Dying A Thousand Deaths

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When I die, my epitaph should be, I died a thousand deaths. That was the story of my career. They didn't know what to do with me at the end, so they killed me off. This week we are talking about anime wong. This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts, and I'm your host, Christina Rose. Hello, witches, bitches, and sluts. Welcome to episode three. I hope you've enjoyed the podcast so far. If you are listening to the audio, make sure you follow us on Instagram where I post all the charts and photos that I share in the videos. Find us at the.wbs.pod. That's on Instagram at the dotwbs.pod. And now to our story. The opening quote was from Anna Mae Wong in a 1933 interview for Film Weekly. If you haven't heard her name before, Anna Mae Wong was one of Hollywood's first real movie stars working through the 1920s and 30s. The first Chinese American, and I want to note the American, because she was not from China. So she was the first Chinese American actress to become a genuine leading star at a moment when the film industry itself was still brand new. That opening line, Dying a Thousand Deaths, isn't just a wry one-liner about bad luck in casting. It's a direct consequence of which box she was put in. Under the industry's own production rules at the time, a villain's story couldn't simply end. It had to end in punishment. And the Dragon Lady, written as dangerous and untrustworthy, almost always had to be defeated or killed by the final act for the story's moral order to be restored. And when Anna Mae wasn't playing a stereotypical Dragon Lady, she was the only other label available for a Chinese American in Hollywood, the Lotus Blossom. This was always a character who fell for a white love interest. That relationship wasn't allowed a happy resolution on screen either. So those stories tended to end in tragedy or death for a different reason entirely. So no matter what she played, she had to die. Romantic lead was never really an option for her, not because Hollywood didn't want to give it to her, but because two rules combined made it almost impossible. In 1930, the motion picture producers and distributors of America created the Hayes Code, a set of morality guidelines for Hollywood, an attempt to self-regulate before the government stepped in and did it for them. One of those rules barred any on-screen romantic or physical relationship between actors of different races. Combine that with Hollywood's habit of casting white actors as the male lead, no matter what race the character was supposed to be, and anime was locked out either way. And when a story did need the love interest gone, death was usually how it got resolved. Remember the Hayes code because it comes up in her later career. But

