The Fortunes

When Anna May Wong is 21, she poses for photos during the groundbreaking ceremony for construction of Grauman’s Chinese theatre. Although she is a star renowned for her beauty, and many of the responses to the photograph note that, there are some in the media who jokingly include racial slurs in their written commentary.

Clark Gable’s film Parnell is a box-office flop everywhere but in China, and Carole Lombard stages a stunt in which flyers promoting the film are dropped from an airplane.

Anna remembers purchasing her first movie ticket at the age of 10 using money she’d saved working in her father’s laundry in Los Angeles. She was nervous being the only Chinese person in the theater and hid in the bathroom until she heard the organist’s cue that the film was about to begin. When her father found out, he beat her. This punishment was not a deterrent, however, because after that first film, Anna was transfixed. Initially she enjoyed sitting in the darkened theaters, alone with her emotions, but ultimately she realized that she envied the attention that the film stars garnered: People looked at them not judgmentally, but with awe and admiration.