Chinese Americans in Hollywood: A Virtual Conversation with Authors William Gow and Katie Gee Salisbury
Date: May 22, 2024
Time: 8 PM - 9:30 PM ET
Location: Zoom
Chinese Americans have been involved in the movie business since its earliest days, whether as extras, leading actors like Anna May Wong and Keye Luke, or Oscar-winning cinematographers like James Wong Howe. Join us virtually on May 22nd at 8 PM ET for a presentation on Chinese Americans in early Hollywood with William Gow, author of Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community, and Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong, followed by conversation and audience questions, moderated by Jenny Cho.
Those in attendance will have a chance to receive free copies of William Gow and Katie Gee Salisbury’s books! Use the code GOW20 to receive 20% off your purchase of “Performing Chinatown” when ordering directly from Stanford University Press.
This event is co-hosted by OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates, OCA-Greater Washington, D.C. chapter, and 1882 Foundation.
Questions? Contact Kent Tong at kent.tong@ocanational.org.
About "Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community" by William Gow
In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM's The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history.
Performing Chinatown conceives of these racial representations as intimately connected to the restrictive immigration laws that limited Chinese entry into the U.S. beginning with the 1875 Page Act and continuing until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the heart of this argument are the voices of everyday people including Chinese American movie extras, street performers, and merchants. Drawing on more than 40 oral history interviews as well as research in more than a dozen archival and family collections, this book retells the long-overlooked history of the ways that Los Angeles Chinatown shaped Hollywood and how Hollywood, in turn, shaped perceptions of Asian American identity.
Performing Chinatown will be released May 14, 2024. You can pre-order the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Thriftbooks, and Walmart. Use the code GOW20 to receive 20% off your purchase of Performing Chinatown when ordering directly from Stanford University Press.
About the Author
William Gow is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Sacramento, and a community historian with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, a non-profit in Los Angeles Chinatown.
About "Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong" by Katie Gee Salisbury
Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist, and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest.
Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film.
Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.
Not Your China Doll is now available. You can purchase the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Bookshop.org, Hudson Booksellers, Powell's, Target, and Walmart.
About the Author
Katie Gee Salisbury has spoken and written about Anna May Wong on MSNBC, in the New York Times and in Vanity Fair. She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. She was a 2021 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship finalist and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” A fifth-generation Chinese American from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn. This is her first book.