![](http://uploads.neatorama.com/images/posts/244/76/76244/1412140015-0.jpg)
Anna
Mae Wong grew up in Los Angeles, determined to be a part of the
glamorous world of Hollywood. She became the most famous of the very few
Chinese actors of the 1920s and ‘30s, navigating an industry that
woefully underutilized her talent. Still, she had a groundbreaking
career in silent films and talkies in both the U.S. and Europe.
Wong’s
acting was subtle and unmannered; her eyebrow game was on point. She
had a piercing stare that made you feel as if she saw the very best and
very worst things about you, and her signature blunt-cut bangs made her
face seem at once exquisitely, perfectly symmetrical. Given the quilt
work of exotic roles she’d played on the silent screen, audiences
expected her to speak with a broken, accented, or otherwise un-American
English. But her tone was refined, cool, cultured, like a slap in the
face to anyone who’d assumed otherwise.
Her early success, like
that of Japanese star Sessue Hayakawa, can at least partially be
attributed to the global market for silent films. Yet to truly
understand Anna May Wong’s unique place in Hollywood — and the
particular type of racist role available to her — you have to understand
both the rampant fetishization of the “Orient” by the West and the
place of Chinese-Americans in California in the early 20th century.
One
illustration of this was how fan magazines tried to explain that Wong
was all American, and therefore nothing to be afraid or suspicious of,
yet they also explained that she was really Chinese, really, because
audiences were used to Asian roles being played by white actors in
makeup. And the roles Wong got were stereotyped as the exotic victim,
villain, or sidekick. There was one role that she was dubbed “too
Chinese” for, although the character was, in fact, Chinese. The role
went to Helen Hayes. Read about
Anna Mae Wong’s life and career at Buzzfeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment