Anna May Wong was born at the moment Hollywood was creating itself—and would fight for her whole life to be considered a part of it. Wong Liu Tsong was born January 3, 1905, in Los Angeles, California. She rose to prominence as the first Chinese American movie star in Hollywood, and one of the first Asian American performers to gain worldwide recognition. But firsts in a society designed to marginalize her meant a career filled with paradox: Anna May Wong was applauded for her beauty, brains and allure on screen but was continually typecast; celebrated as modern but othered as “foreign” in her hometown.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Donaldson Collection / Getty Images
Wong grew up in a working-class neighborhood outside Los Angeles Chinatown—an American child growing up in a nation still governed by exclusionist logic, where Chinese immigrants were allowed to toil but not fully belong. Her parents were Chinese American. Her father owned a laundry. Wong's family worked diligently to cultivate a sense of security in a city capable of friendship and brutality simultaneously. For Wong, movies were more than childhood daydreaming. It was recognition of a different kind of American authority: the screen could grant faces immortality, transform fate, and manufacture epic fantasies bigger than hatred — at least the possibility of it.
As a girl, she haunted film sets and learned to navigate the boundaries imposed on Chinese American children. The industry’s doors were barely open to her, yet she pushed through anyway, taking small parts and insisting—against family caution and a culture that viewed acting as unstable and morally risky—that she would make her life in pictures. She began appearing on screen in the late 1910s and quickly revealed what Hollywood could not quite admit it needed: a performer whose modern sensibility and camera intelligence made her more than “exotic casting.”
Her first great success was The Toll of the Sea (1922), notable for its early use of color and widely credited as Wong's first true starring role, though still within the narrow tragic scope usually reserved for Asian women by Western audiences. Wong found further attention two years later opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad (1924), playing a "scheming" character defined by contemporary "Dragon Lady" stereotypes. Audiences and critics saw past the stereotype, however, to acknowledge Wong's dignity, her expressive reserve, the narrative depth of her gaze. The role brought Wong renown—but a clear sense of what that renown would demand of her.
By the mid-1920s, Wong was fashioning herself as much as a style icon as a screen icon—her image expressed a modernity inspired by the flapper era, and she energized photographers and costume designers in equal measure. But when it came to what Hollywood had to offer her, the glass ceiling was palpably low. Hollywood wanted to commodify her image but did not want her whole self. Romance across color lines—which features in many stars' stories—was already forbidden through studio-era taboos and later Production Code decrees, and lead roles in prestige dramas were almost always relegated to white actors in yellowface. Wong knew talent wouldn't grant her leverage to change the rules, so like ambitious artists before and since whose métiers were restricted by small-minded gatekeepers, she left.
In Europe, Wong’s career opened in ways America could not or would not allow. She worked in England and Germany, learned languages, moved among artists, and found roles that—while not free of exotic framing—gave her greater range and authority. Her European films included projects like 1928’s Schmutziges Geld (Wasted Love), part of a period in which she sought to remake herself as an international artist rather than an American stereotype. Europe did not solve the problem of racism, but it offered her something Hollywood rarely did: the chance to be complicated.
By the time Wong returned to America in the early 1930s, she had become a seasoned star. She had work overseas, fluency in urbane movie-star dialects, and expectations of richer fare. The '30s gave Wong one of her most iconic roles, alongside Marlene Dietrich in the steamy Shanghai Express (1932). The decade also renewed her disappointment in how Hollywood viewed Asian identity as backdrop -- at times seductive, sometimes menacing, often less than human.
Anna May Wong seated in her mother's lap, c. 1905. (Photo Credit: Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research)
No episode better illustrates the cruelty of that system than the casting of The Good Earth (1937). Wong wanted—deserved—the central role of O-Lan, a rare opportunity for a Chinese American actress to lead a major studio prestige adaptation about Chinese life. But MGM cast a white actress (Luise Rainer) in yellowface instead, while Wong was offered a stereotyped supporting part and refused. The decision was shaped not only by racism but by the era’s anti-miscegenation rules, which made studios fear pairing an Asian actress romantically with a white male lead. It remains one of the most infamous examples of Hollywood denying authenticity while claiming cultural seriousness.
But Wong didn't stop. She remained in films into the 1930s and 1940s and became involved with television in significant ways after the war—another medium at the time fresh enough that some old boundaries were less restrictive. Wong made television history in 1951 with The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, credited as the first US television show with an Asian American star: Wong played a refined art dealer embroiled in global mysteries. That triumph was tinged with sadness, however: as was the case with so many early television productions, the series didn’t age particularly well and much of it has been lost to history.
Obscurity ― or what outsiders have projected onto Wong’s personal life ― has devolved into rumor, longing and the melodrama of being “unlucky in love.” The reality was far more mundane and far more heartbreaking: She was constrained by forces most of her contemporaries only had to imagine. She chose privacy when she could, fought for her dignity when she had to and shouldered the weight of standing in for an entire people in an industry that wanted her to be both symbol and spectacle. Wong survived. It wasn’t quiet. It was steady. It was practiced. And it came at great cost.
Grave of her mother, Lee Toy (top), her sister, Mary (left), and Anna May Wong (right), at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery (Photo Credit: Arthur Dark – own work).
She died young, still poised for new work, on February 3, 1961, in Santa Monica, California, at the age of fifty-six, reportedly of a heart attack. She was buried at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, her resting place in the city that made her famous, limited her, and—slowly, belatedly—began to understand what it had owed her.
Anna May Wong’s legacy lives on because her story is not just hers alone. It is a blueprint. Every discussion about representation, authenticity, and opportunity in Hollywood today leads back to her reality. Anna May Wong showed that a Chinese American actress could be a movie star—bright, modern and indelible—while revealing how fiercely that industry fought to limit that type of stardom. Pioneering didn’t always mean being embraced. Sometimes it meant blazing a trail through rooms where others would pass once you’d left, the doors ajar behind you.
And if Hollywood has finally begun to place her where she always belonged—among its essential figures—it is because Wong’s greatest performance was not any single role, but the sustained act of presence itself: insisting, year after year, frame after frame, that she was not a novelty. She was cinema.
In 2022, the U.S. Mint issued 468 million Wong quarters – the fifth in the American Women quarters series. / By John P. McGraw, Emily Damstra
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Wong with Ramón Novarro in Across to Singapore (1928) / MGM
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