Happy Birthday Anna May Wong! (January 3rd, 1905 - February 3rd, 1961)
She called herself The Woman of a Thousand Deaths because her screen
characters — racist stereotypes of dragon ladies, prostitutes, and
jilted mistresses — inevitably died, and she left Hollywood when the
lead Chinese female role in the big budget production of “The Good
Earth” went to a white woman with her eyes taped (for which she won an
Oscar). Yet Anna May Wong lives on, on film, in pictures, on paper, a
Chinese American pioneer who used not only her beauty but her voice and
her written words to speak out for herself and her people.
