High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

Anna Chen – First published 11 July 2025, Anna May Wong and containing China

Anna May Wong and China facing the same western fears

Anna May Wong Must Die! but the China dynamic lives on

China catches up and America fires off a frenzy of Yellow Peril mania ever since Trump’s first trade war doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to Asia.

Western anxiety about Chinese getting too big for their foot bindings has been with us ever since the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The mountain of guilt, fear, loathing and desire that went into defining them as a dehumanised Other is still with us today, turbo-charged by neocon ambitions.

Yep, desire is in there as well: you fear the thing you crave. And, so often, vice versa. Powerful it may be, but the impulse is also paralysing.

One way to escape the pain is to destroy the object of desire. What was Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick about if not the control of the entity that was more powerful than him, making off with his leg in a classic image of castration? Some societies eat their enemy. Some have hot wars. Many seek resolution in territorial pissing turf wars.

Green Hornet Syndrome

In the light of all-pervasive sinophobic insanity, I’m coining the term Green Hornet Syndrome to designate the white saviour cohort which insists on Chinese being underlings, or invisible even –— especially! — when outclassed by them.

Be a sidekick or die.

At the macro level, it means tearing down China for being so damn good.

At the micro level, it means tearing down Chinese for being so damn good.

And that’s across the political spectrum.

It’s not just the usual suspects of the usurped Masters of the Universe who cling on to the delusion of supremacy. Purported progressives who can’t resist the system’s white domination blandishments, even subconsciously, are also doing the work of the state. If there’s no visibility, there’s no empathy. No empathy means less resistance to war on a group you barely recognise as human. Look what happened to Muslims after 9/11.

Colonialism rules

Deletion, cancellation, erasure and invisibility are the boss group’s boys-club stock-in-trade in the New Colonialism. But it’s not a recently-minted strategy — it has a tedious history.

In America’s economic downturn of the 1870s, it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white man. Demagogues like Denis Kearney were able to whip up a diversionary wave of hate among European workers who were losing their livelihoods, culminating in the Exclusion Act of 1882, specifically aimed at the Chinese.

We see the same attitudes today despite the lip-service of enlightenment. Chinese are written off as copyists, incapable of original thought. They lack an inner life. The ruling group must speak for them. Nothing is true until a white person says it is true.

This regression into archaic relations from a bygone era exposes a widespread lowering of consciousness that’s depressingly become the norm in what we vainly think of as our sophisticated age.

The template currently coded into the Matrix seems to be: occupy the space and clear out the inhabitants. Absurdly, in the face of World War III, the urge to be an asshat eclipses urgent communal efforts for the collective good. A colonial mindset prevails when more self-knowledge, generosity and solidarity in the face of disaster might be more helpful than indulging residual Gamergate impulses.

Mandelbrot Set’s repeating China patterns

It’s an imperialist throwback that needs challenging. In 2005, I wanted to make a programme about Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, for her 1905 birth centenary. I was astonished that so few knew who she was. It was disappointing when the BBC’s commissioning editor turned down our first pitch on the grounds that “No-one’s heard of her”. Fortunately, my brilliant producer persisted and we eventually made A Celestial Star in Piccadilly in 2008, broadcast in 2009.

Anna May Wong’s story beautifully illustrates the dynamic of imperial power relations which remain embedded in the cultural codes. Our perceptions are invisibly shot through with it at every level like a repeating pattern in a Mandelbrot Set and, as it is ubiquitous, the situation is accepted as a given.

China has been suppressed and degraded in the public eye through the press, literature and the screen arts, ever since the Opium Wars carve-up by Britain and the Eight Nation Alliance which put down the Boxer Rebellion. Yellow Peril untermenschen tropes abound in the cultural undergrowth. Wong’s oppressive experience provided a miniature synechdochal example of the whole process.

I wrote a poem (below) about Wong’s unique pioneering position, wanting to satirically distil its essence and flag it up to a wide audience. It’s not something I was aware of doing while writing it. I was simply unloading what I immediately felt about the hypocrisy and oppression to which I could relate. But the subconscious is an amazing thing. Only in reading it back did I realise what was nailed, the heart of the matter coalesced and exploding out of the final two lines.

The West’s Heart of Darkness

Wong was born third-generation Chinese-American in Los Angeles, 1905. Not only did she face race discrimination in her everyday life, her successful film career in early Hollywood turned her into a symbol of it. The same forces present in Anna May Wong’s life-long struggle within and against a hostile system are here today in America’s bid for supremacy over a rising China.

In her movies, whether playing angel or devil, she had to be punished for the white hero’s attraction to her, sex being one of our fundamental drivers. From a 17-year old playing a tragic Madam Butterfly character in Toll of the Sea, to the daughter of Fu Manchu, her character always had to die.

As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ultimate threat to the white man’s world is embodied in a non-white woman of Freudian nightmare: mysterious, untamed and powerful. The horror! A feminised China in Western eyes similarly represents to timid minds the unknowable, unconquerable entity at the centre of their own id: their fears made flesh.

Even though the white hero could flirt with Wong, find her amusing, be besotted with her exoticism, they were never allowed to kiss onscreen. Similarly, the West may play with the exotic East, admire China’s cleverness and buy its cheap goods, but will never recognise it as an equal. As long as the object of desire never excels, reminding them of what it is they lack, it is tolerable.

However, being cleverer, more able when let off the leash, repositories of secret knowledge held in dark corners of the mind alien to the big lugs who seek dominance, is not tolerable.

Never mind that this threat is mostly paranoid projection. How insecure do you have to be to hold Chinese from Anna May Wong to the nation of China responsible for your own neurosis surrounding their outstanding distinction? Never truly welcomed as a strategic partner, China will always be defined as the strategic competitor; forever smacked down for someone else’s inadequacy.