A Third-Generation LA Childhood

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before we get to that, let's talk about Anna Mae before she became a movie star. Anna Mae Wong was born Wong Liu Song on January 3rd, 1905 in Los Angeles, just outside of Chinatown. Her family had been in the U.S. for generations already. Her grandparents arrived in the mid-1800s during the California Gold Rush. This makes Anna May third-generation Chinese American. So Anna May grew up in a genuinely mixed neighborhood. Chinese, Irish, German, Japanese, Mexican, and Eastern European families all living close together. Her father ran the family laundry, and young Anna helped out around it growing up. That mixed working class LA upbringing matters for the thesis here. This is about as American a childhood as you can describe. Nothing foreign about it. Keep that in mind because it's the direct opposite of the exotic outsider image Hollywood was about to build around her. The neighborhood itself was mixed and largely peaceful, but Wong's specific grade school experience wasn't. She and her older sister attended a predominantly white public school nearby, and classmates targeted them there specifically for being Chinese American. They were pushed off the sidewalk, slapped, their hair was pulled, and they were chased home while being called slurs. One boy reportedly stuck her with pins on a regular basis. Her defense was wearing a thicker coat. Wong described the toll directly in her own words later. It left a scar on her heart. In a 1926 memoir printed in Pictures Magazine, she said, They surrounded us. Some of them pulled our hair, which we wore in long braids down our backs. They shoved us off the sidewalk, pushing us this way and that. I don't suppose either of us ever cried so hard in our lives before or since. She also noted that the constant racial taunts, quote, made the world come crashing down. End of quote. Her parents eventually transferred both girls to the Chinese mission school in Chinatown, where their classmates were also Chinese American, and the bullying stopped. She studied both English and Cantonese there, and notably her English came out far stronger than her Cantonese, another testament to her Americann-ness versus her Chinese-ness. But the bullying didn't just start with a few boys at school. The nation was in the midst of an anti-Chinese era. In 1882, about 20 years before Anna Mae was born, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. While Chinese immigrants like Anna Mae's grandfather were not only welcome here, but encouraged to immigrate during the gold rush and the building of the railroads just before this. White Americans saw them as competition in the workforce now that those events were over. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, ethnically Chinese people in the U.S., citizens included, were required to carry government-issued identification, proving their status anytime they traveled internationally. Wong's own certificate of identity, issued when she was 19, still survives in the National Archives. The act was written as a temporary 10-year measure, but instead it got renewed, then made permanent, and stayed that way until 1943, about 30 years after Anime was bullied at school. But while Anime was still in school, the film industry had coincidentally just relocated from New York to Hollywood, practically in her backyard, and Anime was hooked early. By her own account, she decided at 11 years old that she wanted to be an actress. She started skipping school and sneaking into film sets nearby just to watch. Then she would pretend to be the character she saw. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1928, she said, I would be the pure girl repulsing the evil suitor, the young mother pleading for her baby, the vamp luring her victim. Then to Photoplay magazine, she said, I was determined that I would be an actress and nothing could stop me. Film crew started noticing her constant presence around local production lots, so they nicknamed her CCC, The Curious Chinese Child. Her first time in front of the camera actually came in 1919 as an extra in a film called The Red Lantern. She got there by asking a family friend to introduce her to the film's assistant director, entirely behind her father's back. For about two years after that, she kept doing extra work in secret without her parents' knowledge while still going to school. Around age 14, still unaware of any of this, her father tried to steer her toward more respectable work and got her a job as a secretary. She was fired within a week. She came home expecting trouble, but instead found a letter waiting for her. A director's office was offering her a role in a film called Bits of Life. It became her first credited screen role in 1921. Her father, who'd opposed the acting all along, finally relented on the condition that an adult, often him, chaperone her on set from then on. Her breakout came the next year when she was 17. It's also this film that begins the labeling of both Lotus Blossom and Dragon Lady. But we'll talk about that more after the break. Before

The Lotus Blossom And Dragon Lady

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the break, Anna Mae was just about to get her breakout role. It was in 1922 in The Toll of the Sea, one of the first films ever shot in full Technicolor. It loosely followed the same Madame Butterfly story structure from which the lotus blossom archetype gets its shape. The devoted Asian woman destroyed by her love for a white man who leaves her. Two years later in 1924, she landed a role in The Thief of Baghdad, opposite Douglas Fairbanks, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood at the time. She was still a teenager. Motion Picture News reviewed the film with the following quote: Anna Mae Wong as the scheming slave girl is a model of slinking malevolence. The New York Times said, Anna Mae Wong is the Mongol slave, and she acts with the restraint that is to be commended, as the tempter is only too apt to overdo such a part. In case it wasn't obvious, in Toll of the Sea, she played the Lotus Blossom, and in Thief of Baghdad, the Dragon Lady. By the late 1920s, the pattern was setting in. At one point, she tried to start her own production company, but unfortunately, a dishonest business partner forced it to close. In 1928, frustrated, she left for Europe, where British and German filmmakers were willing to give her bigger, more complex roles than Hollywood ever had. In Europe, Wong's career actually expanded. In 1929, she starred in the British silent film Piccadilly, directed by German filmmaker E. A. DuPont and widely considered the best role of her career. She played Shosho, a scullery maid at a London nightclub, who's discovered dancing on the job and becomes the club's star attraction. In a genuine leading role with real range, ambition, seduction, vulnerability, tragedy, rather than a single stereotyped note. It's also notable for directly depicting an interracial relationship on screen between her character and the club's white owner. At a time when American censors wouldn't have allowed it. The film implies they sleep together, even though it still cuts away just before an actual kiss. She worked on stage during the same period, too, in London that same year in a production called The Circle of Chalk, alongside a young Lawrence Olivier, at the time an up-and-coming actor, not yet the star he'd later become. And in Vienna in 1930, in the title role of a play called Shun Shi, written specifically for her, she also produced it and composed the music and lyrics for its songs. She never had that kind of control over her own material in America. All of this is evidence that the limitation really was American industry policy, not her arrange as a performer. Given real material, she gave what's still considered her best performance in Piccadilly and had to leave her own country to get it, the same country she was born a citizen of three generations deep.

