Word: wong
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...father: "In the 20 years I have fought to live," he says in his florid maleficence, "the thought of killing you and your son has been my dearest nurse." He kills the father, is mortally wounded himself and, on his deathbed, reveals his identity to his daughter Ling Moy (Wong) and elicits her vow that she will "cancel the debt" to the Fu family honor and murder the son, Ronald (Bramwell Fletcher)... who, dash it all, is madly infatuated with Ling...
...Ling Moy, a nice girl, previously unaware of her lineage, might be expected to struggle, at least briefly, with the shock of her identity and the dreadful deed her father obliges her to perform. But Wong makes an instant transformation, hissing, "The blood is mine. The hatred is mine. The vengeance shall be mine." Just before his death, Fu mourns that he has no son to kill Ronald. But, in a good full-throated reading, Wong vows: "Father, father, I will be your son. I will be your son!" The audience then has the fun of watching her stoke Ronald...
...Wong may have broken through the Hollywood race barrier, but her success didn't help others; no studio boss told his casting director, "Get me another Anna May Wong!" It didn't even help her. When Hollywood made movies about Chinese people, it simply put white actors in "yellowface." The term is a misnomer. Whereas a white actor playing a black was obliged to dab cork to darken the visage, a white playing an "Oriental" character didn't change face color but applied spirit gum to give the eyes a higher slant...
...actors. In 1919, the year Richard Barthelmess played the sensitive "chink" in Broken Blossoms, the Danish actor Warner Oland played his first Chinese in The Lightning Raider. Oland looked no more Chinese than, say, Bob Keeshan, yet he was cast "yellow" dozens of times, including in four films with Wong, and culminating in 16 Charlie Chan movies. When Oland died, in 1938, Missouri-born Sidney Toler was tabbed to replace him; he played the sleuth in 22 films, until his death in 1947. Wong had played Fu Manchu's daughter in 1931, but the following year, when MGM made...
...Wong had played featured roles in A pictures, and leads in B's. But could Wong win a major part in the biggest Chinese-set film yet to be made? She yearned to play O-Lan, the heroine of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, a best-seller that won the American novelist the Nobel Prize for Literature...