Download or read book Shining Star written by Paula Yoo and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of Chinese American film star Anna May Wong, whose trail-blazing career in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s broke new ground for future generations of Asian American actors.
Download or read book Perpetually Cool written by Anthony B. Chan and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2007-02-08 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna May Wong was an extraordinary Asian American woman who became the country's most famous film actress of Chinese descent. From small parts in silent films to starring roles in Hollywood and across the Atlantic, Wong made an impression on audiences of all persuasions. In Perpetually Cool, Anthony Chan takes the reader on a compelling journey through Wong's early years in Los Angeles and her first Hollywood pictures. Chan also examines the scope and nature of race, gender, and power and their impact on Wong's personal growth as a Chinese American. Perpetually Cool is not only the captivating story of a cinematic career, but also of roots and identity, as it recounts Wong's desire to connect with her heritage in the United States and in China. Chan provides extensive textual analyses of Wong's signature films, especially The Toll of the Sea (1922), The Thief of Bagdad (1924) with Douglas Fairbanks, and her most famous role as Hui Fei in Shanghai Express (1932), opposite Marlene Dietrich. Perpetually Cool is a fitting tribute to the influence of this Chinese American icon.
Download or read book Anna May Wong written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a biography of Anna May Wong who is undoubtedly, one of the best known and most popular Chinese-American actresses ever to have graced the silver screen. Between 1919 and 1960 she starred in over 50 movies.
Download or read book The Story of Movie Star Anna May Wong written by Paula Yoo and published by Story of. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of Anna May Wong, a Chinese American actress who advocated for authentic depictions of Asians and Asian Americans in film during the early years of Hollywood. Includes sidebars on related topics, timeline, and glossary"--
Download or read book Anna May Wong written by Shirley Jennifer Lim and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made more than sixty films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and even starred in her own television show. Her work helped shape racial modernity as she embodied the dominant image of Chinese and, more generally, “Oriental” women between 1925 and 1940. In Anna May Wong, Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong’s life and work as a consummate artist by mining an historical archive of her efforts outside of Hollywood cinema. From her pan-European films and her self-made My China Film to her encounters with artists such as Josephine Baker, Carl Van Vechten, and Walter Benjamin, Lim scrutinizes Wong’s cultural production and self-fashioning. Byconsidering the salient moments of Wong’s career and cultural output, Lim’s analysis explores the deeper meanings, and positions the actress as an historical and cultural entrepreneur who rewrote categories of representation. Anna May Wong provides a new understanding of the actress’s career as an ingenious creative artist.
Download or read book Anna May Wong written by Philip Leibfried and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna May Wong, born in Los Angeles in 1905 to a Chinese family that did not support her ambition, is the only Asian-American actress to have achieved stardom during Hollywood's Golden Age. Staying single to avoid endangering her career, she became the darling of the intelligentsia, inspiring poems, songs, and crowds of admirers in the British Isles, Europe, and China. She leaves a legacy of some 60 film appearances, numerous stage and television shows, and several radio spots. This book covers Anna May Wong's entire career and personal life. Detailed filmographic entries, with critical commentary as well as cast and technical credits, synopses, and newspaper and magazine reviews, are followed by Wong's stage work and radio and television appearances.
Download or read book Oculus written by Sally Wen Mao and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May Wong In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.
Download or read book The China Mystique written by Karen J. Leong and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005-07-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on three women, Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong & Mayling Soong, this book studies the shifting images of China in American culture, particularly during the 1930s & 40s.
Download or read book Anna May Wong Paper Dolls written by and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate the first Chinese-American Hollywood movie star! Anna May Wong made more than 60 motion pictures beginning back in the days of silent movies. Anna May was very fashion conscious, declared in 1934 to be "the best-dressed woman in the world." Illustrated by David Wolfe, this collection represents movie clothes and her own personal wardrobe to dress on three dolls. There are 25 costumes in all plus star bio. An extravagantly executed gem!
Download or read book Anna May Wong written by Graham Russell Gao Hodges and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood's best-known Chinese American actors. Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant's difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. Born in Los Angeles in 1905, she was the second daughter of seven children born to a laundryman and his wife. Childhood experience fueled her fascination with Hollywood. By 1919 she secured a small part in her first film, The Red Lantern, and she continued to act up until her death. Her most famous film roles were in The Toll of the Sea, Peter Pan, The Thief of Baghdad, Old San Francisco, and Shanghai Express. But discrimination against Asians, in both in the film industry and society, was commonplace, and when it came time to make a film version of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, she was passed over for the Chinese female lead role, which was ultimately given to the white actor Luise Rainer. In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in Los Angeles's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood's pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.
