Wong has emerged as something of an icon over the last two decades, the recovery of her storied life spurred by the increasing demand for Asian American representation. A staple of Asian American studies courses, last year she became the first Asian American memorialized on U.S. currency. Gail Tsukiyama is the latest artist to pay homage to Wong, through a fictionalized autobiographical novel about the actress’s life, “The Brightest Star.” The novel opens in 1960, when Wong, age 55, embarks on a trip to visit old friends. On the train, she rereads three journals she had filled over the previous years with her life story. The novel splices the contents of the notebooks with Wong’s retrospective reflections.

“The Brightest Star” reprises plenty of biographical details of Wong’s life, but it stops short of offering any depth. Upon finishing the book, I had the uncanny feeling that I had read this all before. And maybe I had, insofar as I had skimmed the Wikipedia entry on the actress when I first encountered her in my studies. “The Brightest Star” is the Soylent of novels: The words pass through smoothly, but there is nothing to sink one’s teeth into. What we have is not so much a literary rendering of the talented, tortured actress but rather a cardboard cutout of a character in American history. The first-person voice — a rhetorical device that should have allowed for intimacy and personality — is eerily lifeless.

Part of the problem is that the novel relies on clichéd superlatives instead of delivering fully realized scenes, as when Wong, as the narrator of “The Brightest Star,” tells us that meeting Gertrude Stein in 1934 was “the beginning of an evening [she] would never forget.” Thrilling if true, but instead of inviting us into that experience, the scene cuts abruptly to her tour around Europe the following year. The actress Marlene Dietrich “was like no one [she’]d ever met before.” Yet the descriptions of Wong and Dietrich’s brief dalliance following their fateful first meeting in Berlin are vague. “She took me to bed as candidly as she had taken so many others. … I was such a novice that I found her touch and the softness of her skin and breasts a complete revelation.” The reader is left wondering how, exactly, as the narrative skips ahead. There’s a thrumming rush to the plot, as if Tsukiyama felt a self-imposed pressure to cover every year of Wong’s life, from birth to death.

The desire to honor this wildly gifted but long overlooked Asian American actress is noble. Representation matters. But how does it matter? The injunction must be a bit more specific. Representation does not matter simply for its own sake; it matters because it has the power to alter our lived reality. The real-life Wong gestures toward the dangers of representation done poorly in her oft-cited quote: “I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain — murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass.” “The Chinese” are not just villains, Wong insists, and confining on-screen representation of Chinese people to villainy constrains the possibilities of what it means to be Chinese.

The corrective to bad representation, then, cannot be the creation of a blandly relatable puppet who recites the plight of the Chinese American on demand, even if she is more palatable than the dragon lady. Instead, representation should expand the horizons of Chinese identity, beyond relatability. This might, for example, entail depicting characters that are as surprising and, occasionally, as unlikable as real people. Turning the bloodless pages of “The Brightest Star,” I yearned for a glimpse of Wong’s bloodthirsty ambition or the poison of her resentment at her professional and romantic rejections. Surely she did not rise to such great heights against all odds by meekly smiling, dazzled by the celebrities she met, as “The Brightest Star” intimates. A great irony haunts the novel: Although it seeks to challenge the films that pandered to a White audience that could not stomach seeing a Chinese actress on screen, the novel itself panders to a White audience that hungers for tales of legible ethnic struggle.

In “Ornamentalism,” the scholar Anne Anlin Cheng perceptively observes that the “yellow woman” is racialized and gendered through her relationship to objecthood — as an ornament. Cheng dedicates a chapter to Wong, whose iconic image is produced simultaneously by the objectifying practices of film, celebrity, racialization and sexualization. Instead of bringing Anna May Wong to life, “The Brightest Star” reinforces her objectification as an ornament and affixes her to the glass menagerie of liberal multiculturalism.

Kathy Chow is an assistant editor at the Yale Review. Her writing has appeared in the Point and Politico Magazine.