Fernando Amador: Welcome, you’re listening to an episode of the crisis and catharsis podcast where we explore stories that show how people face times of crisis, focusing on artistic expression like literature, music and art, but also the daily activities like cuisine and stories. This episode focuses on Anna May Wong, the first Asian American film star. I’m Fernie, a history PhD student at Stony Brook University and I’m here with Professor Shirley Lim. Hello, Professor.

Shirley Lim: Hello.

 

Fernando Amador: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

 

Shirley Lim: I’m Shirley Lim. I’m an associate professor of history as well as affiliate faculty in Women and Gender Studies, Africana Studies, Asian/Asian American studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

 

Fernando Amador: And you just published a book on Anna May Wong titled Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern. Can you tell us how you became interested in Anna May Wong and what makes her unique and special?

 

Shirley Lim: Gosh. Answering that question could easily take hours and hours and hours of time. It’s a wonderful question. I became interested in her when I was a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. I knew that I wanted to work on Asian American Women’s History. UCLA is in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood so Paramount studio archives is actually part of UCLA special collections. And I thought, Oh, wow, here’s this interesting woman Anna May Wong her films are available. So I booked an appointment to see some of her movies from the 1930s. Now, at the time, there was not much scholarship, when I was a graduate student. There was not much scholarship on Anna May Wong and the little that existed said that she was not important marginalized and play prostitutes and died. The very first movie I saw called king of Chinatown. In the very first scene here is Anna May Wong playing a surgeon. And in fact, she’s been asked to become the chief surgeon of her hospital. And in this movie she plays a detective who ends up being heroic and saving various people and her family, so on and so forth. So I thought, Oh, my goodness, there’s a far bigger and interesting story here.

 

Anna May Wong, I feel, she’s interesting for millions of different reasons. But one of the important ones is she’s a feminist icon. And she’s a woman of color who was very strong, very powerful at a time when we don’t think of women being strong and powerful. She started her career in the 1920s, and indeed continued until her death in 1961 but throughout it she epitomized a strong racial minority woman of color fighting for representation, for careers, for opportunities and for civil rights and justice.

 

Fernando Amador: She seems like just an amazing person. Can tell us a bit more about her upbringing. Where she was born and raised, and some of the difficulties she faced from early childhood and being Chinese American.

 

Shirley Lim: Anna May Long was born in Los Angeles. She grew up, just outside of Chinatown and her father ran a laundry. She didn’t grow up in Chinatown, she grew out of outside of China Town. So most of her neighbors were actually Eastern European, Mexican American, so not other Chinese Americans.

 

And at this time, there were race riots in Southern California. Everything was segregated from swimming pools to housing to movie theaters, universities like UCLA and Berkeley and Stanford students of Asian descent couldn’t live in dormitories. Miscegenation laws were in effect which meant that if somebody like Anna May Wong had wanted to marry a white person she couldn’t do that in the state of California. She would have to go to Mexico or go to Las Vegas.

 

Anna May Wong grew up being made fun of by white students, she actually missed part of her high school education because– this is going to sound very familiar to everybody–but she missed part of her high school education because of the 1918 influenza epidemic, which closed schools in Los Angeles. And that’s actually how she was able to attend some of the movies and she was able to look at movie shoots throughout Los Angeles. Don’t forget, she’s from Los Angeles, which is where film studios had moved from the east coast to Los Angeles at this time.

 

Fernando Amador: So she’s watching these films and becoming inspired. What was her early career like?

 

Shirley Lim: Her very first role was as an extra, but her first starring role came when she was quite young. And it was in the movie The Toll of the Sea. It’s a two-tone Technicolor movie. So it’s very important because it’s one of the first experimentation in color film, film at the time being black and white and silent and she got the starring role. And this is because, in the United States, and indeed throughout the Western world, Orientalism is very strong. And interested in knowing about Asia, the Orient, the Pacific, especially in the United States as United States is thinking through and expanding empire into the Pacific. So in The Toll of the Sea. She’s playing a role of a woman who  eventually meets a an American man has a baby with him and, at the end, is forced to give up the baby to him and commits suicide. So there’s a real sort of metaphor of colonial relations in this movie where Anna May Wong –colonial subject– giving up commodities, goods, and in this case, baby to American white imperial conquer and the screenplay for this was actually written by Francis Marion, who’s a very well-known female screenwriter in early Hollywood.

 

Fernando Amador: And would this pattern continue in terms of the films that she came out in? Did they follow the sort of colonial Oriental pattern?

