Never-Before-Seen Keepsakes Of Film Star Anna May Wong On View in LA

A mahjong set. A black dress with a deep V paneled with lace. A makeup box emblazoned with a Chinese name: Wong Liu Tsong.

Anna May Wong's mah jong set is one of the personal items on display to the public for the very first time at the exhibit.

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Some of Anna May Wong's personal belongings are on display for the first time ever at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, part of a new exhibition about the woman known as Hollywood's first Chinese American film star.

Unmasking Anna May Wong, which opens Thursday and runs until Jan. 26, 2025, gives a glimpse into the inner life of a screen legend whose magnetic presence and quest for better representation of Asian Americans in the arts and media resonates with audiences today.

"I feel that people are starting to wonder, 'Well, who was the first Asian American to be in this business?" said Katie Gee Salisbury, author of a new biography about Wong. "When you go back far enough, it's Anna May Wong."

Katie Gee Salisbury, who wrote a new biography about screen star Anna May Wong, co-curated the new exhibition at the Chinese American Museum.

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Salisbury co-curated the exhibition some 20 years after interning at the Chinese American Museum in college and stumbling upon the story of the L.A.-born Wong. Through talent and grit, she went from working at her father's laundry downtown to gracing the soundstages of Hollywood, where she starred in her first silent film at age 17.

Wong's acting chops caught the attention of superstar Douglas Fairbanks, who in 1924 cast her in The Thief of Bagdhad, catapulting her to international fame.

It came at a cost.

Wong's career-long battle against racist typecasting and sexism is chronicled in Salisbury's Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong.

Wong was fed up with playing dragon ladies and being treated as a second-class citizen when she was third-generation Chinese American. In 1931, she took a trip to China to learn the culture and language, an experience she documented on film. Salisbury said she came back changed.

Though she was a third-generation Chinese American, Anna May Wong had to file a special application to get traveling papers that proved she was a U.S. citizen and not an "alien" Chinese.

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Anna May Wong at her Santa Monica home which she designed with the help of renowned architect Rudolf Schindler.

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LAist

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"She decided that she was no longer going to take on any unsympathetic roles," Salisbury said. "And she would only play roles that reflected well on her people."

Michael Truong, the executive director of the museum, said Wong's battles in Hollywood are some of the same waged today by Asian American creatives.

"We should look at her as a trailblazer and to continue on her steps to make sure that we are equally represented in media," Truong said.

The exhibition was inspired by a 12-foot-tall mural of Wong created in 2020 by the artist Rachel O'Donnell for a different show about red envelopes. Rather than paint over the mural when the exhibition ended, staff decided to build a new one dedicated to Wong that rides a surge in interest in her.

Michael Truong, executive director of the Chinese American Museum, said that the Anna May Wong exhibit has been several years in the making.

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Wong is the subject of a second recently-released biography Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History and an upcoming biopic to star Gemma Chan and to be penned by playwright David Henry Hwang.

She's been portrayed in the 2020 limited Netflix series Hollywood, and was the inspiration for a pivotal character in the film Babylon, which opened in 2022. That same year, Wong became the first Asian American to be featured on U.S. currency with the release of a commemorative quarter featuring her face framed by her signature bangs.

It's just one of multiple firsts that Wong achieved in a life cut short.

After leaving the U.S. to act in films and plays in Europe, Wong returned stateside to make the 1937 crime thriller Daughter of Shanghai, opposite the Korean American actor Philip Ahn. They were the heroes and the villain roles were filled by white actors.

The pair became the first Asian Americans to play a leading romantic couple in the sound era.

"It was kind of visionary that she helped create this script," Salisbury said. "Unlike many of her early films where she often had to die or was killed off, she actually gets a happy ending."

Two of Anna May Wong's dresses, gifted to the museum by author Lisa See, are on display.

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Josie Huang

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LAist

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In real life, things were more complicated. Wong found work after her ingenue years were over — in 1951, she became the first Asian American to lead a television show with “The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong" — but roles became scarcer as she got older.

Wong struggled with alcoholism and developed cirrhosis of the liver. In 1961, she died of a heart attack at her home in Santa Monica, just a couple weeks before she had been scheduled to begin rehearsals for the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit musical Flower Drum Song.

"She was only 56," Salisbury said. "But if you consider all the things she did in her short life, it's worth several lifetimes."