Member Event: Anna May Wong - Not Your China Doll

Director: Robert Florey

1937 / 62min / 35mm

Admission to this special event comes with a drink ticket to the pre-reception, beginning at 8pm in the lower lobby.

Anna May Wong, the preeminent Chinese American movie star of her day. After rising to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and performing in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London, she returned to Hollywood, where she spoke out about the industry’s racism, and used her new stature to reshape Asian American representation in film. To celebrate the publication of Katie Gee Salisbury’s debut biography Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, which showcases the vibrant, radical life of this groundbreaking artist, join Salisbury and New Yorker writer Mayukh Sen for an extended introduction before a screening of Robert Florey’s 1937 Wong-showcase Daughter of Shanghai.

Wong, the preeminent Chinese American actress of her day, newly returned to Hollywood after a sojourn in Europe, plays art gallery owner-cum-detective Lan Ying Lin in French-born genre specialist Florey’s economical, drum-tight thriller, which sees our heroine team up with Korean American actor Philip Ahn’s government agent in order to hunt down the dastardly European head of a human trafficking ring. With its two Asian American leads—former classmates at Los Angeles’s Central Junior HS, no less—clearing up a case of Caucasian mischief, Daughter of Shanghai is not only a true outlier in lily white Tinseltown, but a corker of a crime pic.

Pre-screening discussion with author Katie Gee Salisbury and New Yorker writer Mayukh Sen.

Sponsored in part by Asian CineVision and Yao King