Europe Broadway And A Promising Return

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In 1930, Paramount Pictures offered her a contract promising lead roles and top billing enough to lure her back to the U.S. On her way back, she landed a lead on Broadway in a play called On the Spot, and it was a genuine hit, 167 performances, with the reputation she'd built in Europe carrying directly over to American audiences this time. When the director wanted her to use stereotyped Madame Butterfly mannerisms for her Chinese character, she refused, drawing on her own knowledge of actual Chinese style and gesture instead. When she finally reached Hollywood, her first lead role under the new contract was 1931's Daughter of the Dragon, playing Princess Ling Moi, the vengeful daughter of the villain Fu Manchu, a character played in Yellowface by white actor Warner Oland. She starred opposite Susui Hayakawa, a Japanese American actor and the only other major Asian star working in Hollywood at the time. The first and only time the two would share a film. Despite top billing, her pay reflected the industry's actual priorities. Wong was paid $6,000 for the picture. Hayakawa was paid $10,000. Olin in Yellowface with about 23 minutes of screen time was paid $12,000. The math on who Hollywood actually valued here isn't subtle. This film matters for a specific reason beyond the plot. Sociologist Nancy Wang Yen, author of a book on race and Hollywood casting, has identified this specific role as the performance that crystallized the Dragon Lady archetype in American film. Not the term itself, which came later, but the image. This isn't just a devious woman anymore. She's the actual daughter of the genre's own defining villain. This shows how the Dragon Lady label didn't arrive fully formed and get imposed on her in one clean moment. It built over years using her until this film gave it its most concrete, most explicitly named shape yet. Even Trade Press at the time noticed something absurd about the casting. A contemporary review of the film In Variety pointed out that the white actors playing Asian characters in Yellow Face somehow read as more convincing oriental types than the two actual Asian leads did. This just supports the fact the stereotypes of Asians had no basis on actual Asian people. The following year, Wong appeared in Shanghai Express, playing a character named Hui Fei, opposite Marlena Dietrich, a major German American star at the time, in a film directed by Joseph von Sternberg. Wong had fewer scenes than Dietrich, but multiple critics at the time and since have said she stole the film anyway. The Chicago Tribune wrote in February 1932, Anna Mae Wong is magnificent. She shares honors with Miss Dietrich and to my mind does the better acting of the two. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, Anna Mae Wong, returnee from European successes, matches the star Dietrich, point for point in exoticism. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right. Exoticism, exoticism, exoticism, you know what I mean, and gives and gives a performance of much greater substance. And the Detroit Free Press said Anna Mae Wong does a superb piece of work as the second woman of the coast. Hers is the active role in the drama, and she plays it with a beautiful, venomous calmness. It was a significant box office hit. None of that meant anything changed for her, though. Hollywood had already decided what kind of role she'd play. This one confirmed it rather than offering her a way out. Hui Fei is still a dragon lady, the same as Ling Moi in The Daughter of the Dragon. She just got better at performing it. In a 1933 interview, she directly criticized the pattern she was stuck inside. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain? And so crude a villain, murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. Then finally she gets her chance. MGM

