The price of modernity
Will movie legend Anna May Wong, caught between the past and the future, find her moment?

By B. Ruby Rich

IF LIFE WERE fair or movie history more generous, Anna May Wong would be a household name. And if the current Wong revival succeeds – a revival born of obsession and passion, replete with archival discovery and restoration, biographies, dissertations, a flurry of books, and even a new film score – then the legacy of the first Chinese American actress of extraordinary talent and fame may well be secured at last.

Today watching Wong's fascinating films is the equivalent of a full-body plunge into a cultural studies mud bath. The four films from the 1920s and '30s chosen by the National Asian American Telecommunications Association for a tribute at this year's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival amply illustrate the appeal of her persona – from her misplaced trust in The Toll of the Sea to her savvy seduction in Piccadilly, from her noirish cunning in Shanghai Express to her girl-detective gumption in Daughter of Shanghai. Always her expressive face, her famous hands, and her infamous body are on the line, refusing simple line deliveries in order to make the word flesh. While some of the films have a claim on mainstream film history (The Toll of the Sea, for instance, was the first Technicolor movie, using an early two-strip process, and Shanghai Express is everyone's favorite von Sternberg), all are important, especially for the extent to which Wong absolutely commands the screen and rivets our attention.

The great tragedy of Wong's life was that she sought to break free of her tradition-bound community and join the world of modernity that the cinema represented, only to find herself lashed by that very industry to constraining racial stereotypes. The industry consigned her to an imaginary version of the old-world traditions she had sought to escape. But as specific as Wong's problems were to her identity as a Chinese American woman, born and raised in Los Angeles, they were also shared by other women of color and immigrant women who were breaking into the movies in the silent and early sound eras. The Toll of the Sea is dated 1922, the year in which Tina Modotti made her last silent film before heading to Mexico with her lover, Edward Weston. Wong was born in 1905, just four years prior to the birth of both Lupe Velez and Carmen Miranda. Velez was often mentioned alongside Wong as a star of considerable magnitude and sex appeal, while Miranda was marketed by the Hollywood machine with a level of ethnoracial stereotyping that was at least the equal of Wong's poor treatment. To make matters worse for Wong, she found herself denounced by her own community of origin, which reacted with rage to the sexualized and demeaned image of itself that she represented on-screen. It was a uniquely gendered, racialized hell Wong entered when she became a movie star.

On-screen, her persona captivates audiences today as surely as she captured those of her own era. There's something about her performances that's simultaneously less and more than what was required of her, as though she were pouring some ineffable part of her soul into roles that seemed to care only about her body – or using her body as a kind of mask behind which the other Anna May Wong, the one the camera couldn't see, might hide. In Piccadilly she performs two dances: one, in torn stockings, on a tabletop in the scullery for the amusement of her exhausted coworkers; the other, in an expensive costume, on the club's main stage for the pleasure of the fancy crowd. The expressiveness of the two performances – the qualities they share and those that diverge – is revelatory. Comments on Wong usually focus on her face or hands, but it's her utter command of the total performance that's so impressive and intoxicating.

But the tribute NAATA's devised is not a simple appreciation for the fans. Quite deliberately – with a panel I'm moderating titled "Dangerous to Know" – it provides a forum for a set of themes and issues (orientalism, anti-miscegenation laws, the intertwined nature of exoticism and eroticism) that demand consideration if Wong herself and her era as a whole are to be understood.

Dutiful daughter

The earliest of the films in the festival tribute, The Toll of the Sea, is an oddly familiar if orientalist version of a woman's weepie. Screenwriter Frances Marion transplanted the plot of Madame Butterfly to China, with Wong made to speak broken English for her role as Lotus Flower, the virginal Chinese woman seduced by a feckless American businessman who marries her merely, as a mean gossipmonger predicts, "Chinese-style." He abandons her before learning she's pregnant. Years later, when he returns with his American wife to visit, Lotus Flower tries to pretend the child is a neighbor; then she beseeches the wife to take the child away and raise him as her own, telling the little boy she was a nurse who had only pretended to be his mother, a sacrifice that brings Stella Dallas and other melodramas to mind, with race substituting for class as the unredeemable sin. Mission accomplished, her own race erased from the bloodline of her son, Lotus Flower moves offscreen to throw herself into the raging ocean for the film's finale. Thus the circle closes, as she'd rescued her lover from the sea at the start of the film, ignoring a village elder's warning to beware the foreigner who would only bring her bad luck.

