1. Raymond Lou, “The Chinese American Community of Los Angeles, 1870–1900: A Case of Resistance, Organization, and Participation” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1982), p. 118.
2. Robert L. Wagner, “Two Chinese Girls,” Rob Wagner’s Script (November 21, 1936), p. 1. See also Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 14; Shirley Jennifer Lim, Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), p. 21.
1. In the Chinese zodiac, each of the twelve animal signs is further divided into five types, corresponding to the five elements, forming a sixty-year cycle: Gold, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth.
2. Hodges, pp. 2, 9.
3. “Brief Weather Report,” Los Angeles Times (January 3, 1905), p. I1; “The Fall of Port Arthur,” Los Angeles Times (January 3, 1905), p. II6.
4. “Glad Hand for People,” Los Angeles Times (January 3, 1905), p. I4; “About Mediation,” Los Angeles Times (January 4, 1905), p. I7.
5. “Japanese in High Feather,” Los Angeles Times (January 3, 1905), p. II12; “Geisha Girls Sing,” Los Angeles Times (January 4, 1905), p. II8.
6. “Railroads Break Records,” Los Angeles Herald (January 3, 1905), p. 5.
7. “Rain Helped Tournament,” Los Angeles Times (January 2, 1905), p. I15.
8. “Rose Festival Draws Thousands,” Los Angeles Herald (January 3, 1905), p. 1.
9. “Flags and Flowers, Throngs and Glory,” Los Angeles Times (January 3, 1905), p. II1; “Envoy Wong Comes to See,” Los Angeles Times (January 4, 1905), p. II1.
10. “Bigger Ships and Bigger Guns,” Los Angeles Times (January 4, 1905), p. II12.
11. “The Immigration Evil,” Los Angeles Times (January 3, 1905), p. II6.
1. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, ed. Sam Bass Warner Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 91, 100.
2. “Jacob A. Riis on Slum and Paradise,” Los Angeles Times (January 4, 1905), p. II1.
3. David L. Ulin, ed., Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (New York: Library of America, 2002), p. 1; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 58.
4. Lou, pp. 20–21; Stan Steiner, Fusang: The Chinese Who Built America (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 79–81.
5. Yunte Huang, Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (New York: Liveright, 2018).
6. Lou, p. 20.
7. Ibid.; Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 14.
8. Los Angeles Star (July 13, 1861); Maurice H. Newmark and Marco R. Newmark, eds., Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1916), pp. 297–98.
9. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1973), p. 86.
10. Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 39; Lou, pp. 3–4.
11. Daniels, pp. 59–62.
12. Lou, pp. 33–34.
13. Zesch, p. 19.
14. Lou, p. 5.
15. Nora Sterry, “Housing Conditions in Chinatown Los Angeles,” Journal of Applied Sociology (November–December 1922), pp. 71–73; Roberta S. Greenwood, Down by the Station: Los Angeles Chinatown, 1880–1933 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 1996), pp. 16, 19.
16. Sterry, “Housing Conditions in Chinatown Los Angeles,” p. 71.
17. Fae Myenne Ng, Foreword to Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020), p. ix.
1. Wen Yiduo, Selected Poems, ed. Zhou Liangpei (Wuhan, China: Changjiang Art and Literature Press, 1988), p. 70; translation mine.
2. The word Lee on the sign of SAM LEE LAUNDRY or SING LEE LAUNDRY is actually the character for “profit” rather than the last name “Lee.” See John Jung, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain (Las Vegas, NV: Yin & Yang Press, 2007), p. 55.
3. Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tchen (New York: New York University Press, 1987), p. 2.
4. National Laundry Journal (Chicago: Dowst Brothers Co., 1905), p. 41.
5. Zesch, p. 17.
6. Siu, pp. 46–47.
7. Hodges, p. 6.
8. Zesch, p. 18; Lou, pp. 125, 64–65.
9. Greenwood, p. 21.
10. Hodges, p. 2; Lisa See, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 64.
11. Hodges, p. 6; Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 59–60.
12. Hodges, p. 2.
1. Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry: An Autobiography (New York: Collier Books, 1965); John Baxter, Von Sternberg (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), pp. 16, 37.
2. Lou, p. 121.
3. Siu, p. 60.
4. Ibid., pp. 61, 51.
5. Ibid., p. 62.
6. Ibid., p. 68.
7. Ibid., p. 52.
8. Lou, p. 122.
9. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 3, 21.
10. Sabine Haenni, “Filming ‘Chinatown’: Fake Visions, Bodily Transformations,” in Peter X. Feng, ed., Screening Asian Americans (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p. 21.
11. Ibid.; Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), p. 89.
12. Jung, Chinese Laundries, p. 99.
13. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 101.
14. Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities (London: Wallflower, 2000), pp. 20–21; Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in T. Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), pp. 56–62.
15. McDonald, p. 21; Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By.… (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 2.
16. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 60, 72.
17. Baxter, p. 20.
1. Los Angeles Unified School District, History of Schools: 1855-1972, 3d ed. (Los Angeles: Education Housing Branch, 1973), p. 8. According to the same record, the California Street School was closed in 1939.
2. Victor Low, The Unimpressible Race: A Century of Educational Struggle by the Chinese in San Francisco (San Francisco: East/West Publishing Company, 1982), pp. 59–67.
3. James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1988), pp. 66–68.
4. Harry Carr, “I Am Growing More Chinese—Each Passing Year!” Los Angeles Times (September 9, 1934), p. H3; Anna May Wong, “The True Life Story of a Chinese Girl,” Pictures (August 1926), pp. 107–8.
5. Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 214.
6. Wong, “The True Life Story,” p. 108.
7. Ibid.
8. Ng Poon Chew, “The Chinese in Los Angeles,” Land of Sunshine (October 1894), pp. 102–3.
9. Myra Paule, “Chinese Mission Thrives amid Squalor,” Los Angeles Times (January 24, 1926), p. 20.
10. Nora Sterry, “Social Attitudes of Chinese Immigrants,” Journal of Applied Sociology (July–August 1923), p. 326.
11. Wong, “The True Life Story,” p. 108; Hodges, p. 15.
1. McWilliams, p. 331.
2. Sklar, Movie-Made America, pp. 67–68; McDonald, p. 23.
3. Sklar, Movie-Made America, pp. 50–51.
4. McDonald, p. 33.
5. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 46.
6. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 61; Anna May Wong, “Wode zishu” (An Autobiography), Liangyou 114 (1936), p. 24; Carr, p. H3.
7. Hodges, p. 19.
8. Wong, “The True Life Story,” p. 108.
9. Nathanael West, The Complete Works of Nathanael West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), p. 316.
10. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 74.
11. Haenni, pp. 22–23.
12. Bonnie Tsui, American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods (New York: Free Press, 2009), pp. 114–16.
13. Wong, “The True Life Story,” p. 108.
14. Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 332; Timothy G. Turner, “Maid of Orient Unspoiled by Success Dips Her Ivory Hands in Suds,” Los Angeles Times (July 24, 1921), p. 1.
1. Anthony Chan, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 1905–1961 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), p. 30.
2. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 53.
3. Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discourse Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 33; Brownlow, Behind the Mask, pp. 320, 325.
4. Brownlow, Behind the Mask, p. 332.
5. Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021), p. 207.
6. Moving Picture World (May 1919), pp. 920–21; Brownlow, Behind the Mask, p. 327.
7. Carr, p. H3.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Brownlow, Behind the Mask, p. 330.
11. Lambert, p. 210; Axel Madsen, The Sewing Circle: Hollywood’s Greatest Secret—Female Stars Who Loved Other Women (New York: Open Road, 1995), p. 100.
12. Lambert, p. 210; Madsen, p. 115.
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. Northwestern-Newberry ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), p. 3.
2. Carr, p. H3.
3. Ibid.
4. Turner, p. 1.
5. Jack Spears, Hollywood: The Golden Era (New York: Castle Books, 1971), pp. 293–94; Hodges, pp. 35–36.
6. Brownlow, Behind the Mask, p. 337.
7. Photoplay (December 1923), p. 114.
8. Hodges, p. 36.
9. Wong, “The True Life Story,” p. 107.
1. Andrea Most, “ ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’: The Politics of Race in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific,” Theatre Journal 52:3 (2000), pp. 306–7.
2. Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 143.
3. Carr, p. H3.
4. Film Daily (December 3, 1922), p. 7; Variety (December 1, 1922), p. 35; New York Times (November 27, 1922), p. 18.
5. New York Times (November 27, 1922), p. 18; Variety (December 1, 1922), p. 35.
6. L. T. Troland, “Some Psychological Aspects of Natural Color Motion Pictures,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 11:32 (1927), pp. 687–88.
7. Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, “The Politics of Color,” Frames Cinema Journal 17 (2020), https://
8. Xin Peng, “Color-as-Hue and Color-as-Race: Early Technicolor, Ornamentalism and The Toll of the Sea (1922),” Screen 62:3 (Autumn 2021), pp. 299–300.
9. “Picture and People,” Motion Picture News (December 9, 1922), p. 2900.
10. New York Times (November 29, 1922), p. 24.
11. New York Times (November 27, 1922), p. 18.
1. Starr, Inventing the Dream, p. 313.
2. Madsen, pp. 124–26.
3. Starr, Inventing the Dream, pp. 324–29.
4. Ibid., p. 334; David Robinson, Hollywood in the Twenties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968), pp. 9–14.
5. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 77; Starr, Inventing the Dream, p. 335.
6. Starr, Inventing the Dream, p. 337.
7. Turner, p. 1.
8. Anthony Slide, Hollywood Unknowns: A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 82; Turner, p. 1.
9. A. Chan, p. 34.
1. James S. Peters, Sadakichi Hartmann, Alien Son: A Biography (Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2017), p. 11.
2. Starr, Inventing the Dream, p. 338.
3. Hodges, p. 49.
4. “Troubles of a Bagdad Thief,” New York Times (March 16, 1924), p. 5.
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), p. 182.
6. New York Times (March 18, 1924).
7. Rob Edelman, The Thief of Bagdad, in Magill’s Survey of Cinema, Silent Films, vol. 13, ed. Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1982), pp. 1109–10.
8. Peters, pp. 13, 107.
9. Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, ed. Richard Sieburth (New York: New Directions, 2003), p. 73.
10. “Police Clear Jam at Movie Premiere,” New York Times (March 19, 1924), p. 19.
11. A. Chan, p. 211.
12. “Fairbanks Wins Berlin,” New York Times (January 23, 1926), p. 19.
1. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1955), p. 330.
2. A. Chan, p. 37; Hodges, p. 53; “Re-Chinafying Herself: Ashamed No Longer,” South China Morning Post (January 25, 1924), p. 6.
3. Hodges, p. 47.
4. A. Chan, p. 37.
5. Arthur Dong, Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films (Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2019), pp. 223–25; Jenny Cho and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, Chinese in Hollywood (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2013), pp. 9–12.
6. Dong, pp. 228–29.
7. Emma-Lindsay Squier, “The Dragon Awakens,” Picture Play Magazine (January 1922), pp. 84–86.
8. Brownlow, Behind the Mask, p. 330.
9. Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 193.
10. A. Chan, p. 37.
11. Variety (September 17, 1924).
12. Todd Rainsberger, James Wong Howe: Cinematographer (San Diego, CA: A. S. Barnes, 1981), pp. 11–20, 152–53.
13. Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane, Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio, and Television Work (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), p. 39.
14. Ibid., pp. 39–40.
15. “Re-Chinafying Herself,” p. 6.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
1. Kracauer, pp. l-li.
2. George C. Warren, “Anna May Is Pure Delight,” San Francisco Chronicle (January 22, 1925), p. 11.
3. For the history and politics of casting Charlie Chan, see Huang, Charlie Chan.
4. Warren, p. 11.
5. V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting: The Cinema Writings of V. I. Pudovkin, trans. Ivor Montagu (London: Vision, 1954), p. 109.
6. Warren, p. 11.
7. Ibid.
8. Moon Kwan, An Anecdotal History of the Chinese Cinema (Zhongguo yintan waishi) (Hong Kong: Guangjiaojing Press, 1976), pp. 61–62.
9. Hans J. Wollstein, Vixens, Floozies and Molls: 28 Actresses of Late 1920s and 1930s Hollywood (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1999), p. 250; Leibfried and Lane, p. 12; A. Chan, p. 39.
10. Wollstein, p. 250.
11. “Picture Actors Jailed in Omaha Board Bill Dispute May Sue Hotel for $70,000,” San Francisco Chronicle (March 6, 1925), p. 4; Wollstein, p. 250; A. Chan, pp. 39–41; Leibfried and Lane, pp. 12–13.
1. James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere (New York: Mysterious Press, 1988), p. 115.
2. Alice Tildesley, “I Am Lucky That I Am Chinese,” San Francisco Chronicle (June 3, 1928), p. 3.
3. Cho, p. 23.
4. Ironically, the TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics manufacturer based in Canton, acquired the naming rights in 2013 and rebranded the historical landmark in Hollywood as TCL Chinese Theatre (Dong, p. 107).
5. Hodges, p. 60.
6. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Martin Secker, 1924), p. 160; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 3.
7. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 12–13.
8. Leibfried and Lane, p. 48.
9. Brownlow, Behind the Mask, p. 341.
10. Carr, p. H3.
11. Ibid.
12. Grace Kingsley, “Anna May Wong Goes to Europe for UFA,” Los Angeles Times (March 17, 1928), p. 1.
1. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. xiv; David Clay Large, Berlin: A Modern History (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 6, 157.
