Anna May Wong’s Labor and Performance: An Interview with Yiman Wang

In 1936, Anna May Wong picked up a 16mm camera and filmed her own views of China in a bid to remake her filmic career and chart a new course between and across the national film industries of Hollywood and China. Working with a newspaper cameraman and her own Leica camera and lighting equipment, she toured Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, and Suzhou, as well as southern China and Hong Kong, to shoot a quasi-ethnographic travelogue that would highlight a modern China and her role in representing it. This bold, self-initiated film work was precipitated by Wong’s infamous exclusion from The Good Earth (1937), in which the principal role of O-Lan was given instead to the white actress Luise Rainer to play in yellowface. Wong was at the height of her career (at the time of the film’s production, the most well-known Hollywood actress of Chinese descent), and many regarded this decision as a glaring example of the Hollywood film industry’s deeply racialized casting practices. Shot around the time that The Good Earth was in production, Wong’s film work in China offers us a parallax view through which the viewer may glean her persistence as an actress and the unanticipated, circuitous routes she traveled throughout her life and career. Wong’s filmmaking journeys in China did not result in major advances for that career. The 1936 China footage, now held at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, garnered no accolades and little recognition. For reasons extraneous to its quality, the project (or, rather, the lack of contemporary interest in it) failed to provide Wong with the autonomy and professional possibilities she longed for. But it is this yearning for artistic independence, and Wong’s tireless work in trying to obtain it, that scholar Yiman Wang tenderly examines in her recently published book To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World (University of California Press, 2024).

Much has been written about the iconic and seemingly singular Wong. In To Be an Actress, Wang explores this territory in new ways, offering an innovative, more general framework for the study of media history, in order to account for Wong’s multifaceted accomplishments. The book grapples with Wong’s entire career, which spanned over half a century across changing media forms and cross-border entertainment industries. Drawing on extensive archival research, and the massive body of contemporary coverage Wong received in the trade press and newspapers (both in the U.S. and internationally), the book analyzes a wide-ranging corpus of Wong’s work, from her star vehicles and signature performances to the lesser known, ephemeral, and nonextant work that also characterized the precarity of her life and career, despite her celebrity. In fact, To Be an Actress shifts our gaze and retrains us to look beyond stardom and the image altogether in reckoning with Wong’s importance as both a public figure and as a minoritarian artist.

Wang proposes performer-worker studies as a critical mode for considering the “invisibilized, unglamourous, nonwhite, gendered labor [that is] the very foundation for hypervisibilized white stardom.” Such an approach builds on feminist media history critique to reconsider film pioneers, particularly in early film studies, thinking beyond screen representations and reexamining the often overlooked and marginalized labor of women working in the male-dominated film industry. But performer-worker studies make a doubly critical (yet still largely unrealized) intervention within feminist media studies. Drawing on Black feminist film criticism and queer theory, Wang’s approach not only recenters women of color in the industry but also—and most importantly—reveals their affective and performative labor. Furthermore, as a critical approach, performer-worker studies moves scholarship out of dead-end debates about representation that too often delimit the study of minoritarian performers. While often condemned for reproducing Orientalist stereotypes and the hyper-sexualization of Asian women on screen, Wong also has been reclaimed as a celebrated Asian American pioneer. To Be an Actress makes an essential critical intervention by moving beyond the politics of representation, which sometimes get stuck in limited and binary arguments over simplistic judgments regarding positive/negative portrayals and complicit/resistant historical figures.

The book’s five chapters map the uneasy movements and interruptions—as well as the episodic nature—of a career characterized by glamour and precarity, celebrity fame and invisible labor. (The book was reviewed insightfully in these pages by Faye Qiyu Lu in FQ 78.2, although I did not have access to the text of the review at the time of this interview.) To Be an Actress resists any simple biographical retelling of a star and her career. Instead, the book probes Wong’s appearances and disappearances from the screen, her work in the limelight along with her labors in the background and the margins. Chapter One examines Wong’s star vehicles, the most well-known and recognizable pictures of her film work, including The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922), Schmutziges Geld (Show Life, Richard Eichberg, 1928), Großstadtschmetterling (The Pavement Butterfly, Eichberg, 1929), Piccadilly (Ewald André Dupont, 1929), Daughter of Shanghai (Robert Florey, 1937), Dangerous to Know (Florey, 1938), and Lady from Chungking (William Nigh, 1942). Placing Wong’s performative labor at the center of analysis, the author rereads her excessive, hyperbolic embodiment of Oriental femininity and race-gender stereotypes. This chapter delights in Wong’s excessive and expressive weeping—her fetishized tearful screen deaths—that became something of a hallmark in so many of her films. In so doing, the author does the critical work of rewriting a narrative of simplistic victimhood and instead reframes Wong’s death scenes as a space for liberatory imagining. Or, more precisely, as an imaginative exit from the patriarchal normativity and racialized violence that has so long characterized the film industry and society at large.

Moving from center stage to the margins, Chapter Three looks at Wong’s work playing minor, extra, and supporting roles in film and television. In Lilies of the Field (John Francis Dillon, 1924), for example, Wong is a fleeting presence onscreen and unacknowledged in the film’s credits. Here, Wang turns to a British fan magazine—the only source to capture and document Wong’s spectral presence in the film at the time. In addition to playing uncredited ancillary characters, Wong also worked in films that are now lost. Drawing on Black feminist critique, the author takes a speculative and imaginative approach to this archival lacuna. Looking to the surviving ephemera around the film, and the overall environment in which Wong’s performative labor occurred, Wang also examines her work in films like Mr. Wu (Nigh, 1927) and Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg,1932). In these, Wong transformed supporting or seemingly minor roles into indelible performances that far exceed their bit-player screentime. Moving from the margins, her labor-intensive performances steal the show, handily upstaging her white protagonists. The chapter also considers Wong’s postwar film work in Portrait in Black (Michael Gordon, 1960), and, later in life, her television work on The Barbara Stanwyck Show. Thinking about the aging body as an archive, the author explores Wong’s resilience and reinvention as a character actress.

Each of the chapters takes the reader through Anna May Wong’s long and mosaical career, or what Wang calls her “rebeginnings,” the multiple iterations of her labor-intensive retraining, relearning, and reimagining. This concept helps illuminate Wong’s role in cross-media industries, spanning the film industries of the US, Europe, and China, as well as professional and amateur filmmaking, vaudeville, theatrical, and other performance circuits in the twentieth century—not to mention the emerging glamour photography industry and the era of postwar television. The final chapter of the book explores Wong’s afterlives in contemporary art installations by Patty Chang and in documentary films by Yunah Hong and Celine Parreñas Shimizu. In many speculative sojourns imagined here, Wong encounters not only worker-performers across continents and media industries but also the author of the book herself. While conventional biography narrates the life story of an individual, To Be an Actress tell us something entirely different—and wonderfully rich—by placing Anna May Wong “out of time, out of place.”

The following interview took place over the course of multiple conversations with the author and via email exchange.

Resisting the victim discourse and celebratory presentism (which assumes the passage of time will fix all the wrongs), this book adopts an approach that aims to 1) surface and amplify Wong’s invisibilized labor, and 2) develop a method of generatively understanding Wong’s predominantly stereotypical roles (whether in the foreground or the background) without simply chalking it up to her victimization by gender-race discriminations in her times (although this is undoubtedly true). To surface and amplify her invisiblized labor, I adopt a multifocal and anamorphic (metaphorically speaking) approach, which also represents my methodological intervention in star studies and film studies. By tilting the lens and racking the focus, this study retrains our attention to not only the center stage, but also the margins, the background, even off the screen/stage and behind the scenes. My goal is to advance a method that goes beyond star studies to reckon with Wong’s precarious and migratory endeavors. Through Wong’s example, I retool star studies as performer-worker studies.

To generatively understand Wong’s predominantly stereotypical roles, I trace and theorize [about] what she brought to the table, given or despite the discriminatory circumstances that she struggled with throughout her life-career. This constitutes the core of the book, where I theorize Wong’s literal and symbolic signature performance in interaction with her collaborators and international publics, and her resulting paradoxical agency. My approach here is a three-pronged semiotic-affective reading strategy that enacts “reparative reading” (à la [literary critic] Eve Sedgwick) of Wong’s films and gender-race stereotypes; that politicizes these texts by repositioning them (à la [sociologist] Tony Bennett); and that deploys an affective understanding of the experience of racialization (à la [performance and race and affect studies scholar] José Esteban Muñoz). Bringing this reading strategy to bear on Wong’s problematic films and stage plays, I read between the images and unpack Wong’s construction of her signature performances in collaboration with international artists and audiences. Thus, I tune into Wong’s strategies for addressing diverse audiences differently to co-create her cumulative and iterative authorship.

By inserting Wong’s migratory physical, intellectual, and affective labor back into her glamour-oriented, iconic, cosmopolitan stardom, I seriously take into account her gender-race performance, be it lightweight or stereotypical. My multifocal approach conduces to what I call performer-worker studies, which paves the way for reconstructing a long-obscured early 20th-century genealogy of border-crossing minoritized female performer-workers such as a Wong, Lady Tsen Mei, Rose Quong, Nina Mae McKinney, Josephine Baker, and many others. Just as I see Wong’s life-career as episodic, reiterative and non-teleological, I understand this genealogy as concatenated and intertwined, even if these performer-workers were not consciously collaborating with each other.

Instead of further subjecting herself to Hollywood’s gender-race-age discriminations, Wong embarked on her first and only China trip in January 1936, with the express purpose of studying Peking Opera, Chinese calligraphy and Mandarin Chinese (officially adopted by China’s Nationalist government as the national language as late as 1932), so as to better represent China to the US audience. This nine-month China trip represented Wong’s continuous efforts to retrain herself so as to find work opportunities outside Hollywood, while also refashion herself for her American audience. By making China her new stage, Wong prepared herself for what she was to describe as her “third beginning” in a 1937 interview.

Frustrated by The Good Earth casting, Wong’s China trip first and foremost embodied her bid as a spokesperson for modern China (especially modern Chinese femininity), in a David-vs.-Goliath contention against MGM’s monopoly on representing the “real” China—a claim both closely monitored and authorized by the Chinese government. Just as MGM procured twenty tons of props from China to construct a replica Chinese village in the San Fernando valley, Wong acquired her own props, albeit at a much smaller scale—including qipao dresses, Peking Opera costumes and more—all in preparation for her performance of modern urban Chinese femininity, spiced with operatic exotica, in her post-1936 films and stage plays. One example was a two-minute costume parade Wong enacted in the middle of Hollywood Party in Technicolor (directed by Roy Rowland), a twenty-minute musical revue released on April 3, 1937, just over two months after The Good Earth’s premiere on January 29 in Los Angeles. Jump starting the “third beginning” in her career after returning to the US, Wong leveraged her newly acquired wardrobe to display modern Chinese femininity to American audiences in this otherwise cringeworthy, yellowface-infused revue film.

During her China trip, Wong visited Shanghai’s Star Film Studio, conversed with Chinese filmmakers and dramatists about her professional experience in America and Europe, and engaged with Hong Kong-based diasporic Chinese filmmakers to explore work opportunities. In the new setting of China, she worked with Newsreel Wong (aka H. S. Wang, or Wang Xiaoting), a Shanghai-based newsreel photojournalist (who, interestingly, also assisted MGM’s location scouting for The Good Earth in China), with the goal of making her own activities in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou, and her journey to her father’s hometown in southern China, into quasi-travelogue-cum-ethnographic footage.

The 16mm footage and numerous photos, shot by Wong herself and Newsreel Wong, combined with her travel writings commissioned by the New York Herald Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle, demonstrated her persistent and collaborative authorship. The footage was to resurface in an ABC TV episode, “Native Land” (1957, from the travelogue series Bold Journey), narrated by the now 52-year-old Wong, whose voiceover introduced the US audience to pre-socialist China. Describing this episode as “the springboard for the beginning” of ABC’s new season’s travelogue series, Bold Journey, Wong clearly reasserted her agency by migrating the 1936 footage to 1957 through yet another media form—television—following her foray into TV in the 1951 DuMont-produced television series The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong, where Wong played the first female lead on television and became the first Asian American to have her own series.

Wong’s mobilization of her first-hand Chinese knowledge and props did not suggest her smooth or unambiguous alignment with a Chinese identity, however. That many Chinese government officials and commentators panned Wong for betraying China by participating in “China-humiliating” films ([known as] ruHua pian, 辱華片) meant that Wong had to battle China’s patriarchal ethno-nationalism as much as she had to struggle against race, gender, class, and age-related discriminations in American showbiz. Seen as neither American nor adequately Chinese, Wong turned this experiential neither-nor dilemma into a position of critical disidentification (à la José Esteban Muñoz), which enabled her to question homogenizing identity categories, be they Chinese or American. Thus, she anticipated what Asian American critic Kandice Chuh theorizes as a postcolonial and transnational “subjectless” position that leverages “categorical flux” to challenge “naturalized racial, sexual, gender, and national identities.”¹ Wong’s persistent labor outside of Hollywood both as a result of and despite her exclusion from The Good Earth, therefore, led her to expand her toolkit and enhance the authority of her strategic gender-race performances, further strengthening her critical de-essentialization of reductive identity politics.

While traveling around the UK doing films and vaudeville shows from 1933 to 1934, Wong sought the expertise of the Glasgow-based Henry Farmer, a specialist in Arabic and Islamic music, for her vaudeville repertoire and her film Chu Chin Chow (Walter Forde, 1934). Additionally, Wong worked with other artists, including Parry Jones, a Welsh operatic tenor, on her “A Jasmine Flower” number, with Anton Dolin, “Britain’s greatest ballet dancer,” on her dance act in Chu Chin Chow, and with Katherine DeMille (Cecil B. DeMille’s adopted daughter), who choreographed a dance for her stage act in early 1934. Thus, Wong ventured into domains that she had not been professionally trained for, and that were perceived as atypical for her ethnic background.

Furthermore, I use Wong’s example to gesture toward a genealogy of ethnic and migratory female performer-workers. One important figure who springs to mind immediately is Josephine Baker, Wong’s contemporary, who saw no future in the U.S., traveled to France in 1925, and quickly shot to stardom just a few years before Wong’s first European trip. Much less well-known, but equally important for my construction of this genealogy are the following artists: Lady Tsen Mei, a Chinese African American vaudeville and film actress, who did a vaudeville tour in Australia in 1916–17; Black American singer-actress Nina Mae McKinney who toured Australia in 1937; and Chinese Australian Rose Quong, whose path crossed with Wong’s in 1929 when they played together in The Circle of Chalk in London’s New Theatre. Many more contributed to this genealogy, beckoning our attention. The fact that these border-crossing ethnic female performer-workers mostly did not actively interact leads me to understand the genealogy as concatenated, intertwined, arising from their shared experiences of marginalization and resilience, rather than an a priori feeling of collectivity.

