Yunte Huang’s Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History recounts the life of the famous film star from her childhood through her career around the world and finally her postwar years struggling to find work in an industry that prizes youth at the expense of careers. The book completes Huang’s “Rendezvous with American History” trilogy that began with biographies of the fictional character Charlie Chan and the conjoined twins Cheng and Eng. Like those previous books, Huang’s study uses his protagonist to shine a light on all aspects of American culture and the role Asian Americans played in their development. In following Wong’s life, Huang frequently shifts his focus to analyze accounts of others in Anna May’s life as well as official policies, historical anecdotes, Hollywood gossip, details of Japanese aggression in Asia during the 1930s, and more. The result is a literary biography that will appeal to those looking for an informative account of Anna May Wong’s life without the format of an academic work such as Graham Russel Gao Hodges and Shirley Jennifer Lim’s books. Though Huang writes for a popular audience, he thoroughly documents his sources so that interested readers may follow his research on their own. He demonstrates how Wong’s life and career reveal more about the lives of Asian-Americans and the LGBTQ community in Hollywood’s Golden Age. Huang’s Daughter of the Dragon is a great read for those looking to learn more about Anna May Wong following recent efforts to honor her legacy from the US Mint and Barbie. ( )

Compelling story of the life of Anna Mae Wong, daughter of a Chinese laundryman in Los Angeles, whose dream from girlhood was to be a Hollywood star. Well, she sort of made it, as this book shows. But she had to work harder than anyone else and suffer ridiculous casting rejections, because as an Asian, she couldn't play one if the lead was a yellowface White actor. This book follows Anna Mae as she makes pictures in America and Europe, starting in silent films and moving into the talkies, where she formed her lasting image as the Dragon Lady. This book shows how unfair all that was. There are great pictures of Wong at various stages in her career. Certainly the author admires her and does his best to paint her in the best light--but you know what? It's convincing. Unfortunately, there aren't more films we can watch her in. But when we do watch one now, we can appreciate the human being underneath the film persona. Well done and well researched. ( )

Anna May Wong’s stardom has surged in the 20 years since her ‘rediscovery’. Arguably the first Chinese-American film star, following her death in 1961 her place in Hollywood history was overlooked until 2004, with the release of Graham Russell Gao Hodges’ biography Anna May Wong: From Laundryman’s Daughter to Hollywood Legend and the simultaneous reissue of Wong’s best known film, Piccadilly (1929). These events set in motion a Wong renaissance that continues apace today. In 2022, the US Mint issued a quarter bearing Wong’s likeness. She has appeared as a character in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (2022) and the miniseries Hollywood (2020). The latter features a counterfactual twist with Wong receiving an Oscar, something she was denied in her lifetime. The English actress Gemma Chan has announced a film based on Hodges’ biography. Hollywood, it seems, has fallen in love with Anna May Wong.

Yunte Huang is the latest writer to attempt a telling of Wong’s life. His book completes a trilogy on early Chinese-American popular culture, each of which bears the same subtitle, ‘Rendezvous with American History’. The first book, in 2011, examined the fictional Chinese ‘honorable detective’ Charlie Chan; the second in 2015 told the story of the ‘original’ Siamese twins, Chang and Eng. Both books were revelatory and succeeded in humanising figures often portrayed in (racist) stereotypes.

Anna May Wong presents her most recent biographer with different challenges. Hodges offered a complete narrative of Wong’s life in his 2004 book. Huang seeks to distinguish his biography with historical context. He covers Wong’s early life as a laundryman’s daughter with evocative descriptions of Los Angeles’ Chinese laundries and their ubiquity in silent-era films as a representation of ‘noisy operations and repetitious actions’. Wong endured troubled teenage years but made her film debut as an energetic extra in The Red Lantern (1919). From there, she made a rapid ascent to stardom in the early 1920s with roles in Toll of the Sea (a 1922 reworking of Madame Butterfly), The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and the first cinema adaptation of Peter Pan (1924) as Tiger Lily.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Gao Yunxiang is Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is currently finishing a biography of Soo Yong.

nonfiction/biography (international film and vaudeville star) and Chinese-American history

I hadn't read any Yunte Huang's books yet but was immediately impressed by how well this is written. I had recently read 2 other books about AMW (one nonfiction, one fiction) but didn't enjoy them even half as much as I am enjoying this one. The short chapters are packed with carefully researched details and are written in a way that gives the reader a real sense of the person as well as the time period she lived in. The many photos provided as illustration include film posters and stills, as well as other portraits and historical artifacts that complement the text well.

All the thumbs, all the way up -- highly recommended.

also recommended:
Lon Chaney speaks (graphic nonfiction about the child of Deaf adults actor)
Agent Josephine (biography of international star and spy Josephine Baker) ( )