Anna May Research Articles

Sticking with Trans: Reconsidering Chinese American Cinema through Anna May Wong

This article asks what exactly makes the trans a key concept in our understanding of Sino-American filmic transactions. By studying two silent films of the Chinese American film pioneer, Anna May Wong (1905–1961), with special attention to her mercurial sartorial performances, I analyze her interstitial trans position between nations, communities, cultures, between audiences here-now and elsewhere-another time, and between objecthood and subjecthood. I stress the trans position as a tension-ridden field that resists easy resolution, thereby challenges American assimilationism and China’s ethno-nationalism all at once. I argue that this trans position, which appears to be stuck and suspended, offers a theoretical and methodological framework for unpacking Wong’s legacy, and more broadly, the complexity of diasporic Chinese and Chinese American film cultures.

Old Is the New: Immersive Explorations in Another Beautiful Country—Moving Images by Chinese American Artists

This article explores how diasporic Chinese video artists present familial histories and tales of cross-cultural exchange in the context of an exhibition I am curating, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists, at the University of Southern California (USC) Pacific Asia Museum. I discuss projects by featured artists Richard Fung and Patty Chang. These artists’ experimental documentaries and performative videos foster deep personal discoveries that defy the late-capitalist obsession with the new as defined by youth, novelty, and the next trend, providing revelatory insights through recuperative engagements with what has come before. In analyzing artworks by Fung and Chang, I also reference related texts by/about artists and historical figures including Walter Benjamin, Anna May Wong, and Zhang Ailing, who emigrated from the People’s Republic of China to the United States in the 1950s and whose special collections in the USC Libraries helped inform the exhibition’s programming. I also interweave my own related familial histories and share some (not-so-new) curatorial ideas for immersing audiences in intercultural art and reflection.

Cinema’s Cosmic Shifts

Cinema’s Cosmic Shifts

Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa: Racial Performance, Ornamentalism, and Yellow Voices in Daughter of the Dragon (1931)

Abstract This article provides a comparative study of Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa—the two most iconic stars of Asian descent of American cinema's silent era—by examining the reception history around their rare collaboration, the early sound film and yellow peril thriller Daughter of the Dragon (dir. Lloyd Corrigan, US, 1931). The on-screen collision of these two stars associated with the imaginary East reveals incongruities between a homogeneous Orientalist image and heterogeneous—culturally acquired, professionally trained, mechanically reproduced, and gendered—yellow voices. Situating the star personae of Wong and Hayakawa in the geopolitical environments of the interwar era, the essay foregrounds the plasticity of voice as a form of cultural capital fetishized as an exchangeable commodity through the heavily marketed product of the new sound cinema. In this case study, the accented voice serves also as a contact point between European, American, and Asian film industries. A close analysis of the differently accented yellow voices in Daughter of the Dragon demonstrates the artificial homogeneity of the Orient embodied by the supposedly “authentic” stars of Asian descent and complicates the established configurations of the gendered “Orientals”: the Janus-faced Japanese man and the ornamentalist yellow woman.

Anna May Wong and the Color Image

Abstract In Cinema 1, Deleuze proposes the “color-image,” a type of film image with an “absorbent characteristic” that does not refer to a particular object but seizes all that happens within its range. Like color-images, racial categories have an absorbent, seizing quality: they assert “color” at the expense of the object of representation. Deleuze does not address the potential applications of his concept to race, but they are especially illuminating when applied to early color-process cinema. This essay approaches The Toll of the Sea (dir. Chester M. Franklin, 1922), starring Anna May Wong and set in China, the first Technicolor film to be widely distributed in general release, as a feature-length “China Girl” and feature-length color-image, in Deleuze's sense. It further shows how Wong and her world are virtualized in this film under the rubric of a fictional orientalist palette.

Shirley Jennifer Lim. Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern.

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Images of Chinese American women on Screen: Femme Fatale and Chinese Swordswoman as the Oriental drug for Western viewers

Representation in the U.S. film industry since the early twentieth century has invariably presented Asian women as sexualized and vampish. The figure of the Asian American femme fatale signifies a particular deathly seduction. She attracts with her soft, unthreatening and servile femininity while concealing her hard, dangerous, and domineering nature. Early images, particularly the performances of Anna May Wong, continue to this day to haunt the production and reception of Asian women on screens, such as in the star-making roles of Nancy Kwan in the 1960s and Lucy Liu in the present. If Asian/ American women’s subjection is fundamentally dependent on sex, creating the parameters for Asian women’s presences in popular film and in history, racialized sexuality on screen must then be sites where bondage of representation is itself re-imagined, recast and criticized at the very moment of performance… This gender imbalance not only sustains the construction of Asian American women as more desirable candidates to be assimilated when paired with White men but also reinforces the “ownership” of White American males over the bodies and spirits of Asian/American women by negating the potential physical and sexual threat imposed by Asian/American men…

