Sign In Sign In. New Customer? Create account. List activity. Ovidie was born on 25 August in Lille, Nord, France.
She is an actress and director, known for Everything's Better than a Hooker Anna May Wong. A third-generation American, she managed to have a substantial acting career during a deeply racist time when the taboo against miscegenation meant that Caucasian actresses were cast as "Oriental" women in lead parts opposite Caucasian leading men.
Even when the role called for playing opposite a Caucasian in yellowface, as with Paul Muni 's as the Chinese peasant Wang Lung in The Good Earth , Wong was rejected, since she did not fit a Caucasian's imagined ideal look for an Asian woman.
The discrimination she faced in the domestic industry caused her to go to Europe for work in English and German films. The Wong family moved back to Chinatown two years after Liu Tsong's birth, but in they uprooted themselves, moving to a nearby Figueroa Street neighborhood where they had Mexican and East European neighbors. There were two steep hills between the Wongs' new home and Chinatown, but as her biographer, Colgate University history professor Graham Russell Gao Hodges, points out, those hills put a psychological as well as physical distance between Liu Tsong and Chinatown.
Los Angeles' Chinatown already was teeming with movie shoots when she was a girl. She would haunt the neighborhood nickelodeons, having become enraptured with the early "flickers.
