Daily Inspiration Quote by Anna May Wong

There is a sly snap in the way Anna May Wong folds herself into the crowd: "everybody should marry, including me". It reads like a neat little surrender to a social script, but the punchline is the tag-on: including me. The phrasing suggests she knows she is being treated as an exception, a woman permitted to be glamorous on screen yet quietly disqualified from the most respectable off-screen ending.

In Wong's era, marriage wasn’t just romance; it was a citizenship badge in a culture that wanted actresses to be alluring but legible, modern but contained. For an Asian American star navigating both Hollywood typecasting and the constraints of anti-miscegenation laws, the idea of "should" carries extra weight. She’s not simply talking about companionship. She’s talking about access: to normalcy, to privacy, to a life where her desirability isn’t managed by studios and policed by race.

The humor is defensive and strategic. "I've come to the conclusion" has the tone of someone performing reasonableness, as if she’s meeting the public halfway. But the subtext is closer to: I’m tired of being treated like a special case. The line reframes marriage as something she’s allowed to want, not something she must apologize for wanting. It also needles the culture that insisted on pairing her with exotic loneliness as a permanent role. In one sentence, Wong makes conformity sound like rebellion.