confronting Hollywood’s racist past When the topic of yellowface is broached, most Asian Americans can readily recall the insulting images of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine (a role that was originally pitched by and for Bruce…

the woman who inspired one of the most famous love songs ever written Anna May Wong had many lovers. She was a movie star, after all, and a legendary beauty at that. Her slim-cut figure and graceful gait seduced more than a few in her day, sometimes without her even trying. British composer Constant Lambert, who first set eyes on the actress as…

Constance Wu & the impossible expectations of representation Constance Wu was all over the media this past week on a redemption tour of sorts as she promotes her new book, a memoir in essays called Making a Scene. Like many Asian Americans, I’ve had ambivalent, sometimes even negative, feelings about her. I heard the rumors — that she…

And it’s time for the University to acknowledge it This op-ed was collaboratively composed by a multi-generational coalition that includes Doug Chan, Kevin Fan Hsu, Katie Gee Salisbury, Jacob Wang, and Connie Young Yu. There’s nothing like the feeling of entering Stanford University through the majestic, tree-lined approach of Palm…

the playboys, half-castes, outsiders, and sirens who made motion pictures Another year, another badass Asian film becomes the unexpected darling of arthouse cinemas across the country and takes the film world by surprise. Since the release of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018, every new release that centers around Asian or Asian American stories has felt like winning another chip at…

the shutter click that immortalized Anna, Marlene & Leni Berlin in the late 1920s was a surreal place. For the Weimar Republic’s greatest artists and bohemian visionaries, the city offered safe harbor and a space in which to experiment freely. At the same time, Berlin symbolized all the stuff that hedonistic dreams are made of, or depending on how…

what it means to be writing a book about Anna May Wong On a hot summer afternoon in Los Angeles this past August — the kind of day where you can feel the crisp California sunshine searing right into your skin — I decided to make a detour. I was…

a story of familial love When reporters asked movie actress Anna May Wong about her family and whether she had any brothers and sisters, she answered cheerfully that there were, in fact, seven Wong children. “We’re not a family — we’re a dynasty,” she’d add with a twinkle in her eye. As modern and outré…

Sadakichi Hartmann, the man who would be king — “Having made sure that I was wrong, I went ahead,” reasoned Douglas Fairbanks, when he explained how he arrived at the decision to make The Three Musketeers in 1921. In preparation for his next film, he had taken an informal poll of theater exhibitors, the businessmen who would be distributing…