“Whatever you’re about to ask, it’s not true.”
The first Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong was a vocal critic of Hollywood’s portrayal of Asian characters. Raised in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles, Wong dropped out of high school to pursue an acting career. Critically praised for her lead role in The Toll of the Sea (1922), she rose to prominence after appearing in Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924). Wong quickly developed a level of craft that Hollywood was unprepared to accommodate. Frustrated by repeated typecasting, Wong left for Europe in 1928. Her performance in Piccadilly (1929)—her last silent picture and a British production—is regarded as one of her finest. But the lure of top billing and more challenging roles led her back to Hollywood to sign with Paramount in 1930. Her high point within the studio system was Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932), opposite Marlene Dietrich. (Onscreen chemistry between the two led to rumors of a lesbian relationship.) But institutional racism—MGM considered her “too Chinese to play Chinese”—kept her from moving beyond supporting-player status. Wong’s biggest disappointment came in 1935 when the Chinese lead in The Good Earth—a part she’d longed to play—was given to German actress Luise Rainer. The following year, Wong embarked on an extended tour of China, during which she wrote dispatches for a number of American newspapers. She rarely acted in the years that followed, devoting herself instead to promotion of the Chinese struggle against Japan.
IN EUROPE, THEY HAD a word for Chinese-American Anna May Wong: superstar. In America, specifically her hometown of Los Angeles, they had dozens of words—but most of them had only four letters.
To be fair, these vulgarians were hardly alone. From 1882 to 1943, Federal Law forbade the Chinese from emigrating to or entering the United States—ever. In fact, any Chinese-American citizen could be stopped by police just for “looking Chinese” and made to show their passport. In effect, these Chinese-Americans were stuck with either hating the Chinese or hating the Americans—neither of which could have felt very good.
As for Anna May Wong, she started drinking.
A third-generation Chinese-American, her family had been in the United States since the Civil War era. But such a pedigree changed nothing. She was forbidden by law from owning land, from working in the public sector, and even from testifying in court. It was also illegal for her to kiss a white man, much less on screen—a restriction that severely hampered her career.
Returning home, Wong grew even more outspoken and fearless—and, not surprisingly, began to drink even more. She drifted in and out of film, never losing her elegance and grace.
Wong was a fairly successful actress in Hollywood but was always passed over, even for female leads written as Chinese (in favor of, say, Myrna Loy). This, because of the kissing issue. Instead, Wong got pigeonholed in stereotypical roles that offended Chinese audiences, most of whom weren’t sure what to make of her modern, Americanized image in the first place—after all, she did the Charleston.
Over time, much of her community would feel Wong had betrayed her roots and pandered to her oppressors by accepting racist film roles. (A few of her character names: China Mary, Lotus Flower, Mongol Slave, and Zahrat.) When she visited China for the first time, she was met at the dock by a protester chanting down with the “stooge who disgraces China.” Others reportedly tried to block her boat from docking.
At this point, Anna May Wong started drinking more.
Hated by many and disallowed by law from doing her job to the best of her ability, she decided to take an extended trip to Germany in 1928; she immediately became a media sensation. This was partially due, no doubt, to her choice of party-circuit companion: Marlene Dietrich, “the busiest and most passionate bisexual in theatrical Berlin.” One particular snapshot of the two, by famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, shows Wong pouring liquor into Dietrich’s mouth, neatly capturing in a single frame everything that made her a beloved European superstar: her beauty, her wit, her fearlessness, not to mention her fashion sense.
Returning home, Wong grew even more outspoken and fearless—and, not surprisingly, began to drink even more. She drifted in and out of the world of film, never losing her elegance and grace. By the 1950s, when she could finally fully display her talents without fear of an FBI raid, Wong could no longer do so—she was already suffering from liver disease. This, the result of too many years doing the only thing U.S. law allowed her to do freely.
IN 1935, WITH THE Depression crippling his family’s Chinatown antique shop, twenty-nine-year-old Eddy See asked himself a very basic question: What is the one thing people will continue to spend money on, no matter how poor they may be? The answer, he decided, was food. And so, in 1935, See converted the basement of the store, F. Suie One, into one of Los Angeles’s first family-style Chinese restaurants. At a time when all Chinese cuisine was condescendingly called chop suey, Dragon’s Den served up authentic, inexpensive dishes that, though now de rigueur, were considered novel, even exotic: almond duck, sweet-and-sour pork, egg foo yong, fried shrimp. The cost of an entire six-course meal? As little as fifty cents.
Capitalizing on his connections to the Asian American art world (the antique shop had a tiny gallery in its mezzanine), See enlisted Tyrus Wong and Benji Okubo to decorate the space, which was a basement in every sense of the word, complete with exposed beams and pipes. On the inside walls they painted murals of Buddha, the Eight Immortals, and a warrior fighting a dragon; on the outside, the restaurant’s name, in both Chinese and English. With its bohemian aesthetic, Dragon’s Den attracted scores of Hollywood set and costume designers (who already frequented F. Suie One for props and wardrobe), as well as actors Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, the Marx Brothers, Walt Disney, and of course, the Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong.
Though Wong was almost universally despised in Chinatown, See adored her; they discovered they were kindred spirits. Their favorite pastime was telling each other jokes. Decades later, writer Lisa See could still remember her grandfather’s favorite. “One day, a fisherman throws out his line,” Wong began. “He catches a beautiful mermaid with long blonde hair. He reels her in. The fisherman picks her up, examines every detail of her gorgeous face and body, and then unceremoniously tosses her back in to the sea. His friend, having observed all of this silently, looks at the fisherman in shock.”
“Why?” the friend finally asks.
The first fisherman’s response: “How?”
The Dragon’s Den only lasted through World War II, but the influence of its style and menu remain visible in every Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles. And the antique shop? It moved to Pasadena, where it remains open; now owned by Lisa See and her cousin Leslee Long.