Huang Liushuang was the first Chinese-American film actor to make a name for herself in Hollywood, acting in more than 60 films in her lifetime, and her career spanned the era of silent to sound films. Although Huang Liushuang was a top figure in the fashion industry in the 1930s, being voted the most beautiful fashion person of the year many times and appearing on the covers of many magazines, her acting career was quite bumpy, because of her race, she could only act in B-grade films (mainly shoddy horror films and crime films), and most of them played supporting roles, and her development was severely limited. Now her most remembered movie masterpieces "Shanghai Express" and "Moon Palace Treasure Box" are the few well-known movies she is lucky to participate in, but they are all for people, which is a pity.
The path of an actor who started from B-grade films
Born on January 3, 1905 in Los Angeles' Chinatown, Huang Liushuang is a third-generation Chinese immigrant whose grandfather was from Taishan, Guangdong. The second of eight children, her family named her Anna May. Wong was born into a multi-ethnic neighborhood where her family lived in a multi-ethnic community, but her parents transferred them to a Chinese church school in Chinatown when she and her sister were bullied because of the color of their skin when they attended a public elementary school.
As a child, Ms. Huang worked out at her family's laundry and attended Chinese classes after school (many Chinese immigrants do not speak Mandarin). When the American film industry moved from New York to California in the 1910s, she began skipping school to buy tickets to movies with lunch money. At the age of 9, she decided to become a movie star, giving herself the stage name Anna May Wong at the age of 11. In 1919, a film called The Red Lantern was calling for Chinese women to cast it. Without her father's knowledge, Huang Liushuang asked her father's friend to introduce her to the assistant director of the film, and was finally selected as an extra, and since then her acting career has begun.
In 1921, she dropped out of Los Angeles High School to become a full-time actress. In the same year, she played the wife of Hollywood's "Man of a Thousand Faces" Lon Chaney in a section of the film Bits of Life, her first named role, about an opium-smoking Chinese man who kills his wife and then tortures himself with a "soul-snatcher". This kind of absurd and bizarre B-grade film plot also foreshadows Huang Liushuang's obedient drama in the future.
Racial discrimination, nudity, and a bumpier dream journey than expected
At the age of 17, Wong first played the leading role in The Toll of the Sea (1922), which moved Madama Butterfly to Hong Kong, the second film in film history to be made in special color.
After that, Huang Liushuang continued to fight for the opportunity to lead the blockbuster, at that time there were many rules in Hollywood, such as that people of different races could not play husband and wife or fall in love in the film, so she could only play a bewitching supporting role, but fortunately there were many Orientals in the script at that time, so she was not short of acting opportunities. In March 1924, she founded her own production company, Anna May Wong Productions, so that she could make the films she wanted to make. However, her partner was found to have engaged in illegal business practices, which led to the closure of the company not long after.
Because of Hollywood's racial prejudices, Huang Liushuang was very discouraged, and once went to Europe to develop, it is more worth mentioning that she acted in a British crime silent film "Chinatown Prosperous Dream" with the veteran British actor Charles Laughton (Charles Laughton), which has many "bold" breakthrough performances, such as kissing with British actor Jameson Thomas (but it was later cut), and the movie poster shows her as a dancer in the sky, with obvious oriental eroticism. The film was briefly dissolved, but it was rediscovered in 2003 and re-released by the British Film Institute (BFI) as a "pioneer of film noir", which brought Wong's performance to great prominence, as well as the 1929 stage play The Circle of Chalk in the West End with Laurence Oliver. Charles Lawton and Lawrence Oliver were later both heavyweights in the British and American film industry, but Huang Liushuang's acting career could not be taken to the next level.
In 1931, Wong returned to the United States and starred in three of her most successful films: the B-grade crime film Daughter of the Dragon (1931), Marlene Dietrich's Shanghai Express, and the later B-star film Daughter of Shanghai (1937) 's screen image not only made her very unhappy, but also made her criticized in China and labeled as insulting China.
Huang Liushuang's future acting career is mostly consumed in B-grade films, and the most dissatisfied with her is that when MGM was preparing to shoot Pearl Race's novel "The Earth", she gave the heroine O-Lan to European actress Louise Rena, because the male protagonist was played by Paul Mooney, so his wife could no longer let an Oriental play it, and instead asked her to play the evil concubine Lotus in the film, and then Huang Liushuang angrily refused. In order to avoid playing the role of an exotic femme fatale, Huang Liushuang actually pushed back many scripts — and bizarrely, she also fought for the seductive Chinese mistress of "General Yan's Bitter Tea", but later it was played by Japanese actress Toshia Mori.
The development of China was not as expected, and he returned to Hollywood for the second time
Because the Hollywood market thinks that Huang Liushuang is too "Chinese" and restricts her acting path, Huang Liushuang decided to return to her roots, study under Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang, and perform stage plays in Chinese theaters, but the Chinese people think that she is too "Westernized" and will ruin the atmosphere of the theater circle, and they are quite disgusted with her, and a year later, she returned to Hollywood in frustration.
Looking at Huang Liushuang's acting career, in addition to her not being reused by the mainstream commercial market, it is a pity that she made a low-cost reasoning film "When Were You Born" made by Warner Bros., which was originally going to be made into a series of Chinatown case handling movies, all starring Huang Liushuang, let her play the Chinese astrologer who used horoscope fortune telling to help the police solve the case, each of the 12 characters in the play represents a constellation, the plot concept is quite interesting, but the plan was not successful.
Huang Liushuang's last 2 films were the 1942 low-budget film Lady from Chungking and Bombs Over Burma, which coincided with the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack and had a strong anti-Japanese propaganda connotation. Ironically, Wong's career has since declined, and she has not been able to make a film for 7 years, citing that she was mistaken for Japanese by American audiences during World War II, and later appeared in only 3 films, but could not return to the old days.
Wong died of a heart attack on February 3, 1961, at the age of 56, so she missed out on the role of Mrs. Leung in the all-Asian song and dance classic "Flower Drum Opera" and replaced her by African-American actress Juanita Hall. After her death, several Asian American art awards and Asian fashion designer groups established annual awards in her name. In 2022, the U.S. Mint issued five new commemorative coins of Outstanding American Women, one of which is Huang Liushuang, in recognition of her contribution to the film, which is also the first time in the history of American coins that a portrait of a Chinese American figure has been minted on a commemorative coin.