“Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong” by Katie Gee Salisbury

Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, Katie Gee Salisbury (Dutton, March 2024; Faber & Faber, April 2024)

Over the last few years, there’s been a renewed interest in pre-War Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong. A screenplay by David Henry Hwang starring Gemma Chan is in the works and the US Mint recently issued a quarter to commemorate her. A novel and narrative non-fiction study were published last year, but there hasn’t been a complete biography of her published in the United States until now. Katie Gee Salisbury, from Anna May’s hometown of Los Angeles, has captivatingly filled this gap in Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, and none too soon at that.

The first chapter dives right into Anna May’s late teens when she’s about to star in the epic Douglas Fairbanks film, The Thief of Bagdad, not her first film or even her first major role, but her big break. Salisbury begins with this career-changing role and then weaves in snippets from Anna May’s childhood years helping out in her family’s laundry. But it’s her life as a movie star that becomes the focus of the book, and because Anna May started acting in her early teens, her career and her life story become one and the same.

 

Salisbury’s talent as a biographer shines through not only from her thorough research, which leaves no gaps in Anna May’s story, but also in the way she gets into her characters’ thoughts. In one scene where Anna May’s mother Lee Gon Toy worries about her daughter’s chosen career, Salisbury writes:

 

She didn’t like that her daughter was constantly having her picture taken, her soul slowly drained out of her, and that her work took her to far-off places. She worried about her health and whether she was getting the right kind of sustenance to balance her qi. She worried about her safety, alone in the world among men. This concept of the independent woman was a bizarre and radical idea; surely it wouldn’t last. When was her daughter going to quit this movie business and settle down?

 

Both of Anna May’s parents were born and raised in California. Her mother never stepped foot in China and her father had moved there in his youth and had another wife and son in southern China only because his first wife refused to return with him to California.

But Salisbury also critically tackles the question of identity that Anna May was forced to deal with—whether she wanted to or not—as the first Chinese-American and Asian-American actress to appear in starring roles on the big screen. Hollywood producers found her “too Chinese” to headline films so ended up hiring white actors to play in yellowface and instead casted her in stereotypical roles of dragon women or delicate butterflies. At the same time, the Chinese government looked down on her because she portrayed Chinese characters in these derogatory ways, although she had no choice in the roles she was offered. Anna May grappled with these issues in ways that few Hollywood stars had experienced both at home and in another country.

Salisbury chronicles Anna May’s decision to find more fulfilling work in Berlin, Paris, and London before returning to the US in the early 1930s where she acted on stage in New York before making her grand Hollywood return. Another career-changing role in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express—filmed entirely on set in California and starring alongside Marlene Dietrich—would catapult her to another level in Hollywood. But Anna May still couldn’t get roles that portrayed Chinese characters in a human way: rather than casting Anna May for the leading female role of O-Lan in the film production of The Good Earth, based on the Pearl Buck novel, MGM put Luise Rainer in yellowface.

Salisbury departs from the style of a traditional biography when she gets to this part of Anna May’s story, alternating between the filming and reception of The Good Earth and Anna May’s first trip to China to learn about the country of her predecessors, creating a particularly brilliant contrast between Anna May discovering the real China while Hollywood went all out to create a fake China. Anna May traveled to half a dozen cities in China, spending four months in Peiping (as Beijing then was) and weeks at a time in Shanghai. She unwittingly insulted fans in Hong Kong when she didn’t shake hands with the Toisan delegation, there to greet her before she traveled to her ancestral town.

The other parts of her trip would go off much more smoothly and Anna May’s life changed once again. She found roles that were less derogatory and eventually worked in television. When war broke out around the world in the late 1930s, Anna May devoted her free time to raising funds for China. And even in this work, she was not entirely accepted by the most prominent fundraiser, Madame Chiang Kai-shek. She never felt entirely recognized as an American in the United States and as a Chinese-American in China.

 

Salisbury’s multilayered examination of Anna May Wong is extensive and often painted against the restrictive American immigration laws and Hollywood casting prohibitions of interracial relationships on screen. Although other Asian-American actors and actresses worked in Hollywood at that time, none other stood out as much as Anna May. Now one hundred years after the premier of The Thief of Bagdad, Anna May’s pioneering work has paved the way for Asian-American actors that have come after her, yet there’s still a long way to go. As Salisbury writes at the end of her book:

 

Anna May’s defeats, more than her triumphs, are lessons in what must change in Hollywood if we want and expect filmmakers to represent the full spectrum of human experience. According to the sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, as recently as 2015, more than half of all film, television, or streaming stories in the United States failed to include at least one Asian or Asian American actor in a speaking or named role. What’s more, the same biases that plagued Anna May—mainly, the idea that Asian actors are not charismatic enough to carry a leading role—are still at play in Hollywood in the twenty-first century.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.