The Good Earth And A Closed Door

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is adopting the novel The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck about a family of peasant Chinese farmers trying to survive a drought in pre-World War I China. As early as 1933, Wong made it known to MGM that she wanted to play Olon the lead. It was also widely assumed by the public and the industry press that she'd get it. Several sources describe her as the clear favorite. And note people naturally expected Hollywood's one Chinese American star to land the one major Chinese story role of the decade. But the studio had cast Paul Muni, a white actor, to play the male lead Wang Lung in Yellowface. And remember the Hayes Code that prevented romantic on screen relationships between different races. This solidified MGM's rejection of Wong playing the lead role. Biographer Yang Tae Wang wrote, Because Paul Muni was white, the studio argued they could not legally cast a Chinese American woman as his wife. These puritanical and overly racist guidelines became a virtual form of foot binding for anime, shackling her career ambitions for the rest of her life. FYI Huang is referencing a traditional Chinese custom that involved breaking the feet of young girls when they were between four to six years old. Then they would bind the feet with the toes tucked under the foot to create what they called lotus feet. You can Google pictures. They are disturbing. This is just to make clear, this is not something done today or in modern times. But that's what he's referencing, that it's binding her just like how Chinese women's feet were bound before. MGM's casting office reportedly rejected her and other Chinese American actors on the grounds that they simply didn't look Chinese enough for the studio's own idea of the part. Further proving that the American idea of what an Asian person should be has no basis on actual Asian people. So the role of Olan went to white actress Louise Rayner, who ended up winning an Academy Award for it. Instead, they offered Wong the role of Lotus, who was, wait for it, the villainous seductress. But Wong had had enough. She refused, saying, You're asking me with my Chinese blood to do the only unsympathetic role in the picture featuring an all-American cast portraying Chinese characters. Disappointed,

China Trip And Double Rejection

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Wong took a year off from Hollywood and actually went to China for the first time in 1936. I really want to emphasize that this was her first trip to China and remind you that she is third-generation American because I have heard other people describe this trip as going back to her homeland, which really annoyed me. And she wasn't even embraced by the Chinese people. Chinese critics attacked her for the stereotypical role she'd played and criticized her as too American. She put the situation in her own words afterward. I have no feeling for it. It's a pretty sad situation to be rejected by the Chinese because I'm too American. So to sum it up, she was born in America, but too Chinese to play traditional American movie roles, yet not Chinese enough to play the Chinese roles. So she was forced into less desirable stereotypical roles, which upset the actual Chinese people in China who then would not accept her either, saying she was too American. And this is just the first example of the damage these labels caused her. After

Fighting For Better Roles In America

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the China trip, Wong shifted towards smaller budget films where she had more creative control and could occasionally play sympathetic, non-stereotypical roles. Daughter of Shanghai in 1937 gave her a rare happy ending, opposite a Korean-American, not white, male lead. That's notable specifically because it was so unusual across the rest of her filmography. The exception proves how tightly scripted the rest of her career had been. During World War II, she appeared in Bombs Over Burma and Lady from Chung King, both released in 1942, playing Chinese characters written as empowered resistance figures against Japanese occupation rather than victims waiting to be rescued. Off-screen, she raised money for Chinese war relief organizations directly, at one point auctioning off her own film costumes and sending the proceeds to Chinese aid groups. Despite all of that, years of advocacy, real money donated, some of it her own salary, Wong was deliberately excluded from the single biggest China Relief event Hollywood ever staged. In April 1943, producer David O. Selznick, who ran the Hollywood chapter of United China Relief, organized a massive event at the Hollywood Bowl, honoring Madame Chang Kai-shek, the first lady of nationalist China, who was touring the U.S. to build support for the war effort. Madame Cheng, Western educated and speaking for a modern, dignified vision of nationalist China, reportedly saw Wang's decades of stereotyped film roles as representing exactly the version of China she was trying to move past. The same reason Wang was rejected during her trip to China. There's also a class and regional layer to it, too. Wang's family was working class and Cantonese speaking from southern China. Madame Chang was elite and Mandarin speaking. One biographer argues this specific snub set the negative tone around Wang's reputation for decades afterward. Two of her B-movie roles from this period are worth naming specifically because they disrupt the pattern rather than repeating it. In 1934's Java Head, a British production, Wong played the Chinese wife of a white sea captain. And in the process of playing that role, she kissed her white co-star on the screen. It's the only film in her entire career where that happened. And note it was a British production. According to biographer Graham Russell Gow Hodges, that may be exactly why it stayed one of her personal favorites. In 1939's King of Chinatown, she played Dr. Mary Ling, a surgeon who turns down a lucrative promotion to stay and help the Chinese community resist Japanese aggression. A competent professional, not a villain or a victim. Neither film was a hit, and neither changed the industry's overall pattern. But they're proof the labels were a choice, repeatedly remade by specific people, not some unavoidable law of how her career had to go. A contemporary press profile picked up on this, writing in Hollywood magazine in January 1938, columnist Louise Lung summed Wong up directly. In 1944, MGM adapted another Pearl Buck novel about Chinese wartime resistance, Dragon Seed, and cast Catherine Hepburn, one of the biggest stars in America, in the lead Chinese role in Yellowface, alongside a large supporting cast of other white actors in Oriental makeup. This is the same studio telling structurally the same kind of story during the same war Wong was personally raising money for through Chinese relief organizations, and they still didn't cast her. Major roles remained largely out of reach through the 1940s. Wong worked sporadically in radio, smaller films, and eventually television. Her family later connected some of her declining health in this period to ongoing financial strain. Typecasting had a real material cost, not just a reputational one. So

