Special Guest Blogger: Anna May Wong

20th Century Hollywood hated foreigners. The production companies hated them because they stop talented young American actors from getting roles, the media hated them because their names were awkward to spell and racists hate them because they are pathologically incapable of complex thought.
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations and i was the first Chinese-American movie star in Hollywood but the laws forbade an interracial couple from kissing on-screen and a lack of Asian-American male film stars meant that i was denied leading lady roles that would have been mine if i’d been white, or if Hollywood had been less prejudicial.
Asian people were considered a bunch of sinister opium addicts or downtrodden peasants with funny accents and buck teeth but i was pencilled in for the lead romantic role in The Good Earth. However, they suddenly remembered that it was the 1930s and everyone was super racist, and the average American wouldn't give a flying one if they cast a bunch of white people instead and as it meant that i would be playing the wife of a guy playing my chinese husband, Farmer Wang, who was actually a white man in make up and a Chinese looking woman with a white man, it was a no-no.
Showing race-mixing on-screen was tantamount to taking a whizz on a burning American flag so to to protect America's moral fiber, Hollywood hired a white actress in yellowface with a funny accent instead and to add insult to injury she won the the Best Actress Oscar that year.
After i finished recording The Flame of Love, doing a version in French, English and German, i decided i could battle my way into America's hearts but then thought sod it and wasn't prepared to take any of Confucius' crap and sailed off to Britain where the racism was a little less of the lynching and burning crosses on your lawn type where i had a romance with lyric writer Eric Maschwitz, his song 'These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)' was about me after i left him to go to China to help in their war effort against the Japanese.
After the war i returned to America and did some TV and radio work before dying aged 56 from a heart attack so my life was a battle against racism which is sad, not as sad as a man bravely hiding his face under a hood and hating people just because their skin is a slightly different colour to theirs but close.