The struggles and breakthroughs of Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong

Transcript

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John Yang: As this year's Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month draws to a close, we bring you the story of a pioneering actress considered to be the first major Asian American star despite the limits imposed by Hollywood's racism.

John Yang (voice-over): Before there was Lucy Liu, Awkwafina.

Awkwafina: She will make that check. They do that around here.

John Yang (voice-over): Or Michelle Yeoh. There was Anna May Wong considered Hollywood's first Asian American film star. She appeared in more than 60 movies beginning of the silent era. But racism meant that in most of them she played stereotyped supporting roles while white actresses in yellow face got top billing.

It wasn't until she went to Europe in the late 1920s that she was cast as a leading lady starring in British French and German films. Wong Liu Tsong was born in Los Angeles in 1905, one of seven children of American born owners and operators have a laundry business.

As a teenager she skipped school to go to the movies and to watch scenes being shot on the streets of Chinatown. She landed a role as an extra and quickly rose through the ranks. Over her parents objections she dropped out of high school to pursue an acting career.

When she was 17, Wong landed her first major role was in a largely forgotten silent retelling of Puccini's Madame Butterfly called the Toll of the Sea. That's one of the first films made using an early version of Technicolor. Her big breakthrough came when Douglas Fairbanks the biggest matinee idol of the day, cast her in the classic swashbuckling film The Thief of Baghdad.

But after that the roles Hollywood gave her were limited to exotic dragon ladies or stereotypically submissive characters. Off screen, Wong was nothing like those roles. She was an all American 1920s flapper right down to her signature banks, but on screen limitations led her to abandon Hollywood for Europe where her race didn't matter.

Despite her success overseas, Wong returned home to find that little had changed. During the planning for the 1937 film version of pearl bucks novel The Good Earth, which is set in China, Wong was mentioned for the lead, but the role went to German actress Louise Reiner who won an Oscar for her performance in Yellow Face. She left Hollywood for a year-long tour of China, but she found herself criticized there for her stereotype roles rejected in Hollywood for being too Asian she later lamented, and in China for being too American.

She returned to the United States and found modest success in the infancy of television starring as a crime solving art gallery owner in The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, the first show to star an Asian American woman that lasted one season. She found more work in television but years of heavy drinking had led to poor health. She was about to appear in the movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein Flower Drum Song when she died of a heart attack at age 56.

Today, Wong is largely forgotten beyond her image on a quarter and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, both first for an Asian American woman. But her refusal to accept a career of stereotype supporting roles laid the groundwork for today's Asian American actors and the push for representation in Hollywood films.