In October 2022, the United States Mint began shipping a quarter bearing the face of Anna May Wong. For the first time, an Asian American appeared on US currency. Sixty years earlier, the actress had spent her career fighting the roles Hollywood kept offering her.
A child of Chinatown
Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles, near Chinatown, on 3 January 1905, into a Chinese American family. Film studios were moving into the city, and she spent her free time watching them shoot. Around 1919 she got her first part, as an uncredited extra in The Red Lantern. Two years later her name appeared in the credits for the first time, and she left high school to act full-time.
In 1922, aged 17, she played her first leading role in The Toll of the Sea, one of the first features shot in two-colour Technicolor. Her performance in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad (1924) brought her to a wide audience.
Leaving to escape the stereotypes
Success did not change the kind of parts she was offered. Hollywood gave her supporting, stereotyped characters: the servant, the spy, the femme fatale who dies before the end. The rules of the day also banned on-screen romance between an Asian actress and a white actor, which kept her out of romantic leads.
In March 1928, frustrated, she left for Europe. In London she made Piccadilly (1929), one of the most admired British silent films today, worked on stage and also filmed in Germany. She became an international star and a fashion icon: in 1934 a New York society named her the best-dressed woman in the world.
“Shanghai Express” and “The Good Earth”
Back in the United States in 1930 with a Paramount contract, she starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932). In 1935 came her greatest disappointment. MGM was adapting Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, a novel whose main characters are all Chinese. The female lead, O-lan, went to the German-born actress Luise Rainer, made up to look Asian.
In January 1936 Anna May Wong set off on a year-long journey through China, visiting her family’s ancestral village. During the Second World War she devoted much of her time to supporting China against the Japanese invasion.
A television pioneer
In 1951 she starred in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong on the DuMont network, the first American television series led by an Asian American. The title character, an art dealer turned detective, carried her birth name.
In 1960 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She died of a heart attack at her home in Santa Monica on 3 February 1961, aged 56.
A coin, and recognition at last
The 2022 coin was the fifth in the American Women Quarters Program, which honours American women from fields including suffrage, civil rights, science and the arts. It shows the actress resting her chin on her hand in front of the lights of a theatre marquee. The Mint’s director, Ventris Gibson, described her as a courageous advocate for greater representation of Asian Americans and for richer roles on screen.
More than a century after her first film, Anna May Wong remains proof that a career can open the way, even when the industry refuses to give it the place it deserves.
© Photo: Paramount - public domain