Download or read book Not Your China Doll written by Katie Gee Salisbury and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Enlightening, nuanced, and honest.”—Lisa See Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles during the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history. One of Autostraddle's Most Anticipated Queer Books for Spring 2024 Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist, and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest. Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film. Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.
Download or read book Delayed Rays of a Star written by Amanda Lee Koe and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of the Year A dazzling debut novel following the lives of three groundbreaking women--Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl--cinema legends who lit up the twentieth century At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, who would wend her way into Hollywood as one of its lasting icons; Anna May Wong, the world's first Chinese American star, playing bit parts while dreaming of breaking away from her father's modest laundry; and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director of propaganda art films would first make her famous--then, infamous. From this curious point of intersection, Delayed Rays of a Star lets loose the trajectories of these women's lives. From Weimar Berlin to LA's Chinatown, from a bucolic village in the Bavarian Alps to a luxury apartment on the Champs-Élysées, the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, victim, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance. And in the orbit of each star live secondary players--a Chinese immigrant housemaid, a German soldier on leave from North Africa, a pompous Hollywood director--whose voices and viewpoints reveal the legacy each woman left in her own time, as well as in ours. Amanda Lee Koe's playful, wry prose guides the reader dexterously around murky questions of identity, complicity, desire, and difference. Intimate and clear-eyed, Delayed Rays of a Star is a visceral depiction of womanhood--its particular hungers, its oblique calculations, and its eventual betrayals--and announces a bold new literary voice.
Download or read book To Be an Actress written by Yiman Wang and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-25 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong's cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.
Download or read book The Tool of the Sea written by Jennifer Warner and published by BookCaps Study Guides. This book was released on 2014-09-21 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We remember Hepburn, Monroe, and West. They were the queens of Hollywoods Golden Era. But there's one star that's often left out even though in her time there were few more famous: Anna May Wong. She was a symbol of grace and beauty, but more importantly she broke barriers and became the first Asian American actress to be not just a star, but have international recognition. This book covers the life and times of one of the greatest actresses of all time--from her rise to stardom to her death at 56.
Download or read book Daughter of the Dragon Anna May Wong s Rendezvous with American History written by Yunte Huang and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-22 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Atlantic's "Books to Get Lost in This Summer" Best Books of August 2023: New York Times Book Review, Christian Science Monitor, InsideHook, BookRiot, WNET AllArts, Arlington Magazine A trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood’s most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos—with a touch of defiance—“Orientally yours.” Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong’s tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai, and capturing American television in its infancy. As Huang shows, Wong’s rendezvous with history features a remarkable parade of characters, including a smitten Walter Benjamin and (an equally smitten) Marlene Dietrich. Challenging the parodically racist perceptions of Wong as a “Dragon Lady,” “Madame Butterfly,” or “China Doll,” Huang’s biography becomes a truly resonant work of history that reflects the raging anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, and ageism toward women that defined both Hollywood and America in Wong’s all-too-brief fifty-six years on earth.
Download or read book Dietrich Riefenstahl Hollywood Berlin and a Century in Two Lives written by Karin Wieland and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) Named of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Boston Globe Magisterial in scope, this dual biography examines two complex lives that began alike but ended on opposite sides of the century’s greatest conflict. Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into Dietrich’s Berlin apartment. Coming of age at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, both sought fame in Germany’s burgeoning motion picture industry. While Dietrich’s depiction of Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel catapulted her to Hollywood stardom, Riefenstahl—who missed out on the part—insinuated herself into Hitler’s inner circle to direct groundbreaking if infamous Nazi propaganda films, like Triumph of the Will. Dietrich, who toured tirelessly with the USO, could never truly go home again; Riefenstahl could never shake her Nazi past. Acclaimed German historian Karin Wieland examines these lives within the vicious crosscurrents of a turbulent century, evoking piercing insights into "the modern era’s most difficult questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage and capitulation" (New Yorker).
Download or read book The Fortunes written by Peter Ho Davies and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of the Year: “The most honest, unflinching, cathartically biting novel I’ve read about the Chinese American experience.” —Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts Winner, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award * Winner, Chautauqua Prize *Finalist, Dayton Literary Peace Prize * A New York Times Notable Book * A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience. Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor; Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star; a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes the Asian American community; and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive—as much through love as blood. “Intense and dreamlike . . . filled with quiet resonances across time.” —The New Yorker “Riveting and luminous . . . Like the best books, this one haunts the reader well after the end.” —Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award-winning author of Sing, Unburied, Sing “A moving, often funny, and deeply provocative novel about the lives of four very different Chinese Americans as they encounter the myriad opportunities and clear limits of American life . . . gorgeously told.” —Chang-rae Lee, Buzzfeed “A poignant, cascading four-part novel . . . Outstanding.” —David Mitchell, The Guardian