The message to stay away from white men would be repeated back home by Wong's father. The family was close-knit. Wong was born in L.A. and grew up working in the family laundry shop in Chinatown. Sent to a Western school, she suffered racist taunts that haunted her the rest of her life and led her to return to Chinatown schooling. But on excursions to make deliveries to the laundry's clients, she also got a taste of the glamorous life outside Chinatown. Determined to act, Wong practiced in front of a mirror until she had the chance to prove her stuff to a live audience. She was a sensation from the beginning, climbing from work as an extra and an uncredited player to the starring role in The Toll of the Sea when she was only 17.

However obedient Wong may have been at home, she wasn't about to follow her father's injunctions related to carrying on with men. No series of chaperones could begin to combat the charismatic charm and flat-out sexiness of his daughter and the characters she played. Wong formed a series of liaisons on-screen and off- with white men, though all of them proved transitory. On-screen, that was the fault of the scripts and movie-industry codes, which mandated that she could never so much as kiss her Caucasian male costars. Offscreen, the same rules and more prevailed. She never married.

As her fan base grew, Hollywood came knocking. Douglas Fairbanks had her cast in The Thief of Bagdad, in which she appears scantily clad while he holds a knife to her back. Ah, for the innuendo of pre-Freudian life! With a new level of fame driven by her scandalous image, Wong still tried to balance career and familial obligations. In his definitive biography, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend, Graham Russell Gao Hodges points out that Wong responded to her career success by moving out of the family laundry only to move back, into a bungalow her father built for her behind the shop. It was there she met journalists and gave interviews. She was trying to perform the role of the dutiful daughter as hard as she was trying to flee the part, torn, like a toddler learning to walk, between the demands of tradition and the allure of modernity.

Over there

In a search for evidence that Hollywood actresses like Wong, Modotti, Miranda, and Velez – as well as their Shanghai counterpart, Ruan Lingyu, whose tragic life was brought to the world by Maggie Cheung in Center Stage (The Actress) – had something in common that was far more profound than chronology, I came across a Web site enshrining a 2003 project at the University of Washington dedicated to the "Modern Girl." The professors there paint a picture of this creature as "a figure who appeared around the world in cities from Tokyo to Berlin, Beijing to Bombay, Johannesburg to New York City in the early to mid twentieth century. What identified Modern Girls was their use of specific commodities and their explicit eroticism. By wearing provocative fashions, pursuing romantic love, and smoking packaged cigarettes, Modern Girls appeared to disregard the roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother." By this definition, Wong was a Modern Girl who, as a Chinese American, was caught between her inheritance and her aspiration, between the past and the future.

A temporary solution for Wong (as for Louise Brooks, Josephine Baker, and Ingrid Bergman) was to look for social acceptance and serious film work in Europe. She spent the late 1920s in Berlin, Paris, London, and Vienna; everywhere, she was the toast of the town. There too she was caught over and over in the contradictions between authenticity and fantasy as she endeavored to teach those cultures about Chinese values at a time when none had sizable Chinese populations yet were full of orientalist fantasies.

It was in London that Wong made what may well be her greatest film, the 1929 masterpiece Piccadilly; newly restored by the British Film Institute, it's presented here with a newly commissioned score performed live by Jon Jang. As Shosho, the Chinese dishwasher at a fancy London club, Wong plays a pragmatic working-class woman who, disguising her Chinese husband as her accompanist, proceeds to become the wealthy club owner's star attraction. Lushly photographed, the film is an interior design extravaganza. Wong's rooms and costumes show an attention to cultural detail that stands out from that of her usual Hollywood B movies. As high as her character might rise in the world of the film, however, that's how far she would fall. She's blamed for her liaison with the philandering club owner, Valentine (an interesting reversal of sexual harassment) and punished by death for her sexual transgression.

Interestingly, Piccadilly inserts astonishingly plain messages into its plot. When Shosho is "discovered" by Valentine, the script dictates that she betray Jim, her secret partner, by giving away a spiritual keepsake from him to her boss, and then figuratively emasculate him, by getting him to don a costume purchased for her. When Shosho takes Valentine to "her" club, a working-class tavern in the Chinese Limehouse district, they witness an altercation: the tavern owner ejects a white woman for dancing with a black man. We witness Valentine get the message, as a title card declares "We'd better leave." His class and her glamour, so clearly marked, are evidently insufficient protection against disgrace.

This anti-miscegenation incident is sufficient to signal the dangers of the world through which Wong herself moved, even in a Europe between the wars, already pulled between Weimar openness and fascist closure. Pegged by exoticism, Wong would carry its double burden (a shame to "her" people, a forbidden treat to others) throughout her life. In Piccadilly the white characters are all let off the hook – and alive – by the end. Wong, on-screen and off-, would be the one consistently to pay the price.

Identity theft

So adept at rising to the occasion, whatever the culture or role, Wong managed to survive the perilous transition from silent to sound cinema. Her newly audible deep voice only added to her allure (and to rumors of her bisexuality). In 1930 she returned to Hollywood after three years in Europe. She soon made the best-known of all her films, Shanghai Express (1932), in which she nearly upstages Marlene Dietrich in her own vehicle. On the train from Beijing to Shanghai, Wong dazzles as Hui Fei, a courtesan with sex as her trade and murder in her heart. For once she doesn't have to die at the end, a significant victory. Dietrich may get the man, but Wong at least gets to live, albeit alone.

Rumors about an alleged affair with the notorious Dietrich added to Wong's scandalous reputation. In the film, of course, they both play the role of prostitute. Here's an interesting conundrum: over and over, then and now, audiences identify Wong with her roles. Lacking the professional training boasted by actors who transitioned from stage to screen, Wong is assumed to be playing, instead, "herself." What a strange fate: pigeonholed by Hollywood into stereotypical, exoticizing, and often demeaning roles, Wong sought to elevate her characterizations by insisting on authentic wardrobes and interiors. Yet she is constantly taken, or mistaken, as identical with the roles she played, not just then but now as well. However much this may be the fate of all performers, it's an especially ironic one for her.

By the mid '30s, Wong was increasingly caught between her identity as a Chinese American woman and the movie industry's stereotypes, between the course of her career and the United States' relationship to a changing China. It was at this moment that several interlocking events transpired. In what looks in hindsight like the great tragedy of her acting career, Wong was refused the role she most wanted: O-Lan in the movie version of Pearl Buck's Good Earth. Hard as this may be to believe today, with racial impersonation largely relegated to the not-so-distant past, MGM instead cast German Jewish actor Luise Rainer in the role! It must have broken Wong's heart, for she decided to visit China for the first time and spent nearly a year there.

Welcomed by many of China's leading artists, actors, and intellectuals, she was attacked by journalists. "If you look at the chronology of her career," says Stephen Gong, associate director of the Berkeley Art Museum and author of the film festival program's essay on Wong, "she's trying to establish a personal identity exactly as China is undergoing its own series of revolutions. She's raised all this money for China relief, but the Chinese government doesn't know what to do with her. Instead, they too are reacting to stereotypes and condemn her because they resent her projecting a disreputable and exoticized image of China to Americans."

Wong traveled to China in part because she was ditching her hyphen, going for the Chinese identity the world kept imposing on her. But there was another level of irony lurking. In the 1930s, with China in transition, Wong was attracted to its new cultural manifestations and figures. Scholar Karen Leong, whose dissertation is about to be published as The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong Chiang, and the Transformation of American Orientalism, uncovered documents in the University of Texas at Austin's David O. Selznick Collection that prove what Wong was up against. Wong couldn't have known that it had been Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself, arriving in L.A. after a triumphant tour to win FDR's support for her husband's cause, who advised Hollywood against casting her as O-Lan. A member of her entourage even told a Hollywood insider, "What can you do for the war effort? Stop portraying the Chinese as stupid laundrymen."

And laundrywomen, presumably. Leong notes the tragic collision of the two women and what they represented, telling me by telephone how Madame Chiang Kai-shek represented the new China just as Wong's own career was reaching its nadir. "She was the new Chinese woman, the first woman to wear pants on the Wellesley campus, and there was Anna May Wong in her old China exotica." And then there was the class difference, besides the nationalist disdain for those who had emigrated. "She's not Chinese enough, yet she had created a whole myth for herself about being Chinese."

