A Hollywood TRAILBLAZER

THE SILVER SCREEN'S FIRST CHINESE-AMERICAN STAR REFUSED TO PLAY SECOND-CLASS ROLES

- Fortune Benatar

Hollywood’s earliest filmmakers often used colorful real locations, like the streets around Los Angeles’ Chinatown n, in their movies. Watching them as a child, Anna May Wong, a third-generation Chinese American, became fascinated. “She saw people making movies in the streets,” says Katie Gee Salisbury, author of Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong. “Her dad ran a laundry business, so she and her older sister were often walking around making deliveries or picking things up from costumers. That was her first brush with moviemaking.”

By age 17, Anna May began appearing in films as an extra. Only a few years later, 1924’s