Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend

Epilogue

Epilogue After Anna May’s passing, Richard took a month off from the shop. Among the first contacts he made were with the Van Vechtens, whom he thanked for their kindness in a letter on April 14. Richard said that he was tired of inactivity and was ready to get back to work. He consoled them by saying that both Anna May and he believed in eternal life and that “we will all meet again and have a real happy reunion.” Sometime later that year, Richard closed the shop and took a job at the nearby Veterans’ Administration building. The new job was regular, had little stress, and paid better than selling Oriental knickknacks. He kept in touch with the faithful Van Vechtens over the next few years. In 1964, he told them happily that he had gotten married and that his wife Carol was expecting a child, which was to be the first grandchild of Wong Sam Sing and Lee Gon Toy. There were no others. The family of Huang Dounan in China fared far better. Although only three of the daughters are still alive, collectively, there are fourteen granddaughters and seven grandsons, descended from Huang Dounan. The family lasted through the immense political changes in China. A family photo in the 1970s shows four of Huang Dounan’s daughters in peasant clothing and sporting “liberation hairstyles ,” cut sharply just below the ears. By the 1980s, Huang Dounan’s daughters began their migration to North America, living in Detroit and Toronto. The gaps of many decades meant that Anna May’s memory diminished to a few yellowing pages from movie magazines filled with stories about her 1936 visit. Huang Dounan and his father fared better. Each year, those descendants still living in China gather in Chang On to honor Liangren, as Wong Sam Sing is known in the village, and Huang Dounan.1 208 Anna May Wong Over the next decades, Anna May’s other siblings passed away. James, who had been teaching for many years at St. John’s University in Los Angeles, succumbed to a heart attack on April 10, 1971. By Lulu’s orders, he was cremated and the ashes placed near his father’s in Rosedale Cemetery. Roger, who was retired from his job as a warehouseman at McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, died on December 26, 1993, at the age of eighty-eight. He was not buried with the family but in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills. Lulu died on October 31, 1995, two months shy of her ninety-third birthday. Richard died on December 14, 2007, at the age of 85. Her family’s general longevity is testament to the hard life Anna May suffered chasing her Hollywood dreams.2 Anna May’s legacy extends far beyond her immediate family. She is recognized as the great Asian American star of early cinema and pointed the way for later actors and actresses. As Helen Zia points out, Anna May’s typecast roles evolved easily into the Suzie Wong—prostitute characters of later decades. But Anna May’s death came during a brief golden era for Asian-themed films in the United States. The World of Suzie Wong, starring Nancy Kwan and William Holden, explored mixed-race love with greater openness and sensitivity than in any of Anna May’s movies. Ross Hunter’s 1961 production of Flower Drum Song had an actual Asian cast in an American setting. Handling issues of acculturation and gender stereotypes with subtlety and intelligence, Hunter’s production, for which Anna May had originally been cast, was the kind of film she had longed for during her career. Instead, Nancy Kwan stepped forth in the high-powered dance number, “I Enjoy Being a Girl” and flourished. After those two sensational films, however, in general, roles for Asians in films remained rare and restrictive. In 1967, Tsai Chin played a Chinese sex nymph opposite Sean Connery in the James Bond epic, You Only Live Twice. Other Chinese American actors, including Beulah Quo, Chao Li-Chi, James Hong, and Lisa Lu, gained brief stardom in secondary roles, but were never able to crack Hollywood’s casting limitations. More often than not, Chinese and other Asian actors watched as “yellow faces” took roles from them even into the 1990s. Nancy Kwan herself found that only through travel to Europe and to Hong Kong could she break out of ethnic typecasting. Following a decade outside of the United States, she returned to Hollywood...