She was not Chinese enough to some people in her life, too Chinese in many other ways to Hollywood. You portray this bind that Anna May Wong was in. And I knew as soon as I could feel her voice that it would be a story that would come from her voice.ĬHANG: Absolutely. And she had written to her good friends, Carl Van Vechten. And how am I going to do this? A great help, finally, was getting her letters and reading them over and over. Trying to figure out - you know, this is not a character of my imagination. TSUKIYAMA: You know, I mean, every book is different. How did you inhabit a real person in history and imagine their internal voice? So even though you've written historical fiction before, this was your first time writing from the perspective of a real person - right? Like.ĬHANG. It's lovely to be here.ĬHANG: Lovely to have you. Haggerty) I'm sure you're very respectable, madam.ĪNNA MAY WONG: (As Hui Fei) I must confess, I don't quite know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house.ĬHANG: Never fully American, never fully Chinese, never fully seen by Hollywood - in the new book, "The Brightest Star," Gail Tsukiyama reimagines the internal life of Anna May Wong and offers a fictionalized account of the actor's thoughts and emotions as she navigated an industry that insisted on flattening her. Moviegoers recognized Anna May Wong as the dragon lady, the opium dealer and so often the sex worker. Stereotypes and tropes about Asian women gave her access to movie roles, but they also imprisoned her. Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American actor to ever achieve Hollywood stardom, but that glittering fame came at a price.
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