Anna May Wong — born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles on Jan. 3, 1905 — is widely recognized as Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star. A year before she died in 1961 from a heart attack at age 56, she joked that her epitaph should be, “I died a thousand deaths.
” During her career, she’d appeared in more than 60 films, TV series and theatrical shows, but many of her roles were stereotypical caricatures of Asian women as exotic temptresses, dragon ladies and China dolls who inevitably met their doom so the white leads could attain their happy ending. Though Wong’s many deaths are well documented on film, her multifaceted life offscreen remained generally unacknowledged until now. For the next seven months, the exhibit at downtown L.
A.’s Chinese American Museum (CAM) will shine a broader light on the actress, philanthropist and socialite, who was known variously as “the world’s most beautiful Chinese girl” and “the world’s best-dressed woman.” (In 1938, she auctioned some of her famed wardrobe to fund medical supplies for people in China after Japan invaded the country.
) “She was a really vibrant, alive person,” says Katie Gee Salisbury, one of the exhibit curators, who first stumbled upon a photograph of Wong back in 2004. As a woman of Chinese and Anglo-Irish descent who grew up in Southern California, Salisbury was surprised she’d never heard of the Chinatown-born Chinese American actress. Thus began Salisbury’s 20-year journey learning .
