Notes from the Living on Respecting the Dead

Katie Gee Salisbury
6 min readDec 22, 2021

what it means to be writing a book about Anna May Wong

clipping of Anna May Wong from the Los Angeles Examiner, November 10, 1934

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 leaving Doheny Memorial Library at USC, where I had spent the morning and afternoon looking through clippings and photos of Anna May Wong from the Los Angeles Examiner archives, and I had a little bit of time to kill before a drinks date with a writer friend in East Hollywood. I got in my car and set the GPS on my phone to the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, Anna May Wong’s final resting place.

I had often thought about going to pay my respects to the woman I have devoted so much time and psychic energy to. I’d heard stories about obsessed fans who arrived weekly to sweep and take care of her gravestone. I imagined, similarly, arriving with a bouquet of flowers, incense, and a platter of fruit as an offering to her honored spirit. But I hadn’t planned ahead and didn’t have time to stop and pick something up. Better to visit her than not at all, I reasoned, and swallowed the fact that I’d have to show up empty-handed.

When I pulled into the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, I was greeted by a hillside of parched, yellowed grass and a slew of dead palm trees, many with their tops cut off…

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Katie Gee Salisbury

Author of NOT YOUR CHINA DOLL, a new biography of Anna May Wong, out now from Dutton and Faber. www.notyourchinadoll.com