Anna May Wong: Classic Starlet, Trailblazer, and Badass Risk Taker

In an opening scene of Shanghai Express (1932), a pinch-faced boarding house owner lectures two of her lodgers, a pair of courtesans named Hui Fei (Anna May Wong) and Shanghai Lily (Marlene Deitrich), about respectability. Appalled by Lily’s sauciness, the mistress of the house, Mrs. Haggarty (Louise Closer Hale), asks of Hui Fei: “I’m sure […]