Mayukh Sen at The New Yorker:
In March, 1929, when the twenty-four-year-old Chinese American actress Anna May Wong made her London stage début on the city’s West End, in a play called “The Circle of Chalk,” critics took issue with one aspect of her performance: her voice. Up to this point, Wong, five foot seven with dreamy eyes, had appeared primarily in American silent films that pandered to stereotypes of docile Asian women. Her live audience may have expected a dulcet trill. What she gave them instead was, to the ears of reviewers, “squeaky” and “uncultivated.” Wong was reared around Los Angeles’s Chinatown and had grown up speaking both Cantonese and English; she had an accent that was pure California. After the eight-week run of “The Circle of Chalk” concluded, Wong lunched with some journalists who probed her about her bad reviews. At first, she answered their questions in English. Then, catching them by surprise, she switched to Cantonese.
This episode arrives about halfway through the academic Yunte Huang’s searching new biography of the star, “Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History,” as evidence of what Huang calls Wong’s “defiance and playfulness.”
more here.