Declaring our intent up front - wonder | wader | world believe nothing trumps Chinese operatic drama in its colorful outstanding opulence and its sheer epic scale - in our opinion.
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| Photo: Nick Knight/Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Trunk Archive |
Consumers will soon see a new face peering up at them from the United States quarter: Anna May Wong, the glamorous Chinese American movie star.
When the U.S. Mint begins shipping the new coins on Monday, Wong will become the first Asian American to appear on the country’s currency.
Growing up in the Philippines under the bullying shadow of China our maternal side of the family were among those who fled during the Mao Revolution - stories our mother and her mother carried with them to the bitter end.
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| John Kobal Foundation / Getty Images |
Our grand/mother was an avid cine-file and would drag us to watch two double feature films each weekend at our hometown theaters - leaving us all reeling in audio-visual overload by the end of these extravaganzas.
We loved the Anna May Wong films the most because this lady epitomized all the grace and charm of the enigmatic Asian woman - the proverbial iron fist in velvet glove that all of us who were raised in maternal societies know just too intimately.
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| Anna May Wong quarter Courtesy of U.S. Mint |
We laud her herculean efforts and unbelievable success listening to her own words. Even as we question where her mother was in all this - an inquiry that leads us to our own private insights into our fraught family dynamics.
Wong is the fifth woman to appear on quarters through the program so far. Designer Emily Damstra and sculptor John McGraw created the coin-face image.
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| Anna May Wong: In Her Own Words - courtesy of Women Make Movies, www.wmm.com |
Earlier this year, the Mint released into circulation four other quarters featuring poet and activist Maya Angelou, astronaut Sally Ride, Cherokee Nation chief and activist Wilma Mankiller and suffragist Nina Otero-Warren. Next year’s coins will highlight journalist and activist Jovita Idár, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, pilot Bessie Coleman, teacher and composer Edith Kanaka’ole and ballerina Maria Tallchief.
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| Anna May Wong in Daughter of the Dragon (1931) |
Born in Los Angeles in 1905, Wong began acting as a teenager during Hollywood’s silent film era. Wong faced racism because of her Chinese heritage: She was underpaid compared to her white co-stars, and directors often asked her to play characters that exaggerated racial and ethnic stereotypes.
Fed up with the racism in the U.S. film industry, Wong moved to Europe in 1928 and became a global star, appearing in a variety of German, French and English films. She completed a vaudeville tour around Europe and made a short film about her first and only trip to China.
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| November 17, 1937 - Eugene Robert Richee for Paramount Pictures |
Eventually, Hollywood recognized her talent with a star on the Walk of Fame in 1960. Wong died in 1961, but her determination in the face of adversity continues to inspire “all who want to see images of people of color reflected back to them on screen,” writes Shirley J. Lim, a historian at Stony Brook University who wrote a biography of Wong, for the Conversation.
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| cover of The Young Companion, June 1927 |
As the centennial of Wong's birth approached, a re-examination of her life and career took shape; three major works on the actress appeared and comprehensive retrospectives of her films were held at both the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.
Lucky for us the perseverance of Anna May Wong is here to grace our lives in perpetuity.
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