To Be an Actress

Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles and growing up amid the suspicion and scrutiny epitomized by the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. This critical study of her cross-media and transnational career marshals extraordinary archival research and takes a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, Yiman Wang adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her subject as an interlocutor. In doing so, she invites a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.

“The definitive work regarding the contributions of Anna May Wong to cinema. The recognition that her talent demands and deserves is finally given to her by this magnificent book.” — Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian/America

“No work has so rigorously, elegantly, and persuasively considered Anna May Wong’s screen presence, her affective labor, and the longue durée of a career that spanned over half a century. A definitive and field-shaping work.” — Denise Khor, author of Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II

“Yiman Wang artfully demonstrates how to write about a career, particularly one built within a racialized public sphere, without leaving behind the living person who animates it.” — Terri Francis, author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism

Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood.