In an old San Francisco Hall of Justice courtroom on Kearny Street, Chinese American actress Anna May Wong is dressed in a fitted pencil skirt suit, massive black sunglasses and black hat cocked to one side. Another actress catches sight of her and chases Wong out of the building and into a cab that races up Washington Street, beginning an epic Chinatown chase scene — perhaps the city’s only one in cinematic history where all parties are wearing high heels. 
This scene from the thriller-noir “Impact” (1949) marked actress Anna May Wong’s return to the silver screen after a seven-year hiatus, in a role where she could speak mostly in her own California-inflected English instead of a fake Chinese dialect.
FILE: Anna May Wong in the 1929 film “Pavement Butterfly.”
Anna May Wong is considered Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star, emerging during the silent film era and through its transition to Technicolor and the “talkies.” This was during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred most immigration from China to the U.S. from 1882 until its repeal in 1943, and there were no predecessors to break cinematic ceilings. As a result, Wong was often relegated to roles like “Lotus Flower” in the film “The Toll of the Sea” (1922), in which she ends up throwing herself into the ocean out of lovesickness for a white man. Or the scantily clad “Mongol slave” alongside Douglas Fairbanks in “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924).
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FILE: A lobby poster for the 1949 film “Impact,” with, left to right, Ella Raines, Anna May Wong and Charles Coburn.
The demure lotus blossom and dragon lady are stereotypical roles that Wong helped to ingrain into mainstream culture. That said, Wong was a trailblazer who fought back and forged paths of her own, like eventually creating and starring in a plucky lady detective TV series called “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong” (1951). Hollywood cinephiles and Asian American pop culture fans know Wong well — she got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and a 30-foot-tall sculpture in LA dedicated to her in 1994 — but many others don’t know this pioneering actor of the silver screen. That’s been changing as of late, with contemporary references like the 2020 Netflix series “Hollywood” from “American Horror Story” co-producer Ryan Murphy.
Stanford alum Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of a new Wong biography, “Not Your China Doll,” and while on her book tour in SF on a recent Monday night, led the introduction to a joint Roxie Theater-Center for Asian America Media screening of British silent film “Piccadilly” (1929). In that movie, Wong plays a scullery maid-turned-star dancer (dubiously) named Shosho.
FILE: Chinese American actress Anna May Wong reads a newspaper article in a scene from "Piccadilly," directed by Ewald Andre Dupont for British International Pictures in 1929. 
“I learned that [the Roxie’s] been here since 1913, so I’m almost certain that Anna May Wong’s films were shown here in the past. It’s amazing to have them shown here again,” Salisbury said. While sitting watching “Picadilly,” it’s easy to imagine moviegoers a century ago in this very theater — which went by the names the Rex, the Gem and finally the Gaiety during the 1920s — bewitched by the hypnotic gaze and mischievous smirk of Anna May Wong on the big screen.
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Wong’s family history is intrinsically tied to the Bay Area. Her mother, Lee Gon Toy, was born on Clay Street, where her family owned the Fook Lee Cigar Factory. Wong Sam Sing, Anna May’s father, was born just northeast of Sacramento, where his father ran two shops during the Gold Rush. Lee Gon Toy and Wong Sam Sing married in SF in 1901, then moved to LA.
Actress Anna May Wong poses with a cut rose, circa 1935.
Anna May Wong was born Wong Liu Tsong (translating roughly to “frosted yellow willows”) in 1905. The doctor who delivered her gave her the English name Anna. Wong grew up in a family of eight children, all helping to run the family laundry, one of the few work opportunities afforded to Chinese at the time. Using movies as escapism, Wong aspired to be in them and began to act as an extra while in school before dropping out at age 16 to pursue acting full-time.
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Wong worked during a time when white actors dominated Asian roles in yellowface. Anti-miscegenation film rules, later known as the Hays Code, prevented her and the few fellow Asian American actors from landing many roles. Despite Wong’s preternatural talent, shown alongside Marlene Dietrich in “Shanghai Express” (1932), the actress was constantly boxed into stereotypical roles like the evil temptress or delicate flower.
Frustrated by the racism of Hollywood and America, Wong set sail for Europe in 1928 at the age of 23. Her film catalog grew to include “Piccadilly,” plus her first speaking film role in “The Flame of Love” (1930). Her characters, while in bigger roles, were still often wanton exotic women who frequently died. Not completely giving up on America, though, Wong traveled back to the U.S. She was described as “graceful as the lotus flower” with “Oriental inscrutability” by a 1931 San Francisco Examiner article written during one of her SF stays.
