Volume 52, Number 1 · January 13, 2005
Orientally Yours
By Robert Gottlieb
Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughterto Hollywood Legend
by Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Palgrave Macmillan, 284 pp., $27.95; $16.95 (paper)
Perpetually Cool:The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905–1961)
by Anthony B. Chan
Scarecrow, 312 pp., $45.00
Ah, the mysterious East. Oh, the lure of the Orient. Uh-oh, the Yellow Peril. Early Hollywood, in its pre–politically correct days—which is most of its days—loved to drop in on the festering humanity of China (where life is cheap) and the inscrutability of Japan. But not many of the actors involved were even remotely Asian. Certainly not Myrna Loy, as the fiendishly sadistic daughter in The Mask of Fu Manchu (or Fu himself, in this case played by Boris Karloff). Not Nils Asther, as the tragic Chinese warlord fascinated by (and fascinating) Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Not Sidney Toler as clever detective Charlie Chan. Not Peter Lorre as clever detective Mr. Moto. Not Sylvia Sidney, that nice Jewish girl, as Madame Butterfly. Not—try to imagine it—Helen Hayes as 'Star Blossom' in The Son-Daughter, surrounded by such fellow Asians as Ramon Novarro, Lewis Stone, and the brutish (and Swedish) Warner Oland, whom she strangles with her pigtail. Certainly not Katharine Hepburn, at her most risible as the heroine of Pearl Buck's Dragon Seed, or Luise Rainer as the heroine of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. In the hundred years or so of pre–Jackie Chan Hollywood, there were only two genuine Asian stars: Sessue Hayakawa, who thrilled Western ladies in the silent period in much the same way Valentino did, and Anna May Wong, born to Chinese-American parents in Los Angeles in 1905 and recently the subject of two biographies and a full filmography.
Review, 3202 words
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