Gail Tsukiyama first encountered Anna May Wong while watching old movies on television. But it was Sandra Oh’s performance in Killing Eve that encouraged Tsukiyama to think about Wong and other Asian and Asian American women on-screen. Wong became a star during the 1920s and 1930s. She also found herself cast in stereotyped roles. As a result, the actor spent several years working in Europe, where she was free to do a wider range of work. In Berlin, she frequented nightclubs with Marlene Dietrich. Her parents’ dismay at both her acting career and press coverage of her exploits, however, in addition to criticism from China that she was not a proper Chinese woman, put her under pressure just as the Weimar era began to yield to Nazism.
Tsukiyama’s new novel, The Brightest Star, imagines its way inside Wong’s life, from her youth in Southern California to her death at 56 of a heart attack, following many years of depressive episodes and heavy drinking that damaged her health. The product of exhaustive research, The Brightest Star tells Wong’s story in first person, highlighting her purported love affair with Dietrich as well as a childhood in which she visited movie sets so often that she became known as C.C.C., the curious Chinese child.
Recently, Tsukiyama and I spoke via Zoom about Wong and The Brightest Star.
How well did you think you knew Anna May Wong when you started The Brightest Star, and how much did that change over the course of the writing?
Early in my research, I found a site where someone had pulled all her quotes and assembled them, and that made it easier for me, because I could read and reread and try to understand, imagine what she was thinking when she said them. But out of nowhere—although it probably arrived from somewhere—the prologue came to me. All at one sitting. I just sat down and I said, “This is going to be her voice toward the end of her life.” And it was this kind of little miracle.
You tell her story from early childhood to death. Were you ever tempted to focus on just one period—like her time in Berlin?
It’s a good question because I remember thinking the same thing. But I wanted her childhood to play an important part because it was so much of the reason she pushed to be an actress. The more her father said, “You can’t do this. You have to get married,” the more she wanted to do it. That was her character. If you told her no, she’d say, “Forget it. I’m going there.” It helped me as a writer to understand who she was.
Generational trauma and living in a racist society can have an impact on health. It creates conditions in the body that shorten lives. Do you think Wong’s early death is related to that?
Yes, I do believe part of her illness was caused by it. Every battle chips away at you, and it chipped away at her. Everything you fight takes some energy. She was constantly worried about money as she grew older, also. And stress causes you to do things to harm yourself, which is what she did. Smoking at that period of time was something you did. I mean, you didn’t look cool without that cigarette. And all the drinking. And then, her family. She was never Chinese enough to be Chinese and never American enough to be American. She was always fighting to be one or the other. I certainly think that was part of how she died so young.
I also think marriage was something she could never escape. All her life, she was asked why she never got married. She was always worried about that, especially when she went to China. The Chinese were anti–Anna May Wong because on top of everything, she was 31 and still single when she went.
I keep thinking about The Good Earth. If she had been given that role…
That was one of the huge stress things that sent her spiraling. The fact that she didn’t get cast, and the actress who did, Luise Rainer, won an Oscar performing in yellowface. I remember reading that when she was trying to get the role of O-Lan, the guy who was casting The Good Earth said, “These Asians should be in the background, and we need yellow faces to be all the main stars.” Like, what? It was just the mindset. It’s really horrific, and you see some of these films with the makeup and how terrible it is. It’s amazing that this is part of movie history.
Do you ever wonder what kind of older woman Wong might have become? Her life was so abbreviated, but do you think she might have grown into a matriarch of sorts?
I think she would’ve been quite outspoken. She might have actually paved more of a path, a wider one, because her roles were changing. She was becoming the older matriarch in films—the aunties, the mothers, all those things. But she was not simple. She wasn’t easy all the time. The drinking didn’t help, and she would get into her little moods. Still, I think she would have carved a trail for the up-and-coming actresses. Nancy Kwan is one who comes to mind.•
Lorraine Berry is a journalist and an editor who has written for the Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, the Guardian, and many other publications.
