Katie Gee Salisbury, ’07, MA ’08, was interning at the Los Angeles Chinese American Museum in 2004 when she saw a photograph that stopped her: a black-and-white image of an Asian woman being driven in a parade. “The curator said, ‘Oh, that’s Anna May Wong. She was this famous movie star from the 1920s and ’30s,’” Salisbury says. “And I was just like, ‘Whoa.’”
When Salisbury was growing up, she says there were so few Asians on American television that she and her mom would get excited whenever BD Wong appeared on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Now, here was a Chinese American star from Hollywood’s Golden Age she hadn’t even heard of. Salisbury was stunned.
That intrigue seeds her debut book, Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, published last year to positive reviews. A “splendidly entertaining biography,” the Times of London wrote. Other writers have covered Wong, but Salisbury felt they had missed the verve in Wong’s unlikely rise as the daughter of Chinatown laundry operators to international icon. “I wanted to be a fly on the wall when all of these things were happening to her,” she says.
DISPLAY WORTHY: Salisbury’s biography of Wong details the actor’s creative reinventions. (Photo: Courtesy Katie Gee Salisbury)
Salisbury’s telling is one of triumph, tragedy, and, above all, persistence. Born in 1905, Wong began acting at age 13, as an extra. Her star seemed set to launch after she stole scenes as a “Mongol slave girl” in the 1924 blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. “Advance reports say that she walks away with quite a bit of the applause,” one film magazine wrote. She would enjoy a celebrated run of other movies, including the Oscar-winning Shanghai Express. But her roles remained largely supporting in nature, Salisbury writes, describing the taboo against interracial romance and Hollywood’s tendency to cast white actors—and dress them in yellowface—even when making movies about China.
Yet time after time, Wong reinvented herself. She escaped Hollywood to make films in England and Germany. She started her own cabaret show. She embraced new mediums—in 1951, she starred as a detective in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first U.S. television show featuring an Asian American lead. Salisbury says Wong deserves to be remembered well beyond museums. “It took nearly 100 years for an Asian actress like Michelle Yeoh to be recognized with an Academy Award for Best Actress,” she says. “Anna May Wong is a reminder that we’ve been here all along.”
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.