2. Quoted in Large, p. 211.
3. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), p. 178.
4. Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 1929–1939 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), pp. 2, 3, 29.
5. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, trans. Anthea Bell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), p. 338.
6. Stephen Spender, The Temple (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 185.
7. Walter Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong,” Die Literarische Welt (July 6, 1928), p. 213. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from German texts were translated by Wendy Xiaoxue Sun specifically for this book. I also wish to thank Marjorie Perloff for her help with the translations from German.
8. Thomas Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 89.
9. Large, p. 197.
10. Tim Bergfelder, “Negotiating Exoticism: Hollywood, Film Europe and the Cultural Reception of Anna May Wong,” in “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Devon, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1999), pp. 307–8.
11. Erich Gutinger, “A Sketch of the Chinese Community in Germany: Past and Present,” in The Chinese in Europe, ed. Gregor Benton and Frank Pieke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 201; Dagmar Yu-Dembski, “Cosmopolitan Lifestyles and ‘Yellow Quarters’: Traces of Chinese Life in Germany, 1921–1941,” in Chinatown in a Transnational World: Myths and Realities of an Urban Phenomenon, ed. Vanessa Künnemann and Ruth Mayer (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 65–67.
12. For a humorous autobiographical account of Billy Wilder as a hired dancer at Hotel Eden, see Noah Isenberg, ed., Billy Wilder on Assignment, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 23–42.
13. Large, p. 190.
14. Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 157.
15. Ibid., p. 86.
16. Gay, p. 128.
1. Anna May Wong, “I Am Very Happy,” Mein Film 123 (1928), p. 6.
2. Gongzhen Ge, “Anna May Wong Missing Homeland,” Life Weekly 4 (1928–1929), p. 258.
3. Bergfelder, “Negotiating Exoticism,” pp. 308–9.
4. Cynthia Walk, “Anna May Wong and Weimar Cinema: Orientalism in Postcolonial Germany,” in Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia, ed. Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), p. 141.
5. Ibid., p. 143.
6. Lim, p. 37.
7. Ernst Jaeger, “FilmKritik,” Film-Kurier (August 21, 1928). It may be worth noting that some scholars have made an interesting mistake transcribing/translating a key word in Jaeger’s review. The original German sentence reads, “Anna May Wong, die östliche hat lang genug in den exotischen Gärten Kaliforniens gefilmt.” Unfortunately, the word exotischen (exotic) was rendered as “erotic” in some previous studies (see Hodges, p. 84; Lim, p. 50).
8. Quoted in Bergfelder, “Negotiating Exoticism,” p. 310.
9. The Bioscope (September 19, 1928); New York Times (September 22, 1928); Variety (January 1, 1929).
10. Carr, p. H3.
11. Close Up 3:6 (December 1928), p. 9.
1. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 104–5.
2. Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong”; John Scott, “European Bouquets Get Notice: Chinese Flapper Crashes Continent Before Finding Recognition Here,” Los Angeles Times (August 23, 1931), p. 2.
3. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University, Press, 2016), p. 21.
4. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 34.
5. Benjamin, One-Way Street, pp. 447–48.
6. Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong”; Lim, p. 39.
7. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea (1906; Boston: Shambhala, 2001), p. 27.
8. Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong.”
9. Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 52.
10. Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong.” For previous studies of this rare rendezvous between Walter Benjamin and Anna May Wong, as well as varying English renditions of the German text, see Hodges, pp. 77–79; Lim, pp. 39–50.
11. Die Literarische Welt (The Literary World) was one of the leading journals with a circulation of about thirty thousand among the cultural elites in Germany in the interwar years: Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers, ed. Martina Dervis (New York: Verso, 1997), p. 159. It is worth noting that, in 2009, Chinese American artist Patty Chang made a two-channel video installation, titled The Product of Love—Die Waren der Liebe, about the meeting between Wong and Benjamin. The first video alternates among three people, each individually translating Benjamin’s German essay into English, illuminating the ease with which mistranslation occurs in Benjamin’s “reading” of Wong. “On the other screen, two Chinese actors portray Benjamin and Wong’s meeting as an imaginary, intimate encounter. The installation restages and recontextualizes this meeting as a porno in China with Chinese television actors—a reversal of sorts, turning a Chinoiserie into a Western” (Exhibition Brochure, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 2009).
12. Okakura, p. 14.
1. Film-Kurier (April 11, 1929), quoted in Bergfelder, “Negotiating Exoticism,” p. 311.
2. Sozialistische Bildung (May 1929), quoted in Walk, p. 147.
3. Variety (May 8, 1929); The Bioscope (December 18, 1929).
4. Hodges, p. 79.
5. Charles Baudelaire, The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), back cover.
6. Peukert, p. 96; Anton Kaes et al., eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 195, 206–7.
7. Peukert, p. 99.
8. Patrice Petro, ed., Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 270–71.
9. Karin Wieland, Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Liveright, 2015), p. 113.
10. Hodges, pp. 86–87.
1. G. C. Lawrence, ed., The British Empire Exhibition 1924 Official Guide (London: Fleetway Press, 1924), p. 79.
2. Anne Witchard, Lao She in London (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), pp. 60–61.
3. Mary De Rachewiltz et al., eds., Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 317.
4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 17.
5. China Express and Telegraph (January 15, 1925).
6. China Express and Telegraph (January 29, October 15, and October 29, 1925); Witchard, p. 107; Sarah Cheang, “Dragons in the Drawing Room: Chinese Embroideries in British Homes, 1860–1949,” Textile History 39:2 (2008), pp. 223–49.
7. Witchard, p. 109; Xiao Qian, Traveller without a Map (London: Hutchinson, 1990), p. 75.
8. Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), pp. 40–42. According to the 1927 law, a minimum of 7.5 percent of all films distributed and 5 percent of all films exhibited in the year 1928 had to be made in the UK. These percentages were to rise by increments of 2.5 percent until they both reached 20 percent in 1936. See also Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 220.
9. John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” https://
10. For an excellent analysis of the aesthetics and politics of Anna May Wong’s wardrobe in Piccadilly, see Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 66–73. See also A. Chan, pp. 216–18.
11. Cheng, p. 67.
12. Witchard, p. 95.
13. Audrey Rivers, “Anna May Wong Sorry She Cannot Be Kissed,” Movie Classics (November 1939): p. 39.
14. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 179.
15. The Bioscope (February 6, 1929); Close Up 5:1 (July 1929); Variety (July 24, 1929); Marjory Collier, “The Chinese Girl: East Meets West in Anna May Wong,” The Picturegoer (May 1930), p. 27.
1. In the Old Testament, there is a similar story about King Solomon’s wisdom. Facing two women making claims on a child, Solomon ordered that the child be sliced into two parts, with each woman receiving half. The real mother begged the king for compassion: “O my lord, give her the living child, and by no means kill him!” But the other woman said, “Let him be neither mine nor yours, but divide him.” So the king gave the first woman her child back (Kings 3:16–28).
