8ANNA MAY

“CALL ME ISHMAEL”—so begins Moby-Dick, that pelagic American epic by Herman Melville.¹ As literary scholars have pointed out, the narrator’s biblical self-naming—Ishmael being the son of Abraham with his slave woman, whereas Isaac was the rightful heir—is a deliberate act of defiance, affirming his own subversive genealogy. America—a republic born of a war of independence, severing itself from the mother country—also belongs in a subversive genealogy. Consequently, self-naming becomes a quintessential American art. Such a rebirth applies not only to celebrities ranging from Alla Nazimova to Mary Pickford, Warner Oland, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, and Jon Stewart, but also to almost all Americans who hail from another place, another world. Whether your name in your homeland and original language used to be Yacoob, Ölund, or 黄运特 (Huáng Yùn Tè), anglicization, dropping the umlaut, or reversing the word order would be part of your Americanization, after which you become Jacob, Oland, or even Yunte Huang.

Likewise, one of the first things Anna did when she entered the Hollywood scene was to choose a new nomenclature. At birth, she was given the English name “Anna” by the doctor. In fact, three of the Wong girls had American names with four letters: Lulu, Anna, and Mary; Margaretta, the youngest who died in infancy, was the only exception. “Anna Wong didn’t sound well” on screen credits, thought Anna, already dreaming of her own name in lights appearing on marquees. And she also wanted to vary the four-letter format. She ended up choosing “May” because she liked “the suggestion of springtime,” when willows turn green.² Thus, en route to her rendezvous with American history, Wong Liu Tsong became Anna May Wong.

In her 1919 to 1921 period of apprenticeship, Anna May hobnobbed with Hollywood elites at the 8080 Club and elsewhere, at the same time picking up minor roles in several films. The first one was Outside the Law (1920), directed by Todd Browning and starring Priscilla Dean, the popular silent star, and Lon Chaney, who would soon garner the moniker of “The Man of a Thousand Faces.” Against the grain of “yellow films” that featured the stereotypically dark side of the Orient, this film presented a romanticized view of Chinese wisdom, anticipating aphorism-spouting Charlie Chan by a few years. The opening scene reveals a volume of The Sayings of Confucius on a table covered in Chinese tapestry, followed by a title card: “Confucius said: If a country had none but good rulers for a hundred years, crime might be stamped out and the death penalty abolished.”

In this eight-reel silent film, Chaney played the double role of the Chinese servant Ah Wing and the gangster Black Mike. Having seen Alla Nazimova pull the same trick in The Red Lantern—simultaneously playing a Chinese role with taped eyes and a white character with more “natural” makeup—Anna May began to get a taste of Hollywood’s delicate art of yellowface. As an extra, she sat with a clutch of young girls her age and listened to an old Chinese man doling out nuggets of Confucian wisdom. She remained uncredited in the film, since the camera focused for only a few fleeting seconds on her curled bangs, a knee-length Chinese gown, and a pair of embroidered pantaloons.

Anna May Wong in Outside the Law, 1920 (Film still)

In her next film, Anna May received, in her own words, “a real part.”³ It was Dinty (1920), directed by Marshall Neilan, in which Anna May played Half Moon, a young maid/mistress of a Chinatown gangster and vice lord, King Dorkh (Noah Beery). She had previously crossed paths with Beery—albeit tangentially—in The Red Lantern, but this time she has more interaction with him, as King Dorkh tries to seduce Half Moon with money and jewelry. A key turn of the plot involves the abduction of the daughter of a prominent judge, who has been a thorn in Dorkh’s side. The method of kidnapping taps into the stereotypical American imagination, an element that would seem almost ironically endearing to Anna May: The thugs hide the victim in, yes, a laundry basket and whisk her away on a horse-drawn carriage marked with the words OONG WONG LAUNDRY.

