A retrospective at the BFI celebrates how Wong – whether typecast in orientalist fantasies or breaking taboos with a kiss – could always steal the show
Anna May Wong is everywhere these days. The chic Chinese-American actor who first made a splash in the silent era has been fictionalised in films and TV shows, including Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, and an excellent novel, Amanda Lee Koe’s Delayed Rays of a Star. She has her face on the quarter, the first Asian-American to be honoured in that way, and she is the subject of a page-turner of a biography, Not Your China Doll by Katie Gee Salisbury. But what about the films? This month, BFI Southbank in London hosts a retrospective of this remarkable star’s career, titled Anna May Wong: the Art of Reinvention.
Wong was born in Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese parents in 1905. At the very beginning of her film career in 1921, she self-consciously told a movie magazine that she was “a considerable spot of yellow that’s come to stay on the silver of the screen”, announcing her difference as a rare Asian-American leading lady and her determination to become a star in the same breath. As her career continued, she would become more outspoken about the challenges of typecasting and her disappointment with the representation of Chinese characters on screen.