Wong filmed on location in SF for several of her movies, although many of the earliest are considered lost. One of her first credited film roles was in the anthology “Bits of Life” (1921), where she stars alongside a yellowface Lon Chaney as wife to his opium den owner. According to a 1921 San Francisco Chronicle article, Wong’s return trip from SF also included her first ride on an overnight Pullman railway car. There are no known prints of the film in any film archives.
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“Old San Francisco” (1927) is a Warner Bros. silent film set in the Tenderloin in which Wong plays a dragon lady role literally named “Flower of the Orient” in the credits. It’s no fault of Wong’s, but being boxed into archetypes established a pattern of typecasting for both herself and future Asian American female actors.
FILE: Lobby poster for the 1939 film “King Of Chinatown” with Anna May Wong, left, and Akim Tamiroff. 
“King of Chinatown” (1939), while set in a generic Chinatown in a big city, is a fictionalized biopic of Dr. Margaret Chung, the first Chinese American female doctor, who practiced in SF’s Chinatown. Wong plays the Chung-inspired role. It made sense that she and Chung were also friends, both being pioneering Chinese American women in their respective fields.
As Wong’s star power grew, her pushback on racist roles could be seen in the evolution of her films. Salisbury’s book recounts a New York Times article describing Wong’s impact on the industry through the film, noting that “she convinced the producers that not all Chinese can be relegated to two classifications: the dreamy poet and the sinister figure. … Her reasoning, coupled with Chinese representation, has altered considerably Paramount’s treatment of her race.”
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Wong took a hiatus from movies between 1942 and 1949, in part to raise funds for Chinese refugees affected by the Second Sino-Japanese War during World War II, including writing a foreword in a Chinese American cookbook. “Impact” (1949) marked Wong’s return to film. The noir flick was shot entirely in the Bay Area. Fellow Asian American Hollywood actor and friend Phillip Ahn also starred. “Portrait in Black” (1960) was both set and filmed in the city, including locations like Pier 22, Broadway, Pacific Heights, Chinatown and Golden Gate Park. Producer Ross Hunter changed the location of the story to SF and the race of the housekeeper specifically to cast Wong. It was one of Wong’s last films, released the year before she died. 
FILE: A 1931 portrait of film star Anna May Wong. 
Aside from her fame on the silver screen, Wong’s talent also granted her stage roles, from cabaret to operettas. Wong was part of the Broadway cast for “On The Spot” (1930), based on the Chicago St. Valentine’s Day massacre of bootleggers by a rival gang, most likely ordered by Al Capone. She played the role of Minn Lee, the lead gangster’s Chinese mistress, and continued to play her in the SF debut of it in 1931 at the Curran Theatre on Geary, all the while staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in Nob Hill.
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Wong was no stranger to rejection and resilience, at one point saying, “I — that flustered, worried, defensive little Hollywood flapper — found happiness when I ceased to worry about time. No one can give me what belongs to someone else; and no one can take away that which is mine.”
After losing out on a major role in the 1937 Oscar-winning film “The Good Earth,” Wong focused on traveling to China for cultural and social exploration and attending society party circuits in London and New York. She was named best dressed woman in the world by a New York modeling school in 1935.
Portraits of pioneering actress Anna May Wong.
Wong also had many romantic partners, though she turned down at least one marriage proposal from a white man, saying she did not want to bring “half-breed’ children into this world,” a view shaped by harsh legal and social treatment from both the film industry and society at large. Wong died of a heart attack in 1961, at the age of 56, in her Santa Monica home. She had just been cast in the film version of “Flower Drum Song” (1961), a groundbreaking work set in SF’s Chinatown with a majority Asian American cast.
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The cultural acknowledgment of Wong’s contributions to film and social progress continues to build. The U.S. Mint issued a quarter with her face on it in 2022 — the first Asian American to grace U.S. currency. Mattel released a Wong Barbie doll in 2023, which sold out quickly. Salisbury’s new book times well with this new renaissance for the actress, preceding an upcoming biopic of her starring British actor Gemma Chan of Marvel’s “Eternals.”
Instead of cast in tragedy as has been a popular view of Wong, author Salisbury chooses to see her life as full of purposeful choices and excitement. At the “Piccadilly” screening, Salisbury ended her introduction with a note about the film’s story that paralleled Wong’s life.
“The beautiful thing about the story is that it shows that someone from such humble beginnings can have enough agency to change their destiny,” she said.
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Margot Seeto is a freelance writer and third-generation San Franciscan who appreciates home (and its food!) so much more after having lived all over the globe for 15 years. Send her dumpling tips at: margotseeto@gmail.com. You can also follow Margot on Twitter: @meatoseeto.
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