ABSTRACT
AnnaMayWong blazed a trail for Asian American actors in Hollywood. Yet titles of writings about her, such as ‘Right Place, Wong Time’ (Okrent 1990: 84), ‘From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend’ (Hodges 2004), and ‘Caught between the Past and the Future’ (Rich 2004), conjure an Anna May Wong who also embodied the temporal-spatial and ideologicalmisplacement that undermines any assumption of individual agency. Her success thus doubled as failure, as three more descriptions commonly associated with Wong illustrate: to become ‘perpetually cool’ (Chan 2003), the ‘China doll’ (Wong 1996) has to first die a thousand deaths (Los Angeles Times).
