Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend [Hardcover]

Graham Russell Gao Hodges (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 2004

Anna May Wong was one of Hollywood's most well-known Chinese American actresses. Between 1919 and 1960, she starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., Marlene Dietrich and Werner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant's difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. Born in Los Angeles in 1905, she was the second daughter of six children born to a laundryman and his wife. Her life there fuelled her fascination with Hollywood and, in 1919 she secured a small part in her first film, The Red Lantern. Her most famous film roles were in Thief of Baghdad, Old San Francisco and Shanghai Express. Discrimination against Asians, though, was commonplace and when it came time to make a film version of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, she was passed over for the role that was ultimately given to the Luise Rainer. In a narrative that recalls both the pathos of life in Los Angeles's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood's pleasure palaces, Graham Hodges recounts the life of a Hollywood legend.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While Wong (1905-1961) has been called "the premier Asian-American actress," controversies surrounding her career have left her life and work largely unexamined. In this groundbreaking biography, Colgate University history professor Hodges reveals this captivating woman, offering readers a sense of the struggle her career represented. Although Wong was a third-generation Californian, she needed permits to re-enter the U.S. after her foreign tours. She could work in the movies, but only in Asian roles, replete with negative stereotypes. Even then, she was barred from roles involving marriage with non-Asians-even with white actors playing Asians. Off-screen romance wasn't much easier; a Chinese husband wouldn't accept her career, but marriage to a non-Asian violated anti-miscegenation laws. Still, Wong persevered, improving what roles she could get by supplying authentic costumes, hairstyles and gestures. When even bad roles disappeared, she turned to the stage or took work in European film productions. Wong's Chinese war relief work and post-WWII TV appearances provided some satisfaction in her last years. Yet her career and life were cut short by a world that simply wasn't ready for an Asian-American star. Hodges summarizes the plots of all of Wong's films, covers the chronology of her career and has done extensive research into Chinese sources. He's particularly adept at viewing Wong through the lens of Chinese culture, interpreting the meaning of her attire or hand movements. He also covers the Chinese and Chinese-American press's reaction to Wong, adding an important dimension to understanding her limbo between two worlds, unacceptable to racist Hollywood and to the conservative Chinese establishment. Illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hodges first encountered "the premier Asian American actress," who appeared in more than 50 movies during a career spanning some 40 years, in 1999 in a framed photo in a London bookstore. Internationally popular, Wong (1905-61) became the film personification of Chinese womanhood, angering her own family and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist movement, who considered her callously exploited by Hollywood because her career coincided with the Chinese Exclusion Act and increased discrimination against Chinese Americans. Indeed, film codes forbade kissing between races, and the concept of "Orientalism" was forged to excuse such prejudice. Wong portrayed characters whose inevitable fate was lovelessness or death. Hodges not only rediscovers her films but also examines her life as a third-generation American in racist L.A. Rebelling against tradition, she became a Chinese flapper, but through her film work, she later found identity in her roots and sought to improve Americans' image of China and became a movie legend, gay camp favorite, and figure of continuing controversy. A well-illustrated, accessible, scholarly addition to film and women's studies. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition (January 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312293194
• ISBN-13: 978-0312293192
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #157,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #80 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Women's Studies > Women Writers

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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "Laundryman's Daughter" Less Than Best, March 19, 2005

By 

David C. Rive Jr. (New Orleans, Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Hardcover)

In a mysterious convergence of coincidence and good fortune reminiscent of that week in 1975 when then-immerging rocker, Bruce Springsteen, landed on the covers of both TIME and NEWSWEEK, we've witnessed the publication of three monographs on Anna May Wong in a one-year span. Let it be known that, heretofore, there have been no Anna May Wong books, no Anna May Wong "industry" (as there is for, say, Marilyn Monroe or dozens of other dead celebs), and that the unfortunate actress had been lucky to get a capsule bio or passing reference in most mainstream film histories.

Thus, after years of neglect, a full-length biography of Ana May Wong (1905-1961), the first Chinese American star, whose career spanned the silent era, the talkies, stage, radio and television, is cause for celebration.

I should alter that to cause for "qualified celebration," for Graham Russell Gao Hodges' always well-meaning but sometimes flawed ANNA MAY WONG: FROM LAUNDRYMAN'S DAUGHTER TO HOLLYWOOD LEGEND, is not the definitive bio her fans have longed for.

It is good on a whole, even excellent in some respects, but there are technical inconsistencies at hand and dubious interpretations proffered that prevent it from being a totally reliable, much less authoritative statement on its subject.

Furthermore, at the risk of appearing a crank, I'll say that I've encountered few books put out by a major publisher (Paragon Macmillan is an imprint of St Martin's Press) so fraught with repetitions, typos, imprecise language, faulty syntax and poorly constructed writing. At times, the reader feels compelled to cry out, "Is there an editor in the (publishing) house?"

In a chapter devoted to Wong's early career, for instance, Hodges dutifully describes Wong's involvement in several silent films from Cinema's Black & White past, when, suddenly, he starts to describe the colors of her costumes in yet another. What, you may well ask, true-to-life colors in a silent movie? It is not until the sixth paragraph devoted to the film in question that the author reveals that THE TOLL OF THE SEA (1922) just happened to be the first Technicolor feature.

(There are other such lapses, but since they've been noted elsewhere, I shan't repeat them here.)

Though penned by a university professor (Hodges teaches History at Colgate University), the book is accessible and targeted--presumably--for a just-above-middlebrow readership of movie buffs, enlightened culture fans, and curious bibliophiles in search of an offbeat bio. Its availability is obviously welcomed by scholars of Asian American and Film Studies, to say nothing of Wong's loyal "keepers of the flame." While the book cites sources and features a bibliography, filmography and list of Wong's television appearances, it isn't "academic" in tone, nor is it the puff piece or hackwork that some have made it out to be. It isn't as great as it could be, but isn't terrible either.

While I've seemingly dwelled upon the book's weaknesses, there are many things to admire here, and we should be grateful to Hodges for bringing to light many hitherto unknown and obscure facts about Anna May Wong, such as her interview with the Frankfort School philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (alas, not yet available in English translation), or her long-standing friendship and correspondence with 20th Century (Harlem) Renaissance Man, Carl Van Vechten, or that she was the likely inspiration for songwriter Eric Maschwitz's romantic standard, "These Foolish Things."

The author has done a commendable job of gathering the facts. Hodges has traveled the world in search of printed primary and secondary sources, and his book is an admirable compendium of excerpts from yellowing press clippings and movies magazines from long ago and far away, and a fair sampling of some up-to-date theories and perspectives, too. He did not interview Wong's surviving brother, Richard (it's been said that he doesn't grant interviews with anyone, anyway), but he did travel to China and discovered new information and materials on the Chinese branch of her father's family. Hodges excels at gathering material and archival research, and his book will undoubtedly inspire other writers and scholars in their own research into Wong's life, films and legacy.

I think his treatment of her personal life is as in-depth as can be expected for a subject born a hundred years ago, and who died before a "revival" kicked in. Hodges paints his subject as a woman of wit, talent, intelligence (she spoke several languages), and courage. He writes of her triumphs and disappointments, from her earliest years growing up a movie-obsessed kid on the outskirts of L.A.'s Chinatown, to her achievements on stage and screen, to her twilight years in Tinseltown.

The author reflects a global view of the star who was often "too Chinese" for European American Hollywood, and "too American" for Nationalist China. Hodges, himself married to a Chinese, demonstrates particular insight into Wong's duality, and the peculiar cultural/racial tightrope she traversed. He also writes with authority on the authenticity and appropriateness of the actress' various ethnic hairdos, costumes, gestures and dances in many film roles. Still, I think he goes overboard in always attributing the introduction of these elements to Wong's overt contribution or sly "coding" of ethnographically correct elements and their "political and national associations" into mainstream European and European American films.

Hodges, who has in the past written on African American history, is particularly sensitive to matters of race and civil rights, and is quite effective in conveying the particular hardships that American citizens of Chinese descent had to endure in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 until its repeal only during Wong's lifetime. He writes compellingly of Wong's ambivalence about her Chinese heritage and its traditions--she was in most ways a thoroughly modern American woman--and how an extended trip to the land of her ancestry was something of a life-changing experience for the star.

