Lecture on Anna May Wong

Anna May Wong created “My China Film” as her response to not being cast in Metro Goldwyn Meyer’s award-winning film about Chinese peasants, The Good Earth (1937). Immediately after that casting rejection, Wong travelled to China for the first and only time in 1936 to see the real China, the “native land” of her parents where she arranged to have her experiences there filmed by Newsreel Wong. In contrast to The Good Earth, “My China Film” is the result of a Hollywood film studio actress seizing the means of production. Her film reveals her craftsmanship as an American actress learning to play a Chinese by equipping herself to perform the role of a transnational Chinese. In addition, rather than being a straightforward documentary travelogue, “My China Film” reflects differing agendas and multiple Chinas.

Shirley Jennifer Lim is Associate Professor of History and affiliate faculty in Women and Gender Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, and Africana Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has held a Research Fellowship at Australian National University (2010). The author of A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930-1960 (NYU 2006), she is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled “Performing the Modern.”

Event Sponsor
American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Center for Biographical Studies, International Cultural Studies Program, Hawaii American Studies Association, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Vernadette Gonzalez, (808) 956-5404, vvg@hawaii.edu, Lecture on Anna May Wong (PDF)

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