Sadly, MGM too thought she wasn't Chinese enough. Gao Hodges recounts another story of Wong's losing an earlier role – to Helen Hayes! How much has really changed? Just recall Margaret Cho's suddenly less hilarious account of the network calling in a consultant because she just wasn't "Asian enough" to star in her own show, the aptly titled All American Girl.

On the world stage, Wong, once the quintessential Modern Girl, the "Chinese flapper," was suddenly old school. Profoundly transformed by her time in China, Wong dedicated herself to the cause, on-screen and off-. The fourth film in the festival's retrospective, Daughter of Shanghai (1937), is an interesting reversal of the kind of blatant stereotypes that had launched her career. Wong plays the glamorous yet dutiful daughter of a successful Chinese antiques dealer, who is murdered by a gang of smugglers. This time it's the Caucasians who are the villains, and the Chinese Americans, played by Wong and her costar Philip Ahn, are the heroic gumshoes who ride off into the sunset together in what may be Wong's only happy ending, made possible only because the film rejects any race-mixing in its vision of romance.

Beyond the valley of the doll

Wong's career and persona speak loudly, not only of her own struggles and ambitions but of the delusions of her audience. In her recent book, meXican encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands, Rosa Linda Fregoso revives Carey McWilliams's idea of a "fantasy heritage" according to which California, in particular, invented a mythical history for itself by deliberately misrepresenting its actual past. In her chapter on Lupe Velez, Fregoso explains the way in which this fantasy operated to create a "phantasmagoric convergence of racial, economic, and cultural domination." Fregoso goes on to dissect the nature of fantasy itself by pointing out that fantasy "in the service of the powerful [forces of domination] means one thing, in the service of the subjugated, quite another."

Add sexuality to the cocktail analyzed by Fregoso and McWilliams, and Wong begins to come into focus. Their concept of a fantasy heritage becomes a perfect tool for thinking about Wong, whose persona was so deeply split between her own fantasy of embodying a newly modern and worldly Chinese woman on the one hand, and Hollywood's fantasy of her as the vessel for old stereotypes of the sexually available Chinese doll on the other. While Wong never succumbed to suicide, as did Velez, the Berkeley Art Museum's Gong may be right: "Drinking herself to death could be a form of suicide." Severely ill with liver disease, she succumbed to a heart attack in 1961 just as her career was being revived. Gao Hodges reports that she'd been offered roles in The Flower Drum Song and The World of Suzie Wong. In fact, legendary actress Nancy Kwan, who appears in both films, is slated to join the festival's panel, along with contemporary actress Josephine Kim (Charlotte, Sometimes) and scholars Leong and Gao Hodges. Kwan never did get to meet Wong, for she had already passed away when they started filming. In an e-mail, however, she wrote me of her admiration for Wong's "courage and tenacity" because, even though she was "ahead of her time," she nonetheless "followed her dream, and lived by her own rules." It's a fitting epitaph.

The Wong obsession now under way is the tip of a full-scale iceberg, with a deep history and a brimming future. Gao Hodges reports falling under Wong's spell when he spotted a photo of her in a London shop. For Leong, however, it was her immersion in Asian American history and women's studies that opened the terrain, beginning with the "Sugar Sister" literature and studies she said followed in the wake of Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club. Another dissertation should be out soon: Shirley Lim's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: The Politics of Asian American Women's Public Culture, 1930-1960. Both Leong and Lim are central to the renewed focus on Wong by Asian and Asian American scholars. There are two documentaries now under way. And who knows, there could even be talk of a Frida-style vanity production going on right now in some café near Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood's deranged temple to orientalism. After all, it was dedicated in 1926 with Wong herself present for the ground-breaking ceremony.

'Dangerous to Know: The Career and Legacy of Anna May Wong,' a panel discussion with Karen Leong, Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Nancy Kwan, and Jacqueline Kim, moderated by B. Ruby Rich, follows the screening of The Toll of the Sea Sun/7, noon, Castro Theatre. See box, page 32, for more festival information.