--- title: That Old Feeling: Anna May Win description: A girl dreamed of movie stardom. Literally dreamed, as she told it years later. "There is a man with short sleeves and a big horn... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6907687/that-old-feeling-anna-may-win/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2005-02-03T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T15:05:51.298Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: That Old Feeling: Anna May Win og:description: A girl dreamed of movie stardom. Literally dreamed, as she told it years later. "There is a man with short sleeves and a big horn... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6907687/that-old-feeling-anna-may-win/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: That Old Feeling: Anna May Win twitter:description: A girl dreamed of movie stardom. Literally dreamed, as she told it years later. "There is a man with short sleeves and a big horn... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # That Old Feeling: Anna May Win > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Feb 3, 2005 5:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Feb 3, 2005 5:00 AM UTC A girl dreamed of movie stardom. Literally dreamed, as she told it years later. “There is a man with short sleeves and a big horn in front of his mouth, shouting, ‘Anna May Wong, now you come downstairs and look like the prince was already approaching — we do a closeup of that!’ … and I have an overjoyed face because I feel the great happiness — and the important man says, ‘You did a great job, Anna May Wong — You are a film star!'” Born in Los Angeles in 1905, five years before the picture people came west from New York and Chicago, Anna May grew up watching movies made on the streets near her home. Her laundryman father tried to beat (literally beat) a dutiful girl’s sense into her, and told her she was disgracing the family, as we learn from Graham Russell Gao Hodges’ thorough biography [_Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312293194/qid=1106947906/sr=2-1/ref=pd%5Fka%5Fb%5F2%5F1/002-9336716-0248817). But Anna May couldn’t get the dream out of her head. Because she was tall and graceful, and because her big eyes gave her a maturity beyond her years, she found work as an extra by the time she was 14, and played important roles opposite Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks while still in her teens, and was a sensation in German and English films before she was 25\. | | | | RICHEE / PARAMOUNT / MPTVAnna May Wong in 1933 Her resume would be impressive enough for a caucasian actress. It happened that Anna May Wong was Chinese, at a time when East Asians were no more likely to become Hollywood stars than someone from India or Africa. She knew, from seeing _The Perils of Pauline_ serials with the villainous Wu Fang, or D.W. Griffith’s _Broken Blossoms,_ about a sensitive, opium-sotted “Chink,” that Chinese were portrayed in films as notorious criminals or emotional cripples, and that, anyway, they were almost always played by white actors. Hollywood may as well have had a sign on the studio gate reading No Chinese Need Apply. But Wong did; she was merely following her dream to be a star. She was too young and ambitious to know it couldn’t be done. So she did it. The magnitude of Wong’s achievement is not that she was Hollywood’s first star actress of Chinese blood. It is that, for her entire, 40-plus years in movies, and for decades after, she was the only one. Lucy Liu, from Queens, has achieved a little fame on the small and big screens; the Mainland’s Zhang Ziyi, soon to star (as a Japanese!) in Bob Marshall’s _Memoirs of a Geisha,_ may duplicate her Asian luminosity. But Wong was the No. 1 Chinese lady, from the teens to the 60s, and there was no No. 2\. Against devastating odds, she made her name in silent films in the U.S., with Douglas Fairbanks in _The Thief of Bagdad,_ and abroad, starring in the amazing Anglo-German [_Piccadilly_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000777HUW/qid%3D1107352315/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/104-2896216-1396714)_._ Like Greta Garbo, Wong developed a gestural language for silent film and attached it to her already formidable screen presence. When sound came in, she wanted to stick around. WONG TALKS! Dozens of silent stars failed in the talking pictures that went from novelty in 1927 to the norm by 1930\. Wong had garnered raves for speaking German with a natural precision in her first talkie, _Hai-Tang._ Her West End stage debut in _The Circle of Chalk,_ though, was calamitous. Critics derided her “Yankee squeak,” and the show’s producer, Basil Dean, blamed her for its early close. Apparently, she didn’t always project for audiences to hear her, and when they did they were appalled by her flat California diction. Well, she was from California. Maybe she didn’t look California? Here’s what Katherine De Mille said of her: “She has the world’s most beautiful figure and a face like a Ming princess, and when she opens her mouth out comes Los Angeles Chinatown sing-sing girl and every syllable is a fresh shock.” Was Anna May the first Valley girl? Prodded by the _Circle of Chalk_ embarrassment, Wong paid #200 for a speech teacher, who implanted a mid-Atlantic accent that the actress would use from then on. What didn’t change was the flatness. She had a deep alto voice, with a cello’s rich knowing, melancholy, but it was a monotone; it didn’t climb or fall with the musicality most actors adopt. Her tonal range was one of the narrowest in talking pictures, and that limited her emotional range. She rarely giggled or shrieked; her voice suggested that she was either disdainful or incapable of severe highs and lows. She wasn’t one to spit out rapid-fire dialogue, a vocal reticence that would have limited her roles even in a color-blind Hollywood. Saucy comedy, of the sort Jean Harlow personified, was out, as was the scalding, wiseacre melodrama, Barbara Stanwyck-style. Wong could flash a regal hauteur and, when called for, that sensuality. She could have played grand-dame roles of the sort essayed by Garbo — she certainly could match the Swede for fascination, and self-fascination — but not, say, Marlene Dietrich, whose awareness of her power over men was always comic and ironic. The poles of Wong’s screen appeal were that she was nonchalantly sexual (in many films the slim-chested actress wears no bra, thus allowing viewers to ogle at what Sanney Leung on the invaluable Hong Kong Entertainment News in Review website refers to as “two points”) and vaguely forbidding. Hollywood couldn’t ignore her allure, and had taken notice of her stardom in Europe. Finally, in 1931, at 26, she got top billing in her first American talkie, director Lloyd Corrigan’s _Daughter of the Dragon_ — which, in its unabashed melodramatic excess, its rampaging ethnic stereotypes and the opportunity it affords its star to be simultaneously sexy and grave, sympathetic and villainous, qualifies the film as the definitive Anna May Wong movie. DRAGON LADY Based on a Fu Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer, the plot of _Daughter of the Dragon_ extended the curse sworn by Dr. Fu on the Petrie family to the next generation. Fu Manchu (Warner Oland), long ago injured and exiled in an attempt on Petrie Sr., returns to London and confronts the father: “In the 20 years I have fought to live,” he says in his florid maleficence, “the thought of killing you and your son has been my dearest nurse.” He kills the father, is mortally wounded himself and, on his deathbed, reveals his identity to his daughter Ling Moy (Wong) and elicits her vow that she will “cancel the debt” to the Fu family honor and murder the son, Ronald (Bramwell Fletcher)… who, dash it all, is madly infatuated with Ling Moy. Ronald has seen “Princess Ling Moy — Celebrated Oriental Dancer” perform, and the vision has made him woozy. “I wish I could find a word to describe her,” this calf-man effuses. “Exotic — that’s the word! And she’s intriguing, if you know what I mean.” In a near-clinch, Ling Moy wonders if a Chinese woman can appeal to a British toff. When he begs her to “chuck everything and stay,” she asks him, “If I stayed, would my hair ever become golden curls, and my skin ivory, like Ronald’s?” But the lure of the exotic is hard to shake. “Strange,” he says, “I prefer yours. I shall never forget your hair and your eyes.” They almost kiss … when an off-camera scream shakes him out of his dream. It is from his girlfriend Joan (Frances Dade), and the societal message is as clear and shrill: white woman alerting white man to treachery of yellow woman. Ling Moy, a nice girl, previously unaware of her lineage, might be expected to struggle, at least briefly, with the shock of her identity and the dreadful deed her father obliges her to perform. But Wong makes an instant transformation, hissing, “The blood is mine. The hatred is mine. The vengeance shall be mine.” Just before his death, Fu mourns that he has no son to kill Ronald. But, in a good full-throated reading, Wong vows: “Father, father, I will be your son. I will be your son!” The audience then has the fun of watching her stoke Ronald’s ardor while plotting his death. When she is with him, pleading and salesmanship radiate from her big eyes. But when an ally asks her why she keeps encouraging the lad, she sneers and says, “I am giving him a beautiful illusion. Which I shall crush.” As a villainess, she is just getting started. Revealing her mission to Ronald, she tells him she plans to kill Joan — “Because you must have a thousand bitter tastes of death before you die.” (The ripe dialogue is by Hollywood neophyte Sidney Buchman, whose distinguished list of credits would include _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,_ _Here Comes Mr Jordan_ and _The Talk of the Town_.) She soon ascends on a geyser of madness as she decides on a new torture: “My vengeance is inspired tonight. You will first have the torture of seeing her beauty eaten slowly away by this hungry acid.” An aide holds a hose gadget over Joan’s soon-to-be-corroded face, and Ronald cries for Ling Moy to stop. Very well she says. “Ling Moy is merciful.” She barks at Ronald: “Kill her!” He must decide if his favorite white girl is to be etched with acid or stabbed to death. Great stuff! Melodrama is the art of knowing how precisely _too far_ to go. The film is a triangle: not so much of Ling Moy, Ronald and Joan as of Ling Moy, Ronald and a Chinese detective, Ah Kee, played by Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor who in the teens was Hollywood’s first Asian male star. He’s not plausibly Chinese here, and he is in a constant, losing battle with spoken English. But he is a part of movie history, in the only studio film of the Golden Age to star two ethnically Asian actors. And he gives his emotive all to such lines as “It is the triumph of irony that the only woman I have ever deeply loved should be born of the blood that I loathe.” And in the inevitable double-death finale — neither the villainess nor the noble detective can survive the machinations of Hollywood justice — he gently caresses the long hair of the lady he would love to have loved. “Flower Ling Moy,” he says, a moment before expiring. “A flower need not love, but only be loved. As Ah Kee loved you.” SHANGHAI GESTURES _Daughter of the Dragon_ was the first of two pictures Wong made at Paramount in the early 30s. It happens that she bore similarities to two other of the studio’s cuties: she looked a bit like Claudette Colbert, with the bangs and high cheekbones, and had some of Miriam Hopkins’ sexual musk (though, again, those actresses applied a real or implicit smile to their roles). Of course, Paramount’s big new exotic flavor was Dietrich. To see the German import and the Chinese girl from L.A. play off each other in _Shanghai Express,_ as director Josef von Sternberg and cinematographer Lee Garmes swathe them in a kind of visual incense, is pleasure of a high order. Lily (Dietrich), with her fancy frocks, and Hui Fei (Wong), in scythe-shaped sideburns and a bob with the sides parted, are prostitutes sharing a coach room on a train lumbering through China during the Nationalist-Communist civil war. The two women fend off the condemnation of the more proper passengers — “One of them is white and one of them is yellow,” says the Rev. Carmichael (Lawrence Grant), “but both their souls are rotten” — with glances that may be flirtatious or contemptuous. They toy with the huffy Mrs. Haggerty (Louise Closser Hale), who runs a boarding house; Dietrich wants to call it a bawdy house. When the matron declares that Lily and Hui Fei might not be respectable enough to warrant her hospitality, Wong looks up from her cards, takes the matron in her sights and murmurs, “I confess I don’t quite know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house, Mrs. Haggerty.” Wong imparts a ponderous, attention-grabbing delicacy to the speech, possibly because it’s the longest she has in the film. She has no more than a score of lines, yet she is crucial to the film’s plot. The villain Chang (Oland again) is a Communist rebel who takes the passengers hostage in order to secure the release of a comrade. As a diversion — “It’s a long journey, and a lonely one,” he says to Hui Fei — he rapes the Chinese girl. Later she fatally stabs him. “You’d better get out of here,” she whispers to Lily’s captive beloved (Clive Brook). “I just killed Chang.” When Lily hears of this, she says, “I don’t know if I ought to be grateful to you or not.” Hui Fei replies, with quiet intensity, “It’s of no consequence. I didn’t do it for you. Death canceled his debt to me.” (Spoken like the daughter of Fu Manchu.) Throughout, Wong exudes a star power that complements Dietrich’s but doesn’t compete with it. She has a stillness with a force field around it. WONG RULES BRITANNIA Paramount was Wong’s home, or at least her hotel, throughout the 30s; she did three stretches there. But in 1933, going where the work was, she returned to Britain for four films; I’ve seen three. First was _A Study In Scarlet,_ starring and written by Reginald Owen, directed by Edward L. Marin, and based on the title but not the plot of Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novelette. Wong plays Mrs. Pyke, a suspect in the murders of several members of a secret society, the Scarlet Ring. She has a generous spot on the cast list (she’s billed third), and a tiny role; she can’t be on screen for more than eight of the film’s 73 mins. She gets a few closeups for smirking privileges, and is enlisted into the climax, when she is arrested and disappears without a word. Her exit is appropriate, since Wong seems to be performing under silent protest. In the 1934 musical fantasy _Chu-Chin-Chow,_ Wong, though billed second, is again a supporting player. Her role as Zahrat echoes the one she had a decade earlier in _The Thief of Bagdad_: she’s back in that once-fabled city as a slave girl in the royal house, scheming and spying for an invader villain with predatory aims. But this time she gets to atone, by turning on her master Abu Hasan, played by that thick slice of ham, Fritz Kortner. In one scene Wong displays more leg than most stars would. (Then again, the long-limbed Wong had more leg to show.) And when chained to a Wheel of Death, she nicely flexes muscles in her sinewy arms. She strangles one of her captors, escapes from the wheel (without bothering to free her fellow prisoners) and silently vows (actually, smirks) revenge against her master. _Chu-Chin-Chow_ embraces — indeed, squeezes the life out of — all manner of racial stereotypes, notably in the equal-opportunity offender “Slave Song” and in a joke about a fat African woman. Kortner, whose acting style manages the seemingly unimaginable blending Al Jolson and Klaus Kinski, appears in black-face (as an African), brown-face (an Arab) and yellow-face (a Mongol). The picture, directed by Walter Forde, is an appalling but vagrantly vigorous entertainment, especially at the end, when Wong leads a big dance number (Lots of sinuous arm gestures) so she can find and stab Abu Hasan, who dies as floridly as he lived. Here, as in _Shanghai Express,_ Wong gets to kill without being killed. TRAGIC ALIEN The higher-minded _Java Head,_ directed by Hollywood’s J. Walter Ruben from a story by Joseph Hergesheimer, presents Wong as a tragic heroine, driven to death by her own high ideals and the prejudices of a 19th-century English village. Taou Yuen, the Manchurian princess Taou Yuen, is brought to England as the bride of businessman Gerrit Amiddon (John Loder). An epidemic of prejudice immediately erupts, with everyone but Gerrit and his sister fuming over Taou Yuen. The family cook calls her “a heathen, with fingernails like that” and spreads her hand into a claw. The brother of the pretty girl Gerrit left behind (Elizabeth Allen as Nettie) spits out his verdict: “The great Gerrit Amiddon playing the fool with a common little yellow girl from a teahouse.” The great Gerrit is, at first, in love with, in awe of, his precious acquisition: “I feel like a clumsy fool who’s stolen a priceless lacquered vase and expected it to serve as a beer mug.” Taou Yuen smiles and says: “As long as you do not drop and break it.” Guess what? He drops, he breaks. Learning that the family fortune has been stoked by trading in opium, and feeling the fanning of an old flame with a white woman, Gerrit chides Taou Yuen for her “barbaric” and “pagan ways.” He gives Taou Yuen the back of his hand, and Wong the chance to simmer regally. She notices Gerrit’s attraction for Nettie and asks if an Englishman “can love two women equally” and opines that, in that case, “One would die, and the other grow stronger.” Any moviegoer can recognize the Noble Renunciation theme that the young Wong had embodied in _The Toll of the Sea._ The film’s only suspense: How will Taou Yuen be dispatched so Gerrit can marry Nettie? Answer: by taking a gulp of poison meant for the white girl. _Java Head:_ has a passing resemblance to _E.T._ (48 years later), the story of a strange and gifted creature who shocks on first glance, wins over the kid sister, is rejected for looking different and escapes to another land (a distant planet for E.T., death for Taou Yuen). The movie also is mildly progressive and provocative in positing a saintly Asian destroyed by ignorant Europeans. (Possible caveat: the villain, Nellie’s brother, is a white man tainted by the Yellow Peril — opium.) But its most interesting subtext is the Code of the Kiss. In movies of the day, the hero was destined to wind up with the first woman he meaningfully kisses. Man and wife share several intimate scenes in their bedroom, but they never kiss. Late in he film, Gerrit surrenders to his old amour and plants a passionate one on Nellie. It seals their fate — and, terminally, Taou Yuen’s. YELLOW EARTH Wong may have broken through the Hollywood race barrier, but her success didn’t help others; no studio boss told his casting director, “Get me another Anna May Wong!” It didn’t even help her. When Hollywood made movies about Chinese people, it simply put white actors in “yellowface.” The term is a misnomer. Whereas a white actor playing a black was obliged to dab cork to darken the visage, a white playing an “Oriental” character didn’t change face color but applied spirit gum to give the eyes a higher slant. Hollywood’s rationale, put baldly, went like this: 1\. East Asians look just like “us,” only their eyes go up funny, so they can be played by European Americans with the help of spirit gum. And 2\. Asian-American actors don’t have the training or star power to sell a movie character or a movie ticket. The theatrical tradition of white actors in “yellowface” precedes movies, and the innate realism of films didn’t discourage early actors. In 1919, the year Richard Barthelmess played the sensitive “chink” in _Broken Blossoms,_ the Danish actor Warner Oland played his first Chinese in _The Lightning Raider._ Oland looked no more Chinese than, say, Bob Keeshan, yet he was cast “yellow” dozens of times, including in four films with Wong, and culminating in 16 Charlie Chan movies. When Oland died, in 1938, Missouri-born Sidney Toler was tabbed to replace him; he played the sleuth in 22 films, until his death in 1947\. Wong had played Fu Manchu’s daughter in 1931, but the following year, when MGM made _The Mask of Fu Manchu,_ that role went to caucasian Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Jerry Lewis, Alec Guinness, Shirley MacLaine all applied Oriental makeup for mainstream movies. It wasn’t until the late 60s, when Americans were seeing East Asians on their TV screens every night, that Hollywood finally renounced this sorry tendency, Wong had played featured roles in A pictures, and leads in B’s. But could Wong win a major part in the biggest Chinese-set film yet to be made? She yearned to play O-Lan, the heroine of Pearl Buck’s _The Good Earth,_ a best-seller that won the American novelist the Nobel Prize for Literature. Buck’s thoughts were similar to Wong’s. As Anthony B. Chan relates in his book [_Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong, 1905-1961_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0810847892/qid=1106947906/sr=2-3/ref=pd%5Fka%5Fb%5F2%5F3/002-9336716-0248817), Buck had lunch with an MGM executive, some time before _The Good Earth_ was to be cast. “I said I hoped they would use Chinese actors in the leading parts,” she recalled, “to which he replied that this was impossible because of the American star system.” Wong, who had just turned 30, tested several times for O-lan, meeting with skepticism and animosity. The skeptic was Albert Lewin, the MGM producer in charge of casting the film. After a screen test, he wrote an evaluation expressing “a little disappointed as to looks. Does not seem beautiful enough to make Wang’s infatuation convincing; however, deserves consideration.” She also tested for the role of Wang’s second, younger wife Lotus, but she was not seriously considered. In the New York American, Regina Crewe reported that “The producer said Anna May Wong ‘wasn’t the type’.” Lewin and MGM were unlikely to hire any Chinese-Americans for major roles. “In his reports on … other Chinese actors,” Hodges writes, “Lewin consistently argued that, despite their ethnicity, they did not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like.” What were they supposed to look like? Warner Oland? No, not a Dane like Oland — Austrians! Paul Muni played Wang, Luise Rainer was O-lan and Tilly Losch got the role of Lotus. Wong, Chan, speculates, was “Too beautiful for one part and too old for the other.” (Anna May’s younger sister Mary Liu Heung Wong did get the small role of the Little Bride. She hanged herself in the family garage in 1940.) Resistance to Wong came from outside the studio as well as inside. The Chinese government’s official advisor to MGM, who said that her odor in China was “very bad … whenever she appears in a movie, the newspapers print her picture with the caption ‘Anna May again loses face for China.'” He wasn’t exaggerating. When _Shanghai Express_ played in the city it supposedly was set in, a local newspaper called Wong “the female traitor to China,” and a journal in Tianjin carried the headline: “Paramount Uses Anna May Wong to Embarrass China Again.” Apparently not realizing that the villain Chang was a Communist, and Wong’s Hui Fei, though a prostitute, was a brave Nationalist who kills Chang to save China, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government banned the film. Said Wong: “It’s a pretty sad situation to be rejected by the Chinese because I am too American.” A few years later, Wong did appear in the adaptation of a Pearl Buck novel, _The Patriot,_ on Orson Welles’ [_Campbell Playhouse_](http://www.unknown.nu/mercury/) (successor to his _Mercury Theatre on the Air_), supported by future _Citizen Kane_ co-stars Ray Collins and Everett Sloane (as Chiang Kai-shek!). Wong played Peony, a servant in the house of the mandarin-turned-revolutionary I-Wan (Welles). Again she gets star billing; again she has a small role. Listening to the show on the Mercury Theatre on the Air website, I winced to hear Wong make three gaffes in less than a minute: pronouncing the Welles character’s name once as “Aye-Wan,” a few moments later as “Ee-Wan”; then blowing a simple line (“Oh I’m not used — not used to — oh I’m used to serving, not sitting down with the others”); and finally stammering out a scene-ending sentence (“Tell me more, En-lan — En-lan — tell me more about this revolution”) while the other actors try to cover and step on her line. It was the _Circle of Chalk_ debacle all over again. At the end of this April 1939 radio play the author and the guest star enjoyed a few moments of chat. “Delighted to meet you, Miss Buck,” Wong says. “As a Chinese I naturally have been intensely interested in your books on China.” Did Buck realize how probing and poignant Wong’s interest had been? THE MOUNTAIN AND THE VALLEY In 1937 she was back at Paramount, for three B pictures. But she was the star! And now, no more dragon ladies. Also no more meaty roles. Sinophiles may rue the villainy imputed to them in movies, but they should realize that villains are often the best parts. The snake gets all the lines. In _Daughter of Shanghai_ she again stars with an Asian, the Korean actor Philip Ahn (though he was billed 10th). She’s the daughter of an antique dealer who is threatened, and killed, by a smuggling ring he is trying to expose. In an early scene, smugglers are shown flying aliens into the country; when the Feds close in on them, they jettison their human payload. (An identical scene appears two years later in _Secret Service of the Air,_ the first in Ronald Reagan’s Brass Bancroft series.) Wong turns globe-trotting sleuth to learn the identity of the smugglers’ Mr. Big (who turns out to be a Mrs.) and is nearly gang-raped on slave ship of illegal immigrants. When four guys fight in a dispute over her honor, she stands by, paralyzed. Scriptwriters, who didn’t have trouble dreaming up cool things for her to do when she was a baddie, usually made her passive as a goodie. The 1938 _Dangerous to Know_ was a film version of Edgar Wallace’s _On the Spot,_ which Wong had played on Broadway. She’s the “hostess,” i.e. mistress, of a gangster (Akim Tamiroff) with potent political connections. While he does all the heavy acting, she stands by, stoic and steaming, as, essentially, a housekeeper in her own house. She hasn’t much more to do in the 1939 _Island of Lost Men,_ where the strong man is J. Carrol Naish as the Oriental plantation boss Gregory Prin. She’s a nightclub singer (“China Lily — Songstress of the Orient”) and, again, a top-billed irrelevance. She is sent off the island, and doesn’t appear in the climactic seven mins. of a 63 min film. Her career was winding down. Her last contract was with the Poverty Row studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) for top-billed roles in two 1942 propaganda films set in the Asian war. In Joseph H. Lewis’ _Bombs Over Burma_ she’s a schoolteacher joining forces with American GIs to defeat the Japs. “I can stand up and take it now,” a soldier brags. “And what’s more I can give it back.” Wong smiles and replies, “Like China.” This is one of the few exchanges in a strange movie, whose dialogue is so sotto voce, it’s almost not-o voce. Long sequences are without dialogue, others are only in Cantonese. The actors play like non-actors. In its rigorous artlessness, _Bombs Over Burma_ is almost a preview of Italian neo-realism. The PRC _Lady from Chungking_ reunited Wong with William Nigh, who had directed her in two silent films. She plays Kwan Mei, a rebel leader who is organizing guerrillas in the hills while wheedling strategic information from Kaimura, the Japanese officer in town. “There is a fragile but durable beauty in you, Madame,” purrs the smitten swine, to which Kwan Mei says, “Perhaps I’m as aged-looking as the Great Wall.” No, she is fetching in her improbable gear. Anthony Chan observes: “Even as the rebel leader in the rice fields, Kwan Mei wears a silk suit with handwoven buttons…” While paying a dozing attention to the plot, a viewer wonders whether, for once, Wong will get an on-screen kiss. She does, from Kaimura — a rebel leader will do anything for the Cause — and, when he discovers her true mission, she pays with her life. Standing before the firing squad, she declares: “You cannot kill me. You cannot kill China. Not even a million deaths would crush the soul of China. For the soul of China is eternal. … We shall live on until the enemy is driven back over scorched land and hurled into the sea. … Out of the ashes of ruin … until the world is again sane and beautiful.” The firing squad’s fatal work doesn’t interrupt Kwan Mei’s oration; her ghost finishes the speech. It would be Wong’s last grand gesture in films. THREE RULES FOR ANNA MAY WONG A few rules that guided and restricted Wong’s career: 1\. She couldn’t kiss. A Wong character might lure men to delight or destruction, but she was forbidden the main movie signifier of romantic fulfillment: the kiss. In _Piccadilly_ with Jameson Thomas and in _The Road to Dishonor_ (the English-language remake of _Hai-Tang_) with John Longden, their kiss was cut by British censors “on moral grounds.” Wong, quoted in TIME, [proclaimed the furor much ado about bussing, “I see no reason why Chinese and English people should not kiss on the screen, even though I prefer not to.”](/time/archive/preview/0,10987,738208,00.html) Both co-stars agreed. Thomas: “In England, we have less prejudice against scenes of interracial romance than in America. In France, there is still less, and in Germany, there is none at all. But we are careful to handles such scenes tactfully.” Longden: the ban on kissing was “a ridiculous anomaly,” “stupid and inconsistent.” There were occasions when Wong could be kissed: tenderly, sexlessly, by a child (in her first starring role, _The Toll of the Sea_) or, greedily, by a rapacious, besotted Japanese general (in her last starring role, _Lady from Chungking_). But, so often, directors sidled up to the big smooch, then found an excuse to abort it, as with the white Fletcher and the Asian Hayakawa in _Daughter of the Dragon_ and with Loder in _Java Head._ Decades after her death, the poet John Lau wrote a verse titled “No One Ever Tried to Kiss Anna May Wong.” That’s not quite true; the poem’s title should be “Everyone Tried to Kiss Anna May Wong But Hardly Anyone Got to Do It.” 2\. She had to die. Not always, but frequently. You may know that Chaney, because of his gift (and fondness) for distorting his features to play a wide range of characters, was known as the Man of a Thousand Faces. Well, Wong was the Woman of a Thousand Deaths. A saunter through the film synopses in [_Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0786416335/qid=1106947906/sr=2-2/ref=pd%5Fka%5Fb%5F2%5F2/002-9336716-0248817), by Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane, reveals some of the mischief done to Wong characters: she was buried alive in _The Devil Dancer,_ fatally impaled on knives in _Song,_ shot dead in _Piccadilly,_ _Daughter of the Dragon_ and _Lady from Chungking._ She committed suicide in _Shame_ and _Drifting,_ _Hai-Tang,_ Tiger Bay and _Java Head_ (poison) and _Limehouse Blues_ and _Dangerous to Know_ (dagger). You may think that her regular demise was the last vengeance of racist screenwriters. Think again. Garbo, the most exalted Hollywood star of the period, died in most of her movies too. 3\. She would be given star treatment in the credits but not in her pay packet. On the business side of Wong’s career, two anomalies stand out. She was often billed higher than warranted by the importance of her character or the size of her role. (The names of black actors, no matter how substantial their roles, were typically placed below the least significant white actors.) Yet, even when she was the star, she often was paid less than her supporting actors. In _Daughter of the Dragon,_ where she was top-billed, she earned $6,000 to Hayakawa’s $10,000 and Oland’s $12,000 (though he’s out of the picture by the 23rd min.). Her _Shanghai Express_ gig, where she is billed third, again above Oland, Wong earned another $6,000; Dietrich got $78,166\. A decade later, in her two-film deal with PRC, she was paid a pretty paltry $4,500\. She donated it all to China War Relief. ANNA MIGHT… She spent much of the war beating the drum for the Chinese who had not made it to the Golden Mountain: America. At war’s end she was 40 — not as old as the Great Wall, but getting on. Age had thickened her features, and years of playing either stern villains or stalwart heroines had stripped animation from her face. Now it was an impassive mask, as if she were preparing for a Peking Opera version of a Samuel Beckett play. She didn’t return to films until 1949, and then in a small role in a B picture called _Impact._ As the hero’s housekeeper she is mostly mute and still, a piece of antique statuary, hoarding secrets in deference to her good master. When she speaks, it’s in tortuous translations from the pseudo-Cantonese (“It is the hope that Su Lin was of small help to Mr. Williams”), Eleven years later she was another housekeeper in the Ross Hunter production _Portrait in Black,_ this time supporting Anthony Quinn, who had done small roles in her late-30s Paramount films. Now he was the famous name and she the filler. (Also in 1960, Quinn starred as an Inuit in Nicholas Ray’s _The Savage Innocents_ — opposite another actress, Marie Yang, who in this film was billed as Anna May Wong! It may be the only instance of an actor appearing with two actresses of the same name in the same year.) Like a lot of veteran performers in the 50s, Wong found more work on the small screen than the large. She hosted a 13-week series, _The Gallery of Madame Liu Tsong_ (her Chinese name), for the Dumont network in 1951, and in 1957 hosted an ABC evening of film clips from the 30s trip to China, called _Bold Journey._ She did guest spots on _The Barbara Stanwyck Show_ and _Adventures in Paradise._ In 1956 she got a long-deferred chance to play a role she lost out on in Hollywood: as the Asian blackmailer in Somerset Maugham’s _The Letter._ The director of the TV show was William Wyler, the man who had said no when he made the film version in 1940\. She was set to return to Hollywood, with the large role of Auntie Liang in Hunter’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s _Flower Drum Song,_ when, on Feb. 3, 1961 — 44 years ago today — she died of a heart attack following liver disease. She was 56\. The woman who had died a thousand deaths on screen now died for real. And the story of her life traced the arc of triumph and tragedy that marked so many of her films. Wong’s youthful ambition and screen appeal got her farther than anyone else of her race. But her race, or rather Hollywood’s and America’s fear of giving Chinese and other non-whites the same chance as European Americans, kept her from reaching the Golden Mountaintop. We can be startled and impressed by the success she, alone, attained. And still we ask: Who knows what Anna May Wong could have been allowed to achieve if she had been Anna May White? ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907687/that-old-feeling-anna-may-win/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6907687/that-old-feeling-anna-may-win/"},"headline":"That Old Feeling: Anna May Win","datePublished":"2005-02-03T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:05:51.298Z","description":"A girl dreamed of movie stardom. 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