Description: "This critical cultural biography of Anna May Wong--a Chinese American actress who made close to sixty films, headlined theater and vaudeville productions, and had her own television show in 1951--examines Wong's life in order to gain an understanding of racial modernity and twentieth-century Western fantasies of China"--
Review Quotes:
"Lim's innovative book expands the existing archive on Anna May Wong and provides a new analytic framework for materials discussed in other works. Her masterful exploration of modernity and women of color through the central presence of Wong, combined with her creative ways of imagining different experiences, is both engaging and moving. Broadening the analysis from a singular celebrity, Anna May Wong shows how women of color whose careers relied on their visibility and self-fashioning encountered and engaged modernity and its various articulations. Richly nuanced, this book is elegant and lucid, absorbing and provocative."--Karen J. Leong, Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University and author of The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism