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Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005)

AS A BIOGRAPHY, Graham Russell Gao Hodges's volume came at a most opportune moment – the eve of the centennial of Anna May Wong's birthday. Hodges's is not the only work that brings Wong back to the spotlight. Two other important books published around this time are Anthony Chan's Perpetually Cool (Lanham, MD, 2003) and Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane's Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio, and Television Work (Jefferson, NC, 2004).

What characterizes Hodges's biography is his use of substantial archival materials meticulously gleaned and compiled from a wide spectrum of sources such as fanzines, posters, newspapers, newsreels, film studio files, personal interviews, correspondences and memoirs, and government documents (including immigration forms, birth certificates, and death certificates). Furthermore, these sources originate from European, Asian, and Oceanic as well as North and South American countries. They combine to present a comprehensive picture of the production, exhibition, and reception of Wong's transnational work. The author also does the reader a great favour by carefully categorizing and documenting these sources in his selected bibliography.

Some of the most useful details that Hodges successfully tracks down regarding Wong's life and work include: Wong's earnings as an actress in comparison with those of her Caucasian Hollywood counterparts; reviews from Scandinavia, Cuba, Japan, and the Philippines, in addition to the more well-known Western European, North American, and Chinese commentaries; details of some of Wong's obscure films as well as radio shows and TV appearances; her elaborate costumes and body language; her hobbies and public activities as a transnational sophisticate, her personal correspondences (especially with Carl Van Vechten) and intricate interactions with a wide range of artists, writers, and politicians in Europe, America, and China; and finally, images of her palm print from Charlotte Woolf's palm-reading book and her immigration document (Form 430) from 1927.

All these bits and pieces that animate the entire book, often to the reader's delightful surprise, demonstrate the labourious research the author conducted in preparing for the biography. The end result is a delightfully comprehensive and informative coverage of Wong's half-century of life and work, which, unsurprisingly, constitute the two emphases of the author's project.

Hodges's focus on Wong's life and work complies with the genre of biography. A unique challenge in this case, though, is that his subject, an early 20th century Chinese-American actress active prior to the late 1960s canonization of the term "Chinese American" or "Asian American," has been historically obscured and reduced to what Maxine Hong Kingston calls a "No Name Woman" (xvi) or what Wong self-referentially alluded to as the "Half-Caste Woman." (149) Given her obscurity that resulted from her uncategorizable identity, accounts of her story are necessarily fragmented, at times contradictory, leaving her a mystifying figure, even for her contemporaries. How to fully address the contradictions and assess what Hodges calls Wong's "Janusfaced" legacy (234) become the crux not only of an individual biography, but also of the historiography of Asian Americans in general.

If Wong's contemporaries failed to meet the challenge, or more accurately, failed even to see this as an issue, because they suffered from Orientalism and/or narrow-minded nationalism, how then does Hodges redress this situation which involves recovering Wong and critiquing historical discourses on Wong? Facing such a "Janus-faced" legacy "with meaning inside and outside of Asian American society," Hodges suggests that "recasting her memory requires more breadth and subtlety than is needed for the worthy men and women who were pathbreakers in other fields." (234) His goal is to "move beyond negative perceptions of Anna May as solely the product of Orientalism" (235) by showing that her "cinematic and personal reputations translated differently among the world's myriad nationalities." (xx)

Hodges laudably critiques the mode of argument that fits everything into a set theoretical grid. His labourious excavation and weaving together of wide-ranging archival materials clearly demonstrate his commitment to "breadth and subtlety." Nevertheless, his project falls short of full realization due to two weaknesses. First, as the title suggests ("from laundryman's daughter to Hollywood legend"), the structure unproblematically follows that of an "American Dream" (from rags to riches) hybridized with Bildungsroman (from a self-centered child to a socialized adult). Both formats presume a teleological trajectory predicated upon illusory causal linkages. In Hodges's biography, this predetermined trajectory translates into Wong's predictable transformation from a rebellious third-generation Chinese American child who desired Americanization, via the opposite swing to a Chinese identity, toward "becoming Chinese American."

The second weakness has to do with the author's shifting position vis-à-vis his archival materials. On the one hand, he perspicuously points out that Orientalism is inscribed in some ostensibly positive European writings on Wong. A Portuguese review of Wong's Daughter of the Dragon (Paramount, 1931), for example, states that many people "adore the yellow [skin]" and will "long for the Chinese, dreaming of oriental scenes, full of opium-smokers and peaceful faces." (115) Hodges rightly criticizes the review as an instance of "pure Orientalism, made up of Portuguese unfamiliarity with Anna May, and with Chinese people in general, racial fantasies derived from skin consciousness, and blatant stereotyping." (115) On the other hand, however, he tends to see the more dominant European media (from Germany, Britain, and France) as more capable of appreciating what Wong had to offer. Thus, English girls' imitation of the "Wong complexion" (by tinting their faces ivory with ochre color) and the "Wong haircut" (or the China Doll bangs) are seen as evidence of Wong's star impact in Europe (which was denied to her in America). Such an uncritical approach to Western European reactions to Wong prevents the author from fully diagnosing the Orientalist fetishization of the Asian female mystique.

This blind spot stems from a more fundamental problem, that is, the tendency to fetishization does not only characterize the Orientalist reviewers contemporaneous with Wong; rather, it might also underlie the tributes by Wong's modern admirers, even Hodges's own project to an extent. This is highlighted in the fact that the tributary efforts described in Hodges's epilogue mostly hinge upon appropriating, stylizing, even exoticizing Wong's image without however paying sufficient attention to the complexity of Wong's situation as a labourer/actress with an uncategorizable nationality. Hodges's own project, as he acknowledges, is triggered by one of Wong's autographed photographs, which piqued his "interest" that turned into "fixation" and "obsession." (ix)

The challenge, for Wong's contemporary reviewers, modern admirers, and the author, is therefore to come up with strategies of moving beyond fetishization, beyond pat celebration of "an individual's will and strength against hegemonic powers" (xxiii) toward a structure of subversive dynamic. To achieve this level of "subtlety" (to borrow Hodges's term), one needs to learn from Wong. By that I mean that one should not simply describe and eulogize her personal virtues matter-of-factly, but should rather see those virtues as consciously constructed strategies that Wong mobilized in negotiating her disadvantageous position under Western colonialism and Orientalism. In other words, to assess Wong's legacy more adequately, we need to problematize the reductive scenario of heroic individual vs. evil society, and focus upon Wong's interactions with the socio-political apparatus of her time, oftentimes conducted on the institutional level. For example, note her effective mobilization of transnational media in self-promotion, as Hodges usefully highlights throughout the book.

With that understanding, we come to see the "American Dream" or Bildungsroman model as a counter-productive model. It fails to address Wong's strategic negotiation insofar as it presumes an individual's self-sufficiency and inevitable success story against societal odds while occluding the multiple registers of Wong's situation.

Hodges's biography succeeds in building an impressively rich and accessible collection of Anna May Wong materials. By providing such excellent groundwork, it encourages readers to further explore the significance of biography in recovering and redressing repressed legacies, individual and collective. One way to deepen such an exploration is to reconceptualize the genre of biography so as to develop a more useful structure for addressing subversive identity formation. In this new model, identity formation is an open process susceptible to the interactions of variegated determinants, rather than a teleological trajectory that marches toward an a priori status (be it American, Chinese, or Chinese-American).


YIMAN WANG University of California, Santa Cruz

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