How A Stereotype Becomes A Legacy

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everything we have gone over so far shows that Anna Mae Wong had range and talent beyond just playing a Dragon Lady. So why did that label stick with her? Interestingly, the actual phrase Dragon Lady wasn't coined until around 1934 when cartoonist Milton Caniff introduced a character by that name in the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, three years after Daughter of the Dragon. Contemporary film reviews from when Wong's own Dragon Lady films actually came out never used the term. It got applied to her retroactively years and sometimes decades after the fact. This shows that the specific word most people associate with her wasn't hers and didn't even exist yet when she built the image it now describes. But the retroactive naming isn't really why it stuck to her personally. The reasons for that are more specific to her own career. Wong is not one data point in a larger pattern. By this account, she's close to the actual point of origin for both halves at once. That alone makes her name harder to separate from the archetype than other actresses who came later and simply worked inside a template they didn't build. Then there's repetition. This wasn't a role she played once. Shanghai Express in 1932, the same basic type across her most visible, most commercially successful years, the ones that made her famous in the first place. And critically, she never got the one role during her most famous years that could have replaced that image with something else in the public's mind. As I mentioned before, MGM specifically passed her over for The Good Earth, the single highest profile Chinese story of Hollywood told that decade in favor of a white actress in Yellowface. Her later work, Java Head, King of Chinatown, Daughter of Shanghai, was often more personally satisfying and disrupted the pattern in real ways, but it happened in smaller films with smaller audiences after her most famous years were already behind her. The public's lasting memory of her skewed toward the roles that made her famous, not the later roles that would have challenged that memory. This is the real answer to why it stuck with her. Not just that the industry built the label, plenty of actresses had labels built around them. It's that she originated the label during her most visible years, then was specifically denied the one chance to visibly replace it, and died in 1961 with no major effort to revisit her legacy for decades afterward. The image had a uniquely long, uncontested run as the entirety of her public memory, precisely because nothing else was ever given the same level of attention to compete with it.

Walk Of Fame And A Dream Role Lost

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It was the first American television series built around an Asian American lead. It ran for a few months before cancellation, but unfortunately, no copies of the series or its scripts are known to survive today. On February 8th, 1960, Wong became the first Asian American woman to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That was the same day construction began on the Walk of Fame itself, which means she was a part of the first batch of permanent stars that went into the sidewalk. It took 59 years after that, in 2019, for actress Lucy Liu to become the second Asian American woman to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. The Chamber of Commerce placed her star directly next to Wong's, and Liu used her own acceptance speech to thank Wong by name for the path she'd opened. Now wait, isn't that segregation on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? I hope it was Lucy Liu that chose that spot and not the designated Chinese spot. Around the same time as getting her own star while filming a small role in Portrait in Black, its producer Ross Hunter told Wong he'd just bought the film rights to a musical called Flower Drum Song and wanted her in it. She wrote to friends about it herself, clearly thrilled. Production, she told them, wouldn't start until February. And Flower Drum Song wasn't just any project, it became the first major Hollywood studio film with a majority Asian American cast telling a contemporary story rather than a historical one, a real landmark. It wouldn't happen again at that scale for more than 30 years until the Joy Luck Club in 1993. And I have to say, as an Asian American who grew up in the 80s with long duck dong and short round, I was shocked, literally shocked, when I found out there was an almost all Asian American musical in the 1960s and none of them had access. It made me wonder what happened between then and the 80s. And of course, I was even more shocked to discover Wong as an actress in the 1920s who also didn't have an access. Seriously, what happened? I need to look into that more. Okay, anyway, back to the story. Wong was set to play Madame Liang, a character described on the official Flower Drum Song website as a Chinese American talent agent, Rita Lang, is an ambitious businesswoman with a big personality. She has a vision to transform Golden Pearl into the hottest night spot in Chinatown and later to franchise the clubs all over the country. She is strong and independent. Sadly, Anna Mae Wong never got the chance to play what she described as her dream role. She died of a heart attack at 56 years old on February 3rd, 1961, one month before filming was due to start. Her role went, in the end, to Juanita Hall, an African American and Irish American actress, playing the part in, Say It With Me, Yellow Face. In a film specifically celebrated for breaking Hollywood's habit of casting non-Asian actors as Chinese characters, the one part that didn't go to an Asian actress was the part meant for the one Chinese American actress who spent 40 years fighting that exact habit. In the

Modern Reappraisals And Lasting Impact

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year since, biographers and historians have directly revisited her legacy. In 2019, historian Shirley Jennifer Lim published Anna Mae Wong Performing the Modern, an academic study arguing Wong deliberately authored her own public image across multiple countries and mediums, choosing her venues, her collaborators, her costuming, her press angles, rather than simply absorbing whatever roles Hollywood handed her. That's the direct scholarly version of the same observation that 1938 Hollywood magazine profile we referenced earlier that called her self-made. In 2024, Katie Gee Salisbury published Not Your China Doll, drawing on newly available family material to push back specifically against the flattened, tragic ending version of Wong's story that had solidified since her death. Modern pop culture has directly engaged with the Good Earth Snub 2. In 2020, television producer Ryan Murphy released a Netflix series called Hollywood, blending real historical figures with fictional ones in an alternate history version of 1940s Hollywood. In it, actress Michelle Krusick plays a fictionalized wong who, unlike the real one, wins an Academy Award. It's explicitly fantasy, not history, a deliberate act of narrative repair for an injustice the show's creators considered real. The fact that a major streaming series felt compelled to invent her a happy ending says something about how unresolved the actual one still feels decades later. In October 2022, Anna Mae Wong became the first Asian American honored on U.S. currency, appearing on a quarter as part of the U.S. Mint's American Women Quarters program. And while Wong was never nominated for an Academy Award in her lifetime, in 2023, 62 years after her death, an Asian woman finally won the Best Actress Oscar for the first time in the Academy's 95-year history. It was Malaysian-born actress Michelle Yao for her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is roughly how long the specific door Wong kept pushing on actually stayed closed. So the record shows a third-generation Californian who started a film production company at 19 spent years directly campaigning MGM for the biggest Chinese story role Hollywood would produce that decade, kept working in whatever roles let her build something closer to a real character, and was still being cast in a new filmwork the week she died. None of that fits inside Dragon Lady. Where that specific image, the seductive, dangerous, exotic woman actually came from as a media pattern, and why it kept getting recycled onto other Asian actresses for decades after Wong stopped playing it herself is what we're investigating in next week's rabbit hole. But

Closing Words From Anna Mae Wong

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until then, I will leave you on Anna Mae's own words in 1921 at the age of 16 before she even had her first real movie role. Quote, I represent one considerable spot of yellow that's come to stay on the silver of the screen. 40 years, 60 plus films, a walk of fame star, and a spot on a U.S. quarter, she was right. This has been Witches, Bitches, and Sluts. Thanks for listening. I'm Christina Rose, and I'll see you down the battlefield.