 

Shirley Lim: Well, what’s important to remember at this time in the 1920s. When Anna May Wong is starting her career a lot of the leading roles went to white women and white men for the male equivalent roles in yellow-face so these roles very much fit in with American and Western fantasies of Asia. But on the other hand, she’s very pioneering because she’s actually playing Asian roles as a person of Asian descent, instead of having say white actress with her eyes taped playing Asian roles and there’s a whole range of actresses who played Asian and Chinese roles, including a Mexican actresses like Lupe Velez and Dolores del Rio, but also actresses like Helen Hayes and Loretta Young and then later on Merle Oberon, Katharine Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, so on and so forth.

 

It still did become very hard for her, though, that she didn’t feel she was receiving the types of roles that she wanted because of these stereotypes and also because European American women were getting so many of the roles like for example in 1928 she wanted the starring role in The Son Daughter. Helen Hayes ended up with the lead role and, you know, Ramon Novarro, a Mexican American actor got the Chinese lead as “the Son.”

 

So for her this was very frustrating. And what I really admire about Anna May Wong, is that she she’s not the kind of person who sits around and sulks and feel sorry for herself. So with Hollywood racism, what’s really amazing about her is she’s like, “to hell with Hollywood,” and she accepts an offer to go star in films in Germany.

 

So these are films that would be shot in Berlin, Paris, London in those respective languages, German, French and English. And they were meant to be circulating around Europe and not just Europe, but the colonial world.

 

Fernando Amador: Just to be clear, she when she came out in these films in Europe was she speaking French and German as well?

 

Shirley Lim: When she’s commenting on her experience in Germany she mentioned to her friends that she’s speaking German like nobody’s business because she had her in a German for a role in a talking film, you know, as well as singing German in an opera in Vienna.So this, this is an important transition that she’s making. She’s learning the languages of French and German and she’s making a transition from silent movies to talking movies. And it’s because she was able to master languages and something that I think is really important to note about Anna May Wong is she’s actually also learning upper class English. So a very aristocratic world English accent. So she’s from Los Angeles. She’s California and she’s gonna sound a kind of like me. She’s not gonna sound like she has this really hottie–she’s not gonna sound like the Queen of England. But what she does when she’s in London is, she wants to enhance her career possibilities. So she learns how to speak the Queen’s English or something called World English. So yes, she’s learning foreign languages, German and French, but it’s also aristocratic English that she’s learning as well, which is you know absolutely incredible.

 

Fernando Amador: That’s probably one of the reasons why she was successful, like you said, transitioning between silent film to sound film, which is quite amazing. Can you tell us now about her connection with the 1937 film The Good Earth.

 

Shirley Lim: Oh yes, The Good Earth. Everybody in Los Angeles knew that this was going to be one of the biggest movies ever. MGM, Metro-Goldwin-Meyer, a mayor major studio $2 million, they were going to transform the desert hills of Southern California into rice paddies. And the year is important. This is the middle of the Great Depression so the movie is meant to resonate with American audiences suffering from the Great Depression. This is a movie about good Chinese peasants. And what’s also interesting about the Chinese American community at Los Angeles is many of them made a living through working as extras on Hollywood movie sets because at this time they weren’t going to China to film. They were filming on location in Southern California. And what’s also interesting is they knew that they were going to hire like 2000 or more extras. So not only did they hire Chinese Americans for the scenes as actors. They also hired Filipino-Americans, Japanese-Americans Mexican Americans, they would put them further back in the shoot, but this was the way to do it.

 

So everybody knew that landing a starring role in this film about the good Chinese peasants during the Great Depression was going to be huge. Whoever got a lead would be extraordinarily famous and if Anna May Wong had even earned one of the leading roles, she would probably be far better known to people nowadays than she currently is known.

 

However, MGM cast Louise Raynor as the female lead. Paul Mooney plays the main lead, the supporting roles were also cast with white actors and actresses. So this is what’s called yellow face casting. And what’s also striking about this is Paul Mooney and Louise Rainer won Academy Awards for their roles in yellow face leads for The Good Earth. So this is something that Hollywood rewarded, having white actors made up and yellow face play the roles of these good Chinese peasants, Anna May long was shut out.

 

Fernando Amador: So what did she do after she was not given a role in this film?

 

Shirley Lim: Once again, as was the case in the 1920s. She did not sulk or say woe is me, or if she did, it was only for five seconds. Because what she did is she planned her one and only trip to China. She’s Chinese American and she had never been to China.

 

In her life Chinese Exclusion is in effect. It is very difficult for a person of Chinese descent to leave the country. There’s all sorts of paperwork, registration cards, identification cards that people of Chinese descent need in order to travel that people of other races did not need.