2. Basil Dean, Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography, 1927–1972 (London: Hutchinson, 1973), p. 67.
3. Ibid., p. 65.
4. Ibid., p. 66.
5. James Laver, The Circle of Chalk: A Play in Five Acts Adapted from the Chinese by Klabund (London: William Heinemann, 1929), pp. 4, 6, 69, 103.
6. Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 4–7.
7. Neil Okrent, “Right Place, Wong Time,” Los Angeles Magazine (May 25, 1990), p. 84.
8. Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp. 47–48.
9. A. Chan, p. 56.
10. Sydney W. Carroll, “A Star of Film and Drama: Anna May Wong,” South China Morning Post (April 15, 1929), p. 9.
11. Thomas Kiernan, Sir Larry: The Life of Laurence Olivier (New York: Times Books, 1981), p. 61.
12. Quoted in Barrie Roberts, “Anna May Wong: Daughter of the Orient,” Classic Images 270 (December 1997), p. 21.
13. Quoted in Anthony Holden, Olivier (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), p. 53.
14. Dean, pp. 67–68.
15. Los Angeles Examiner (August 12, 1934).
16. Roberts, p. 21.
1. Time (October 1, 1934); Judy Chu, “Anna May Wong,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Center, 1976), p. 286.
2. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), p. 42.
3. Rose Eichenbaum, The Directors Within: Storytellers of Stage and Screen (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), p. 6.
4. Sternberg, p. 32.
5. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 154.
6. Wieland, p. 162.
7. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 176.
8. Anna May Wong, “Mein erstes Wort im Sprechfilm” (My First Word in a Sound Film), Mein Film (July 22, 1930).
9. Scott, p. 2.
10. Lichtbildbühne (February 28, 1930); Film-Kurier (February 27, 1930).
11. The Bioscope (March 12, 1930); New York Times (November 3, 1930); Variety (November 5, 1930).
12. Hebdo-Cinéma (October 4, 1930); Cinémonde (September 18, 1930); New York Times (April 12, 1931).
13. Hodges, p. 99.
14. Screenplay Secrets (October 1931); Hodges, pp. 108–9.
1. “Anna May Wong, Combination of East and West,” New York Herald Tribune (November 9, 1930), p. G5.
2. J. P. O’Malley, “Edgar Wallace, Literary Mercenary,” The American Conservative 15:1 (2016), p. 51.
3. Margaret Lane, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), pp. 269–70.
4. “Anna May Wong, Combination of East and West,” p. G5.
5. “All for Mr. Wallace,” New York Times (November 16, 1930), p. 3.
6. “Anna May Wong, Combination of East and West,” p. G5.
7. Edgar Wallace, On the Spot (Middlesex, UK: Echo Library, 2006), p. 2.
8. In On the Spot, Edgar Wallace mistakenly described Minn Lee as a graduate of Columbia University, unaware that women in those years would graduate from Barnard College, not Columbia.
9. Brooks Atkinson, “Presenting Edgar Wallace,” New York Times (October 30, 1930), p. 7.
10. “Anna May Wong, Combination of East and West,” p. G5.
11. “Injuries Fatal to Mrs. Wong: Mother of Oriental Film Actress Dies Following Auto Accident,” Los Angeles Times (November 12, 1930), p. 5; Steven J. Dubner, “The Perfect Crime,” Freakonomics Radio Podcast (May 1, 2014), https://
1. Hodges, p. 113.
2. Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (San Jose, CA: New Millennium Library, 2001), p. 13.
3. Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1972), pp. 72–73.
4. Huang, Charlie Chan, pp. 146–60.
5. Sax Rohmer, The Daughter of Fu Manchu (New York: Zebra Books, 1986), pp. 241, 148, 60, 143.
6. Richard Corliss, “That Old Feeling: Anna May Win,” Time (February 3, 2005), http://
7. Hodges, p. 114.
8. New York Times (August 22, 1931); Variety (August 25, 1931).
9. “Dragon Lady,” Urban Dictionary, https://
10. Eugene Franklin Wong, On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Motion Pictures (New York: Arno Press, 1978), p. 15.
11. Louise Leung, “East Meets West,” Hollywood Magazine (January 1938), p. 55.
12. Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls, and Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 9.
13. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 11.
14. Miriam Hansen, introduction to Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. viii.
15. Yiman Wang, “The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong’s Yellow Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Era,” Camera Obscura 20:3 (2005), pp. 167–69.
16. Ibid., pp. 160–61.
17. Ken Hanke, Charlie Chan at the Movies: History, Filmography, and Criticism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1989), p. 45.
18. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1996), pp. 35–36.
19. Wang, p. 176.
1. Anna May Wong, “Manchuria,” Beverly Hills Script 5:153 (January 16, 1932), pp. 6–7.
2. Sternberg, p. 49.
3. Gay, p. 102.
4. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), p. 3.
5. Sternberg, p. 262.
6. Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), p. 125.
7. “Even Chinese Think Oland Is Oriental,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (February 10, 1932), p. 5.
8. “Carlton Theatre, Shanghai Express,” London Times (March 18, 1932), p. 2.
9. Riva, p. 127.
10. Wollstein, p. 253.
11. Donald Spoto, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 39.
12. Michael Blowen, “Hollywood Hotline,” Boston Globe (September 28, 1990).
13. Riva, p. 127.
14. Ibid., p. 128.
15. Nora M. Alter, “The Legs of Marlene Dietrich,” in Dietrich Icon, ed. Gerd Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 60.
16. Vanity Fair (March 1932).
17. Sternberg, p. 263.
18. Ironically, in the recent Netflix miniseries Hollywood (2020), the self-aggrandizing Tinseltown rewrote history by having Anna May Wong, played by Taiwan-born Michelle Krusiec, win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
1. Sklar, Movie-Made America, pp. 161–62.
2. Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories (New York: Bantam, 2003), p. 37.
3. A. Chan, p. 242.
4. Wong, “Bamboo, or China’s Conversion to Film.”
5. “Wong’s Beauty Talk to Draw Record Crowd,” San Francisco Chronicle (October 2, 1931), p. 13.
6. “Chinese Star Advises Care in Makeup,” San Francisco Chronicle (October 13, 1931), p. 15; A. Chan, p. 74.
7. New York Times (September 22, 1934); Film Daily (September 22, 1934); Motion Picture Exhibitor (October 1, 1934); The Times (London) (August 20, 1934), p. 12.
8. “British Film Success in New York,” The Times (London) (September 25, 1934), p. 4.
9. Hodges, p. 144.
1. Sternberg, p. 62, 102.
2. A. Chan, p. 75; Hodges, p. 140.
3. “Music Hall Marks,” Liverpool Evening Echo (January 30, 1934).