Casting Fu Manchu by Eelyn Lee

Commissioned by Chinese Arts Now, a UK organization that typically supports live theatre, music, and dance, but responded to the pandemic with a series of digital commissions, Casting Fu Manchu took the form of an edited digital performance that reflected Lee’s dual backgrounds in devised theatre and filmmaking. The gender-conscious casting choices were particularly striking in dialogue with an extract from the movie Daughter of the Dragon, in which Anna May Wong, playing Fu Manchu’s daughter, pledges to become his son in order to avenge him, a moment that queers assumptions of East Asian femininity even as it reinforces conventional gender roles. At the close of the performance, when the cast listed their dream roles in theatre and film, we were left to reflect on how few of these modest dreams are likely to be realized in an industry within which, as York Loh suggested, casting directors who grew up with Fu Manchu are still clinging to the image of China and East Asia he perpetuated, unwilling to cast Asians who stray too far from his distorted image.

Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern

Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern

Race, Celebrity and Fashion: Anna May Wong in Spanish Magazines of the 1930s

Anna May Wong was the most widely known Asian American film actress of her generation, achieving unprecedented success in the Hollywood and European industry. When she traveled to Spain in 1935 to perform at the Teatro Casablanca in Madrid, she was already an international star and her visit garnered extensive coverage from the Spanish press, particularly film magazines of the period. These magazines provided their largely female readership with access to Hollywood stars such as Wong, whose celebrity was the site of complex negotiations of race, ethnicity and citizenship in the United States and Europe during the 1930s. Publications such as Cinegramas and Popular Film represented Wong for Spanish readers who, although removed from the particularities of race politics in the United States, were nevertheless intrigued by her ‘exotic allure’, positioned as she was at the intersection of racial otherness and Hollywood glamour. By reading Wong in Spanish magazines from the 1930s, this article considers how Spanish readers might have used these representations as a tool for negotiating their own identities as cosmopolitan at a moment when Spain was often perceived as existing on the cultural margins of Western Europe.

Anna May Wong: Navigating Asian American Racial Identity in Early Hollywood

Anna May Wong: Navigating Asian American Racial Identity in Early Hollywood

Review: Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern, by Shirley Jennifer Lim

Review: <i>Anna May Wong: Performing the Modern</i>, by Shirley Jennifer Lim

Just Nina Mae: The Struggle of an Early African American Movie Star

Just Nina MaeThe Struggle of an Early African American Movie Star Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Nina Mae McKinney, 1931, Courtesy George Eastman Museum [End Page 67] During Hollywood's early years, tantalizing stories of discovery flourished, luring young hopefuls to the fledgling industry out west. According to movie lore, The Hollywood Reporter founder Billy Wilkerson came across sixteen-year-old Lana Turner drinking a Coke at a soda fountain. Photographer David Conover spotted Marilyn Monroe while she was working on an airplane assembly line. And John Wayne was a prop man on John Ford's movie set when the director made him an extra in his film. Fame and fortune for these actors soon followed. Nina Mae McKinney's story of discovery was no less fantastic. She left high school at sixteen to join the chorus of impresario Lew Leslie's all-Black Broadway musical revue, Blackbirds of 1928. Hollywood directors and producers regularly raided Broadway productions for fresh, inexpensive talent to fill their stables at their California studios. After failing to sign jazz singer Ethel Waters, one of MGM's top directors, King Vidor, was on the lookout for an extraordinary Black actress to play the title role of Chick, a singer and dancer in Hallelujah. The movie was a serious look into the lives of African Americans in the South. When he saw Blackbirds, McKinney stood out. He later recalled, "She was third from the right in the chorus. She was beautiful and talented and glowing with personality." When they met after the show, he offered her the lead, skipping the usual preliminary screen tests, acting classes, and makeovers. There is no evidence that McKinney was seeking a movie career; she had fallen in love with theater as a young girl growing up in South Carolina and trained herself as a singer and dancer, borrowing songs and choreography from the movies she saw at the local theater. In many ways, films were still inferior to Broadway, which in 1925 staged over two hundred productions; nevertheless, she accepted Vidor's offer. McKinney portrays Chick, a seductive cabaret dancer who lures a cotton picker into a crooked game of dice. As an actor, McKinney had nuance and depth, and the camera loved her. Dressed in a fringed drop-waist dress, bangles on her arms, gold chains around her neck, she wisecracks, dances, and sings. Vidor praised McKinney's performance and her ability to take direction: "She just had it. Whatever you wanted, whatever you visualized, she could do it. Nina was full of life, full of expression, and just a joy to work with." Critics were also smitten. The Daily News of New York wrote that she was "an honest-to-goodness film star." In the 1930s, Black performers were promoted by identifying them with white movie stars. The press labeled McKinney the "Black Greta Garbo," even though the only things she had in common with [End Page 68] Click for larger view View full resolution Nina Mae McKinney, Safe in Hell, 1931, Courtesy George Eastman Museum [End Page 69] Click for larger view View full resolution Nina Mae McKinney, Safe in Hell, 1931, Courtesy George Eastman Museum the Swedish actress were youth, talent, and beauty. She evoked the era's "It" girl and was anointed the "dusky Clara Bow." Her offbeat, wacky sense of humor drew comparisons to Carole Lombard. African American newspapers simply referred to her as Nina Mae. MGM gave McKinney a five-year contract and rolled out the red carpet, lavishing limousines, hotel suites, and a smartly decorated dressing [End Page 70] Click for larger view View full resolution Nina Mae McKinney, Safe in Hell, 1931, Courtesy George Eastman Museum room on her. Yet her meteoric rise from chorus girl to star quickly stalled. After her successful film appearance in Hallelujah, starring roles did not follow. In 1930, during a fallow period, McKinney followed in the footsteps of minority performers such as Josephine Baker, Anna May Wong, and Paul Robeson and sailed to Europe for a three-month tour. The press covered the eighteen-year-old's departure and noted her fashionable appearance in black satin and a black velvet...

The Many Lives of Anna May Wong

The Many Lives of Anna May Wong

Shape shifters: Racialized and gendered crossings inPiccadilly(1929) andShanghai Express(1932)

The Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) is today considered an ambivalent icon who, on the one hand, was the first Asian American film star to gain international recognition, and on the other hand, became a symbol of the hypersexualized Asian woman in film. In this article, I will analyse the crossing of racial and sexual boundaries in two of her films, Piccadilly (1929) and Shanghai Express (1932). The comparison of Piccadilly with Shanghai Express reveals the journey not only of transatlantic agents, like Anna May Wong, but also the simultaneous trajectory of sets of interrelated motifs, narratives, and aesthetic tropes. As discourses of gender and race converge into the figure of the transnational Asian American actress, Anna May Wong offers a key and privileged site to unpack and discuss them. The relationship between sexuality and race in these films has often been reduced to processes of exoticization. However, I will show that this relationship ought instead to be understood as interrelated through practices of appropriation, subversion, and cross-dressing.By applying the term ‘exotic’ to the analysis of Anna May Wong’s performances, I aim to foreground the entangled processes of sexualization and exoticization in order to reveal that the delineation of the ‘other’ is more ambivalent than clear. The films are particularly interesting in the context of ‘sexoticization’ because they do not construct a gendered and racialized ‘other’ that is clearly distinct to a western ‘us’. Modes of appropriation and masquerade complicate the representation of the ‘sexotic’, non-European ‘other’.

The Reconstruction of the Image of Chinese Female Immigrants in Full Moon in New York, Siao Yu, and Finding Mr. Right

