NOT A TYPICAL cradle-to-grave biography, Daughter of the Dragon examines the spectacular life and career of Anna May Wong, the Chinese American actress who once captivated the world with her enigmatic, almost tragic beauty. A screen siren far more complicated than her legendary celluloid image would suggest, she signed her publicity photos with the phrase “Orientally yours,” suggesting a touch of both demureness and defiance. She is, dare I say, a study in inscrutability, a loaded English word that carries the historical weight of Chinese travails in America. Like Charlie Chan and the Siamese Twins, heroes of my two previous books, Wong speaks with a subversive voice that, while avowing the unbridled creative spirit of this great nation, cries out against America’s bigotry and injustice toward those who simply look different.
I emphasize the word look, because who can forget Anna May Wong’s signature bangs, her almond eyes radiant as if with cosmic rays, her willowy figure wrapped in a silky qipao (cheongsam) as if it were her second skin? For vintage shine, we need look no further than the now-defunct Look magazine, which crowned Wong as “The World’s Most Beautiful Chinese Girl.” Wong herself once famously said, “You can forgive a woman for a face that is not beautiful more easily than for a dress that isn’t.”1 However, if mainstream America fell in love with Wong for her looks, that romance also became a taboo because of her looks. After all, she lived at a time when a Chinese would be deemed “too Chinese” to play such a role—a cultural absurdity plaguing both Hollywood and Main Street USA, a racial attitude that imposed a virtual form of foot-binding on Wong throughout her career.
Born into the steam and starch of her father’s laundry, Wong rose to global stardom. Such a rags-to-riches ascension may sound like an American cliché, but here’s a spoiler alert: Wong had to go to Europe to be recognized as American, to Australia to be hailed as Chinese. Facing the “triple jeopardy” of race, gender, and age in Hollywood, “The World’s Most Beautiful Chinese Girl” spent her twilight years nursing a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, running around a small shop in Santa Monica like an elderly maid with a Chinese feather duster. In other words, hers is not another Horatio Alger saga celebrating the American Dream. Instead, the Anna May Wong story is as much about her charm and drive as it is about how Hollywood as the world’s grandest Dream Factory turned into a dystopia, or a “Dream Dump,” as Nathanael West called it, for Wong and countless others like her; it is about those historical currents that molded, propelled, and frustrated her, and finally swept her up.
To write about Anna May Wong, then, is to write about the undulations of the American experience in the first half of the twentieth century. Wong came of age during the film industry’s meteoric rise in which it grabbed the lion’s share of the American imagination, a period when Hollywood became not just a place but a state of mind. Unlike so many of her “silent” generation, Wong survived film’s transition from silence to sound, and later from silver screen to TV screen—a powerful testament to her talent and tenacity. More important, it was in the same period when America’s Chinatowns remained exotic destinations, as distant and foreign as Shanghai or Tokyo, a time when Chinese immigrants were routinely detained on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and denied entry into the country, while Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps. A “star coolie,” as it were, in Hollywood’s Dream Factory, and endowed with a disarming appeal, she was not allowed to kiss or even be kissed by a white man, at least not on-screen, for fear of offending a misguided American sense of propriety. As a symbol of forbidden love, she embodied America’s love and hate for the Orient, an inner war with itself in the crucible of race.
In her four-decade career, Wong appeared in more than sixty films, a dozen stage plays, several television series, and countless vaudeville shows. In the limited playing field allowed for a nonwhite actress of her time, always having to negotiate the binary stereotypes between the self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly and devious Dragon Lady, she carved out a distinct performative space for herself while blazing a trail for other Asian American artists. Compared to her costar Lon Chaney—dubbed “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for the myriad yellowface Chinese characters he had impersonated with the aid of adhesive tape—Wong was a woman of a hundred names who, figuratively speaking, died a thousand deaths. Like Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, she did it so it felt like hell; she did it so it felt real. Each time, she would rise again, not to “eat man like air,” in a vampirish way, but to show the world her undying commitment to her calling as an artist.2
Mind you, I am not quoting Plath in vain. Unknown to most, Anna May Wong was a remarkably gifted writer—articulate, stylish, and hilariously witty. The autobiographical pieces she published when she was living in self-exile in Europe, the serial articles commissioned by the New York Herald Tribune during her soul-searching China trip, and her voluminous correspondence with friends, especially Carl Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, have provided me with a veritable goldmine of material. Whenever possible, I have tried to let Wong speak for herself or have reconstructed events based on her words. One of her favorite catchphrases was “and Confucius didn’t say this,” which always preceded her deadpans like a theatrical peal of a gong. As with her use of “Orientally yours,” the droll expression was both self-mocking and brutally ribbing. Read together, her writings reflect a sharp mind acutely aware of its own place in a world that, on the one hand, is captivated by her and, on the other, looks askance at her. Between her satirical lines, between the parodically timid China doll and the intimidating Daughter of the Dragon, lies the alluring art of Anna May Wong, who continues to haunt us all.
With this book, I am also completing the trilogy I refer to as a “Rendezvous with America,” a saga that explores the Asian American experience in the making of America. Beginning with Charlie Chan (2010), in which I traced the protagonist’s evolution from rough-and-tumble Hawaii cop to fictional hero to Hollywood detective, I continued with Inseparable (2018), a book that charts the implausible rise of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to slaveholding Southern gentry, married to two white sisters, who sired twenty-one children. In both books, I reexamined the tortured odyssey of controversial cultural icons, elevating and humanizing them through stories deeply embedded in the grand narrative of American history. Likewise, in this third installment, I illuminate Anna May Wong’s spectacular rise from laundryman’s daughter to global celebrity, against the broad backdrop of a world riven by racism, bigotry, and injustice. Whether it is Charlie Chan’s resurrection from the graveyard of postmodern symbols, the Siamese Twins’s powerful testimonial to what it means to be human, or Anna May’s impeded rendezvous with America, my focus remains on this subversive genealogy of Asian icons, thus depicting the epic journey of Asian Americans in the nation’s tumultuous history. As Confucius said—and he did say this—“Roads are made for journeys, not destinations.”