Perhaps inspired by the scene, Timothy G. Turner, a Los Angeles Times journalist, arrived at the Wong Laundry on North Figueroa Street and interviewed Anna May after the release of Dinty. In the published feature story, “Maid of Orient Unspoiled by Success Dips Her Ivory Hands in Suds,” Turner appeared impressed by the fact that even though Anna May was making $150 a week as an actress, she still toiled in her father’s washhouse. “Anna May Wong has a little room in the barn of a building,” Turner described. Save for a little Chinese garden, the building was surrounded by vacant lots on all sides, its walls almost paintless and its roof a gallery of floating linen. The journalist, struck by the natural beauty of the young actress, depicted her in an ersatz-Orientalist style: “She is slender, has hands of ivory, carved as delicately as an idol’s, and her face is not made of cheeks, ears, eyes and lips, but of petals. Such, after the fashion of the Chinese poet, is Anna May Wong.” Applauding her beauty and her work ethic, Turner called her “the Chinese exception to the American rule. The films have not spoiled her.” Perhaps he was not clued in, but Turner failed to mention a key development in Anna May’s life.⁴

As proverbial as it sounds, art does imitate life. As it turned out, the budding fifteen-year-old actress, while playing a mistress in Dinty, had become romantically involved with the predatory director, a married man more than twice her age. Rising from chauffeur to film director, Marshall Neilan, known as “Mickey,” was a dandy who liked to splash his high salaries ($125,000 per film) on “wild parties and presents for his many girlfriends.” Neilan’s affair with teenage Anna May apparently was an open secret in Hollywood, and the two even planned a quick trip south of the border to get a Mexican marriage license in order to circumvent California’s antimiscegenation laws.⁵

By 1920, Neilan had become so successful as a director that he was able to establish his own production company, giving him more creative leeway to do his heart’s bidding. Captivated by Anna May, Neilan wrote a part specifically for her in his next production, Bits of Life (1921). Inspired by a title card in Broken Blossoms that read, “Broken bits of his life in his new home,” Neilan’s new film was an artistic mélange of four short stories. Anna May appeared in the third episode, “Hop” or “Chinese Story.” Born in China, the character of Chin Chow (Lon Chaney) had been taught that girl babies were undesirable. Moving to America, he runs opium dens and rises to overlord of the San Francisco underworld. When his wife Toy Sing (Anna May) produces a girl, he beats her and vows to kill the baby. A friend gives Toy Sing a crucifix, which she hammers into the wall, unaware that her husband is lying in an opium stupor on a bunk on the other side. As if only in the movies, the nail penetrates the skull of Chin Chow and kills him.⁶

The film received excellent reviews and was selected by Photoplay magazine as one of the eight best pictures of the year, along with Tol’able David and A Man of Stone, among others. But too many scenes seemed so exotic for middle-class Americans that some states did not even show the film. As one exhibitor put it, “I tell you that Chink stuff of that kind won’t do if we expect to stay in the game.”⁷ While a daring artistic effort, the film was a financial flop.

However, Bits of Life set in motion something larger than the film itself. For Chaney, a rising makeup artist, it launched his remarkable career of playing Chinese characters, a legacy that would prove as controversial as Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan a decade later. Besides assuming the roles of myriad tortured, often grotesque characters in horror films, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Chaney would play Yen Sin, a grubby, opium-smoking Chinese laundryman, in Shadows (1922); and, later, two Chinese men simultaneously in Mr. Wu (1927). Together, the two films would establish a benchmark for Hollywood’s representation of Asians. Anna May, who would often appear opposite Chaney’s yellowface characters, learned at least one important lesson from Bits of Life: As a Chinese woman in Hollywood, she would have rough going in her professional and personal lives. After the initiation to torture in Bits of Life, her various future characters would suffer countless torments and die a thousand deaths. In real life, the rapacious Neilan soon lost interest in his young Chinese paramour and moved on to his next quarry.⁸

Earlier during the shooting of Dinty, Anna May’s mother had said to her, “I wish you would not have so many pictures taken. Eventually you may lose your soul.” Not a believer in her mother’s Old World superstitions, Anna May replied that her life could not be lived within the same parameters as her mother’s. “It might not be a happier life,” she said, “but that was for time to tell.”⁹

The up-and-coming actress had chosen May as her new name because it is a hopeful month of spring, but “may” is also part of “maybe.” As Charlie Chan says, “Every maybe has a wife called Maybe-Not.”