Kulraj Phullar pens a tribute to Anna May Wong and the Hollywood and British films in which she starred, which became some of the first to express ideas of diaspora in a contemporary UK setting.
The retrospective Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention recently launched at BFI Southbank in London builds on the momentum of fascination with the Chinese-American star: from a limited edition Barbie doll and US quarter coin to Katie Gee Salisbury’s acclaimed biography Not Your China Doll; from the historical fantasy miniseries Hollywood to a pair of experimental shorts by the award-winning British-Sri Lankan artist filmmaker Michelle Williams Gamaker.
Coverage of Wong’s career celebrates her status as the first Chinese-American film star, sustaining a career across the silent and talkie eras, Hollywood and Europe, film and television. At a time when performers of colour in Hollywood, especially African-Americans, struggled to secure sizeable roles with billing and even character names, the longevity of Wong’s career and status as a star and celebrity make her an exception and pioneer.
Wong achieved notable successes – despite, alongside, and sometimes because of prevailing racial and racist hierarchies both on- and offscreen. Classic Hollywood cinema figures prominently in the BFI’s repertory programmes and amongst Blu-ray releases for boutique labels like Indicator. Wong makes visible the whiteness that is central to spectacle and storytelling, and disrupts the cosy nostalgia associated with this cinema.
Wong was that rarity in Hollywood, a Los Angeles native, but her ambition led her to Germany and Britain for better roles. Hollywood today may be full of British actors of colour, but in the 1920s and 1930s American performers including Wong, her close friend Paul Robeson, and Josephine Baker all relocated to Europe for film roles that were certainly bigger but not always more progressive.
Lady From Chungking (dir. Robert Florey, 1942). The BFI National Archive.
A number of Wong’s films place her characters in British settings, extending her status as a pioneer to include some of the earliest representations of British diasporic life. The British Piccadilly, and Hollywood films Daughter of the Dragon, A Study in Scarlet, and Limehouse Blues were all set in contemporary London. Java Head takes place in mid-1800s Bristol. More exotic colonial spaces appear in Across to Singapore and in Tiger Bay, for which censors forced the filmmakers to relocate the seedy story from Britain to an unnamed French mainland colony in the Caribbean.
When we look at onscreen depictions of migration and British diasporic lives we tend to privilege post-WWII Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities. However, East London’s Chinese community was the first to be regularly (mis)represented in interwar British and Hollywood cinemas, including D. W. Griffiths’ Broken Blossoms and the many appearances of Sax Rohmer’s villainous Fu Manchu. White actors in yellowface played the leads, accompanied by Asians for extras and occasional supporting roles. Wong often carries the burden of representation, but despite her characters’ isolation in white spaces there are glimpses of multicultural London. Detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa) walks past a row of Chinese businesses in Daughter of the Dragon, and Chinese New Year celebrations provide the background for the climax of Limehouse Blues. In Piccadilly Wong’s scullery worker-turned-star performer and the white nightclub owner Valentine visit a rowdy Limehouse pub that is a melting pot of Asian, Black and white working class Eastenders. The outrage directed at a white woman for dancing with a Black man makes visible the taboos of interracial desire that would prevent Wong and other actors of colour from becoming romantic leads.
The drama of diasporic identity also played out in media coverage of Wong, including film magazine interviews and profiles that typically riff on “East meets West” themes. Writers perform journalistic somersaults as they itemise and assign Wong’s physical features, accent, clothing, tastes and values to “America” or “China”. It’s a false dichotomy that struggles and ultimately fails to reconcile Wong’s Chinese-American identity. These 1920s and 1930s articles express the “torn between two cultures” discourse which – rightly or wrongly – remains the most enduring trope in diasporic Asian cinemas, working to resolve the conflicted identities of second-generation characters.
These conflicts take different forms in Wong’s films, mainly because her characters are rarely identified as second-generation Chinese-Americans or Europeans. The Paramount b-movies Daughter of Shanghai and King of Chinatown are the notable exceptions and coincidentally feature Wong’s most “positive” (least racist) characterisations.
Wong primarily appears as Chinese immigrants whose otherness is stressed visually and through other characters’ reactions. Java Head deploys montages of white Bristolians gossiping and gaping at Wong’s Chinese bride, newly arrived in England with her white husband. Attempts to fix labels on Wong’s characters reach ridiculous levels in A Study in Scarlet, when a white male offers this description to Sherlock Holmes: “The lady is an Oriental. An Asiatic. As a matter of fact, she’s Chinese.”
At a time when East Asian characters were routinely played by white actors in yellowface, these moments that insist on Wong’s authenticity both on- and offscreen can briefly and unintentionally expose the films’ racial logics as performance, as artifice, as sham. A reminder for those who need it that Hollywood and British cinemas have always committed great energy to maintaining racial fictions. Wong’s performances are imbued with this knowledge and she is always most dangerous – and exciting – when her characters manipulate the racialised expectations of audiences on- and offscreen.
The BFI’s retrospective is curated by the brilliant University of Cambridge scholar Dr Xin Peng. Like retrospectives of Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge earlier in the year, the Wong season breaks from their usual classic Hollywood programming and will hopefully attract diverse audiences. It falls outside of “Asian” programming conventions too, which tend to prioritise non-diasporic cinema in the form of male auteurs (especially Japanese directors, Satyajit Ray for India) and cult genres (anime, horror, martial arts). When was the last time we had a season dedicated to a second-generation diasporic figure with Asian heritage?
Anna May Wong’s heightened visibility seems to be here to stay. We can – and should – be critical, whilst also remaining open to the possibilities of discovering pleasure, defiance and unexpected connections across histories and geographies in this extraordinary career.
Anna May Wong: The Art of Reinvention is playing now and running until the October 6th at the BFI.
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