"A screen siren who captivated early twentieth-century global audiences, Anna May Wong (1905-1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood's most famous Chinese American actress, signing her publicity photos, with a touch of defiance, "Orientally yours." Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang, the acclaimed biographer behind Charlie Chan and Inseparable, narrates Wong's triumphant-turned-tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Wong longed to escape her humble origins, becoming obsessed with Tinseltown at an early age. Following her debut as an uncredited Chinese lantern carrier in the silent drama The Red Lantern (1919), the striking young actress appeared as a femme fatale in countless film noir and detective movies. Yet Wong ultimately hoped to defy the "Madame Butterfly" and "Dragon Lady" stereotypes that defined her early years and embarked on a career abroad. Still, as Huang shows, Wong had little success in challenging widely held perceptions of Asian women as "domineering," "deceitful," or "inscrutable," whether in London, in movies like Piccadilly (1929), that great silent-era swan song, or back in Hollywood, where she filmed what would become her most famous films, Daughter of the Dragon (1931) and Shanghai Express (1932). With "insight, empathy, and fine attention to historical detail" (Gene Luen Yang), Huang casts Wong's life story against the wider backdrop of world history, capturing the twilight of the almost ephemeral glory of the Weimar Republic, the early throes of the Great Depression in America, and the global rise of television. From the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Immigration Act of 1924, Huang pays particular attention to Chinese American history, recounting the racial violence and pernicious responses to the perceived "Yellow Peril," many of which were experienced by Wong herself. As Huang reveals, Wong's rendezvous with history features a remarkable parade of characters, including Hollywood legends Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, as well as a smitten Walter Benjamin, and an equally smitten Marlene Dietrich. Although she occasionally achieved equal billing with the likes of Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, and Chaplin, Wong would never earn equal pay -- and she returned, at the end of her life, to Chinatown. "A lonely celibate who had once liaised with countless men and occasionally women," Huang writes, Wong sought solace from the bottle, dying in 1961 at the age of just fifty-six. At once a reclamation of Wong's life and a trenchant social commentary, Daughter of the Dragon, with its lyrical writing and period illustrations, 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 too-brief time on earth." --