Not Your China Doll: A Conversation on Anna May Wong, the First Asian American Film Star

*Note: this session will be recorded and posted online at a later date.

Co-sponsored by UBC Asian Studies; Centre for Cinema Studies; Centre for European Studies; Department of History; Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies; the UBC Film Society;  and the Winnifred Eaton Archive.

With Katie Gee Salisbury, moderated by Mila Zuo

Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.

Mila Zuo is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at UBC. Her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke UP, 2022) received the best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Other articles can be found in Celebrity Studies, Women & Performance, Post 45, and Journal of Chinese Cinemas. In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo is also a filmmaker whose award-winning works have screened in numerous international film festivals, universities, and galleries.