On 24 July, the Heidelberg “Epochal Lifeworlds” team hosted a hybrid book talk with 2023 fellow Wang Yiman. Wang Yiman is Professor of Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has published numerous articles and books on Chinese cinema, ethnic border-crossing stardom, ecocinema, film remakes and adaptation. In 2023, the Heidelberg Worldmaking project had the great pleasure of profiting from her fascinating research on climate in PRC film and media technologies since the socialist era. Through the book talk, we had the opportunity to continue our dialogue with her, and discuss her brand-new book “To Be an Actress. Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong's Cross-Media World”, published with the University of California Press and Open Access.

Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905-1961) is one of the most intriguing and complex personalities of the early to mid-20^th century media landscape. As a “defiant misfit”, Yiman Wang claims, she “innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career”. Much of the existing research is zooming in on the star Anna May Wong, and struggling with her ambivalent behaviour vis-à-vis the racialized and gendered media landscape of her time. Wang Yiman’s book offers a fresh look at the performance worker Anna May Wong, or her labor cum performance, throughout the four decades of her career, and her nuanced and subtle challenging of stereotypes across media, cultures, and languages. Wang Yiman offered glimpses into her fascinating research; together with the scholars present in Heidelberg and joining digitally, she engaged in discussions on Wong’s medial strategies and the possibilities of approaching a character through various historical lenses while also allowing for a certain amount of speculation on potential and unfulfilled histories.