EPILOGUE: ANNA MAY WONG ON THE MONEY

Anna May Wong, image on US quarter (Photograph by Yunte Huang)

ON A FINE SPRING DAY in 2022, I drove from Santa Barbara to a dinner party at a friend’s house in Pacific Palisades. As it was a Saturday, the often execrable Los Angeles traffic turned out to be as smooth as a babbling brook. So, with some extra time on my hands, I decided to make a field trip to the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, the final resting place of Anna May Wong.

There is a saying in Hollywood that one’s fame is measured by the distance one lies from the stars. Take a walk in Glendale’s Forest Lawn Cemetery and look at the great vaults and crypts with multicolored marbles, and you’ll know the truth of that saying. In fact, after Jean Harlow’s early death and grand burial ceremonies in 1937, there was a rushed land grab in the vicinity of her mausoleum. Driving her paramour Eric Maschwitz and his friend Val Gielgud to Pasadena one day that summer, Anna May stopped by Forest Lawn and showed her British visitors a prime example of what Evelyn Waugh would call “an Anglo-American Tragedy”—that is, America’s eschatological obsession that became a real estate craze. In his novel The Loved One (1948), inspired by his own visit to Forest Lawn, Waugh satirized how death was wrapped up and sold American-style like a package trip. In his diary from that tour, Gielgud wrote about “passing the Forest Lawn Cemetery, where trustification has been applied to the limit to the whole apparatus of death and burial.” Impressed by Irving Thalberg’s $3,500 vault, Gielgud repeated the Hollywood cliché he had just heard from Anna May: “The nearer to dead ‘stars’ you wish to lie, the more you must pay—the late Miss Harlow being, I gather, the summit of this grisly pyramid.”¹

Angelus Rosedale, however, is no Forest Lawn. Lying quietly off Highway 10 and bordering on South Central Los Angeles, it is one of the oldest cemeteries west of the Rockies. Founded in 1884 as Rosedale, it was the first Los Angeles cemetery open to all races and creeds. Hemmed in by Washington Boulevard, Normandie Avenue, and Venice Boulevard, the cemetery now occupies sixty-five acres. Even though it has a fair share of Hollywood stardust, including the gravesites of Todd Browning and Marshall Neilan, both of whom romanced Anna May, Rosedale was better known as a burial ground for politicians and leading community members, with notable internments including several former mayors and David Burbank, after whom the city of Burbank was named.²

After her passing in 1961, Anna May was remembered in a service at the Unity by the Sea Church, officiated by Reverend Sue Sikking, whose teachings had brought much consolation to her desolate final years on Earth. Afterward, Anna May’s body was cremated and her ashes were entombed next to the graves of her mother and her sister Margaretta, who had died in infancy.

Having seen pictures of the trio’s shared gravestone, and having memorized the plot number found online, I thought I could find the site without difficulty by relying on my sixth sense. Wandering around the old cemetery full of wildflowers, brambles, and ancient engravings dating back more than a century, I was soon lost. Following a path lined with tall palms, I went back to the office near the cast-iron front gate. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had by then killed about one million Americans, the office was closed to visitors without an appointment. But I rang the doorbell anyway, thinking they could at least answer a simple question. A young man in a polo shirt opened the door but held it to keep me from entering. After I told him I was looking for Anna May Wong’s grave, he raised his thick eyebrows: “Who?” I repeated her name, spelling out “Wong” and adding that she was a famous actress who had died long ago. He told me to wait and then shut the door.

Standing under the small white portico, I gazed at the eternal blue sky of Southern California that looked like the background of a play the stage manager had been too lazy to change. The giant palms soaring over the grassy ground looked parched; some of them had even turned dark, like stone pillars blackened by fire or time.

After a long ten minutes, the clerk returned and handed me a photocopied map on which a spot had been marked with a blue pen.

Map in hand, I quickly located the grave in an older section of the cemetery. On a brown marble slab erected on a cement base, the horizontal English inscription on the top read: LEE TOY WONG, OUR BELOVED MOTHER. Beneath that were three Chinese names displayed vertically. Anna May’s was on the right: DAUGHTER, LIU TSONG. In front of the headstone stood a metal tube holding an American flag, and behind it was a Dusty Miller with its yellow flowers and silvery tomentose leaves. Some people also call the plant Silver Dust. It reminded me of fairy dust, the glittery powder coming out of the magic wand of stardom that had touched young Anna May at the beginning of her long journey. I also recalled her mother’s admonition at the time. Having ventured out against her mother’s wishes, and having captivated the world with her charm and talent, Anna May was finally back in the maternal embrace, forever.

Anna May Wong grave, Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, Los Angeles (Photograph by Yunte Huang)

According to Chinese custom, one should bow before the grave, as Anna May had done at the burial ground of the Ming emperors outside Peking many years earlier. But perhaps instigated by the American flag, I placed a pebble on the cement base and said a silent prayer. Since Anna May was familiar with both Chinese and American traditions, I was sure she would understand my gesture.

Before going to my friend’s, I had one more stop to make. A cemetery might be the final resting place of one’s physical being, but for an actor there is another, in some ways more permanent, place for their legacy—the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Driving down Washington, I passed streets with august names: Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Roosevelt. Turning north around a corner, I was soon on bustling Western Avenue, the aorta of Koreatown, lined with shops and restaurants displaying Korean signs. News on the car radio reminded me that it was actually the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. In the wake of the Rodney King beating and the acquittal of LAPD officers, angry protests erupted in South Central, the Black neighborhood, and quickly turned into riots that spilled across the highway into Koreatown. For six days, the former frontier city that had seen plenty of race unrest in its long history—the Chinese Massacre in 1871, the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, the Watts Riots in 1965, to name just a few—once again witnessed widespread looting, assault, and arson. By the time the joint forces of the California National Guard, US military, and federal agencies put an end to the carnage, sixty-three people had died, thousands had been injured, and Koreatown suffered disproportionate damage.

Coincidentally, during my first summer in America, I had taken a Greyhound bus from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to San Francisco. On that three-day journey in early May of 1992, I was as excited as Jack Kerouac hitchhiking on LSD. In Los Angeles, as my bus rolled through the forlorn district, I saw astonishing remnants of the devastation—singed walls, broken storefronts, and boarded-up windows. Going up Western Avenue now, after visiting Anna May Wong’s gravesite, I felt that I was driving through history and, more palpably, a forgotten lane of my own memory.

Even with the raging pandemic, Hollywood Boulevard was still packed with tourists on a Saturday afternoon. Open-top tour buses crowded with out-of-town folks wheeled around, making scheduled stops at celebrity houses. They reminded me of those rubberneck cars that took people slumming in Chinatown in the early days. As I have written in this book, the initial rise of Hollywood had something to do with American curiosity about Chinatown, which fortuitously also opened a door for Anna May. The inauguration of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on May 18, 1927, an event she had attended, marking the height of Hollywood’s chinoiserie, also gave a huge boost to Tinseltown tourism. Today, the Chinese Theatre, whose courtyard with celebrities’ handprints and signatures inspired the Walk of Fame, remains a center of attraction for visitors.

A short distance from the Chinese Theatre, on the sidewalk near the corner of Hollywood and Vine, once described by Ross Macdonald as “where everything ends and a great many things begin,” I found the terrazzo-and-brass star bearing the name of Anna May Wong.³ Fortunately, she had received the honor in 1960, a year before her passing. Curiously, lying next to her star was that of the Chinese actress Lucy Liu. In fact, at her ceremony on May 1, 2019, Liu paid homage to Anna May for being a pioneer who had to endure racism, marginalization, and exclusion, blazing a trail for the future generation of Asian American artists. Pointing out the close proximity of their stars on the sidewalk, Liu quipped, “We can actually start our own little Chinatown right here.”⁴ An affectionate expression, the remark also contained a dig at an industry still struggling with the racism that has plagued the entire nation. Actually, from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre to the film set of The Good Earth to the manufactured China City, Hollywood has always had its Chinatown, except that it’s usually been a town without Chinese.

Anna May Wong’s star, Hollywood Walk of Fame (Photograph by Yunte Huang)

Driving down Sunset Boulevard toward my evening rendezvous, I peered at the strip through the windshield tinted by a layer of golden twilight. Blue jacarandas dotted the sidewalks, disrupting the monotony of palms and lampposts. Night prowlers were not out yet, but I could feel the pulse of the strip quickening, as neon signs began to stir and valets stood ready in front of clubs and restaurants, showing a look of eagerness.

A few months earlier, I had heard the news that the United States Mint had planned to issue quarter coins commemorating, in the first year, five American women: African American poet Maya Angelou, Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller, astronaut Sally Ride, New Mexico suffragist Nina Otero-Warren, and Anna May Wong. Like Lucy Liu’s poignant tribute to her a century after Anna May’s film debut, I knew it would be a long-overdue honor for her image to appear on US currency. But as someone who had tracked her life and career in awe and admiration, I also knew that Anna May Wong had always been on the money.