4. Tim Bergfelder et al., Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 193.
5. Alan Schroeder and Heather Lehr Wagner, Josephine Baker: Entertainer (New York: Chelsea House Publications, 2006), pp. 51–52.
6. “China Rises Out of Hollywood,” Picturegoer Supplement (December 18, 1937).
7. Quoted in Dong, p. 69.
8. Erich Schwartzel, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (New York: Penguin, 2022), pp. xiii, 6.
9. Beverly Hills Script (July 13, 1935), p. 21.
10. Quoted in Dong, pp. 78–79.
11. See Anna May Wong, letter to Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, December 16, 1935, Beinecke Library, Yale University; cited hereafter as CVV.
12. Ray Coll, “Anna May Scorns Minor Role: Chinese Star Leaves Hollywood Flat,” Honolulu Advertiser (January 30, 1936), p. 3.
13. Victor Jew, “Metro Goldwyn Mayer and Glorious Descendant” (paper presented to 2003 meeting of American Historical Association). Quoted in Hodges, p. 154.
14. Dong, p. 73.
15. “Wrecking Crews Begin Clearing Depot Site,” Los Angeles Times (December 23, 1933), p. 2.
16. Los Angeles Examiner (March 8, 1936).
17. Carolyn Anspacher, “Star Goes ‘Home’: Anna May Wong Leaves for China,” San Francisco Chronicle (January 24, 1936), p. 17.
1. Anna May Wong, “Anna May Wong Tells of Voyage on 1st Trip to China,” New York Herald Tribune (May 17, 1936), p. B1.
2. Ibid.
3. Anspacher, p. 17.
4. “Newsmen, Photographers Rush on Hoover to See Noted Film Star,” The China Press (February 12, 1936), p. 5.
5. Wong, “Anna May Wong Tells of Voyage,” p. B6.
6. Ibid.
7. Melville, p. 483.
8. Wong, “Anna May Wong Tells of Voyage,” p. B6.
9. Anna May Wong, “Anna May Wong Relates Arrival in Japan, Her First Sight of the Orient,” New York Herald Tribune (May 24, 1936), p. B1.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., pp. B1–B2.
14. Ibid., p. B2.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.; Anna May Wong, “Anna May Wong ‘Amazed’ at Chinese Appetite,” New York Herald Tribune (June 7, 1936), p. B2.
17. Wong, “Anna May Wong Relates Arrival in Japan,” p. B1.
18. Anna May Wong, “Anna May Wong Recalls Shanghai’s Enthusiastic Reception,” New York Herald Tribune (May 31, 1936), p. B2.
19. Ibid., pp. B2, B6.
1. Louis L’Amour, Yondering: Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 2018), p. 111.
2. L’Amour, p. 115; Harriet Sergeant, Shanghai (London: Trafalgar Square, 2002), p. 9.
3. J. G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 286–87. Ballard, a famous British writer, was born in Shanghai in 1930 and lived there with his family till the end of World War II. For a detailed account of his childhood in Shanghai, a fascinating experience that might have molded the imagination of the future master of dystopian fiction, see Ballard’s memoir, Miracle of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography (New York: Liveright, 2008).
4. Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 16.
5. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (London: Faber and Faber, 1939), pp. 227–28.
6. Wong, “Anna May Wong Recalls Shanghai’s Enthusiastic Reception,” p. B6.
7. “Mob Meets Chinese Film Star at Shanghai,” South China Morning Post (February 17, 1936), p. 11; “Many Friends Greet Anna May Wong,” The China Press (February 12, 1936), pp. 1, 12.
8. “Many Friends Greet Anna May Wong,” p. 1.
9. “Mob Meets Chinese Film Star at Shanghai,” p. 11; “Many Friends Greet Anna May Wong,” p. 1.
10. Wong, “Anna May Wong Recalls Shanghai’s Enthusiastic Reception,” p. B6.
11. Anna May Wong, CVV, February 22, 1936.
12. Hui-lan Koo, An Autobiography as Told to Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer (New York: Dial Press, 1943), p. 258.
13. Wong, “Anna May Wong Recalls Shanghai’s Enthusiastic Reception,” p. B6.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Koo, pp. 255–56.
17. Andrew David Field, “Freddy Kaufmann, Shanghai Club Impresario and Master of the Cathay Hotel Tower Club 1935–1938),” http://
18. Pat Patterson, “The Dawn Patrol,” The China Press (March 30, 1936).
19. Ken Cuthbertson, Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 132.
20. Wong, “Anna May Wong Recalls Shanghai’s Enthusiastic Reception,” p. B6.
1. Wong, “Anna May Wong ‘Amazed’ at Chinese Appetite,” p. B2.
2. Koo, p. 265.
3. Ibid., p. 266; Wong, “Anna May Wong ‘Amazed’ at Chinese Appetite,” p. B2.
4. Koo, p. 260.
5. Yu Dafu, “Malady of Spring Nights,” trans. Yunte Huang and Glenn Mott, in Yunte Huang, ed., The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature: Writings from the Mainland in the Long Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), p. 60.
6. Koo, p. 263.
7. Wong, “Anna May Wong ‘Amazed’ at Chinese Appetite,” p. B2.
8. Ibid.
9. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. John S. Whitley and Arnold Goldman (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 145.
10. Wong, “Anna May Wong ‘Amazed’ at Chinese Appetite,” p. B2.
11. Ibid.
12. Susan Blumberg-Kason, “Ballet in the City: Jewish Contributions to the Performing Arts in 1930s Shanghai,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 18, 2021), https://
13. Ned Kelly, “Emily Hahn: The American Writer Who Shocked ’30s Shanghai,” That’s Mags (January 28, 2020), https://
14. Emily Hahn, “The Big Smoke,” The New Yorker (February 15, 1969), https://
15. Cuthbertson, pp. 147–49.
16. Emily Hahn, China to Me: A Partial Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944), p. 1.
17. Ibid., p. 37.
18. “Columbia Country Club,” Historic Shanghai, https://
19. James Carter, Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), p. 133.
20. Hahn, China to Me, p. 37.
1. Kamiyama Sojin, The Unpainted Faces of Hollywood (Tokyo: Jitsugyo no Nihonsha, 1930), pp. 60–61; Hodges, p. 65.
2. “Anna May Wong: Expresses View on Modern Chinese Women,” South China Morning Post (February 27, 1926), p. 7.
3. “Anna May Wong: Severely Criticized by the Chinese Press,” South China Morning Post (February 28, 1936), p. 8.
4. “Anna May Wong: Expresses View on Modern Chinese Woman,” p. 7; “Anna May Wong: Severely Criticized by the Chinese Press,” p. 8.
5. “Styles of Actress Are Noted Here,” The China Press (February 26, 1936), p. 11; “Among Anna May Wong’s Dresses,” The China Press (March 8, 1936), p. 11.
6. “Taishan Folks Refused to Let Anna May Wong Go Home,” Entertainment Weekly (March 2, 1936), p. 218.
