Because Wong could not always transcend these toxic customs, her legacy may have suffered.
“She’s been unfairly forgotten and neglected,” said the actor Paul Giamatti, a longtime admirer of Wong.
Like his subjects, Huang himself has crossed cultural chasms. Sitting in the Formosa Cafe, he explained that he had attended Peking University hoping to become an English professor in China. But during his sophomore year, in the spring of 1989, soldiers gathered to quell student protests in Beijing — protests in which he and his friends were taking part, sometimes even sleeping out on Tiananmen Square.
At the end of May, he received a cable telling him his mother was gravely ill. Worried, he traveled for three days to get to his family’s home, about 300 miles south of Shanghai. When he arrived, he said, “my mom was standing in front of our house, smiling like a bride.” His parents had tricked him into going home to get him out of danger’s way. Days later, government tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square, leaving thousands injured or dead. Watching the scene unfold on his parents’ television, Huang knew that he could not remain in China.
“Intellectually, emotionally, it was just not for me anymore,” he said.
Two years later, he arrived in Tuscaloosa to earn his master’s degree. He had chosen Alabama because it was first in an alphabetical guidebook to U.S. universities, he said. He didn’t have a car, so on Sundays, he would stand on the corner holding a Bible. When people pulled over, they’d ask, “What church are you going to?” and Huang would say: “Yours.” This was how he experienced Tuscaloosa’s Calvinist, Baptist and Mormon offerings.
He applied for four credit cards and used them to open a Chinese restaurant. “Like in ‘Out of Africa,’ when Meryl Streep says, ‘I had a farm in Africa,’” Huang said, “well, I had a Chinese takeout in Tuscaloosa.”