The Hot Mess Of Hollywood

THERE'S BEEN A mini-revival of late actress Anna May Wong (1905 - 1961) in popular culture recently. As the first Chinese-American star in Hollywood, Wong was a major character in the accomplished 2019 novel, Delayed Rays Of A Star, by Singapore writer Amanda Lee Koe. Then in January 2020, Google Doodle commemorated Wong by celebrating the 97th anniversary of The Toll Of The Sea, a groundbreaking 1922 silent film with Wong in the lead role.

This May, Netflix debuted a Ryan Murphy TV series titled Hollywood, which attempts to right the racist, sexist and homophobic wrongs of Hollywood's past by reimagining it as a progressive town of the 1940s, that brings change to the rest of the US and the world.

Where in reality Wong was forced to play stereotypical roles of the "dragon lady" or the vulnerable "butterfly", here Wong wins an Oscar for playing, in her own words, "a woman, a complex woman with a heart and soul" instead of "a yellow face or a caricature".