Anna May Wong (1905–61), the iconic early twentieth-century Chinese-American stage and screen performer, ventured into film acting at the age of fourteen in Hollywood as an extra in an Alla Nazimova vehicle, Red Lantern (Albert Capellini, 1919). Submerged in the large number of uncredited ethnic extras recruited for the film, Wong silently contributed to the so-called ‘Chinese atmosphere’ (designed for the Hollywood Orientalist fantasy about turn-of- the- twentieth- century China), while Nazimova, the leading star, portrayed the mixed-race Chinese protagonist as well as her white half-sister. Wong's screen debut, inconspicuous as it was, led to more appearances as an extra in a string of films until 1921, when she obtained her first credited role as the abused Chinese wife of Lon Chaney's character in Bits of Life (Marshall Neilan, 1921).

Her tenacity during Hollywood's silent era eventually won mainstream public recognition, especially with her portrayal of the tragic Chinese Madame Butterfly in The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922), Hollywood's first two-colour Technicolor feature, and of the scantily costumed Mongol slave in Douglas Fairbanks's spectacular exotic fantasy, The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924). Nonetheless, acutely aware of her limited career prospects due to Hollywood's racist practices, Wong sailed for Germany on 29 March 1928, armed with a one-film contract with the German film studio, Universum Film AG (UFA). Written by Karl Vollmoeller as her vehicle, Wong's European screen debut, Show Life (aka Song) (Richard Eichberg, 1928), quickly snowballed into a multitude of film and theatre performances in Germany, France, Britain and Austria, catapulting her into unprecedented stardom. In June 1928, barely three months after her arrival in Europe, Show Life was finished; and Wong was pronounced a ‘decided hit’ in a US report. Later reports were to reinforce her unique stellar status, touting her Oriental mystique combined with cosmopolitanism.

How did Wong attain such leading lady hyper-visibility in interwar Europe, a fame that eluded her in the US, her home country? What strategies did she develop to mobilise her itinerant and interstitial position for greater star and celebrity value? The key to these questions is her successful bid for cosmopolitanism, which, I argue, hinged upon her versatile linguistic performance, or the ability to speak in a ‘forked tongue’ with a subversive effect that inverted Homi Bhabha's use of the same term.