This conception of genealogy affords a framework for understanding the ethnic female performer-workers’ endeavors not as acts of individualistic self-determinism, but rather as a constellation in which one person’s efforts inevitably find reverberations in another’s, while also shaping the field for still others. This genealogy also encourages a speculative approach to the spatio-temporality of the performer-workers’ linkages. In the Refrain of the book, for instance, I paired Josephine Baker’s 1928 Charleston dance filmed in the Netherlands with Wong’s 1926 version, playfully dubbed “a peppy Chinese dance” in the “East Is West” segment of Columbia’s Screen Snapshots series, in order to probe Wong’s truncated career as a comedienne. Another glimpse can be seen in The Honorable Mr. Buggs (Fred Wood Jackman, 1927). Similarly, I speculatively engage with Wong’s untimely death, and her narrowly missing out on what would have been a major big-screen comeback role in Flower Drum Song (Henry Koster, 1961), a landmark musical comedy about Chinese American assimilation. I contemplate the What-If scenario of Wong actually meeting her successor Nancy Kwan, and doing a “Chop Suey” duet with the African Irish American actress Juanita Hall, who replaced her in the film after her death. Such lateral and vertical touching that could have happened might still happen in what I call “Refrain: The Second Beginning in the Wong Time (Intersti-racial Comic Melancholia).”

The glaring gaps, though, are the absence of responses from her interlocutors. There aren’t letters from Van Vechten and Marinoff, or from Farmer and Langner, to Wong, although I deduce certain details from Wong’s follow-up letters. There is also little record of how her films were received by contemporary Asian-heritage or other minoritized communities in Euro-America. Wong starred in exactly one Chinese American film, The Silk Bouquet (aka Dragon Horse) (directed by Harry Revier, 1926) and produced by the San Francisco–based Zhonghua yizhi yinghua gongsi (中華益智影畫公司, or China Educational Film Company). Yet Wong never mentioned this film in her numerous interviews. And for the many film productions and television episodes in which Wong played supporting or minor roles, there is little press coverage aside from the rehashed Orientalist rhetoric.

To parse out the available materials, therefore, one must simultaneously remain vigilant of their limitations and find a method of engaging with the inevitable gaps. Drawing upon Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” and Allyson Nadia Field’s method of “looking and thinking adjacently,” I activate the gaps and absence as potential exits from the discriminatory system, providing breathing room that might stimulate alternative histories. In order to adequately respond to Wong’s speculative greetings to the world (which I theorize through her multi-registered address to her international publics), one cannot but write with a speculative mind.

The way I came across The Honorable Mr. Buggs was nothing short of a stroke of luck. In 2021, I participated in a Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference panel on “Off-Color Laughter: Ethnicity and Film Comedy in the Early Twentieth-Century” with Dr. Aurore Spiers, organized by Dr. Megan Boyd. My paper, “The Comedic ‘Oriental’: Anna May Wong’s Hal Roach Comedy Shorts,” relied on a few publicity photos and Wong’s Roach contracts, as I did not have access to any of her comedy shorts (a conundrum you beautifully navigated in your book Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II [University of North Carolina Press, 2022]). After my presentation, Dr. Spiers informed me that she had a copy of The Honorable Mr. Buggs. She had recognized Wong in a film that her godmother had bought at a yard sale in France. Dr. Spiers then generously shared a digitized copy with me.

My chance encounter with the film was enthralling. For the very first time, I saw Wong super animated in her definitively non-“Oriental” bling costume, playing a jewelry thief (opposite the Japanese actor Sōjin Kamiyama), flinging the white Mr. Buggs down a flight of stairs, then frantically kicking her legs and swatting at a bug that has crawled under her sheath dress. The contrast with her pathetic melodramatic roles was shocking and refreshing. It reveals Wong’s comedic acting skill—a physical excess conventionally attributed to African American actors, while “Orientalized” bodies tended to be marked by “pathos of emotional suppression rather than by emotional excess,” as Sianne Ngai argues.³ A gem finding as it is, the film is not unproblematic, not least due to Stan Laurel’s blackface impersonation of the butler whose keyhole view of Wong’s fight with the bug triggers the chaotic unraveling of Mr. Bugg’s household. Corporeally resonating with a stereotypical minstrel character, I suggest that Wong enacted racialized bodily humor that was neither Asian or Black, which, as noted above, I call “intersti-racial comic melancholia.” Following Wong’s understanding of her career in terms of multiple beginnings, I analyze this comedy short to speculate on how Wong might have returned for yet another beginning, this time as a comedienne who could really enjoy her work.