LOS ANGELES – Yunte Huang was emerging from the bathroom at the Formosa Cafe, a storied Chinese restaurant in Hollywood, when a woman with long blonde hair waved him down and requested a table for one.
Huang, an author and English professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, smiled and walked back to the red-leather booth where he was finishing his fried tofu lunch.
The 54-year-old is hardly new to these kinds of assumptions. His latest book, a biography of the great Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, out now from Liveright, considers the sweep of Wong’s life and her success in the face of the profound anti-Chinese sentiment of her day.
Wong is the third and final subject of Huang’s trilogy about Asian-American icons in popular culture. He has also written about the fictional detective Charlie Chan and about Eng and Chang Bunker, who travelled to the United States in the 19th century as “the original Siamese twins”.
For each book, Huang chose a subject with a complicated, controversial legacy. In the case of Wong, he said, she is “revered but also one of the most reviled characters in Asian-American history”, seen by some as perpetuating the stereotypes of “dragon lady or Madama Butterfly”. It is the very complexity of the subjects that drew him, he said.
“I’m trying to Americanise myself,” said Huang, who was born in Wenzhou, China, in 1969 and moved to the US in 1991. “What I found were these kind of fault lines, where people are so divided about these issues.” The contradictions his subjects embodied helped him reach a deeper understanding of his adopted culture, he said.
Later, he would return to that moment in the Formosa Cafe, and to the blonde woman’s mistake. “Some things never change,” he reflected, “or too damn slowly.” And that, he added, is also part of Wong’s story.
Huang’s book about her, Daughter Of The Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous With American History, arrives amid a flurry of new interest in that first Chinese-American Hollywood star.
A character based on Wong winds her way through the early scenes of Damien Chazelle’s 2022 film Babylon – a dazzler with black bangs, comfortable with her bisexuality. In 2023, Gail Tsukiyama published a novel based on Wong’s life, The Brightest Star. And in 2024, another biography, Not Your China Doll, by Katie Gee Salisbury, will be published by Dutton.
Wong died more than 60 years ago at the age of 56, but Huang is not surprised by the interest. He sees a direct line from the battles she faced as an actress in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood to those being fought – and increasingly won – today.
“If you want to know how momentous it is for Michelle Yeoh to win the Oscar,” Huang said, referring to the 2023 Academy Awards, which marked the first such victory for an Asian actress, “you cannot possibly understand without going back to Anna May Wong.”
Wong was born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles in 1905, and grew up in her father’s laundry shop, a few blocks from the city’s Chinatown. It was a dangerous time. There were growing restrictions on Chinese immigrants nationally and routine acts of violence and looting against the Chinese community, particularly in California. Chinese Angelenos wore whistles around their necks to ward off would-be attackers on the street.
Yet, Hollywood developed a fascination with the Far East, churning out movies such as Chinese Procession (1898), Scene In A Chinese Restaurant (1903) and Rube In An Opium Joint (1905). Hollywood scouts found in Chinatown a cheap and easy place to film, and Wong won her first role – a walk-on part in a crowd – in The Red Lantern (1919).
Cast in a supporting role in the 1924 film The Thief Of Bagdad and scantily clad in a two-piece outfit – for which her director, Douglas Fairbanks, had to seek permission from her parents – she won praise for her beauty and for the power of her expressions.
In the years to come, she would soar, starring beside German American actress-singer Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932), working with famous directors in Weimar Germany and London, and rubbing elbows with the dynasties of 1930s Shanghai, such as the Sassoons. Stylish and droll, she toyed with stereotypes, signing her letters “Orientally yours” and often deadpanning with phrases like “Confucius didn’t say this…”
Miscegenation was illegal onscreen and off: A Chinese person, or any person of colour, could not be shown kissing someone white. Hollywood turned instead to actors of European descent, in yellowface, to play Asian roles.
Although Wong’s career broke barriers, working as an actress at the time often meant having to take roles that invoked stereotypes.
“The stereotype of the Chinese immigrant was so ossified,” said Ms Janet Yang, a long-time film producer who is president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It had to be a certain look and a certain sound, if you could even get those horrible roles. So, Anna already broke down a lot of barriers, but yes, sometimes she took roles and she couldn’t transform them on her own.”
As Huang sank into Wong’s life story, he could not help seeing the irony of his situation. During the pandemic, as he was writing Daughter Of The Dragon, violence towards Asian-Americans soared. His wife and three-year-old son were stuck in China, behind closed borders. For three years, he saw them only on FaceTime. When they were finally allowed to reunite in China, they faced new travel restrictions and were not sure they would be able to get back to the US.
“It was a Chinese-American story,” Huang said. “We are caught between systems that are totally not compatible.” NYTIMES
