Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History

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Friday, October 27, 2023 | 5:30pm to 7pm

Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood’s most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos—with a touch of defiance—“Orientally yours.” Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong’s tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai, and capturing American television in its infancy. As Huang shows, Wong’s rendezvous with history features a remarkable parade of characters, including a smitten Walter Benjamin and (an equally smitten) Marlene Dietrich. Challenging the parodically racist perceptions of Wong as a “Dragon Lady,” “Madame Butterfly,” or “China Doll,” Huang’s biography becomes a truly resonant work of history that reflects the raging anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, and ageism toward women that defined both Hollywood and America in Wong’s all-too-brief fifty-six years on earth.

Purchase Book: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631495809

Author Bio

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Dr. Yunte Huang is a distinguished scholar, best-selling author, past Guggenheim Fellow, and currently a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is fluent in Chinese and English; and has translated Chinese poetry into English, and The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound into Chinese. His ideas about the interconnections between the literature and culture of East and West are widely influential and encapsulated in two books on the “transpacific,” a term and concept he devised to interrogate East-West cross-cultural currents, both historical and imaginative. More recently, he has written three books examining East-West cultural exchanges, as these are embedded in the dynamics of racism, by focusing on cultural icons, such as Charlie Chan, the “original” Siamese twins (Chang and Eng), and Anna May Wong. His study of Anna May Wong will come out in August 2023, and his latest scholarly book (University of Chicago Press 2022) is Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics, which investigates how poetry both facilitates and complicates the production of “transpacific” meaning.