Starting my Anna May Wong book where it opens with a fantasy scene where she is tied to the railroad tracks, a train is barreling down at her, and she’s struggling to escape, that was a very risky move because especially for children’s picture book biographies, you have to be very factual, you have to be very true to – authentic and accurate to what happened. I took a little bit of a liberty there. It’s a little bit of a fictionalization.
But I felt the reason why it was necessary was because I write narrative nonfiction. So, the narrative nonfiction that I write is not Anna May Wong was born on, you know, in this year. I have to tell a story. I have to let you know who her character is. So, for Anna May Wong, I realized she wanted to be an actress. She wanted to be in Hollywood. That was her one dream. She was working in this poor Chinese immigrant laundry, and she had the most unglamorous life.
But the one thing that helped her escape this hard, hard childhood life – like today that would be against child labor laws. You can’t have kids working at a laundry like that. She’s eight years old. But I think what helped her escape that was going to the movies whenever she could save up enough money to see those movies and also seeing people film movies in downtown Chinatown in Los Angeles. There were a lot of movies filmed in that area, and she would walk by with her basket of laundry, and she would pause and just watch the movies being made.
And I realized I have to show her imagination because her resilience, her superpower is her imagination, and we need to see her imagining this. And I will say that authentically, nonfiction-wise, and realistically, and to be accurate, she did say in interviews that she would get distracted and practice in front of a mirror fainting and looking scared, and she would always – she loved those Pauline in peril movies, a very popular movie series in the 1920s where, you know, the heroine – you know, the black and white movies.
You’re tied up at the railroad station, you know, the train is coming at you, and then the movie stops. And then you got to go back on Saturday, next Saturday morning to see how does she escape? And she loved those movies. So, to me extrapolating that, even though it was fictional what I did, it was true in real life authentically to what she would say in interviews. So, I can’t imagine her not having a fantasy like that and then pulling back and realizing oh, you’re in a laundry, you’re eight years old, you’re trapped.
And also, I think the topic of Anna May Wong is very cerebral. It’s about fair representation and nonstereotyped, anti-Asian racist images on screen.
That’s a very cerebral kind of inner conflict. So, that’s why I opened the book the way I did ’cause I needed to externalize that inner conflict.
She used her imagination to fight back for Asian-Americans in this country.