“Wong provides us with a road map of how to forge ahead even under the most difficult of circumstances.”

If the old Ernest Hemingway adage holds true, that courage equals grace under pressure, then Anna May Wong (1905-1961) had it in spades. Wong embodied a model of how to reinvent oneself in the face of the most daunting societal obstacles. In my thirty-plus years of writing about Wong, I am continually reminded of how she remains an exemplar today.

Article continues after advertisement

Anna May Wong Cabaret Cross-dressing. Photo by Carl Van Vechten. Beinecke Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Trust.

In her time, Wong inspired a wide array of admirers. Anne Frank pasted not one but two photographs of Wong on her bedroom wall in the secret annex in Amsterdam where she and her family hid from the Nazis during World War II. At the 1930s Harlem balls, the very same venues that sparked today’s Tony-nominated musical marvel, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, drag performers paid homage to Wong by recreating her dance moves from her British film, Picadilly (1929). At the Royal Ascot horse races in England, society women also dressed up as Wong, albeit by sporting imitations of the Coolie Hat that she turned into a coveted high fashion item.

The pressures Wong faced throughout her lifetime were severe. Wong was an American. She even had a passport to prove it. But as an American of Chinese heritage, her travel was circumscribed by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Wong, alongside all other Chinese Americans, had to undergo arduous procedures every time she left the country. Not only did she have to fill out Form 430, an “Application of Alleged American Citizen of the Chinese Race for Preinvestigation of Status,” she had to ace an in-person interview. Inaccuracy or non-compliance could result in immigration prison and deportation. Born in Los Angeles, Wong should have enjoyed all privileges of birthright citizenship. But she did not. Her situation reverberates uncomfortably today.

Anna May Wong’s Form 430 April 6, 1939. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The list of pressures continues. The photographic record shows Wong arm-in-arm with numerous admirers, many of whom were her lovers. Yet, in her home state of California, laws prohibited her from marrying a white person, a fact she decried during press interviews. In 1946, Wong, in search of a new Los Angeles home, bumped up against covenants that forbade housing sales to “Orientals” and could not find anyone who would sell a house to her. Fame and money were not enough to surmount housing segregation.

Perhaps no moment better shows Wong’s grace under pressure than how she handled the casting debacle at the center of The Good Earth (1937). Wildly popular with the Depression-era American public, the 1931 Pearl S. Buck novel of the same name celebrated impoverished yet resilient Chinese peasants. Hollywood’s leading studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), intended the film to be an important one; it had been allocated one of the largest budgets in cinematic history, two million dollars. Winning the leading role of O-lan would have catapulted Wong to the Hollywood A-list.

Wong Writing in London. With Paul Robeson, Eslanda Robeson, S. I. Hsiung, Mei Lanfang. Photo by Fania Marinoff. Beneicke Library, Yale University. Courtesy of the Carl Van Vechten Trust.

Wong had gone on record in the Los Angeles Times that she sought the main role of O-lan and would refuse to attend a casting call for Lotus because it was “the only unsympathetic role” in The Good Earth. Wong’s correspondence, upon which I draw to depict her life, reveals a discrepancy between her public words and private thoughts. She confided in a letter to her best friend, Fania Marinoff, that, since Luise Rainer had locked up the role of O-lan, MGM had instead invited her to screen test as Lotus, the second wife who ruins the family. As Wong disclosed: “Practically everyone, including my friends, seem [sic] to feel that I should take the Lotus part ‘if there is enough money in it.’” In the same letter, the pragmatic Wong divulged that, contrary to her declaration in the Los Angeles Times, she auditioned for Lotus not once but twice.

Wong embodied a model of how to reinvent oneself in the face of the most daunting societal obstacles.

MGM’s notes from Wong’s second screen test are shocking: “[d]eserves serious consideration as possibility for Lotus—[but] NOT as beautiful as she might be.” For MGM, no Chinese American had the correct face to play a Chinese role. Lewin’s casting reports for others such as Keye Luke similarly stated that they “did not fit his conception of what Chinese people looked like.” Lewin recommended that they be employed primarily as ‘atmosphere’ and not as principal actors.” Not surprisingly, MGM nixed Wong as Lotus, casting instead the Viennese performer Tilly Loesch. Chinese Americans, in the hundreds and even thousands, were relegated to the background as atmosphere.

Popular culture has fixated on Wong’s “failure” to land a starring role in The Good Earth as launching the supposed negative trajectory of Wong’s life. In Netflix’s Hollywood (2020) and Amanda Lee Koe’s novel Delayed Rays of a Star (2019), Wong’s purported O-lan tryout (her letters reveal that she never auditioned for that role) is misrepresented as the event that permanently devastates her, pushing her into an alcohol-soaked stagnation.

Wong’s letters to Marinoff, however, reveal a very different story, one of courage and resilience. After the MGM rejection, Wong declared: “[I] feel a strong inclination to carry out my original plan of going to China.” Wong was too excited by “my first trip to the land of my fore-fathers” and too busy to wallow in self-pity. With breathtaking speed, a little over a month after the Good Earth casting rejection, Wong left Hollywood to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting China.

What makes Wong extraordinary is that she was not content to witness China as a tourist. This was not a vacation. This was work. This was Wong’s opportunity to reinvent herself as a journalist. During the month before her departure, Wong contracted with the New York Herald Tribune to write a series of articles about her journey through China. For a woman who stopped her formal education after two years of high school, this was extraordinary. Not one to waste time, Wong posted her first dispatch about the voyage while still enroute to China.

Anna May Wong Behind the Camera in China. Courtesy UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Even more impressively, Wong transformed the major crisis of her entire career into an unprecedented milestone: seizing the means of production to become a filmmaker. Wong crafted a riposte to MGM’s faux China portrayed in The Good Earth by producing a motion picture about the actual China featuring a person with actual Chinese heritage, herself. Before she left Los Angeles, Wong arranged to have her experiences recorded by cinematographer H.S. (Haisheng) “Newsreel” Wong (no relation). Wong starred in, scripted, directed, and produced her own documentary about her travels, an astonishing feat at a time when Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino were two of the very few female directors in Hollywood. After decades of promoting the film, Wong’s short feature about her China trip was finally aired throughout the United States on ABC television on February 14, 1957. Grace under pressure indeed.

Even today, Wong provides us with a road map of how to forge ahead even under the most difficult of circumstances. Many of us move differently in the world because who we are does not match what society values. It is my fondest hope that my new book will show that we are all, in one way or another, Anna May Wong.

_______________________________

From Anna May Wong: An Intimate Portrait by Shirley Jennifer Lim. Copyright © 2026. Available from Abrams Books.