As above, so below.

So here is a poem: my political analysis, cultural response and artistic endeavour in 32 lines.

Anna May Wong Must Die!

By Anna Chen, 2009

Down in the alleys of old Chinatown,
In the gawdy bawdy backstreets of sinister renown,
Dope pedlars peddle, the dragon gets chased,
It’s the same old story, the same yellowface
The Man with the Fu Manchu opium embrace
Could kill you in an instant and never leave a trace.
He knows all the tricks how to get you high
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Down in the sewers of Chinatown way,
Chinamen get chinkified every single day.
Little yellow people all merging into one,
You eat their rice for punishment, their noodles are no fun.
Robotic ant-like army with phasers set to stun,
Marching cross the countryside, nowhere left to run.
Here’s a tall poppy soaring in the sky
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Silver screen dreams in black and white
But without the black bits, so that’s alright.
Along came a flapper, a cute little score,
The women went ‘Ooh!’ and the boys went, ‘Phwoah!’
Black hair, almond eyes, a figure to adore,
Yellow skin glistening, sticking in their craw,
There’s a comet in the heavens, the end is nigh
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Who’s that upstart flouting all the rules?
Not one thing or the other, fall between two stools.
It’s Anna getting cocky, Anna out of line,
Anna take your punishment, Anna do your time,
Scary Chinee nemesis looking mighty sly
Crush the Dragon lady, the mastermind of crime.
Anna kissed a white boy and made him cry
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

More about Anna May Wong in the BBC profile: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly (2009)

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Anna May Wong – Not Your China Doll book review

Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong (Faber) – by Katie Gee Salisbury

Book review by Anna Chen - First published 11 April 2024

A lively, well-written journey through Anna May Wong’s life and career, if light on the political landscape that shaped her.

Every generation needs its fix of America’s first Chinese screen legend. When my producer and I first proposed a programme about Anna May Wong to the BBC in 2005, it was turned down because “no-one’s heard of her”. Three years later they saw the light and commissioned us to make A Celestial Star in Piccadilly, for BBC Radio 4, broadcast in January 2009.

One chief source was Graham Russell Gao Hodges’ biography, The Laundryman’s Daughter (2004), plus Anthony B Chan’s Perpetually Cool (2007, the hardback now selling for £103!). I enjoyed interviewing Hodges for the programme as he was such an enthusiast eager to bring this cultural phenomenon out of the shadows and into public eye.

My own first awareness of Anna May Wong was as a little child when strange men would bark out of no-where, “Oi, you, Anna May Wong,” accompanied by a thigh-slapping chortle of familiarity.

Mystified, I’d wonder, “How did they know my name’s Anna?”

After all, I wasn’t named after no glittery Hollywood movie star. The origin of my name lay with Anna Louise Strong. She was the American journalist who got on so well with Mao when he was leading the most populous nation in the world out of colonial and feudal subjugation and into its modern era, despite an unfortunate detour by way of the calamitous Cultural Revolution as seen recently on Netflix — rolling eye emoji.

Feeling a mite resentful even as a kid of all the damagingly negative images of Chinese people — that’s when they were even recognised as existing — my first encounter with the screen legend was a TV screening one rainy Sunday of the sublime Shanghai Express.

Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich

Made in 1936 and set in the chaos of warlord-era China where life had little value, the action surrounding two “coasters” and their admirers takes place on the titular train.

I recognised the star: Marlene Dietrich, the teutonic blonde viz ze deep voice, who’d relocated from pre-Nazi Germany to become one of the biggest movie icons ever in the 1930s.

But who was this tall Chinese raven-haired beauty easily holding her own in balance with her like yin and yang on the silver screen? No submissive child-women with Minnie Mouse voices here. Anna May Wong and Dietrich out-baritoned each other the way drag queens can only dream of.

Katie Gee Salisbury explores the making of the movie, dispelling the gossip that Anna May might have had intimate relations with the well-known sybarite and bisexual. Despite the absence of polaroid evidence, I lean the other way … in the debate, that is.

They didn’t call it Hollywood Babylon for nothing. It was the raucous 1920s and 30s and the world was going to hell in a handcart. In Hollywood and its European environs, these were the new gods lusted after by all, libidos set to eleven, fuelled by booze and white powders. Everyone in the upper set was doing it with everything that moved. In aristo Britain, Margaret, Duchess of Argyle even kept her Grade A coke in a salt cellar on the dining room table. So do I believe they might have done it? You betcha! And so what?

Taste in boyfriends

Salisbury stacks up Anna May’s encounters with stars, adding an imaginative take to how those meetings might have gone. Anna May had proven to be a muse for a slew of male creatives. The lyrics of These Foolish Things were said to have been written about her by her one-time lover Eric Maschwitz. Like other paramours, he refused to leave his wife for Anna May, whose taste for men was not the wisest; although this may have had more to do with the dynamics and status of her ethnicity and the unenlightened times.

Director Tod Browning briefly became her boyfriend after casting her as a concubine in his 1923 movie, Drifting, when she was only 18. I’m surprised everyone keeps missing that he was also the director of the horror film, Freaks. “Gooba, gabba, gooba, gabba. One of us, one of us.”



And Anna May was the most beautiful freak of them all.

Politics as backdrop

We know German philosopher Walter Benjamin had a crush on her from his writings about her. I wasn’t sure how much of the detail in the book was research or written with an eye on the screenplay. In classic biopic form, we get a long paragraph of how, sitting on a sofa at a swanky dinner party with him, she let down her hair. Was it a long up-do or a bob?

We are told: “As Anna May loosened her hair with her immaculately manicured fingers, stroking and restyling the fringe across her forehead, Benjamin no doubt caught a thrill.” Yet nothing materialises about Benjamin’s tragic end in suicide on the run from Nazis on the France Spain border in 1940.

As with the movie Shanghai Express, politics provide a backdrop against which personal dramas unfold, not the circumstances out of which character and deeper meanings are forged. At times, this gives Anna May’s story an uncanny valley soap-opera feel.

Chances are missed. Madam Chiang Kai-shek, a political powerhouse on the world stage in her own right, is mentioned only once as thanking Anna May by cablegram for her fundraising efforts for China against Japanese occupation. But never is the upper-crust Soong sister’s deep disdain for the declassé actress Wong discussed. Considering that she was the other most famous Chinese woman of the era — later wooed by David Selznick and the Hollywood establishment for “China”, the documentary (eventually dropped) — some investigation and comparison might have raised the game.

Patent king Thomas Edison and Hollywood

Salisbury gives the reason for Hollywood flourishing in Los Angeles as the lovely weather. You might as well listen to Rick (Humphrey Bogart) telling the Nazis that he went to Casablanca for the waters. That Hollywood was founded on the Pacific coast was an accident of sanctuary and escape from patent holder Thomas Edison’s hoodlums, both legal and illegal, who upheld his movie monopoly. Anyone challenging his stranglehold on cinematic technology in sound and vision was roughed up by mobsters and judges.

Budding filmmakers were forced to flee as far away as they could scarper from Edison’s turf on the East coast, to an exotic location whose transit was made easier with the transcontinental railroad all the way out to California. And so the development of technology shapes the culture and the politics out of the ecoomic base, as I am fond of reminding anyone who’ll listen.

Thus California was populated by misfits and outlaws, the perfect milieu for the fledgling cinema industry and one that would be a more natural fit for an outsider like Anna than the stiff, sewn up East coast.

Plus it did have that perfect weather.

The Good Earth

There’s an impressive amount of research and details in the book that tell a good yarn. Written through the lens of a Chinese American woman, the emphasis on identity politics often hits the mark.

Salisbury drily describes the making of MGM blockbuster The Good Earth with Swedish actress Luise Rainer in the lead role in Pearl S Buck’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel about Chinese peasants. Did Rainer devote months to studying for the role? “No,” she answered, “I depend upon my own imagination. Somehow instinctively I assume the right attitude.”

Not unlike Marie Antoinette playing at shepherdess.

And the “right attitude,” of course, was a gobsmacking conformity to the American dream, not the concrete reality of people’s lives, a state of affairs in evidence in the representation of China today.

Salisbury brings Anna May’s story up to date in the epilogue with the rejection of yellowface and progress made in casting Asian actors.

Cultural representation and changing geopolitical agendas

However, in recent years the game has changed. A fundamental manipulation from the top of how China and Chinese are perceived, aided by President Joe Biden’s $500m a year anti-China propaganda bounty on top of Donald Trump’s covert CIA operation devoted to China’s character assassination from 2019, has resulted in the very real tragedy of race hysteria that’s seen Asian women attacked and murdered.

How a book about the Mitochondrial Eve of the Chinese diaspora can be produced that ignores the gigantic elephant perched on the coffee table and fails to explore how cultural representation has deeper ramifications in geopolitical agendas is a disappointment.

On a side-note, we might have reached peak AMW with the issuance of the AMW quarter, now mysteriously withdrawn in the run-up to war with her race. My friend Jack has been on the look-out for one for me since the start and there are none to be had for love nor money. Makes no cents.

Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly: Anna Chen writes and presents a profile of Hollywood’s first geopolitical superstar on BBC Radio4, 2009

The Good Earth: review of MGM’s blockbuster movie of Pearl S Buck’s Pulitzer Prize novel, and how Anna May Wong was denied the role of her career

Yellowface and the erasure of a race

Video: Anna May Wong Must Die! Anna Chen presents extracts (2009)

Another chance to hear Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly on BBC Radio 4 Extra and iPlayer

Anna May Wong: a celestial star in Piccadilly, BBC Radio 4 Extra, 06:30 & 13:30 Wednesday 16th March 2016. Written & presented by Anna Chen

I had the great pleasure to make my programme on Anna May Wong, Hollywood's first Chinese screen legend, in 2008 for broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009. It's repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra tomorrow, Wednesday 16th March at 06:30 and 13:30, then on iPlayer for 30 days.

Anna Chen writes and presents A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, a half-hour profile of Hollywood's first Chinese movie star for BBC Radio 4.
First Broadcast 11:30am, Tuesday 13th January 2009.
Pick of the Day in Guardian Guide, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

LISTEN AGAIN ONLINE FOR 30 DAYS AFTER BROADCAST HERE

While I was growing up in Hackney, there were few east asian women in the culture reflecting anything like my appearance. Those that did slip through were not necessarily an inspiration. Yoko Ono was unfairly reviled in the media as a hate figure, although – far from breaking up the Beatles –she was a respected Fluxus artist in her own right and famous among the avant-garde cognoscenti way before John Lennon was anything more than a pop star. The twin horrors of my childhood, Suzy Wong and Juicy Lucy – happy hookers who migrated from popular literature onto the screen – were always there to define me in the eyes of a society without any other reference points. There were powerful women, too, but they came in the shape of Jiang Qing (Madam Mao), the kleptocratic Imelda Marcos and, in fiction, the evil daughter of Fu Manchu. Her I quite liked.

I wondered who the young Anna May Wong had to look up to. She grew up as third-generation Chinese born in a youthful America when Native Americans were safely out of the way on their reservations and former slaves were consigned to ghettos and plantations. Chinese-Americans were about as low as you could get; depicted as so much of a danger to working men and decent citizens that the US government introduced legislation specifically designed to curb the ambitions of the Yellow Peril within. Their ambitions may have been humble — earning an honest dollar for one's labour, living in safety and security, bringing up families of their own — but the owners of capital tolerated them only as cheap labour, while much of the labour movement in both the Britain and the USA (Wobblies excluded) saw the Chinese as more of a threat than as fellow workers.

Various schools of thought say that Asiatic humans first walked over the Beriing Straits more than 17,000 years ago and populated the Americas down to their southernmost tip. Others contend that Imperial Chinese ships arrived in the 15th century, predating Columbus by decades; or that they initially landed in California on Portuguese ships carrying silver from mines in the Philippines.

What we do know is that in the mid-19th century, the discovery of gold at Sutters Mill in 1848 drew first a trickle and then a flood of Chinese who joined in the Gold Rush, populating the west coast and working the mines in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The next wave of immigration was brought in as cheap coolie labour by Charles Crocker in the 1860s to build his Central Pacific railroad which would link Sacramento with the East and bring the West into the Union during the Civil War. Conditions were harsh and they were paid less than their white counterparts.

But not all Chinese would submit and conform to the role of coolie; there was one major strike with thousands laying down tools as they busted through granite mountains and worked in 20-foot snowdrifts. It was a strike that had the potential to unite all workers, and ever since I found out about it in the early 1990s while working with Sinophile author Martin Booth on his film script The Celestial Cowboys in 1993, it has inspired me, especially as there are those who insist that Chinese are genetically bourgeois and incapable of working-class consciousness. The strikers were eventually starved back to work with a few concessions but they had shown they they weren’t all pushovers.

Many miners and railworkers settled in the US and formed America’s first Chinese communities. These were Anna May Wong’s roots.

In a world bereft of role models, Anna May carved out an acting career in the early days of the Hollywood film industry. She started young, as an extra on the streets of Los Angeles, learning her craft and gaining proper roles in defiance of her traditionalist father, who wanted her at home in the family laundry.

By 17, she was starring in Hollywood’s first technicolour movie, The Toll of the Sea, as the Madame Butterfly character, “marrying” an American who promptly dumps her when he returns to his homeland and a white wife. She dies tragically at the climax, beginning a pattern that would endure for most of her career.

Trapped in Dragon Lady or Lotus Blossom roles, she grew tired of being demeaned, insulted and limited. Anti-miscegenation laws meant she wasn’t allowed to kiss a romantic lead if he was white, even if he was a white actor playing a Chinese. Your sexuality got you killed, at least symbolically.

In the late 1920s she came to Britain, where she was already a huge star and made the black and white silent feature film Piccadilly for the German director E A Dupont. This was perhaps her greatest starring role, but she still had to die at the end. Death was the fate she had to endure for the crime of being attractive. I take a closer look at this movie in the programme as there’s a plethora of prejudice leaking at the edges, some of it hilarious, much of it still extant today.

Anna May was the toast of Europe: mates with Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich and, strangely, Leni Riefenstahl. Such was the contrast in Europe with what she’d experienced back home that she once stated there was no racism in Germany. And that was in the Thirties, which gives you some idea how bad it must have been if you were a minority in the Land of the Free.

She starred with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, acted with a greenhorn Laurence Olivier on the London stage. Philosopher Walter Benjamin had a major crush on her. She dined with royalty and was adored by her fans. Eric Maschwitz wrote the classic song “These Foolish Things” about her.

Yet Hollywood still refused to lower the drawbridge and give her the starring roles she deserved. Those still went to white actresses in Yellowface. Myrna Loy as evil Daughter of Fu Manchu? Loy, Katherine Hepburn, Luise Rainer and Tilli Losch were all considered better at being Chinese than Anna May Wong.

These things take their toll and she died in 1961, at the unnervingly early age of 56.

But isn’t everything different today? Nope, it’s still with us. The form has mutated but the content lives on. A Celestial Star in Piccadilly is one case study in how minorities are rendered invisible in the culture and as producers of culture, while the fruits of their labour are appropriated by those who sit at High Table.

And the danger of that is it’s the sleep of reason where monsters are born.

Hmmm, sounds familiar and rather too close to home ...

Interviewees include:
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong's biographer, Laundryman's Daughter
Diana Yeh, historian
Alice Lee, writer and actress who performed her one woman show about Anna May Wong, Daughter of the Dragon
Elaine Mae Woo, director of Frosted Yellow Willows about Anna May
Ed Manwell, film producer, Frosted Yellow Willows
Neil Brand, composer of the new score for the BFI Southbank rerelease of Piccadilly on DVD
Jasper Sharp, east Asian film expert
Kevin Brownlow, legendary film historian and filmmaker
Margie Tai and Connie Ho, who remember Anna May Wong visiting their Limehouse neighbourhood when they were kids

Produced by Chris Eldon Lee for Culture Wise Productions
Many thanks to Mukti Jain Campion of Culture Wise for giving me latitude and for her feedback

AVAILABLE TO LISTEN FOR 30 DAYS AFTER BROADCAST HERE

The Life & Crimes of Anna May Wong on Madam Miaow, Resonance FM, 5pm today

Later today on Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge, Resonance 104.4FM, listen to "The Life and Crimes of Anna May Wong", the story of Hollywood's first Chinese screen legend. 5-6pm. Presented by Anna Chen from her one-woman show, Anna May Wong Must Die!

With Charles Shaar Murray.

Listen afterwards here or even better, as it's radio, LIVE via the Resonance FM widget in the right sidebar.

Yellowface sequence from Anna May Wong Must Die!

The Yellowface sequence from Anna Chen's solo show, Anna May Wong Must Die! (2009).

Hollywood legends we have loved getting silly with the oriental make-up.