7. “Anna May to Be Entertained Tonight,” The Hong Kong Telegraph (February 25, 1936); “Obituary,” Ta Kung Pao (September 15, 1982).
8. Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).
9. Hahn, China to Me, p. 37.
10. “Anna May Wong Visited Sir Robert Ho-tung Yesterday,” Tianguang Newspaper (February 27, 1936).
11. Frank Welsh, A History of Hong Kong (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 385.
12. Chris Wood, “ ‘Never Thought It Could Be as Cold as This in Hong Kong’: Charlie Chaplin on 1936 Visit,” South China Morning Post (March 8, 2018).
13. Anna May Wong, CVV, March 14, 1936.
14. “Anna May Wong Feted in South,” The China Press (March 17, 1936), p. 1; “Miss Anna May Back,” North China Herald (April 1, 1936), p. 9.
15. “Anna May Wong Passed through Hong Kong on Her Way to Canton Yesterday,” Hong Kong Industry and Commerce Daily (March 10, 1936), p. 1.
16. Hodges, pp. 8–9.
17. Lim, p. 170; Hodges, p. 169.
18. Leung, p. 40.
19. Huang, Charlie Chan, p. 252.
20. “Anna May Wong and Charlie Chan (Warner Oland),” Manhuajie 2 (1936), p. 34; translation mine.
21. “Anna May Gives a Farewell Tea Party,” South China Morning Post (March 24, 1936), p. 7.
1. “Anna May Wong Slipped into City” and “Japanese Forces Will Fire Blank Ammunition,” The China Press (March 27, 1936), p. 1.
2. Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 136–37.
3. The China Press (April 5, 1936), p. 4.
4. “Anna May Wong Will Study Mandarin Here,” The China Press (March 28, 1936), p. 1.
5. “Actress Plans Production of Historical Play,” The China Press (May 9, 1936), p. 1.
6. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 91–95.
7. Ibid., p. 95.
8. Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), p. 1.
9. Mark Cousins, “The Asian Aesthetic,” Prospect Magazine (November 21, 2004), https://
10. Lily Xiao Hong Lee et al., eds., Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), pp. 236–40.
11. Hu Die, Recollections of Hu Die, ed. Liu Huiqin (Taipei, Taiwan: Lianhe Press, 1987), p. 181; translation mine.
12. “Anna May Wong Visits Star Company,” Screen and Stage News 2:17 (1936), p. 7; “Butterfly Wu Accompanying Anna May Wong on Tour of Star Film Company,” Tianguang Newspaper (May 7, 1936), p. 2.
13. “Anna May Wong Quits Smoking,” Entertainment Biweekly 2:11 (1936), p. 218; “Anna May Wong’s Pet Peeves,” Linglong 1:12 (1931), p. 424; “Should We Welcome Anna May Wong?” Modern Films 5 (1936), p. 2; “Shameless Anna May Wong Should Be Executed,” Camera 53 (1932), p. 2.
14. “Anna May Wong Plans Sneak Departure to Avoid Crowds,” The China Press (February 19, 1936), p. 1.
15. Leung, p. 55.
16. “Anna May Wong Was ‘Resurrected,’ ” Tianguang Newspaper (May 22, 1936), p. 2.
1. Sternberg, pp. 263–64; George N. Kates, The Years That Were Fat: Peking, 1933–1940 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), p. 1.
2. “Anna May Wong Given Big Peiping Welcome,” The China Press (May 17, 1936), p. 1.
3. Lin Yutang, Imperial Peking: Seven Centuries of China (New York: Crown Publishers, 1961), pp. 12–13; Harold Acton, Peonies and Ponies (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 1.
4. Tuchman, pp. 148–49.
5. “$1,800,000 Lost in Six Days from Smuggling into Tientsin,” The China Press (May 17, 1936), p. 1.
6. Tuchman, p. 149.
7. Ibid., p. 155.
8. Paul French, Destination Peking (Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2021), pp. 22–23.
9. Ibid., p. 30.
10. Leung, p. 40.
11. Robert Sklar, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (2002), https://
12. “Anna May Wong Bows Repeatedly,” Entertainment Biweekly 2:21 (1936), p. 416.
13. Blumberg-Kason, “The Movie Star and Madame Salon.”
14. French, Destination Peking, pp. 76, 79; Edmund Backhouse, Décadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, ed. Derek Sandhaus (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2011), back cover.
15. French, Destination Peking, p. 35. In July 1937, at the age of twenty-eight, Parsons died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in Switzerland.
16. Alfred Emile Cornebise, Soldier Extraordinaire: The Life and Career of Brig. Gen. Frank “Pinkie” Dorn (1901–81) (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2019), p. 47.
17. Zheng Hanli, “Anna May Wong Returns to Shanghai from Peiping,” Wanying 3 (1936), p. 24; Blumberg-Kason, “The Movie Star and Madame Salon.”
18. Cornebise, p. 43.
19. L. C. Arlington and William Lewisohn, In Search of Old Peking (1935; New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1967), p. 141. See also French, Destination Peking, pp. 28–29.
20. Arlington and Lewisohn, p. 230; Cornebise, p. 46.
21. Cornebise, p. 47.
22. John P. Marquand, Thank You, Mr. Moto (1936; Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), pp. 136–37.
23. “An Interview with Anna May Wong Before Departure for England,” Entertainment Biweekly 2:35 (1936), p. 696; Zheng, p. 24; “Anna May Sees Infinite Possibilities for China Movies,” The China Press (September 17, 1936), p. 1.
1. “An Interview with Anna May Wong Before Departure for England,” p. 696.
2. Zheng, p. 24; “An Interview with Anna May Wong Before Departure for England,” p. 696; “Anna May Sees Infinite Possibilities for China Movies,” p. 1.
3. “An Interview with Anna May Wong Before Departure for England,” p. 696; “Anna May Wong Goes Chinese,” The Hong Kong Telegraph (August 13, 1936), p. 3.
4. Lao She, Rickshaw, trans. Jean M. James (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1979), p. 173; “Updates on Anna May Wong”; Hodges, p. 173.
5. “Anna May Wong Drew Lots in Tientsin,” Entertainment Biweekly 2:31 (1936), p. 618.
6. “Anna May Wong Goes Chinese,” p. 3.
7. “Anna May Wong to Reflect on China Under U.S. Palm,” The China Press (October 9, 1936), p. 3.
1. Paramount Press Clippings, Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences, Los Angeles.
2. Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 75.
3. Dhruti Bhagat, “How Long Have We Loved Pandas?” Boston Public Library Blogs, September 2, 2020, https://
4. Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 22. Even though Angel Island did not officially become a detaining station until 1910, incarcerating Chinese immigrants in waterfront cell blocks started as soon as the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882.
