more clear after she suffered through a rare illness called Saint Vitus’s Dance. The disorder causes the body to jerk uncontrollably, and the Chinese medicinal cure for it was just as painful. After surviving this ordeal, Anna decided she wanted to concentrate fully on her passion for acting. She dropped out of school and started to look for bigger roles. And she felt she had nothing to lose. “I was so young when I began,” Anna later told Motion Picture Magazine, “that I knew I still had youth if I failed, so I determined to give myself ten years to succeed as an actress.” Anna May was just sixteen years old, so her father made the rule that she should have an adult chaperone at all times.
Anna’s first big role came that very year, in Bits of Life, which is considered to be the first anthology film ever made, telling four separate stories. Though she was still just sixteen, Anna’s role was to play a mother in one of the segments, the wife of a man played by Lon Chaney, who was twenty-two years older than she was. Bits of Life was well-received, and the following year, in 1922, Anna was cast in a movie which made her the first Chinese-American film star.
Toll of the Sea was the second feature film shot using Technicolor, and the first color film that was able to be screened in regular movie theaters. The fascination of this new process made the movie a huge hit. The script was written by Frances Marion, and her brief was to create a movie which would showcase the use of color in movies. Frances said, “The story itself was of little importance compared to the widespread interest in the potential of color.” She decided on a story set in China, using a plot similar to the opera ‘Madama Butterfly’. The lead role, a Hong Kong girl named Lotus Flower was won by Anna May Wong. In the story, Lotus falls for an American man, but their interracial relationship causes scandal. When she becomes pregnant he fears it will hurt his career, so he leaves her to go back to America. Four years later he returns, now with a new American wife, and insists on taking their child back to the U.S. to have a better life. In the end, Lotus throws herself off the side of a rocky cliff.
It was quite a demanding part for a seventeen-year-old who had only been in bit roles, but Anna rose to the challenge, and along with the movie, she was a hit. The New York Times praised her skill in a review, writing, “Completely unconscious of the camera, with a fine sense of proportion and remarkable pantomimic accuracy … She should be seen again and often on the screen.” With this, Anna became a rarity in Hollywood. Asian-American actresses were not often seen on screen, and definitely weren’t given prominent, complex roles to shine in. And apart from Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, no other Asian actor had yet broken through to become a star.
But of course, the very structure of Hollywood restricted the type of roles Anna May Wong could play. The production code in force at the time forbade non-white actresses to play serious love interests with white actors. You could hint at interracial relationships, but the attraction would then need to be punished by the death of the non-white character, lest the film send the message that mixing of cultures was ok. “No film lovers can ever marry me [on screen],” said Anna, “If they got an American actress to slant her eyes and eyebrows and wear a stiff black wig and dress in Chinese culture, it would be alright. But me? I am really Chinese. So I must always die in the movies, so that the white girl with the yellow hair may get the man.”
As author Nancy Wang Yuen explains, the production code even prevented Asian actors from starring with white actors who were playing Asian. “They couldn’t star opposite a white man, and they couldn’t even star opposite white actors who were playing Asians, because that counted as anti-miscegenation as well. There were those kind of structural codes in place that prevented them from ever even being considered. Anna May Wong did want to audition for bigger roles, but she was told that she couldn’t because they had already cast a white man as the Chinese lead.”
The roles she was offered consisted of racist stereotypes. They were either the subservient Asian slave girl, the exotic siren or the villainous “Dragon Lady.” In this way, Anna May Wong’s career reflects what many Asian-American actors still have to go through today. Be exoticized, play “Oriental” stereotypes, or don’t exist at all. Orientalism is a racist way of seeing a variety of cultures from The East as one—from Japanese to Arabic to African and Chinese—all labeled exotic, mystic, uncivilized and often, barbaric. Asian actors also have to deal with the practice of whitewashing in Hollywood, where roles meant for actors of color are played by white actors. This still happens now, and back in Anna May Wong’s day, it was even more common, with white actors donning “yellowface” to play Asian characters. So white people could play whatever role they wanted, but everyone else had to take the scraps.
To counter this, Anna tried to make good use of every opportunity given to her. Hollywood heavyweight Douglas Fairbanks had spotted her in Toll of the Sea, and sought her out to star next to him in 1924s The Thief of Baghdad. In the swashbuckling film, Anna played a scheming slave, and the movie made over two million dollars at the box office. Audiences loved her, but Anna’s career didn’t please everyone. The Chinese government had tried to shut down The Thief of Baghdad, saying Anna’s role was too erotic, and her parents constantly repeated the old Chinese proverb to her, saying, “a good man will not be a soldier and a good girl will not be an actress.” Anna’s parents were also sad that she was still single, but Anna found it hard, with Chinese-American men preferring Chinese women who were more “traditional,” and American men preferring American women. Tabloid magazines also reported on her single status, with headlines like “Oriental Beauty Compelled to Choose Between Heritage of Race and Her Preference for an American Husband.”
Over the next few years Anna had roles playing a variety of “exotic” nationalities. She was an Eskimo in ‘The Alaskan’ and the Indian princess Tiger Lily in ‘Peter Pan’. But her parts continued to be of the small, supporting variety. By 1928, Anna May Wong was fed up with the roles given to her by Hollywood, and the extra pressures placed on her, so she decided to move to Europe, following in the footsteps of African-American actors Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. “I was so tired of the parts I had to play,” said Anna. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel, a murderous, treacherous snake in the grass. We are not like that. We have our own virtues. We have our rigid code of behavior, of honor. Why do they never show these on the screen? Why should
we always scheme, rob, kill? I got so weary of it all.”
She found big success in Europe, where she made films in English, French and German, surprising audiences by speaking multiple languages. Her speaking voice was honed through speech lessons at Cambridge University, for which she spent a lot of her own money. This was a worthwhile investment, with talking pictures becoming increasingly popular around the world. She had a beautiful speaking voice, and her American accent was a shock for people not used to seeing Asian-Americans on screen. Fellow actress Katharine DeMille said Anna had “the world’s most beautiful figure and face … and when she opens her mouth out comes Los Angeles Chinatown sing-sing girl and every syllable is a fresh shock.”
Anna spent two years in Europe, but was so homesick, she returned to Hollywood in 1930. And nothing had changed. Her first role back was in the crime drama Daughter of the Dragon, where she played another dragon lady, a Princess living next door to the villain, Dr. Fu Manchu, who wants to take over the world. Fu Manchu was a character created by author Sax Rohmer, and one of the worst examples of how Hollywood portrayed Asian characters as “evil.” Seeing villainous Asian characters and anti-Asian images on screen furthered the racist idea of “yellow peril”—the thought that the people of East Asia proposed a danger to the Western world. Fu Manchu was called “the yellow peril incarnate in one man,” and was solely focused on bringing down Western civilization. The character appeared in a series of books, five movies and a radio serial. In the films, Fu Manchu was played by Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who made a career of portraying characters in “yellowface” makeup. As well as Fu Manchu, Warner portrayed the detective Charlie Chan in sixteen movies.
Despite her starring
