Perpetually Cool
A second recent book about Anna May Wong is Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong by Anthony B. Chan. I give the book a great deal of credibility. Professor Chan tells the same life story but focuses more on Ms. Wong's strength of character in the face of the prevalent anti-Chinese bias of her time. He had access to Ms. Wong's youngest brother and is himself of Chinese ancestry. I've heard Professor Chan speak on the radio and he seems to me to revere Ms. Wong. He gives more detail about her thoughts and feelings and I have a more complete picture of her, although I feel far from satisfied.
Anna May Wong was able to live with the bias and racial discrimination against her and even to succeed in defeating it to some extent because of her strong will and philosophy. Anna May Wong's philosophy was to surround oneself with good. Even at a time of great evil, both globally and in her immediate professional milieu, she believed that hate is wasteful. She believed that being good and thinking good thoughts would eventually defeat evil by turning evil to good. Consistent with Taoism, which formed the basis of her philosophy, she held that life is more valuable than things. She lived a life wherein she continuously strived to work, to care for others, to be a good person.
Ms. Wong tried to avoid clutter, both the clutter of useless things and the clutter of unnecessary people. In addition to evil people, she tried to avoid what she called "sweet smiling people". The latter were the people who smiled at her but did nothing to add to her life. Apparently her experiences with the insincerity of Hollywood types made her acutely aware of the difference between true friends and those who only wanted to take from her.
I don't flatter myself with the belief that I've succeeded in adopting Ms. Wong's philosophy, her way of life. And I don't agree with her in every detail of her philosophy. But I do agree that we need to be good to defeat evil and that simply being good goes a long way toward making others improve their behavior. It does so by setting an example, it does so by embarrassing those who aren't good and it does so, if Ms. Wong is correct, by eventually changing evil to good. Sometimes I think, and I hear others say, what can I do to make things better in the face of so much trouble in the world. It seems hopeless a lot of the time. Anna May Wong inspires me to believe that if I can be a good person that alone is the beginning of changing the world.
Try to be a good person. Maybe you alone can change the world.
5-17-04
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