Happy August! Time really flies, doesn’t it? This month I’m spending a lot of quality time working on the book and reviewing the many pages of research I’ve collected in recent months, which I wrote about back in June. You’d be surprised how many details and offhand comments only stand out to you on the second or third reading.
I’ve been reminded lately of this interview with Patrick Radden Keefe on the Longform Podcast. He talks about how he wasn’t able to connect all the dots, see the forest for the trees, until close to the completion of his award-winning book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. It was only as he was going over interview transcripts for the hundredth time that he finally saw the meaning hidden in a specific subject’s words and had an epiphany about who was behind the murder his book is all about. I’m realizing firsthand that retracing your notes and research sources again and again is an important part of the process.
I’m also diving back into writing, which is always a bit nerve-wracking the first couple of days. I haven’t hit my daily word count yet, but I expect my pace will pick up next week. Writing is like going to the gym. The first day you work out those muscles they are sore and badly out of shape. But as you keep at it, your body starts to change and respond to the challenge. Each day gets a little bit easier.
So as I work myself back into the groove, I thought I’d try something different for the newsletter—a fun, participatory roll call!
In the seven months I’ve been writing Half-Caste Woman, I’ve heard from many of you individually, old friends and new readers alike. Roll call is a chance for everyone to introduce themselves to each other and maybe even spark a dialogue, the first steps towards making this newsletter feel more like a community.
Here’s how it works:
Click the “comment” button below and introduce yourself, i.e. “Hi, I’m Katie! I live in Brooklyn…”
Tell me about the first time you saw yourself reflected in a character in a book, movie, or TV show. Someone you felt a kinship with, even if on the surface you might not have had anything in common.
Share a question you have about Anna May Wong and/or something you’d like to learn about her in future newsletters.
I’ll go first.
I’m Katie from Brooklyn! As a little girl, I loved Pippi Longstocking. Her red hair screamed Irish to me (even though she was Swedish) and being half Irish myself, I thought having red hair and freckles and green eyes was this cool, exotic thing. But more than that, I loved Pippi’s spunky and independent nature. She lived alone while her pirate dad was away “working” at sea and somehow she took care of herself and her horse and her monkey and a magical clamshell in a jar full of water. She invented an original recipe for nail soup (yes, I’m talking about steel nails, the kind you bang with a hammer) and when she slurped and crunched down on the nails she actually made that soup seem delicious. I’m still waiting to try a bowl.
Pippi showed me that girls can be tough, self-reliant, and even a little weird. It probably helped that the opening scene of the Pippi movie we had on VHS showed her buying out the town’s entire candy store using golden doubloons and then magnanimously letting all the kids pick whatever sweets they wanted.
As for Anna May Wong, a question that was recently posed to me was whether AMW and Luise Rainer, the German American actress who played the part of O-Lan in The Good Earth and later won an Oscar for it, ever met. It was widely known that AMW had wanted the role, which would have been a game changer for her career and the depiction of Chinese characters in Hollywood films. The idea of the two actresses, pitted against each other by MGM, meeting is an interesting possibility that I’d never really considered, and so that’s something I’d like to find out.
Now it’s your turn! Remember, this only works if people actually show up to the party. 🤗
p.s. A few links for the AMW obsessives out there—watch Karie Bible make AMW’s recipe for tea cakes on the latest episode of Hollywood Kitchen with special guests Anna Wong, AMW’s niece, and author and film expert Danny Miller. In November, the Academy Museum is hosting Beyond the Icon: Anna May Wong and will be screening five of AMW’s films, including Piccadilly and Pavement Butterfly, two of the films she made in Europe that are hard to find copies of out in the wild. And if you haven’t already heard the news, AMW is going to be immortalized on U.S. quarters beginning in 2022!
hi, i'm jenny! i'm from san diego, ca currently living in new york city. the first character i distinctly remember seeing myself in was claudia in "from the mixed up files of mrs. basil e. frankweiler" because i identified with her spirit and resourcefulness, and i desperately wanted to live in the met after that. i would love to know more about anna may wong's feelings of being tokenized in hollywood...did she simply accept her roles or was she resentful or angry about it? i see a lot written posthumously about her importance in hollywood cinema but i wonder if there are any records about the things she said about her own legacy.
Hi, my name is Carole. I'm from Los Angeles, although I have lived in Bonn, Germany for the last 31 years. I was always a big reader, and one of the first books that I read was "Alice in Wonderland." The cover of the book that I had had a drawing of Alice falling down the rabbit hole (in a peaceful sort of way, more like floating down with her dress slowing her descent); she was wearing a aqua-colored dress with puffed sleeves and a white pinafore, and had her hair brushed back with a white hairband. At Halloween, when my mom asked me what I wanted to go as, I replied "Alice." So, my loving mother, who was terrific at dressmaking, looked at the cover of my (non-Disney) book and sewed me an aqua-colored dress with the cutest puffed sleeves and a white pinafore. She brushed back my bangs with a white hairband. My Halloween costume was perfect, except. . . with my black hair and Cantonese face, no one recognized me as the young blonde English girl. So, my clever mom wrote "Alice" on the bodice of my pinafore. In retrospect, I think that a stuffed white rabbit and maybe an old-fashioned gold pocket watch may have helped, but at the time, I was so in love with my Halloween costume that I went as "Alice" two years running, until I grew out of dress. I imagine that this is what Anna May Wong had to do, too, to think of creative ways to assist her audience in transcending her outer Cantonese appearance and think of her as a person or at least as the character role she was playing. In fact, I still do this in my every day life in Germany—help people to accept me as an intelligent Asian person who is well integrated into German culture and speaks the language quite well, despite my Chinese face and hair. More power to AMW! And to you, Katie!