5. Hodges, p. 176.
6. A. Chan, p. 76.
7. David Amoruso, “How the Chicago Outfit Made Its Hollywood Dreams Come True,” Gangsters Inc. (November 30, 2010), https://
8. “Police Guard Film Figures: Mutilation Threatened Anna May Wong,” Daily Boston Globe (March 25, 1937), p. 32; “Chinese Film Star: Anna May Wong Threatened with Disfigurement,” South China Morning Post (March 26, 1937), p. 15; “Threat Sent to Producer, Screen Star,” Hartford Courant (March 25, 1937), p. 9.
9. “Anna May Wong Again Target of Threat Letter,” Los Angeles Times (April 3, 1937); Hodges, pp. 179–80.
10. “Anna May Wong’s ‘Boy Friend’ Is a 6-Foot 4-Inch Police Guard,” Hartford Courant (April 18, 1937), p. A6.
11. Eric Maschwitz, No Chip on My Shoulder (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1957), pp. 59–60.
12. Ibid., pp. 87–88.
13. Anna May Wong, CVV, June 19, 1937.
14. Maschwitz, pp. 103–4.
15. Ibid., pp. 105, 112, 115; Val Gielgud, Years of the Locust (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1947), pp. 152–57.
16. Maschwitz, p. 117.
17. Maschwitz wrote the song under his pseudonym, Holt Marvell. Hermione Gingold, How to Grow Old Disgracefully (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 54.
1. Tuchman, pp. 164–65.
2. Paul French, Bloody Saturday: Shanghai’s Darkest Day (Beijing: Penguin, 2017), p. 37.
3. “Anna May Wong: Sister Remains at Work in Shanghai,” South China Morning Post (September 12, 1937), p. 6.
4. Anna May Wong, CVV, January 3, 1938.
5. Mayme Peak, “Bombs Rain on Shanghai: Anna May Wong Plays On,” Daily Boston Globe (October 10, 1937), p. B6.
6. New York Times (December 25, 1937); Motion Picture Exhibitor (January 1, 1938).
7. Hye Seung Chung, Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), pp. 76–77; Liu, p. 31; Hodges, p. 185.
8. Chung, p. 76.
9. Madsen, pp. x–xi.
10. Riva, pp. 433–34; Spoto, p. 142; Madsen, p. 25.
11. Patricia White, “Black and White: Mercedes de Acosta’s Glorious Enthusiasms,” Camera Obscura 45 (2001), pp. 228–29.
12. Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 261; James Smalls, “Van Vechten’s Secret,” The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 13:3 (2006), p. 25.
13. “Anna May Wong’s Sister Arrives Home from Shell-Torn Shanghai,” Los Angeles Times (November 18, 1937), p. 1.
14. “Anna May Wong to Aid Fund,” New York Herald Tribune (June 22, 1938), p. 8.
15. Tsui, p. 116.
16. Ibid., p. 117.
17. Cho, pp. 55–56, 63.
18. “Chinese Hold Moon Festival,” Los Angeles Times (October 9, 1938), p. A16.
19. William Gow, “A Night in Old Chinatown: American Orientalism, China Relief Fundraising, and the 1938 Moon Festival in Los Angeles,” Pacific Historical Review 87:3 (2018), pp. 439–72.
20. “Colorful Moon Festival,” Federation News (November 1938).
21. Wong, “The True Life Story.”
1. Emily Dickinson, letter to Abiah Root, September 8, 1846, in Emily Fragos, ed. Emily Dickinson: Letters (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2011), p. 19.
2. Tuchman, pp. 214–15.
3. “Anna May Wong Aid Sale Sponsor,” Los Angeles Times (January 21, 1940), p. 3; “America and China Called Last of World’s Democracies,” Los Angeles Times (May 25, 1940), p. 1; George Atcheson Jr., “The Chargé in China (Atcheson) to the Secretary of State,” Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 893.20/792, No. 1583, September 17, 1943, https://
4. “China Relief Show Given: Anna May Wong Directs Oriental Talent on War Benefit,” Los Angeles Times (June 28, 1941), p. 1.
5. See the correspondence between Anna May Wong and Richard Walsh, dated February 23 and March 2, 1938, now in the John Day Company Archive at the Princeton University Libraries.
6. Derham Groves, Anna May Wong’s Lucky Shoes: 1939 Australia Through the Eyes of an Art Deco Diva (Ames, IA: Culicidae Press, 2011), pp. 11–15; “Gardening and Cooking: Chinese Star’s Hobbies,” Sydney Morning Herald (June 5, 1939), p. 4; Lim, p. 193.
7. Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rush and Global Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).
8. Hodges, p. 193.
9. New York Times (March 12, 1938); Motion Picture Exhibitor (March 1, 1938).
10. Variety (March 22, 1939).
11. New York Times (August 17, 1939); Variety (August 23, 1939).
12. Lim, p. 184.
13. Groves, pp. 15–16; “Bright Show at Tivoli: Anna May Wong,” The Argus (June 13, 1939), p. 12.
14. Groves, pp. 17–18.
15. “Chinese Film Star at Ball,” Sydney Morning Herald (August 9, 1939), p. 6.
16. “Anna May Wong Returns from Tour,” Los Angeles Times (September 5, 1939), p. 1.
1. Tuchman, p. 203.
2. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat,” https://
3. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 27–28, 34.
4. “Gardening and Cooking: Chinese Star’s Hobbies,” Sydney Morning Herald (June 5, 1939), p. 4; Wang Yun, “Anna May Wong in America,” Pacific Weekly 1:46 (1942), p. 855.
5. Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven: China’s Barnstorming Aviatrixes (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2008), pp. 62–63.
6. Anna May Wong, CVV, May 9, 1940.
7. “Mary Wong Hangs Self: Sister of Anna May Wong Ends Life in California,” New York Times (July 26, 1940), p. 36. The article listed her age as twenty-six, but, according to the 1940 US Census, Mary was thirty at the time of her death.
8. Mike Moffitt, “Tora! Tora! Tora! Over SF: When Imperial Japan ‘Attacked’ the City,” SFGate (December 7, 2016), https://
9. Starr, Embattled Dreams, p. 63.
10. “Summary Removal of Japs Demanded,” Los Angeles Times (February 25, 1942).
11. “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life (December 22, 1941), pp. 81–82.
12. Jeremy Chan, “Chinese American Responses to the Japanese American Internment and Incarceration,” Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal 16:2 (2019), pp. 212–14; Gary T. Ono, “Japanese American Fortune Cookie: A Taste of Fame or Fortune,” Discover Nikkei (November 1, 2007), http://
13. Slide, p. 195; Greg Robinson, “Otto and Iris Yamaoka: Asian Actors in 1930s Hollywood,” Discover Nikkei (April 17, 2022), http://
14. “Yuki Shimoda Does an Imitation,” Online Archive of California, https://
15. Starr, Embattled Dreams, p. 162.
16. Paramount Press Clippings, Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences, Los Angeles; “Anna May Wong Reports First Runs Really Are, in Alaska,” Los Angeles Times (July 25, 1944), p. 8.
