Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong
Karen Fang
Rutgers University Press: 2024
.
In 1910, the boy who would become Tyrus Wong was born in a village in the city of Toisan in Guangdong Province. China was then known as the “Sick Man of Asia”, a crumbling empire beset with social upheaval and foreign bullying. To escape the poverty and instability of their homeland, Wong and his father took on the inhospitable provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act in a bid to make California their new home. The month they spent at sea crossing the Pacific Ocean was easy compared to the years it took to navigate the immigration process. From there, Wong painstakingly built himself up as an artist, his work gracing Hallmark greeting cards and defining the aesthetics of the classic Disney animated film Bambi.

Wong’s extraordinary 106 years on earth is a story of resilience and triumph, told fondly and in meticulous detail by film scholar and cultural critic Karen Fang in Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong.

Fang is adept at world-building and spends the first six chapters setting the scene of the late twentieth century. Wong’s story begins before his birth, shaped by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a racist era that denied Chinese immigrants any kind of dignity or personhood, treating them like vermin to be kept out of the US for the health and well-being of the populace.

• Tags: China, Frankie Huang, Issue 42, Karen Fang, USA