Professor traces life of top Asian-American actress

A casual walk through London proved to be the first steps toward a major research project and the latest book for Graham Russell Gao Hodges, professor of history at Colgate University.

In Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend, Hodges explores the life of the celebrated Asian-American actress who appeared in more than 50 Hollywood movies from 1919 to 1960.

Hodges says he became “fixated” with Wong in 1999 after seeing and buying an autographed picture of her while walking near Charring Cross Road in London. Hodges was in the city leading a Colgate study group.

He read several capsule biographies of Wong, and became further engrossed after buying more pictures and documents of her on eBay, the Internet auction house.

An editor with Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, helped turn Hodges’s keen interest in Wong into an opportunity to write his first book for a commercial publisher. (The $27.95 hardcover is now available.)

Hodges details Wong’s career, which included leading roles in The Thief of Baghdad (1924) opposite Douglas Fairbanks and in Shanghai Express (1932) opposite Marlene Dietrich, and the myriad ways she was perceived by film audiences and critics.

Hodges says that her talent, charm, sophistication, and magnetic screen presence made her a popular figure in movie magazines around the world. She was an international celebrity seen by many fans as personifying Chinese womanhood.

Officials in China, however, were angered by this image of Wong, and called her a stooge of Hollywood. They rankled as she was often portrayed as a dragon lady or shy geisha girl, with her character inevitably being made a victim by her Caucasian counterparts. Even today, she is often viewed as a person willing to undertake roles degrading to her people.

Hodges, though, contends that Wong bravely fought Asian stereotypes, in both her professional and personal lives, and that she helped dismantle barriers as she introduced Chinese culture to world societies and helped pave the way for more authentic depictions of Chinese people in films, though it is still a struggle in today’s Hollywood.

Born in Los Angeles in 1905 to a laundryman and his wife, Wong was the second daughter of eight children. She quickly grew fascinated with the budding Hollywood film industry and the escape it could provide. She secured her first part in 1919, playing an extra in The Red Lantern. She would make her feature debut in The Toll of the Sea (1922), the first film produced in Technicolor.

But her career was severely limited by the restrictions placed on Asian-Americans, Hodges says.

Every on-screen kiss she had, except one, was cut because of movie industry codes that banned kissing between the races. Because she was never allowed to be the main love interest, she was often limited to supporting roles.

Wong was passed over for the lead role in the film version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth because she apparently was “too Asian.”  The part went to Louise Rainer, who won an Academy Award for her performance

The anti-Chinese sentiment of the times also affected Wong’s personal life. U.S. and California state laws curtailed her ability to marry a man of her choosing and regulated her movements in and out of the United States, Hodges says.

Wong often felt incredibly frustrated in having to choose between not working and accepting movie parts that portrayed Chinese as treacherous villains.
She spoke against the racial codes she faced, and after a trip to China in 1936, she became an advocate for China Relief and worked to improve Sino-American relations, he says.

Wong’s later years were spent fighting obscurity and illness. Some television work helped revive her career in the late 1950s, and she was in the midst of pursuing several film roles when she died in 1961, at the age of 56, of a heart attack.

Hodges, the author of several books about New York City and African-African-American history, traveled far and wide researching Wong’s life. He says he spent a lot of time in several libraries in China, going through scores of Chinese movie magazines at the Shanghai Municipal Library and the China Film Institute in Beijing. He visited the village of Chang On, the ancestral home of Wong’s father, and other sites.

More research was conducted in Tokyo, and he says personal contacts in Vienna, London, and Paris provided a great deal of assistance.

Hodges has said many of his books are “Colgate productions,” and he cites help from the staff of Case Library and from the Faculty Research Council as being invaluable for this book. Hodges also thanks Lin Zeng ’03, his student research assistant, and Carolyn Lane ’03, who provided expert French translations.

Hodges dedicates the book to his wife, Gao Yunxiang, whose surname he recently added to his own.