Before color-blind casting was a thing, Anna May Wong (1905-1961) lit up the silver screen. Yunte Huang's superb biography of Hollywood's first Chinese American movie star, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History, doubles as a reckoning with the country's attitudes about Asian people in Wong's day; as Huang writes, "As a symbol of forbidden love, she embodied America's love and hate for the Orient, an inner war with itself in the crucible of race."
Wong was born in California and raised outside of Los Angeles's Chinatown. She dreamed of becoming a movie star and worked her way up from extra to bigger roles--when she could find them. In her heyday, "no China flick could do without her," Huang writes, "but no director could feature her as the lead": the few roles written for Asian characters would typically go to Caucasians in yellowface. At 56, Wong died of a heart attack that may have been precipitated by chronic liver disease resulting from years of drinking, which helped her cope with professional disappointments.
Huang (Charlie Chan) minutely examines the historical and cultural contexts in which Wong quietly blazed her trail, spotlighting her awareness that her dragon lady roles were insulting to Chinese people. With 60-odd films to her credit, Wong did the best that an Asian actor in Hollywood could do in her time. Huang suggests that for Wong, this wasn't enough, but for readers of the tremendously elucidating and moving Daughter of the Dragon, it will be. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer