Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong's Rendezvous with American History [Hardcover]

A With [A]n incisive guide to the tangle of race, politics, and business that Anna May Wong encountered during her rise to fame . . . Illustrated throughout with wonderfully evocative photographs and combining cinema history with social commentary, [Huangs] study offers a moving portrait of a screen siren who is far more complicated than her legendary celluloid image would suggest. Deeply researched.... [Huang] presents a fulsome panorama of creative Berlin... [and his] treatment of 1920s London, Wongs next stop, is equally detailed... Yunte Huang's superb biography of Hollywood's first Chinese American movie star . . . doubles as a reckoning with the country's attitudes about Asian people in Wong's day . . . tremendously elucidating and moving. Exhaustive . . . Huang uses popular, easily accessible prose, mixed with a professor's use of lengthy quotes from revealing sources and digressions into the influences of the day, to illuminate the main facts of the cinema idol's real-life exploits. A vital account of the life of Anna May (n?e Liu Tsong) Wong (19051961), the first Chinese American movie star . . . Huangs sympathetic treatment brings out the nuances of Wongs story, highlighting how she by turns acceded to and bristled against the stereotypes Hollywood asked her to play . . . Its a fascinatingand long overdueclose-up of a Hollywood trailblazer. While Wongs life has recently been explored in historical fiction . . . most readers will find her real story even more engaging. Huang has created a page-turner nonfiction book with this biography by fleshing out the world in which Wong lived. Huang's lively, surprising, and all-encompassing biography of Anna May Wong should be on everyones summer reading list. In a deeply researched and far-reaching biography, professor and award-winning biographer Huang positions Wongs career achievements in America and abroad against the geopolitical challenges of the 1930s . . . The result is a thorough, multillÓÙ