Wong, 41, rifled through a section of the store where old post cards were kept in bins. She picked up one that had a picture of an Asian woman dressed in a tuxedo.

“That’s pretty interesting,”thought Wong as she turned over the card to find the caption, “Anna May Wong, American actress.” That was the beginning of her investigation into the life of Anna May Wong and the “genesis” of her play, “China Doll,” which will be presented by Catawba College Theatre Feb. 22 through 26 as the winning play of the national Peterson Playwright Competition.

Wong, who has been a playwright for the past 11 years, was part of the Asian community incensed by a seething allegation.

“Iwrote the play kind of as a response to the ‘Miss Saigon’ controversy,” she says. “Cameron McIntosh had said that there were no talented Asian people who could play the lead of the engineer... And that’s why Jonathan Price got it. The play, like all my plays, are kind of a response to current events.”

And a way for her to imagine what it must have been like for an actor of color to begin dissolving the racial lines that segregated Hollywood in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Anna May Wong, who has no relation to Elizabeth, was not an “American” actress. She was, though, one — if not the only — premiere actress of Chinese descent who had sauntered onto the Hollywood scene at the end of the “talkies” era, a time when actors of color were not allowed leading roles and white American entertainers were made up to look Asian.

Playwright Wong had never heard of the actress but, after seeing the picture, had to explore her feelings.

“(When responding to social issues) some people write letters and write editorials. Iwrite a play,” she says.

She looked for information about the “immaculate, beautifully trained, very sensual” Anna May, but all she could find was her filmography and photographs.

“The first time I ever saw her in a movie was ‘Shanghai Express,’ and I was really struck by what a beautiful, but well-composed, glamourous woman she was (and) that she held her own against Marlena Dietrich,”Wong says. “I used to call them ‘twin dragons’ just devouring the camera because they truly were in the same league.”

For a better understanding of early 20th-century Hollywood, Wong also visited an art colony in Wyoming and found “books and books”on Hollywood, including stories of the lives of Samuel Goldwyn and Marlena Dietrich, as well as Josephine Baker and other African-American entertainers.

But what Wong found during research was that the relationship she had with Anna May was deeper than one between a curious playwright and someone who could have been a Hollywood legend.

Wong, like Anna May, grew up in the “best ghettos”of Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Her mother and grandmother sheltered her from the continuous violence that surrounded them and encouraged her to succeed in school.

“Iwas a voracious reader, and when you live in a place like that, (reading is) your only escape. I was one of those bookworms who, when the bookmobile blew into town, I was getting 10 at a time and ducking the gunfire.”

Wong says she was always a good writer and, after graduating from high school, earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Southern California. At that point, she pursued a career as a journalist with newspapers like the now-defunct afternoon San Diego Union-Review, where she ran into professional roadblocks.

“Oh, I can tell you the horror stories,” she says, laughing. “I can remember them telling me at the San Diego Union-Review, after three years of glowing recommendations, ‘Quit, be fired or take the rewrite job! You don’t know how to write.’ And I looked around and thought, ‘They can’t be talking about me!”

But, she persevered with other journalists of color — like friend and poet Luis Rodriguez — because they “were of the Woodward-Bernstein era and we had some really high-falutin’ notions of changing the world. We had incredibly high ideals and dreams of how to make it work.” And because she thought journalism was “a practical way to take what I though was my best given skill and be able to survive.” In other words:disposable income.

Finally, after 10 years of writing for newspapers, she became disenchanted.

“I was covering the Jesse Jackson campaign and I really felt betrayed by my own newspaper that they would whitewash the news. You see, back then, journalism was changing; it was becoming more target marketing, quotas. And reporters at my newspaper were chaffing. We left in droves,”Wong remembers.

“And, honestly, I had a vague, unsettled feeling that I needed to do something more. Iloved journalism. I didn’t want to leave it. I had no plans to leave it. But I kept asking myself a very serious question: ‘Why amI not I happier?What makes me happy? When am I happy?’ ”

Her answer, she says, was: “I was always going to the theater, sitting in the dark, watching the magic that happens on stage and it was healing to me.” She just didn’t understand why.

Wong hadn’t seen her first play until she was 18, but she never forgot it. So, on April 1, 1988, she stopped being a journalist and went to New York University to major in fine arts.

It was then, in New York, that she “just started to imagine what it must have been like for (Anna May), because Iknow the kinds of things that Ihave to butt up against.

“Imagine what it must have been like to be at the end of the silent era, the start of the talkies. To be living in Chinatown, much like me, longing to get out, hating where you’re living.... To really delve into what it must have been like for people of color back in the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s and kind of imagine what it would have been like for them, and finding that there’s still so much relevance to what’s it’s like for me even though there are no more misogynation laws. But she had to contend with it. Anna May was an artist of considerable notoriety in her day, yet I felt really drawn to her because Iam also struggling as an artist. ”

Just as she felt drawn to the letters from the woman she met happenstance in Tiananmen Square which inspired the off-Broadway play, “Letters to a Student Revolutionary.”

Wong had given the woman her address, not thinking the woman would actually write her — for years — and, Wong says, “try to make me responsible for her.” After the Tiananmen Square massacre, she received no more correspondence from the woman.

The play was written in response to a graduate class assignment asking the students to adapt a song or poem. Wong, instead, adapted those letters and realized that “sometimes the truth of the matter can be discovered through beautiful lies.” That facts don’t always tell the story. “That was my first realization as a playwright,”Wong says, “that sometimes a well-told lie can really penetrate and discover and then illuminate the truth.”

She left journalism because she felt the truth was being obscured. “In fact, I wasn’t allowed to interpret because that’s not what journalists do. We are supposed to be objective; we are supposed to stand apart.”

Now, she is not standing apart. “I’m interjecting myself completely in the middle of something and really kind of enveloping it, embodying it, learning how to feel,”Wong says.

“Ihad no political opinion. I had tried to be so objective that, as a person, I couldn’t figure out when Iwas thinking about something. So, in order to have an opinion, I started to write plays. Writing this play helped discover parts of the truth about myself.”

With that in mind, her job in “China Doll” is to try and elevate Anna May Wong’s life and dispel popular misconceptions about women and people of color, in the arts and in the workplace.

“My initial impulses were kind of mundane: What was it like for women in the arts pursuing passionately your heart’s desire?What are the glass ceilings that you’ll be smacking up against? Because, that’s the saddest thing, when you can’t discover that.”

The play’s director, Catawba’s Jim Epperson, makes it clear that he wants the production to “technically, and in performance, escape the boundaries of traditional realistic theater practice.”

The flow of the action, he says, should also “transcend what one might expect. Freedom from the boundaries of stage realism is paramount in the success of this production.”

Wong says that, although she has been called up on stage after a production or reading of one of her plays, she does not write for adulation. She writes for her own expression and the education of her audience. And to paint sets. “I love to paint and hammer!” she says.

“But, seriously, I feel at home working on a play. There’s nothing more exciting than the process, even before the play begins — working with the actors, the directors, who have all come together to shape my vision, how I perceive the world, through my eyes.”

The first time she stood on stage and received applause was during a workshop reading at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

“To stand in front of an audience of about 350 or 400 people who are applauding for you… I was grateful and felt immediately that it was really important for me to continue to reach out to audiences and give them a story that they might not have heard before.”