The American Women Quarters Program is a four-year program that celebrates the accomplishments and contributions made by women to the development and history of the US. Beginning in 2022, and continuing through 2025, the US Mint will issue up to five new reverse designs each year.
Anna May Wong was born Wong Liu-Tsong in 1905 in Los Angeles to second-generation Chinese-American parents. Wong always had an obsession with movies and often spent her time and money as a child seeing films in nickelodeon theatres. As early as the age of nine Wong began asking filmmakers for roles, and by age 11 she had come up with her stage name: Anna May Wong.
She was a figure of exotic fashion around the world, feted by high society in London, Berlin and elsewhere. In 1934, the Mayfair Mannequin Society of New York voted her the "world's best dressed woman"; in 1938 Look magazine named her the "world's most beautiful Chinese girl."
Hollywood’s racism continued to dominate Wong’s entire career, casting her as “exotic atmosphere” rather than utilizing her talent and skill.
In The Toll of the Sea, she played a character named Lotus Flower who falls in love with an American man only to be abandoned by him. At the end of the film, Lotus Flower takes her own life. The term "lotus flower" would go on to represent the stereotype of a disposable female Asian love interest. Another stereotype, "the dragon lady," the kind of very barbarous and villainous kind of seductress, also stemmed from one of Wong's most prominent roles, 1931's Daughter of the Dragon.
Wong was also vocal about her frustrations with Hollywood, and she worked against the limitations. "I was so tired of the parts I had to play," she said in an interview with Film Weekly. "Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain — murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that."
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Thursday 2024/10/24