A new, trail-blazing woman will soon appear on US quarters. Who is Anna May Wong?

After a long career on the silver screen, actress Anna May Wong will return for a second act on the copper quarter.

Wong will be the first Asian American to join the exclusive club of presidents, poets and other prominent Americans who have had their likeness featured on U.S. currency.

The United States Mint announced it will begin distributing a new quarter featuring Wong’s portrait on Oct. 24 as part of the American Women Quarters Program.

As part of the initiative, which began this year and runs through 2025, the Mint will create five quarters each year featuring a variety of accomplished women, including aviator Bessie Coleman and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Who is Anna May Wong?

Wong became the first Chinese American movie star in Hollywood, starring in dozens of films in several countries, according to the National Women’s History Museum.

Born in 1905 in Los Angeles to a family originally from Southern China, she was given the name Wong Liu Tsong, which means “Frosted Yellow Willows.” Her family later gave her the English name Anna May.

Her parents ran a laundry business, one of the only options available to Chinese Americans at the time, according to NYhistory.org.

Wong attended a mostly-white school, but transferred to a Chinese school after being taunted and bullied because of her race, Time reported.

As a young girl, she became enamored with film, occasionally skipping school to watch movies being shot in Chinatown, according to Harper’s Baazar.

“I would worm my way through the crowd and get as close to the cameras as I dared,” she later reportedly said.

At 14, she scored her first role as an extra in The Red Lantern, filmed during the 1918 flu pandemic, according to NYhistory.org.

Over the course of her long career, she appeared in over 50 films, according to The New York Times, including The Toll of the Sea in 1923 and Shanghai Express in 1932.

But she was often cast in stereotypical roles.

“Wong’s typecasting into roles of seductive temptresses highlighted a tired racial trope of the exoticized Asian woman,” according to Harper’s Baazar.

Discontented with her treatment in Hollywood, Wong eventually decamped to Europe, where she became a “smash hit,” starring in multiple films and stage productions, according to the Los Angeles Times. But she later returned to the States and continued appearing in films before retiring at 37.

“Asian-American film makers are proud of Anna May Wong because she achieved a remarkable measure of stardom in spite of Hollywood’s tunnel vision, a tribute to her tenacity and talent,” according to her hometown newspaper.

She died at the age of 54 in 1961, and was eulogized in The New York Times as “one of the most unforgettable figures of Hollywood’s great days.”

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, who introduced the legislation responsible for creating the American Women Quarters Program, tweeted “The trail [Wong] blazed paved the way for a Hollywood that better reflects the brilliance & diversity of our country. I’m grateful to honor her with the American Women Quarters program.”

This story was originally published October 19, 2022 at 12:59 PM with the headline "A new, trail-blazing woman will soon appear on US quarters. Who is Anna May Wong?."