Word: hollywood
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...movies made on the streets near her home. Her laundryman father tried to beat (literally beat) a dutiful girl's sense into her, and told her she was disgracing the family, as we learn from Graham Russell Gao Hodges' thorough biography Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend. But Anna May couldn't get the dream out of her head. Because she was tall and graceful, and because her big eyes gave her a maturity beyond her years, she found work as an extra by the time she was 14, and played important roles opposite Lon Chaney...
...resume would be impressive enough for a caucasian actress. It happened that Anna May Wong was Chinese, at a time when East Asians were no more likely to become Hollywood stars than someone from India or Africa. She knew, from seeing The Perils of Pauline serials with the villainous Wu Fang, or D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, about a sensitive, opium-sotted "Chink," that Chinese were portrayed in films as notorious criminals or emotional cripples, and that, anyway, they were almost always played by white actors. Hollywood may as well have had a sign on the studio gate reading...
...magnitude of Wong's achievement is not that she was Hollywood's first star actress of Chinese blood. It is that, for her entire, 40-plus years in movies, and for decades after, she was the only one. Lucy Liu, from Queens, has achieved a little fame on the small and big screens; the Mainland's Zhang Ziyi, soon to star (as a Japanese!) in Bob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha, may duplicate her Asian luminosity. But Wong was the No. 1 Chinese lady, from the teens to the 60s, and there was no No. 2. Against devastating odds...
...give him a year or two. That could be when, in hip-hop-Hollywood terms, Jaa rules. --Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles
...Guilty, with an explanation. As Kafka demonstrates, Murakami's Japan is a land of truck stops, rock music, Ray-Bans, Hollywood movies and workouts at the gym. But for his youngish, hip, history-oblivious fans, this is Japan. More than previous Murakami novels, Kafka embraces nearly the entire Western canon, with learned digressions on Beethoven, Schubert, Chekhov, T.S. Eliot and pantheons of ancient Greeks. It's an education in a box, much like the small but mysteriously well-stocked Takamatsu library where Murakami's young Oedipus finds a job as live-in caretaker...