Anna May Wong trivia: 84 facts about the Hollywood movie star

Anna May Wong is an American actress. She is considered to be the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star.

She was recently the theme of a Google doodle. So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about her life and career.

1. Anna May Wong was an American actress
2. Her birth name was Wong Liu Tsong
3. She was born on January 3, 1905
4. She died on February 3, 1961
5. She is considered to be the first Chinese American Hollywood movie star
6. As well as the first Chinese American actress to gain international recognition
7. Her long and varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage, and radio
8. She was born in Los Angeles to second-generation Toisonese Chinese-American parents
9. Wong became infatuated with the movies and began acting in films at an early age
10. During the silent film era, she acted in The Toll of the Sea (1922), one of the first movies made in color, and in Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
11. Wong became a fashion icon
12. She achieved international stardom in 1924
13. Frustrated by the stereotypical supporting roles she reluctantly played in Hollywood, Wong left for Europe in the late 1920s, where she starred in several notable plays and films, among them Piccadilly (1929)
14. She spent the first half of the 1930s traveling between the United States and Europe for film and stage work
15. Wong was featured in films of the early sound era, such as Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Daughter of Shanghai (1937)
16. And with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932)
17. In 1935 Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role of the Chinese character O-Lan in the film version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth
18. Choosing instead the white actress Luise Rainer to play the leading role
19. Wong spent the next year touring China, visiting her family’s ancestral village and studying Chinese culture
20. In the late 1930s, she starred in several B movies for Paramount Pictures, portraying Chinese and Chinese Americans in a positive light
21. She paid less attention to her film career during World War II
22. Then she devoted her time and money to helping the Chinese cause against Japan
23. Wong returned to the public eye in the 1950s in several television appearances
24. In 1951, Wong made history with her television show The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong
25. The first ever U.S. television show starring an Asian American series lead
26. She had been planning to return to film in Flower Drum Song when she died in 1961, at the age of 56 from a heart attack
27. For decades after her death, Wong was remembered principally for the stereotypical “Dragon Lady” and demure “Butterfly” roles that she was often given
28. Her life and career were re-evaluated in the years around the centennial of her birth, in three major literary works and film retrospectives
29. Anna May Wong was born Wong Liu Tsong on January 3, 1905, on Flower Street in Los Angeles, one block north of Chinatown
30. In an integrated community of Chinese, Irish, German and Japanese residents
31. She was the second of seven children born
32. Her parents were Wong Sam Sing, owner of the Sam Kee Laundry, and his second wife Lee Gon Toy
33. Wong’s parents were second-generation Chinese Americans
34. Her maternal and paternal grandparents had resided in the U.S. since at least 1855
35. Her paternal grandfather, A Wong Wong, was a merchant who owned two stores in Michigan Hills, a gold-mining area in Placer County
36. He had come from Chang On, a village near Taishan, Guangdong Province, China, in 1853
37. Anna May’s father spent his youth traveling between the U.S. and China
38. There he married his first wife and fathered a son in 1890
39. He returned to the U.S. in the late 1890s and in 1901, while continuing to support his family in China, he married a second wife, Anna May’s mother
40. Anna May’s older sister Lew Ying (Lulu) was born in late 1902, and Anna May in 1905, followed by five more children
41. In 1910, the family moved to a neighborhood on Figueroa Street where they were the only Chinese people on their block, living alongside mostly Mexican and Eastern European families
42. The two hills separating their new home from Chinatown helped Wong to assimilate into American culture
43. She attended public school with her older sister at first, but then, when the girls became the target of racial taunts from other students, they moved to a Presbyterian Chinese school
44. Classes were taught in English
45. But Wong attended a Chinese language school afternoons and on Saturdays
46. About that same time, U.S. motion picture production began to relocate from the East Coast to the Los Angeles area
47. Movies were shot constantly in and around Wong’s neighborhood
48. She began going to Nickelodeon movie theaters and quickly became obsessed with the “flickers”, missing school and using lunch money to attend the cinema
49. Her father was not happy with her interest in films, feeling that it interfered with her studies, but Wong decided to pursue a film career regardless
50. At the age of nine, she constantly begged filmmakers to give her roles
51. Earning herself the nickname “C.C.C.” or “Curious Chinese Child”
52. By the age of 11, Wong had come up with her stage name of Anna May Wong, formed by joining both her English and family names
53. Wong was scheduled to play the role of Madame Liang in the film production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, but was unable to take the role due to failing health
54. On February 3, 1961, at the age of 56, Wong died of a heart attack as she slept at home in Santa Monica
55. This happened wo days after her final screen performance on television’s The Barbara Stanwyck Show
56. Her cremated remains were interred in her mother’s grave at Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles
57. The headstone is marked with her mother’s Anglicized name on top, the Chinese names of Anna May (on the right), and her sister Mary (on the left) along the sides
58. Wong’s image and career have left a notable legacy
59. Through her films, public appearances and prominent magazine features, she helped to humanize Chinese Americans to white audiences during a period of intense racism and discrimination
60. Chinese Americans had been viewed as perpetually foreign in U.S. society but Wong’s films and public image established her as a Chinese-American citizen at a time when laws discriminated against Chinese immigration and citizenship
61. Wong’s hybrid image dispelled contemporary notions that the East and West were inherently different
62. Among Wong’s films, only Shanghai Express retained critical attention in the U.S. in the decades after her death
63. In Europe and especially England, her films appeared occasionally at festivals
64. Wong remained popular with the gay community who often claimed her as one of their own and for whom her marginalization by the mainstream became a symbol
65. Although the Chinese Nationalist criticism of her portrayals of the “Dragon Lady” and “Butterfly” stereotypes lingered, she was forgotten in China
66. Nevertheless, the importance of Wong’s legacy within the Asian-American film community can be seen in the Anna May Wong Award of Excellence
67. The award is given yearly at the Asian-American Arts Awards
68. The annual award given out by the Asian Fashion Designers was also named after Wong in 1973
69. For decades following her death, Wong’s image remained as a symbol in literature as well as in film
70. In the 1971 poem “The Death of Anna May Wong”, Jessica Hagedorn saw Wong’s career as one of “tragic glamour” and portrayed the actress as a “fragile maternal presence, an Asian-American woman who managed to ‘birth’ however ambivalently, Asian-American screen women in the jazz age”
71. Wong’s character in Shanghai Express was the subject of John Yau’s 1989 poem “No One Ever Tried to Kiss Anna May Wong”, which interprets the actress’ career as a series of tragic romances
72. Sally Wen Mao wrote a book called Oculus, published in 2019, with a series of persona poems in the voice of Anna May Wong
73. In David Cronenberg’s 1993 film version of David Henry Hwang’s 1986 play, M. Butterfly, Wong’s image was used briefly as a symbol of a “tragic diva”
74. Her life was the subject of China Doll, The Imagined Life of an American Actress, an award-winning fictional play written by Elizabeth Wong in 1995
75. As the centennial of Wong’s birth approached, a re-examination of her life and career took shape
76. Three major works on the actress appeared and comprehensive retrospectives of her films were held at both the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City
77. Anthony Chan’s 2003 biography, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905–1961), was the first major work on Wong and was written, Chan says, “from a uniquely Asian-American perspective and sensibility”
78. In 2004, Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane’s exhaustive examination of Wong’s career, Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work was published
79. As well as a second full-length biography, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Hodges
80. Though Anna May Wong’s life, career, and legacy reflect many complex issues which remain decades after her death, Anthony Chan points out that her place in Asian-American cinematic history, as its first female star, is permanent
81. An illustrated biography for children, Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story, was published in 2009
82. In 2016, the novelist Peter Ho Davies published The Fortunes, a saga of Chinese-American experiences centered around four characters, one of whom is a fictionalized Anna May Wong, imagined from childhood until her death
83. In a conversation published in the 2017 paperback edition, Davies described his novel as an exploration of the Chinese-American quest for authenticity – a third way of being Chinese-American – with Anna May Wong representing an iconic example of that struggle
84. On January 22, 2020, a Google Doodle celebrated Wong, commemorating the 97th anniversary of the day The Toll of the Sea went into general release