Katie Gee Salisbury was a 19-year-old intern at Los Angeles’ Chinese American Museum when she first heard of film star and TV actress Anna May Wong.
“I was totally taken aback that there could have been an Asian American movie star in the 1920s and ‘30s and that I also had never heard of her,” Salisbury recalls on a video call from Brooklyn, where she is now based. “I’m half Chinese. I grew up in an Asian American community in Arcadia and I was like, if she was that famous, how come no one is talking about her?”
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Changing the narrative
Salisbury began what would become years of research into the star’s life and work. The culmination of that labor is “Not Your China Doll,” her biography of Anna May Wong, which has just been published by Dutton.
“When you look up Anna May Wong’s life, there’s a shorter narrative, a very pat narrative that gets told about her career,” Salisbury explains. “That she became very famous, was very beautiful, had roles in some of these huge blockbusters, like ‘The Thief of Bagdad’ in 1924, but Hollywood wouldn’t put her in leading roles because of her race.”
She adds that the story often ends with Wong losing the lead role in “The Good Earth” to German American actress Luise Rainer. But Salisbury thought that there had to be more to it.
And there was.
“When you really start to look at her career, it spanned four decades,” she says. “She worked in almost every medium. She went on to do so many groundbreaking things, after ‘The Good Earth” disappointment.”
In fact, Wong’s filmography is packed. She starred in crime films like “Daughter of Shanghai” and “King of Chinatown” in the late 1930s. Salisbury points to “Daughter of Shanghai,” where Wong and Philip Ahn play the film’s heroes who have a romantic relationship, which was groundbreaking at a time when Asian Americans were often bypassed for romantic leads.
“It’s incredibly mind-blowing that that happened in 1937 and then you don’t see it again for decades,” says Salisbury.
By the early 1950s, she had her own television series, “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong,” playing an art dealer who solves mysteries. Wong continued working until her death at the age of 56, right before she was set to begin rehearsals for “Flower Drum Song,” the 1961 film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.
“It’s so impressive how she continually found workarounds and new ideas that worked, that people were interested in,” says Salisbury. “Towards the end of her career, she had no issue with shifting to character roles, where she wasn’t the leading actress anymore, but she played a lot of interesting roles on television.”
A new generation of fans
As Salisbury notes, Wong’s work is making its way to more contemporary viewers, and there’s increased interest in the star. Last year saw the publication of both a nonfiction book about the star, “Daughter of the Dragon” by Santa Barbara-based author Yunte Huang and an autobiographical novel based on her life, “The Brightest Star,” by Gail Tsukiyama. A biopic scripted by David Henry Hwang is also said to be in the works. The U.S. Mint has even put her likeness on a quarter.
While some of the films are lost, there is still much for fans to see.
“Yes, a lot of the early short silent films are missing, but a good number of them are available,” says Salisbury. She credits the fan-run YouTube channel “The Gallery of Anna May Wong,” which has uploaded some of her more difficult-to-find appearances.
During her research, Salisbury traveled to London to see 35-millimeter prints of some of Wong’s European films. However, these are becoming easier to access, too. “Pavement Butterfly,” the 1929 German film in which Wong starred, was recently restored and has had a few screenings.
Salisbury is hopeful that Wong’s 1928 film “Song,” a German-British co-production, will be restored soon as well.
“I would say ‘Song’ and ‘Pavement Butterfly’ are her best films and almost no one has seen them because they just weren’t available in the U.S. and they didn’t really translate as well,” she says. “They were made in Europe and people in Europe loved them and they would be brought to the U.S. and screened for a week and that was it. They kind of disappeared after that.”
Amongst the still-missing work from Wong’s career is her 1951 television series.
“The story is that Dumont television went bankrupt and didn’t want to store all the things that they had in their catalog, so supposedly somebody dumped everything into the East River in New York,” Salisbury, adding that fans are hopeful that the series will be found someday.
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The struggle for success
In her book, Salisbury illustrates how Wong’s struggles in Hollywood weren’t the result of what audiences wanted to see.
“I do think it comes down to who is at the top of these studios and these decisions that they want to make,” she says. “Of course, they would say, we’re making decisions based on what we think people want, but then the people are telling you that they want Anna May Wong and you’re not putting her in the types of movies that she can succeed in.”
And that’s something that remains the same in Hollywood, says Salisbury.
“Who is making decisions in Hollywood really determines the types of films that get made, the types of stories that are told.”