Wong’s image and career have left a notable legacy. Through her films, public appearances and prominent magazine features, she helped to humanize Chinese Americans to mainstream American audiences during a period of intense racism and discrimination. Chinese Americans had been viewed as perpetually foreign in U.S. society, but Wong’s films and public image established her as a Chinese-American citizen at a time when laws discriminated against Chinese immigration and citizenship. Wong’s hybrid image dispelled contemporary notions that the East and West were inherently different.
Among Wong’s films, only Shanghai Express retained critical attention in the U.S. in the decades after her death. In Europe and especially England, her films appeared occasionally at festivals. Wong remained popular with the gay community, who claimed her as one of their own and for whom her marginalization by the mainstream became a symbol. Although the Chinese Nationalist criticism of her portrayals of the “Dragon Lady” and “Butterfly” stereotypes lingered, she was forgotten in China. Nevertheless, the importance of Wong’s legacy within the Asian-American film community can be seen in the Anna May Wong Award of Excellence, which is given yearly at the Asian-American Arts Awards; the annual award given out by the Asian Fashion Designers group was also named after Wong in 1973.
Wong’s image remained as a symbol in literature as well as in the film. In the 1971 poem “The Death of Anna May Wong”, Jessica Hagedorn saw Wong’s career as one of “tragic glamour” and portrayed the actress as a “fragile maternal presence, an Asian-American woman who managed to ‘birth’, however ambivalently, Asian-American screen women in the jazz age”. Wong’s character in Shanghai Express was the subject of John Yau’s 1989 poem “No One Ever Tried to Kiss Anna May Wong”, which interprets the actress’ career as a series of tragic romances. Sally Wen Mao wrote a book called Oculus, published in 2019, with a series of persona poems in the voice of Anna May Wong. In David Cronenberg’s 1993 film version of David Henry Hwang’s 1986 play, M. Butterfly, Wong’s image was used briefly as a symbol of a “tragic diva”. Her life was the subject of China Doll, The Imagined Life of an American Actress, an award-winning fictional play written by Elizabeth Wong in 1995.
In 1995, film historian Stephen Bourne curated a retrospective of Wong’s films called A Touch of Class for BFI Southbank.
As the centennial of Wong’s birth approached, a re-examination of her life and career took shape; three major works on the actress appeared and comprehensive retrospectives of her films were held at both the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Anthony Chan’s 2003 biography, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905–1961), was the first major work on Wong and was written, Chan says, “from a uniquely Asian-American perspective and sensibility”. In 2004, Philip Leibfried and Chei Mi Lane’s exhaustive examination of Wong’s career, Anna May Wong: A Complete Guide to Her Film, Stage, Radio and Television Work was published, as well as a second full-length biography, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend by Graham Russell Hodges. Though Anna May Wong’s life, career, and legacy reflect many complex issues which remain decades after her death, Anthony Chan points out that her place in Asian-American cinematic history, as its first female star, is permanent. An illustrated biography for children, Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story, was published in 2009.
In 2016, the novelist Peter Ho Davies published The Fortunes, a saga of Chinese-American experiences centered around four characters, one of whom is a fictionalized Anna May Wong, imagined from childhood until her death. In a conversation published in the 2017 paperback edition, Davies described his novel as an exploration of the Chinese-American quest for authenticity—a third way of being Chinese American—with Anna May Wong representing an iconic example of that struggle.
On January 22, 2020, a Google Doodle celebrated Wong, commemorating the 97th anniversary of the day The Toll of the Sea went into general release.
In 2020, actress Michelle Krusiec played Wong in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix drama series, Hollywood. The limited series tells an alternate history of Hollywood in the 1940s. Also in 2020, her life story was told as part of PBS’s documentary Asian Americans.
In 2021, the United States Mint announced that Wong would be among the first women depicted on the reverse of the quarter coin as a part of the American Women quarters series. When the quarters with her depicted on them went into circulation in 2022, Wong became the first Asian American depicted on American coinage.
In Damien Chazelle’s film Babylon, Li Jun Li played Lady Fay Zhu, a role inspired by Wong.
A biopic from Working Title Films is in development, with British actress Gemma Chan set to portray Wong.
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