The Reconstruction of the Image of Chinese Female Immigrants in Full Moon in New York, Siao Yu, and Finding Mr. Right Kaby Wing-Sze Kung This article explores the changing cinematic images of Chinese women immigrants in the United States, focusing on three films by directors from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, respectively, in order to demonstrate ways in which contemporary transnational Chinese cinema introduces alternatives to established stereotypes. Full Moon in New York (1989) by Stanley Kwan (關錦鵬), Siao Yu (1995) by Sylvia Chang (張艾嘉), and Finding Mr. Right (2013) by Xiaolu Xue (薛曉璐) all illustrate how the social, political, and economic changes that have taken place in China since the 1980s have inspired contemporary Chinese filmmakers to construct new images of Chinese female immigrants. The new transnational Chinese cinema develops female characters who are more complex than the stereotypical images of the Lotus Blossom or the Dragon Lady (Tajima 309), and introduces elements of Chinese culture that are less known to Western viewers. To this end, the characters may represent stronger traditional views, as in Kwan's film; may adapt multicultural traits, as in Chang's film; or may be American Dreamers, as in Xue's comedy. In the early history of Chinese immigrants in the United States, Chinese women were stereotyped as "exotic curios, sexual slaves, drudges, or passive victims" (Yung 3). Based on these stereotypes, most Hollywood films portrayed Chinese women in a derogatory manner. In "Lotus Blossoms Don't Bleed: Images of Asian Women," Renee Tajima states that "Asian women in film are, for the most part, passive figures who exist to serve men, especially as love interests for white men (Lotus Blossoms) or as partners in crime with men of their own kind (Dragon Ladies)" (309). In light of this, the images of Asian women in American cinema could be confined to two types: "the Lotus Blossom (also known as China Doll, Geisha Girl, shy Polynesian beauty), and the Dragon Lady (Fu Manta's various female relations, prostitutes, devious madames)" (309). One prominent example of a Lotus Blossom is featured in the aptly [End Page 424] named film Lotus Blossom (1921), starring Lady Tsen Mei, while one famous example of a Dragon Lady is Anna May Wong's character in Thief of Baghdad (1924) (Tajima 309). Owing to deep-rooted prejudice, many influential forms of Western popular culture have marginalized Asian women (Uchida 167); in order to create new images of Chinese immigrants, the three directors discussed here use Self-Orientalism to deconstruct traditional Western stereotypes and then reconstruct images of Chinese women immigrants by focusing on depicting their female characters' personal frustrations and struggles while living in the United States. Although the three directors are from different Chinese locales and depict different types of problems that Chinese immigrants in America face in different eras, they all focus on female immigrants' struggles for survival in their new milieu. They depict Chinese female immigrants as powerless, with no choice but to stay in America. In light of this, comparison of these three films reveals different facets of the images of Chinese female immigrants. Xiaolu Xue, from China, Sylvia Chang, from Taiwan, and Stanley Kwan, from Hong Kong, each bring distinct backgrounds, idiosyncratic ideas, and particular filmic techniques to the depiction of Chinese immigrants to the United States. Each film also presents the experiences of Chinese female immigrants in a different historical period: Full Moon in New York is set in the 1980s, Siao Yu was filmed in the 1990s, and Finding Mr. Right was made in the 2010s. Stanley Kwan's Full Moon in New York tells the story of three Chinese women in New York. Zhao Hong (Siqin Gaowa) who is from mainland China, has just married Thomas, an American-born Chinese man, and is trying to adjust to her new American lifestyle. However, she is not completely content, as she longs to bring her mother to America. Li Feng Jiao (Maggie Cheung) is from Hong Kong and is burdened with managing a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, working as a real estate agent, and confronting her homosexuality. Wang Hsiung Ping (Sylvia Chang), an actress from Taiwan, attends multiple auditions for stage performances without much success. The...

Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman

Reviewed by: Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman Benjamin H. Johnson Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World. Edited by Brian D. Behnken and Simon Wendt. New York: Lexington Books, 2013. 330pp. $85 (cloth). At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934. By Andrae M. Marak and Laura Tuennerman. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. 232pp. $55 (cloth). Contemporary maps divide the world into territories controlled by discrete nation-states, the very entities that have structured the modern discipline of history. Yet social and political reality is also characterized by transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas. Paradoxically, these exchanges—the raison d’être of the burgeoning field of transnational history—include nationalist ideas and mobilizations. “Transnationalized concepts of national belonging” are the focus of the wide-ranging and provocative anthology Crossing Boundaries. Its editors endeavor to show how such concepts have been “forced and adopted, borrowed and compelled, adapted and coopted, and, ultimately how they can be accepted and rejected by local people” (p. 2). The volume consists of fourteen brief essays, of about twenty pages each, which range over the twentieth century. Half of the essays examine transnational dynamics in the Americas; four are set primarily in Asia; and the rest describe transnational relationships rooted primarily in Africa and Europe. The center of gravity lies in the study of political movements, but transnational cultural history is a strong secondary theme, particularly in Brian Behnken’s discussion of music and hair-style in his essay on connections between the U.S. Chicano movement and Mexican student unrest and in Pablo Dominguez Andersen’s examination of Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong and her fame in Weimar Germany. The last essay, Kevin Amidon’s superb and wonderfully theorized “Beyond the Straight State: On the Borderlands of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nation in the United States and Europe,” is more comparative than explicitly transnational. The individual essays have their particular ambitions and historiographic interventions, but the editors conclude that the volume’s most fundamental revelation is that “transnational and transcultural processes impeded political elites’ efforts to create ethnically and racially homogenous national communities, while they also produced a hybrid sense of national belonging that frequently transcended traditional forms of ethnic nationalism as well as national boundaries” (p. 6). This revelation is pursued in a particularly compelling fashion in several of the essays. [End Page 414] Charles Reed makes a convincing case for the importance of “imperial citizenship,” which allowed early twentieth-century South African activists to struggle for dignity and autonomy within the British Empire and to thereby escape the distinctions that later scholars often drew between civic and ethnic nationalisms. His subjects, Reed observes, “imagined themselves as British citizen-subjects (civic) and ‘natives’ (ethnic) without contradiction and without such distinctions in mind” (p. 104). Similarly, Charlton Yingling’s recreation of Dominican exile networks from the 1930s to 1950s traces the joining of notions of pan– Latin Americanism with Dominican nationalism, concluding with a forceful articulation of the importance of exile “as a decisive site of nation-building” (p. 54). Karen Morris points to debates over Ivoirité in the Cote d’Ivoire in recent decades as illustrative of the wider tensions “inherent in equations of post–World War II national citizenship with ancestry-based pre-colonial territoriality” in postcolonial Africa and beyond (p. 173). The similarities in themes link together essays that are diverse in empirical terms. Examining different national projects on five continents over the course of a century necessarily draws on an enormous range of historical developments and historiographies. The fact that the essays speak so well to one another reflects a strong editorial hand and the sweeping importance of the questions about ethnicity, race, and nationalism that lie at the heart of the volume. The anthology’s success in terms of thematic unity, however, raises questions that it does not answer or even substantially address. Taken as a whole, Crossing Boundaries offers very little sense...

Anna May Wong fans her time machine, and: Anna May Wong blows out sixteen candles, and: Anna May Wong meets Josephine Baker, and: Anna May Wong makes cameos, and: Anna May Wong rates the runway

Anna May Wong fans her time machine, and: Anna May Wong blows out sixteen candles, and: Anna May Wong meets Josephine Baker, and: Anna May Wong makes cameos, and: Anna May Wong rates the runway

Performing race and gender: the exoticization of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong

Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong are two exceptions to white hegemony in early show business. They became the first Afro-American and Chinese-American stars in the 1920s and reached international stardom in spite of their ethnicity but also because of it. Their careers and success were based on their exoticization. Baker and Wong's exoticism has much to do with ethnicity, but also with sex and gender. Their exotic dances on stage or on screen can be considered to be forms of erotic shows. This article shows how sex, gender, and race are entangled in their movies and burlesque shows. It also discusses the ways in which the agency and the audience of the performer should be taken into account, and analyzes how these performances were both rooted in Western imaginative geographies and connected to symbolic and material spaces.

Crossing boundaries: ethnicity, race, and national belonging in a transnational world

Introduction: Hybrid National Belonging and Identity in a Transnational World by Simon Wendt and Brian D. Behnken Chapter 1. Politics of Belonging on a Caribbean Borderland: The Colombian Islands of San Andres and Providence by Sharika Crawford Chapter 2. To the Reconciliation of All Dominicans: The Transnational Trials of Dominican Exiles in the Trujillo Era by Charlton Yingling Chapter 3. Mexico's American/America's Mexican: Cross-border Flows of Nationalism and Culture between the United States and Mexico by Brian D. Behnken Chapter 4. Nuestro USA?: Latino/as Making Home and Reimagining Nation in the Heartland by Marta Maria Maldonado Chapter 5. Imperial Citizenship and the Origins of South African Nationalism by Charles V. Reed Chapter 6. An African Nation in the Western Hemisphere: The New Afrikan Independence Movement and Black Transnational Revolutionary Nationalism by Paul Karolczyk Chapter 7. Transnational Ethnic Identities and Garinagu Political Organizations in the Diaspora by Doris Garcia Chapter 8. Avoiding Vagabond Nationality: The Emergence of Ivoirite in 1990s Cote d'Ivoire by Karen Morris Chapter 9. Russians in Manchuria: From Imperial to National Identity in a Colonial and Semi-Colonial Space by Frank Gruner Chapter 10. Japan's Race War: Transnational Dimensions of the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, 1942-1945 by David C. Earhart Chapter 11. Creating a European Constitutional Monarchy for Afghanistan: The Transnational Dynamics of Afghanistan's Constitutional Period by Kristina Benson Chapter 12. So Tired of Playing the Parts I Had to Play: Anna May Wong and German Orientalism in the Weimar Republic by Pablo Dominguez Chapter 13. About Thunderstorms of History and a Society in Crisis: Transnationalizing the Study of Ethnic Nationalism in Southeastern Europe by Nenad Stefanov Chapter 14. Beyond the Straight State: On the Borderlands of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nation in the United States and Europe by Kevin S. Amidon