Katie Gee Salisbury Honors Anna May Wong in Not Your China Doll

Mixed Asian Media - March 21, 2024

By Jalen Jones

Powered by JoySauce

With work appearing in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, author Katie Gee Salisbury knows how to make readers see things differently. Her writing has long focused on the complexities of race and representation; growing up as a mixed Chinese American in California, she admits this interest comes naturally. After discovering the internationally successful Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, who often goes underrecognized, Salisbury found her newest story to spotlight.

20 years later, Salisbury’s research on Anna May Wong’s life comes to fruition in her newest biography Not Your China Doll: a celebration of Wong that reclaims her place in cinema history. Before its release on March 12th, Salisbury chats with us about the moments that inspire her as a writer, her mother’s surprising impact on the San Gabriel Valley, and how she approached Not Your China Doll from a uniquely Eastern perspective.

How did you first find the inspiration to write Not Your China Doll?

I was doing an internship at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles the summer after my freshman year of college, and on my first day there the curator took me on a tour of the gallery. There was a photo of a woman in a car at a parade in Chinatown. The curator told me it was Anna May Wong, and that she was a movie star. I was in shock. There was a Chinese American movie star from the 1930s, and I'd never heard of her? That was almost 20 years ago. It's hard to believe that much time has gone by, but that's where the journey started.

Much of your writing focuses on race and representation. What makes these topics particularly exciting for you to write about?

It's been interesting because sometimes, you don't really realize what you're interested in until you do it, and then it becomes more clear to you. I grew up in Arcadia, which is in [the] San Gabriel Valley. My mom was probably the first Asian person to move to Arcadia, and it also might even be her fault that Asian people live there! Apparently, when she moved there with her first husband, when they were buying the house, there was still a clause in it that said: “No Chinese person may reside here unless they are a servant.” And she insisted that they remove it—she was like, “No, remove it, because this gonna be my house.” 

Wow!

Yeah. And then 30 years later it was 50%, 60% Asian. Now it's like, truly a Chinese suburb. Growing up there, people didn't always necessarily see me as Asian. It depended on how well they knew me or my family. Sometimes I would wonder if I looked more Asian, I wouldn't care about it as much, or if I’d have a different experience. But because so often people don't think that I am, for a long time I felt the need to overcompensate for that. I think it's just something I really care about deeply.

That's totally part of the mixed-race journey. Not as many other people go through it—we have this motivation to dig deeper and understand these identities, because it seems like nobody does yet.

There's this one podcast I listened to and they're always talking about their mixed kids. And sometimes it's really frustrating because I'm like, you could just actually talk to a mixed person who's an adult, you don't have to talk about us all the time. You can talk to us.

Do you think you interact differently with Anna May Wong's body of work as a mixed Asian woman

Yes. I think that I see much more acutely how she feels. One of the reasons my newsletter about Anna May Wong is called Half-Caste Woman is because she sang a song called “Half Caste Woman,” written by Noel Coward, as part of her cabaret act. The song is about a Eurasian woman in some port city in Asia, who’s beautiful and mysterious and exotic. But she can only be a prostitute. She makes these white men fall in love with her, but eventually they leave, and so she's caught between two worlds—neither of them will accept her fully.

So that was a song that she kind of embraced as her own, because I think she felt that way personally. That she just couldn't win. It wasn't only that she had expectations to be American, but she had expectations from the Chinese community to represent them, to be a proper Chinese woman. 

In the preface you mentioned that the story is from an Eastern perspective, rather than a Western one. Why did you find it important to approach the biography from that point of view?

I've always been interested in Taoism and read some philosophy in college. Having spent so much time with the events of Anna May Wong’s life, I really felt that a more fair characterization would be to show the ups and downs, instead of how her story often gets told now, which in an abbreviated form is one of tragedy. “Oh, she only ever played these terrible stereotypes. And then when this one sympathetic film came out about the Chinese, she didn't get the lead role, and then her career ended and she died an alcoholic—the end.” When you tell the story that way, it's devastating, and eludes all the things she achieved in her life. She actually did a lot of great things. And her career didn't end with The Good Earth.

So that's why I felt like it was important to say that, because I just really hate when people call her life a tragedy. I don't think she saw her own life that way. To really honor her spirit, I felt it was important to basically say ahead of time that this is not a traditional narrative. But you're also not necessarily going to get the resolution you want.

Right! I had no idea about her whole path after The Good Earth. 

She always found a way to come back and get a new deal. If her life was really tragic, then her career would have just ended after that, and you would have never heard from her. But she was really active for most of her life.

Pick up your copy of Katie Gee Salisbury’s Not Your China Doll on March 12th, 2024, and keep up with Salisbury @kayteesal on Instagram and @ksalisbury on Twitter!