The author touches on just about every aspect of Wong's life and work, and various mass-media interpretations of the same. Hodges also explores Wong's legacy, and shows that he is hip to the long-standing "camp" appreciation of Wong, and of artists like Andy Warhol, Martin Wong and Ray Johnson who executed works devoted to the exotic star. He also shows that Wong, who might be accused of perpetuating unflattering perspectives of Asians in her film roles, poses a problematic figure to scholars of Asian American history.

Anna May Wong is a fascinating subject, and Hodges is in so many ways an insightful and sympathetic biographer. Yet, his isn't quite the biography its subject deserves. (See Barry Paris' LOUISE BROOKS, (Knopf, New York, 1989) for an example of a thoroughly riveting, incisive and authoritative account of a film star and one of Wong's contemporaries.) If this book is ever released in paperback, let's hope that it is a "revised" edition; there is plenty of good material here for a judicious editor to craft into a much better book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Was it done by the professor or one of his students?, November 25, 2004

By 

Ruby Mae "angelcatsmom" - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Hardcover)

Anna May Wong was known as something of a sex symbol in her day, but she was also a very talented actress. From her first starring role in Toll of the Sea she had an ability to touch you from the screen. Unfortunately, she was constantly put in bad vehicles and is virtually unknown today.

While I was glad to find an affordable biography on Wong, I soon found that I got what I paid for. This book gives alot of facts about Wong, so many in such a hurried fashion that one gets bleary eyed reading them. The writing is terribly uneven and vague. Case in point, something happened to incur the wrath of the Chinese people against Wong when she arrived for her only trip to China. However, the author only says she was "uncharacteristically rude to her fans." So...what'd she do that was so bad they threatened her family if they allowed her to stay in China? He doesn't give us the details. I suppose it could be possible that his source was just as vague, but he could at least have let his readers know the facts were not available, especially when he went to such great detail later in the chaper describing the hatred Wong experienced at the hands of her countrymen due to the mysterious event.

Then at the end of the book Hodges describes one of Wong's last appearances on television with the fact that there was a problem with her lower lip "from her near fatal stroke two years before." The TV show in question was taped in 1960. For whatever reason, this is the first time the author mentions the stroke(I went back over the previous pages to see if, in my boredom, I had skipped over it; the last illness mentioned was a two day hospitalization she had sometime in 1955 or '56. I'm sure if this was the "near fatal stroke" she would have been hospitalized for more than two days). Hodges is so busy describing her TV appearances he "forgets" to tell us about the stroke!

Also disappointing is the lack of photos of Wong from later in her life.

The author seems at times to be protecting Wong's reputation by omitting facts and downplaying her drinking problem so that the reader doesn't come away with a bad feeling about the actress. His subject has been dead for more than 40 years and I'm sure that the knowledge that she may have been "rude" from time to time will not deter people who enjoy her work from buying the Picadilly DVD coming out in February, or seeing any of her rare films should they become available. The man is a history professor, for goodness sakes! It is rather juvenile on his part to write a "puff piece" instead of reporting the facts. This leads me to wonder if Hodges was really the author or did one of his students pen the book for extra credit?

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The psychology of the identity crisis..., June 7, 2008

By 

Joe Anthony "Joe Anthony" (Massachusetts, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (Paperback)

This was a good story for anyone who has an interest in Chinese-Americans, The Golden Age of Hollywood, or the psychology of the identity crisis. Although I have only seen one movie that includes Anna May Wong (The Thief of Bagdad), I have found myself caught up in her beauty and sexy, but rather meloncholoy persona. Her story is, in fact, a sad one that includes alcoholism, loneliness and non-acceptence from Americans and Chinese alike. It is also a story that crosses paths with interesting people of her time including Douglas Fairbanks, Marlene Dietrich, Anthony Quinn, Lin Yutang, and Madame Chaing Kai-Shek.

This book has sparked my curiousity and I plan on trying to watch some of the Anna May Wong movies mentioned in this book such as "Chu Chin Chong", "Shanghai Express", "Piccadilly" and "Lady of Chunking".