There are many contenders who could have been added to this slideshow. Luise Rainer was cast as the wife in the MGM movie of Pearl S Buck's Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster, The Good Earth, depriving Anna May Wong of the major role for which she was so perfect. It could have broken the bamboo ceiling and allowed her to be recognised as a stellar actress. There's Beatrice Lillie in Thoroughly Modern Millie; a weird Christopher Walken (isn't he always) as Feng in Balls of Fire; David Carradine in the Kung Fu television series; Jonathan Pryce in the stage version of Miss Saigon; just about everyone in Cloud Atlas.

More here

http://www.annachen.co.uk

Anna May Wong Must Die! opens tomorrow: satire, crudity and politics

OK, this is it, guys and gals. Anna May Wong Must Die! gets its first London theatrical outing tomorrow night (Thursday 10th) at the New Diorama Theatre, followed by another on Saturday.

Legendary cultural writer Charles Shaar Murray and The Plague's Marc Jefferies will be providing live music.

I'm performing the show as a "work-in-progress" at the New Diorama Theatre as part of True Heart's In The Mirror season. Also performing during the week: Lucy Sheen and Veronica Needa. (Details on the webpage.)

I'll be on-script as it's still early days in the life of this piece (so no press), but I hope to come out of the week with the play nailed. I look forward to to hearing some solid feedback, especially from the Saturday Q&A session where the three of us will be chatting to the audience.

It's unusual, maybe even unique, to get three Chinese diaspora writers and performers together like this in one venue in one week so please do try to make it as we might never get this chance again.

ANNA MAY WONG MUST DIE!
Written and performed by Anna Chen
Live music accompaniment from Charles Shaar Murray and Marc Jefferies
Thursday 10th November 19:30
Saturday 12th November 20:30
£8.50/£6.50
(There will be a Q&A after the Saturday performance)
Presented by True Heart Theatre at the New Diorama Theatre, NW1
More info here

REVIEWS AND MEDIA FOR ANNA CHEN

"Charming, witty and sophisticated ... I am entranced, won over."
The Sunday Times

"Hard hitting and often hilarious ... arresting ... engrossing and provoking."
The Scotsman

"... sensitive, intelligent ... insistent and illuminating."
The Herald

"It's the stuff of brilliant satire ... riveting."
The List

"Very witty."
Graham Norton

"I'm taking you shoplifting."
Jenny Eclair

“Cutting edge …”
Stewart Lee

More press here

The Forum, BBC World Service, and Anna May Wong in Nunhead

You can hear me talking about Hollywood legend Anna May Wong this Sunday on the BBC World Service's The Forum at 9am. Chaired by Bridget Kendall, I'm on with Professor Dimitar Sasselov, discussing Super-earths, and Kwame Anthony Appiah on honour revolutions.

Bob From Brockley tells me there's a chance to see Anna May Wong on the big(gish) screen in Nunhead next month with a showing of Piccadilly (1929), her last silent movie which some have said is her best film ever.

Don't miss out on this night.
1920s Soho is coming to Nunhead!
A classic silent film with live music score
4th December, 8pm
Tickets £8

This classic silent film will be screened with live musical score for one night only at the Ivy House pub in Nunhead. Seated in the style of a 1920s club you will be able to enjoy period cocktails from the bar.

Described by Martin Scorsese as “one of the truly great films of the silent era”, Piccadilly will be accompanied by an evocative improvised score performed by acclaimed Russian accordionist Igor Outkine.

Trailer and booking information www.brockleyjackfilmclub.co.uk/piccadilly

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Anna May Wong Must Die! at the St Ives Arts Festival

One mo' time ...

Anna performs Anna May Wong Must Die! at the St Ives Arts Cub, Westcotts Quay, St Ives, Cornwall, TR26, 7pm, Sunday 20th September, as part of the St Ives Arts Festival. Tickets: £6.00 More Info: 01736 797122

Anna May Wong Must Die! is Anna Chen's one-woman show about Hollywood's first Chinese movie star. This personal journey through the life and crimes of Anna May Wong grew from a half-hour programme about the actress, A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009, written and presented by Anna.

Part comedy, part social critique, this funny, fascinating look at the movie icon dismantles Chinese stereotypes and reveals the human side of the dragon lady of dragon ladies.

Venue: St Ives Arts Club, Westcotts Quay
Date: Sunday 20th September 2009
Time: 7pm
Tickets: £6 from the Guildhall festival box-office
Info: 01736 797122 or steve.mcintosh@onestives.co.uk

More info here

NEW DATE ADDED TO ST IVES FESTIVAL.
Anna Chen reads from her novel-in-progress, Coolie, her story about the Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad who went on strike in the 1860s.

In a scintillating double-bill, she appears with Charles Shaar Murray who will be reading from his novel, The Hellhound Sample, a spooky tale about three generations of a black American music dynasty and an English guitar hero, about to be published by Headpress.

Venue: The Salthouse Gallery, St Ives
Date: Wednesday 23rd September 2009
Time: 6:30pm
Details to be confirmed

Photo of Anna by Sukey Parnell

Anna May Wong Must Die! show highlights video

I finally got an extract of Anna May Wong Must Die! on YouTube. Recorded Tuesday 26th May 2009 at the Roxy Bar & Screen, South London.

Still writing and putting the finishing touches to it. And, alas, no remote control of the Powerpoint/Keynote presentation due to my Mac iBook having no infra-red receiver, something I only found out the other month.

Anna May Wong Must Die! rap video from the Roxy

Anna Chen performs Anna May Wong Must Die! rap at the Roxy Bar & Screen, London, 26th May 2009, from an extract of her show as part of an Anna May Wong themed evening which included a screening of Piccadilly.

Anna May Wong Must Die! is a multimedia personal journey through the life and crimes of the Hollywood screen legend, a development of Anna Chen's recent programme for BBC Radio 4, Celestial Star of Piccadilly, broadcast 13th January 2009.

UPDATE: Well, that was loads of fun. The Roxy is an amazing little venue tucked away in south London, all velvet plush, mismatched chairs and extremely comfy leather sofas, reminiscent of old jazz clubs and torch singers. Everything worked. Not one lost sound file or missing image. The audience was perfect; warm and friendly and they laughed at all my gags. We all found Anna May Wong to be a fascinating subject. It's a mystery how she could have disappeared all these years.

Next job is to line up a string of gigs. Unfortunately, I've missed the big festivals this year but I'll be doing one-offs and 2010 looks promising.

Music and lyrics by Anna Chen

Thanks to Jasper Sharp, Michelle Thomas and Charles Shaar Murray.

Special thanks to the Anna May Wong Society for use of their images.

Harpy's been quick off the mark and has reviewed it here

Anna May Wong Must Die at The Roxy on Tuesday

Glamour, sex, beauty, fame – Hollywood legend Anna May Wong had it all. She was the most famous Chinese woman in the world during the 1920s and 30s, and yet she struggled to get decent parts while white actors played the juiciest Chinese roles in “yellowface”.

No difference there, then.

Film critic Jasper Sharp, of the website Midnight Eye, introduces a screening of Piccadilly (1929), her best known British film, as part of an Anna May Wong themed night at the Roxy.

Writer and performer Anna Chen presents an extract from Anna May Wong Must Die!, a personal journey through the life and crimes of the Hollywood screen legend and a multimedia illustrated reorientation of Anna May Wong. Extending her recent BBC Radio 4 profile of the actress, Celestial Star of Piccadilly, Anna reveals how Wong and the Chinese were depicted in films and what they were up against during Yellow Peril fever in this personal appreciation of the world’s first Chinese movie star.

Shanghai sounds from Resonance FM Lucky Cat DJ, Zoe Baxter

Drinks provided by the Akashi Sake Brewery.

Entry £4, cash on the door only.
There are table reservations for dinner however, so if anyone wants to reserve a table they can via bookings@roxybarandscreen.com or 020 7407 4057.

26 May 2009 at 19:00
The Roxy Bar & Screen
128-132 Borough High Street
London SE1 1LB,
United Kingdom

Thanks to the Anna May Wong Society for their brilliant work and allowing me to use their images.

Lucky Cat: Madam Miaow on Resonance 104.4FM Tonight

Madam Miaow, AKA Anna Chen, takes over the Lucky Cat hour on London radio station Resonance FM at 9pm tonight Tuesday 10th February, bringing cultural and political chat into your home. Not that my usual sophistimicated readers require my witteration to refundicate their erudition on home turf. Would I even think that?

I’ll be talking about a range of topics from Anna May Wong — including material I didn’t have time to cover in my recent Radio 4 profile of the Hollywood legend — to the 5th anniversary of the Morecambe Bay disaster when 23 Chinese cocklepickers died in icy waters off the north east coast of England.

What happened to the surviving families? How does the status of the unauthorised workers contribute to their vulnerability, and what can the government do to ensure there are no more tragedies like Morecambe Bay waiting to happen? How does the slogan, “British Jobs For British Workers” impact on these migrant workers?

My guests are Jasper Sharp — east Asian film expert — and Merlene Emerson who has helped raise funds for the victims' families and campaigns on migrants rights in the UK.

You can join in by phoning in: 0207 407 1210

Resonance 104.4 fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective. It provides a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting and does it brilliantly.

You can listen live to Resonance over the Internet worldwide in two formats: Real Audio and MP3 (at high quality for broadband and low quality for dial-up). Either click on the MP3 or Real Audio links on the website frontpage or click on the listen page for more information.

Thanks to Zoe Baxter who normally hosts Lucky Cat

Lucky Cat: Madam Miaow on Resonance 104.4FM Tonight

Madam Miaow, AKA Anna Chen, takes over the Lucky Cat hour on London radio station Resonance FM at 9pm tonight Tuesday 10th February, bringing cultural and political chat into your home. Not that my usual sophistimicated readers require my witteration to refundicate their erudition on home turf. Would I even think that?

I’ll be talking about a range of topics from Anna May Wong — including material I didn’t have time to cover in my recent Radio 4 profile of the Hollywood legend — to the 5th anniversary of the Morecambe Bay disaster when 23 Chinese cocklepickers died in icy waters off the north east coast of England.

What happened to the surviving families? How does the status of the unauthorised workers contribute to their vulnerability, and what can the government do to ensure there are no more tragedies like Morecambe Bay waiting to happen? How does the slogan, “British Jobs For British Workers” impact on these migrant workers?

My guests are Jasper Sharp — east Asian film expert — and Merlene Emerson who has helped raise funds for the victims' families and campaigns on migrants rights in the UK.

You can join in by phoning in: 0207 407 1210

Resonance 104.4 fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective. It provides a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting and does it brilliantly.

You can listen live to Resonance over the Internet worldwide in two formats: Real Audio and MP3 (at high quality for broadband and low quality for dial-up). Either click on the MP3 or Real Audio links on the website frontpage or click on the listen page for more information.

Thanks to Zoe Baxter who normally hosts Lucky Cat

Anna May Wong Celestial Star: BBC Radio 4 Pick of the Week

I'm delighted to report that my radio show, A Celestial Star in Piccadilly, has been chosen for Pick of the Week on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow (Sunday) at 18:15.

You can listen to the complete programme online until Tuesday morning.

Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl

Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, BBC R4

Anna Chen aka Madam Miaow writes and presents A Celestial Star In Piccadilly, a half-hour profile of Hollywood's first Chinese movie star for BBC Radio 4.
Broadcast 11:30am, Tuesday 13th January 2009.
Pick of the Day in Guardian Guide, Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.
BBC Radio 4

LISTEN AGAIN ONLINE FOR SEVEN DAYS AFTER BROADCAST HERE

While I was growing up in Hackney, there were few east asian women in the culture reflecting anything like my appearance. Those that did slip through were not necessarily an inspiration. Yoko Ono was unfairly reviled in the media as a hate figure, although – far from breaking up the Beatles –she was a respected Fluxus artist in her own right and famous among the avant-garde cognoscenti way before John Lennon was anything more than a pop star. The twin horrors of my childhood, Suzy Wong and Juicy Lucy – happy hookers who migrated from popular literature onto the screen – were always there to define me in the eyes of a society without any other reference points. There were powerful women, too, but they came in the shape of Jiang Qing (Madam Mao), the kleptocratic Imelda Marcos and, in fiction, the evil daughter of Fu Manchu. Her I quite liked.

I wondered who the young Anna May Wong had to look up to. She grew up as third-generation Chinese born in a youthful America when Native Americans were safely out of the way on their reservations and former slaves were consigned to ghettos and plantations. Chinese-Americans were about as low as you could get; depicted as so much of a danger to working men and decent citizens that the US government introduced legislation specifically designed to curb the ambitions of the Yellow Peril within. Their ambitions may have been humble — earning an honest dollar for one's labour, living in safety and security, bringing up families of their own — but the owners of capital tolerated them only as cheap labour, while much of the labour movement in both the Britain and the USA (Wobblies excluded) saw the Chinese as more of a threat than as fellow workers.

Various schools of thought say that Asiatic humans first walked over the Beriing Straits more than 17,000 years ago and populated the Americas down to their southernmost tip. Others contend that Imperial Chinese ships arrived in the 15th century, predating Columbus by decades; or that they initially landed in California on Portuguese ships carrying silver from mines in the Philippines.

What we do know is that in the mid-19th century, the discovery of gold at Sutters Mill in 1848 drew first a trickle and then a flood of Chinese who joined in the Gold Rush, populating the west coast and working the mines in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The next wave of immigration was brought in as cheap coolie labour by Charles Crocker in the 1860s to build his Central Pacific railroad which would link Sacramento with the East and bring the West into the Union during the Civil War. Conditions were harsh and they were paid less than their white counterparts.

But not all Chinese would submit and conform to the role of coolie; there was one major strike with thousands laying down tools as they busted through granite mountains and worked in 20-foot snowdrifts. It was a strike that had the potential to unite all workers, and ever since I found out about it in the early 1990s while working with Sinophile author Martin Booth on his film script The Celestial Cowboys in 1993, it has inspired me, especially as there are those who insist that Chinese are genetically bourgeois and incapable of working-class consciousness. The strikers were eventually starved back to work with a few concessions but they had shown they they weren’t all pushovers.

Many miners and railworkers settled in the US and formed America’s first Chinese communities. These were Anna May Wong’s roots.

In a world bereft of role models, Anna May carved out an acting career in the early days of the Hollywood film industry. She started young, as an extra on the streets of Los Angeles, learning her craft and gaining proper roles in defiance of her traditionalist father, who wanted her at home in the family laundry.

By 17, she was starring in Hollywood’s first technicolour movie, The Toll of the Sea, as the Madame Butterfly character, “marrying” an American who promptly dumps her when he returns to his homeland and a white wife. She dies tragically at the climax, beginning a pattern that would endure for most of her career.

Trapped in Dragon Lady or Lotus Blossom roles, she grew tired of being demeaned, insulted and limited. Anti-miscegenation laws meant she wasn’t allowed to kiss a romantic lead if he was white, even if he was a white actor playing a Chinese. Your sexuality got you killed, at least symbolically.

In the late 1920s she came to Britain, where she was already a huge star and made the black and white silent feature film Piccadilly for the German director E A Dupont. This was perhaps her greatest starring role, but she still had to die at the end. Death was the fate she had to endure for the crime of being attractive. I take a closer look at this movie in the programme as there’s a plethora of prejudice leaking at the edges, some of it hilarious, much of it still extant today.

Anna May was the toast of Europe: mates with Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich and, strangely, Leni Riefenstahl. Such was the contrast in Europe with what she’d experienced back home that she once stated there was no racism in Germany. And that was in the Thirties, which gives you some idea how bad it must have been if you were a minority in the Land of the Free.

She starred with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, acted with a greenhorn Laurence Olivier on the London stage. Philosopher Walter Benjamin had a major crush on her. She dined with royalty and was adored by her fans. Eric Maschwitz wrote the classic song “These Foolish Things” about her.

Yet Hollywood still refused to lower the drawbridge and give her the starring roles she deserved. Those still went to white actresses in Yellowface. Myrna Loy as evil Daughter of Fu Manchu? Loy, Katherine Hepburn, Luise Rainer and Tilli Losch were all considered better at being Chinese than Anna May Wong.

These things take their toll and she died in 1961, at the unnervingly early age of 56.

But isn’t everything different today? Nope, it’s still with us. The form has mutated but the content lives on. A Celestial Star in Piccadilly is one case study in how minorities are rendered invisible in the culture and as producers of culture, while the fruits of their labour are appropriated by those who sit at High Table.

And the danger of that is it’s the sleep of reason where monsters are born.

Hmmm, sounds familiar and rather too close to home ...

Interviewees include:
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong's biographer, Laundryman's Daughter
Diana Yeh, historian
Alice Lee, writer and actress who performed her one woman show about Anna May Wong, Daughter of the Dragon
Elaine Mae Woo, director of Frosted Yellow Willows about Anna May
Ed Manwell, film producer, Frosted Yellow Willows
Neil Brand, composer of the new score for the BFI Southbank rerelease of Piccadilly on DVD
Jasper Sharp, east Asian film expert
Kevin Brownlow, legendary film historian and filmmaker
Margie Tai and Connie Ho, who remember Anna May Wong visiting their Limehouse neighbourhood when they were kids

Produced by Chris Eldon Lee for Culture Wise Productions
Many thanks to Mukti Jain Campion of Culture Wise for giving me latitude and for her feedback

Anna develops her radio programme into a musical multi-media extravaganza, Anna May Wong Must Die!

Anna on Anna May Wong and Chinese in Hollywood. The Good Earth review.

For more pictures, visit the Anna May Wong Society

Anna started writing her novel, Coolie, on the Transcontinental strike by Chinese workers since 1994, taking longer than construction of the railroad itself.

A Celestial Star in Piccadilly: Anna Chen presents Anna May Wong, BBC R4

Anna Chen aka Madam Miaow presents a half-hour profile of Anna May Wong, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, tomorrow morning on BBC Radio 4.

Starring with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, killed off in most of her movies, a huge hit in Europe, reviled in China, Anna May was the most visible Chinese woman in the world during the 1920s and 30s. Stuck playing dragon ladies and lotus blossoms all her career, who wouldn't crack? So what happened to her?

To be broadcast 11:30, Tuesday 13th January 2009, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the making of Anna May's British hit, Piccadilly.

A Celestial Star in Piccadilly is Pick of the Week in the Guardian (Saturday Guardian Guide), Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday.

Media on Anna Chen's last radio series, Chinese In Britain
“A fascinating story” - Chris Campling, The Times
“Each episode sounded effortless only because it had been crafted with such supreme care” - Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph

Please come back — more later tonight.

The Good Earth review: Anna May Wong and Chinese in Hollywood

Luise Rainer in The Good Earth

Every so often I get together with friends for a day of culture. This generally entails snuggling up in my flat over a movie, a bottle (or more) of cava and munchies. Chocolate will invariably make an appearance, as sometimes does proper Jewish cheesecake from the bagel bakery, far superior to the ersatz frozen slabs of synthetic goo which should only be eaten as emergency therapy after the tragic break-up of a love affair, and straight from the freezer.

Last night CSM, a couple of friends and I dug in for a night of cinematic frolix. Several bottles of cava may have been involved. Still, what better way to settle down to all 143 minutes of a Hollywood classic, the “last great achievement” of renowned film producer, Irving Thalberg, before he passed on to the Great Cinema in the sky?

I finally got to see The Good Earth, of which I’d been vaguely aware all my life but which surfaced again during my research into my BBC Radio 4 profile of the Hollywood screen-legend, Anna May Wong (to be broadcast 13th January 2009). This was the black & white MGM spectacular made in 1937, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller by Pearl S Buck about the turbulent fortunes of farmer Wang Lung’s family — a sort of Chinese Grapes of Wrath meets Gone With The Wind.

You’d think the biggest ever film role for a Chinese should be played by the biggest ever Chinese star. Ever since publication of the book in 1931, Anna May Wong had lobbied hard for the starring role of O-Lan, Wang Lung’s long-suffering wife. Fed up with being cast as either dragon ladies or prostitutes, this character meant a proper starring role at last for Anna and entry to the A-list.

Anna May Wong. The wrong sort of Chinese

But vicious race laws meant that you couldn’t have mixed race romance on the screen. Once a white actor, Paul Muni, was cast in the lead his wife would have to be played by a white actress in yellowface.

And what better choice for a strugglng Chinese peasant than the German actress, Luise Rainer? Luise did achieve an other-worldlyness and won an Oscar for her portrayal of O-Lan which has been described as “luminous” and “magical”. But, as film historian Kevin Brownlow says in the programme, “she wasn’t Chinese”.

Acting styles have changed over the years but key roles were played with a distinct absence of gorm. Poor Luise had hardly any lines but a lot of screen-time to fill. Mostly she filled it with an open mouthed passivity reminiscent of Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. The dialogue she did speak was delivered with a thick Germanic accent but who cares? It was foreign, wasn’t it?

Would Anna May Wong have made a better O-Lan than Rainer? Ever since Garbo stared into the cosmic distance on the prow of her ship in Queen Christina and achieved demi-god status, actresses have been trying for the same effect with differing results. No inner life but a beautiful, blank canvas onto which the audience projects the best of itself. It’s a seductive image. Who wouldn’t want to look like they have a hotline straight to god? Even I’ve tried it but failed to keep the requisite immobile face, not being particularly inscrutable, see? Rainer does this to perfection. For 143 straight minutes.

So this is how good Chinese women were portrayed during the heyday of Hollywood, when its movies described the world, laying out its cultural templates, and woe betide anyone who strayed from the Grand Design. I must have been asleep when they gave those lessons coz look at me now.

Anna May Wong was beautiful and authentically Chinese but she had far too much going on inside. Unless she blanded herself utterly, her natural charisma and thought-processes would have upset the symmetry and harmony of white folk’s art.

That‘s not to say the film isn’t worth seeing. If you can suspend disbelief at the racial origins of the actors, you can marvel at the sheer gorgeousness of Hollywood cinematography at its height. Something else Kevin Brownlow told me but we didn't have time to include in the final cut: how did the director achieve the amazing effect of vast clouds of locusts swarming across the Chinese landscape at the climax of the film? They turned the film upside down and placed a tank of water in front of it. Then, as the film was running, they poured coffee grounds into the tank so they swirled in dark clouds. Then they turned the film the right way and it looks as if tonnes of locust biomass is rising above puny humanity. Fantastic!

Madam Miaow says ...The Good Earth. Gorgeous looking but another set of invisible chains I can do without, thank you very much.

The Good Earth — directed by Sidney Franklin, Victor Fleming (uncredited) and Gustav Machaty

Anna Chen writes and presents Anna May Wong: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly, broadcast BBC Radio 4 11:30am Tuesday 13th January 2009. Listen again online for seven days after transmission.