 

She’s never been to China so what she did–and this makes me so proud of her–is she hired her own cinematographer and she said, to hell with Hollywood again, and went to China for a year and made her own film about her time in China. So in some ways, here you have her directing, acting, producing—putting together this film about China, and I very much see it as a counterpoint, and an answer to Hollywood and MGM’s The Good Earth.

 

Fernando Amador: And how did people in China respond or react to her visit, especially because you mentioned, she’s not Chinese, she’s Chinese American. So how did they view, a famous Chinese American actress?

 

Shirley Lim: At first, not well. At first there was a great deal of controversy over her because of her role in Shanghai Express. There were a lot of people who disagreed with the politics displayed in Shanghai Express. The displays of Chinese patriotism, or lack thereof, they were also distressed to that she was playing a woman of ill repute and did not fit in with certain notions of respectability. So at first, it did not go well. In fact, she had to make a second visit to her father’s ancestral village, but that visit went a lot better. And actually, towards the end of her time in China. She was able to become more accepted by political leaders and by film people in China, but it did take a while for them to warm up to her.

 

Fernando Amador: And I know we’re coming up to World War 2. Can you talk a little bit about how she was active in these war efforts?

 

Shirley Lim: Anna May long saw herself as an exceedingly patriotic person, both in terms of China, which at the time was a US ally, as well as Americans, so she saw herself as Chinese American–allied with both, but both were on the same side.

 

So she did two things. First of all, she raised money for China relief. So she would actually sign autographs in Chinatown. She auctioned off some of her glamorous ball gowns and evening dresses to raise money for China relief. China relief was a way to bring medical supplies, food, and assistance to China at this time. So that was one thing that she did. Another thing that she did is she actually became part of the USO which entertained the American army personnel who are stationed in various camps. So she talks about meeting with a group of African American soldiers and because of her contacts with African American actors, singers, entertainers, she was able to tell the African American soldiers about many of their favorite stars, and indeed Anna May long was a very good friend of Paul Robeson so this is an important moment in entertaining the American troops.

 

Fernando Amador: I’ve seen that there’s actually been a couple of articles about her, one in People and other one in Time Magazine. So, and this was fairly recent. So why do you think there is a sudden interest in Anna May Wong?

 

Shirley Lim: Oh my gosh there’s been so many articles on her. She was a Google Doodle in January. She’s in the second episode of Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood Netflix series; Anna May Wong is everywhere. And I would say yes. And the world is finally getting to a place where they acknowledge Anna May Wong.

 

I can say that interest in her has been building for a number of years, it’s everything from Black Lives Matter to the “Me Too Movement“ to racial representation in images, Hollywood, and TV and also the success of Crazy Rich Asians, which convinced people that, even if, it sounds really incredible to say, but that even Non-Asian audiences would actually enjoy seeing people of Asian descent on the screen. I think it’s a combination of various political moments as well as commercial and popular interest in stories around gender around race. And I think there’s also been a real hunger to know about historical figures like an Anna May Wong and how she was able to make it through a sexist, racist, segregated society and how she able to thrive. How was she able to negotiate her way through that.

 

Fernando Amador: Yeah, and I think that’s actually what makes her an amazing individual, particularly because she had no one to look up to. But she persevered and made her own path. For my final question, I would just like to know what sort of legacy do you think she she’s left behind?

 

Shirley Lim: I think her legacy is going to continue to be a work in progress. I mean, for the past several decades I’ve been working on Anna May Wong and I’ve been astounded at how little interest there has been in her, but I think because of this upsurge of interest that you’ve been pointing to that new generations are going to know about her, are going to continue to want to explore her career because there’s so many aspects to her as a pioneering working woman, as somebody who’s labored her entire life, as a working class woman, her legacy in fashion as a style icon, it’s timeless. I think she’s going to continue to be a gay male icon  and to be somebody that people are going to want to emulate.

 

So I think that she’s going to be an enduring figure to explore and bring out and what I very much hope will happen is that as part of this legacy more studios will perhaps maybe release an Anna May Wong box set because many of these movies are only available in archives. So maybe this will prompt them to release it once they realize there is such interest so that there can continue to be an evaluation and thinking through her legacy because she’s as long as we continue to operate in a world where images are of the utmost importance and where race, gender, style–where being transnational, being somebody who travels around the world because she went to Australia as well as China, as well as to Europe. She’s this global figure who always epitomized the future. I very much think there will be a continued interest in thinking through what she will mean for generations to come.

 

Fernando Amador: Well first I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. For those of you interested in in learning more, please check out Professor Shirley Lim’s book called Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern. Thank you again professor for taking the time.

 

Shirley Lim: Thank you so much Fernie.