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Anna May once coached Dorothy Lamour to act Chinese when she was appearing as a Eurasian girl in the film Disputed Passage (1939).
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Anna May was fluent in both French and German along with her native English and Chinese.
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Her younger sister Mary Wong committed suicide by hanging herself in her garage in Los Angeles on July 15, 1940 at age 30. She had a bit part in the film The Good Earth (1937).
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As Anna May’s movie career went into eclipse in the 1940s (she would not appear in another motion picture until 1949), she found work on the stage and in radio and then in the new medium of television. She was one of the very first Chinese women who appeared on early television.
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Anna May wrote a preface to the book “New Chinese Recipes” in 1942, which was one of the first Chinese cookbooks printed in the US. The proceeds from the cookbook were dedicated to United China Relief.
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Anna May was vocal in her opposition to stereotypes and typecasting, and was one of Hollywood’s more memorable victims of racism. Oddly enough, she was considered socially suspect by her own Chinese people and had to deal with it all of her life.
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Roles she was forced to accept in order to have an acting career, as well her status as a single woman, disgusted many Chinese in America along with China where actresses were equated with prostitutes and women were still played by men in classical opera.
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On a trip to China in 1936, Anna May was welcomed by the country’s cultural elite in cosmopolitan Beijing and Shanghai, but she had to abandon a trip to her parents’ ancestral village when her progress was blocked by a crowd of protesters. Someone in the crowed denounced her with “Down with Huang Liu Tsong, the stooge that disgraces China.
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Upon her return from China, Anna May was determined to play Chinese characters more authentically, but her only options were to reject roles she deemed racist or to try to soften them from within. Ultimately for this proud woman, in her mind, it was a losing battle.
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Chinese nationalism had been on the upswing since Yat-sen Sun ended the Manchu Empire in 1911 and was rife in reaction to the war of aggression launched against China by the Empire of Japan. Chinese nationalists, concerned about the portrayal of Chinese people as evil incarnate in American popular culture, were offended by Wong’s portrayals of Asians and exotics. Though she would spend the World War II years working for Chinese charities and relief agencies, she was snubbed by Madame Chiang, the daughter of Yat-sen Sun and wife of Kai-Shek Chiang, the army general who led the Nationalist Chinese, during Madame Chiang’s 1942-43 propaganda tour of the US.
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