Right face, wrong place  

Before Zhang Ziyi, before Joan Chen, before Nancy Kwan, there was Anna May Wong. You may not have heard of the name, but she was "the most significant representation of Chinese womanhood outside of China in the first half of the 20th century".

That is the view of Graham Russell Gao Hodges, who wrote Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend, a biography Time magazine calls "thorough".

Hodges, professor of history from Colgate University and a visiting professor at Peking University, shared his findings on a recent evening at Bookworm, downtown Beijing's hybrid of book club, restaurant and library of predominantly English-language books.
Anna May Wong (Chinese name Huang Liushuang, 1905-1961) might have envied Zhang Ziyi for her opportunities in big-budget studio films, but Zhang would probably love to command the English language as Wong did.