17. Brian Taves, “Joseph H. Lewis, Anna May Wong, and Bombs over Burma,” in Gary D. Rhodes, ed., The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), p. 120.
18. Rhodes, pp. 1–8.
19. Taves, p. 129.
20. “Thrillers Share Bill,” Los Angeles Times (July 10, 1942), p. 17; Variety (August 19, 1942); New York Times (August 10, 1942).
21. Harrison’s Reports (December 5, 1942); Variety (January 20, 1943); “Signs New Contract,” New York Times (March 13, 1942), p. 22.
22. Nathan Masters, “The Shadow of War: Southern California’s WWII Dimout Restrictions,” USC Libraries, April 2, 2020, https://
23. “Anna May Wong Adds Work of Air-Raid Warden to Duties,” Los Angeles Times (December 8, 1942), p. 13.
1. Starr, Embattled Dreams, p. 162.
2. Pakula, p. 320; “Almond-Eyed Cleopatra Is ‘Power Behind Power’ in War-Time China,” Cincinnati Times-Star (April 29, 1938); Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, In Search of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 143.
3. Gardner Cowles, Mike Looks Back (New York: Gardner Cowles, 1985), p. 89; Pakula, pp. 410–11.
4. Laura Tyson Li, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Eternal First Lady (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), pp. 194–95; Pakula, 415–16.
5. Grace Tully, F.D.R., My Boss (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), p. 331; Pakula, pp. 425, 427.
6. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 282.
7. Paluka, pp. 418–21; Li, pp. 201–2; Leong, p. 149; New York Herald Tribune, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Examiner (February 19, 1943).
8. John Jung, Southern Fried Rice: Life in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South (Las Vegas, NV: Yin & Yang Press, 2016), pp. 33, 132–34, 240; Macon [GA] Daily Telegraph (September 22, 1910), p. 12; Leong, p. 110. “Heathen Chinee” had become a racial slur against the Chinese since the publication of the poem “The Heathen Chinee” by Bret Harte in 1870.
9. “Mme. Chiang Stirs Throng at Bowl,” Los Angeles Daily News (April 5, 1943), pp. 2, 5, 7; Leong, pp. 141–42.
10. Hedda Hopper, “Miss Bergman Again!,” Washington Post (April 28, 1943), p. 16.
11. Anna May Wong, CVV, March 17, 1944.
12. Anna May Wong, CVV, May 22, 1944.
13. Milady’s Style Parade and Recipe Book for 1935 (publisher unknown, 1935). See also “Anna May Wong’s Tea Cakes,” Hollywood Kitchen (July 26, 2021), https://
14. Anna May Wong, “Foreword,” in Fred Wing and Mabel Stegner, New Chinese Recipes (New York: Edelmuth Company, 1942), p. 1.
15. Hodges, p. 203.
16. Wong, “Foreword,” pp. 1–2; “Gardening and Cooking: Chinese Star’s Hobbies,” p. 4.
17. Wong, “Foreword,” p. 2.
18. Clementine Paddleford, “Chinese Suggest Recipes for Meat Economy,” New York Herald Tribune (September 3, 1942), p. 10.
19. Mayukh Sen, Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022), pp. 10–17.
20. Frank Dorn, A General’s Diary of Treasured Recipes (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953).
1. Starr, Embattled Dreams, p. 213.
2. Anna May Wong, CVV, January 6, 1945.
3. Alice Tildesley, “Why Waste Your Time?” Seattle Daily Times (April 9, 1939), p. 9.
4. Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 320.
5. Vicki Woods, “Meryl Streep: Force of Nature,” Vogue (December 12, 2011), https://
6. Anne E. Lincoln and Michael Patrick Allen, “Double Jeopardy in Hollywood: Age and Gender in the Careers of Film Actors, 1926–1999,” Sociological Forum 19:4 (2004), p. 614.
7. Robert K. Fleck and F. Andrew Hanssen, “Persistence and Change in Age-Specific Gender Gaps: Hollywood Actors from the Silent Era Onward,” SSRN (January 22, 2020), https://
8. Basinger, p. 320.
9. Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair, The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 256.
10. Abi Aherne, “ ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and the Ageing Woman: Sexism and Ageism in Hollywood,” Screen Queens (June 4, 2020), https://
11. Kashner and MacNair, pp. 15, 337–38.
12. Tricia Welsh, Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), p. 299.
13. Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (New York: Vintage Crime, 1998), p. 41.
14. Leibfried and Lane, p. 141.
15. Harrison’s Reports (March 19, 1949); New York Times (March 21, 1949).
16. Sklar, Movie-Made America, pp. 269–79.
17. Samuel Goldwyn, “Hollywood in the Television Age,” Hollywood Quarterly 4 (Winter 1949), p. 146.
18. Anna May Wong, CVV, December 31, 1951.
19. Conrad Doerr, “Anna May Wong,” Films in Review (December 1968), p. 661.
20. Leibfried and Lane, p. 163.
21. Variety (August 29, 1951).
22. Anna May Wong, CVV, October 3, 1952.
23. Quoted in Hodges, p. 217.
24. Sternberg, p. 62.
25. Anna May Wong, CVV, December 28, 1953; “Anna May Wong in Hospital,” New York Times (December 12, 1953).
1. Mitchell Stephens, “History of Television,” https://
2. Doerr, p. 661.
3. Todd James Pierce, “Disney and the Rose Parade—1955,” Disney History Institute, http://
4. Hodges, p. 221.
5. The New York World-Telegram (October 16, 1956).
6. Lim, p. 201.
7. Robert Creeley, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 132.
8. “Brentwood Living: Steve’s Eye View,” The Brentwood Citizen (July 31, 1958).
9. Doerr, p. 662.
10. See, p. 198.
11. Ibid., pp. 215, 284.
12. Myrna Oliver, “The Rev. Sue Sikking; Founder of Unity by the Sea Church,” Los Angeles Times (June 22, 1992).
13. Variety (June 8, 1960).
14. Doerr, p. 662; Fred Watkins, “Sessue Hayakawa Today,” Films in Review (June–July, 1966), p. 392.
15. Time (February 10, 1961); New York Times (February 4, 1961), p. 19; Los Angeles Times (February 4, 1961), p. 3.
16. South China Sunday Post (February 5, 1961), p. 9; Dagongbao (February 5, 1961), p. 1; Industrial and Commerce Evening Post (February 5, 1961), p. 1.
1. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (New York: Little, Brown, 1948); Gielgud, p. 154.
2. “Rosedale—The Opening of a New Cemetery in This City,” Los Angeles Times (November 20, 1884); Allan R. Ellenberger, Celebrities in Los Angeles Cemeteries: A Directory (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2001), p. 192.
3. Macdonald, p. 44.
4. https://