analysis pivots us away from the “good/bad” performances or emphasizing the exploitative dimension of Anna May Wong’s professional career to something richer, that will prove valuable as we go along: “In the atmosphere of scientific racism that prevailed into the early twentieth century, proving modernity was key ot cultural citizenship.”(4) I want to address “cultural citizenship” and transnationalism later in relation to Anna May’s career. I mention Lim’s key point here so that the reader can keep it in mind as we move further along.

What I am more concerned with here is a point that Lim brings up regarding Anna May’s "Chinese American films and iconography in reworking the American nation as white and [how these] placed Chinese Americans in the realm of citizen-subject.” (5)

Central to any reading of The Toll of the Sea is that for all that “through her portrayal of beauty and fashion, as exemplified in her films and press, Wong proved that Asians are human”, she was still subject to the “double scrutiny” of how gender accentuates race and how “women have symbolically represented culture and nation.”(6) We aren’t quite at the moment in Anna May’s career when she hits her stride as a sex symbol/fashion icon, but she is on the cusp. If we’re a little bit ahead of ourselves, it’s because I want these analyses to resonate when we do get there.

For all that Wong succeeded in rendering Asians as human, Lim points out that “numerous legal and structural elements singled out Asian Americans and rendered them not just second-class citizens but unwanted ones, consigned to outside the nation-state.”(7)

Lim’s chapter will encompass more of how Anna May Wong “performed modernity” and thereby achieved a kind of acceptance and influence that pushed through the racial limitations and stereotypes imposed on Asian Americans; but for now, what interests me most is her reading of the film at hand. I have to be honest, the discussion Lim opens up in this chapter (and the entire volume) is of immense value, far beyond The Toll of the Sea. I will be calling on her insights later, but I recommend engaging with A Feeling of Belonging outside the confines of this essay.

It is worth bearing in mind that The Toll of the Sea was released a scant seven years after D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which to my mind, reinforced racism already running through much of country’s veins, whether conscious or not. It is a seminal film and one that embodies - likely against Griffith’s intentions - race as being “the central contradiction to the American ideals of democracy and freedom.”(8) Lim credits cinema in America with helping to shape and address that contradiction, so that the “U.S. nation-state could reinvent itself and its racial origins.”(9)

Lim posits Anna May’s career as emerging at a period where American imperialism and the myth of the American frontier joined with the nation’s shift from an orientalist fascination with the Middle East to the Eastern Pacific. She cites historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s lament once the country had reached the Pacific Ocean, “the United States had lost its frontier and thus its basis for class harmony.”(10) Here is where I find it difficult to disagree with Lim:

“Colonizing Asia and imaginatively extending the American West into the Pacific reinstated the myth of the frontier as safety valve”(11) (for the “racial anxiety” that marked (white) American society during the period).

The Toll of the Sea is a prime example of the kind of orientalism that promotes several dichotomies and privileges “the West” over “the East” (and again, it’s there in the source material): Eastern/female, Western/male, and all the chauvinism that infers. Lim sums up the metaphors/signifiers tidily: “The colonial metaphors and tropes — substitute baby for laboring bodies or raw goods that the colonizers ship to the metropole and elsewhere — are rife.”(12)

If this seems a heavy-handed reading, it really isn’t. We look back aghast at how various ethnicities and cultures are presented in film (and fiction and even how they were reported on in newspapers and magazines, see Lim’s “scientific racism”) and we forget that audiences took for granted as legitimate a worldview that supported colonialism, racism, white superiority, and the idea that “we” as America/Americans were entitled to it all. 

Did Frances Marion intend the signifiers that Lim picks up on? No, she didn’t have to: those signifiers lay beneath any conscious schema she may have had in mind while at the same time were already baked in by the historical locus in which the work is found.

Additionally, Lim picks up on Lotus Flower as an object of colonialism and a disposable commodity by focusing in on what, for audiences at the time was a humorous moment. When Lotus Flower believes she is leaving with Allen, she changes from her traditional clothing into what she thought was the latest fashion in the U.S. She changes into a dress from the late nineteenth century and one may assume that laugher was the appropriate response. 

A modern audience might not get the joke because 1922 might as well be 1892. However, the more salient critique is that Lotus Flower, like all non-white, non-Americans/non-Europeans (or no America-approved Europeans; we can go on about how even other countries were popularly viewed another time) were backward/behind the times/not very bright and/or just plain sub-human. 

There is this strange dichotomy in racist ideology: on the one hand, the object of the racist ideologue is held to be less-than (white, American, most often male, etc.) and on other, smart, cunning, and strategically genius. I know; don’t look for sound reasoning in racism, but I point it out because so much of popular entertainment reflects the prevailing prejudices of the time.

Lim goes farther into this:  “Thus, her clothing suggest the undercurrent behind Wong giving up her child to Elsie and Allen; she does not know what is modern, she cannot raise a child in the modern era, and thus her son is better off with the modern white couple, to be raised in America. Colonial subjects do not understand modernity; they cannot rule themselves or their own people. Marion’s plot device — that Wong confides in Elsie that the child is Allen’s because women around the world unite, which sets up Allen and Elsie taking the child from Wong — rings hollow. Under regimes of slavery and colonialism, white women have gained status at the expense of women of color.”(13)

What we will be encountering soon enough will be Anna May Wong’s rise, not just to stardom and popular recognition, but how her profile as a modern, independent woman bumps up against the formidable walls of othering, systemic and institutionalized racism, and xenophobia, in roles that offer further critiques of these societal norms in inter-war America. I don’t know that she is able to subvert those forces, but she is able to power through them in a way that few, if any others could do.

The movie at hand is a showcase of a technology that would take some time to be widely accepted, but it is a remarkably eye-catching work. Anna May Wong, in many ways, is the only character with any kind of interiority and this isn’t projection; she prepped for this role her entire life. Her love of the movies, her play-acting, and her ambition to be a star all factor into something deeper in this and later performances. That “deeper” element is her very existence as a woman, as an Asian American, and most specifically, as a Chinese American.

It should be and is reprehensible that American citizens of non-white ethnicity were denied viable entree into civllc and political society, were denied their humanity, actually. As we will see going through her film career, while much has changed, too much is backsliding to a degree where many of the analyses are going to sound dispiritingly contemporary.

Return to Introduction/Table of Contents

Notes

1. Quoted in Salisbury, p. 37

2. Huang, p. 67.

3. Huang, ibid.

4. Lim, p. 48.

5. Lim, p. 49.

6. Liim, p. 48.

7. Lim, p. 48.

8. Lim, p. 52.

9. Lim, p. 52.

10. Lim, p. 53.

11. Lim, p. 53.

12. Lim, p. 54.

13. Lim, p. 54.

Bibliography

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

Lim, Shirley Jennifer. A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930-1960. New York. New York University Press. 2006.

Salisbury, Katie Gee. Not Your China Doll. Dutton. 2024.

“Technicolor No. II.” Timeline of Historical Colors in Photography and Film. Filmcolors.org. https://filmcolors.org/timeline-entry/1213/. Retrieved January 8, 2026.

Note to self: check out sources in Lim, fn. 20, p. 206; see also, Yoshihara, fn. 25, p. 207