Throughout the history of the United States images of China have populated the American imagination. Always in flux these images shift rapidly as they did during the early decades of the twentieth century. In this erudite and original study Karen J. Leong explores the gendering of American orientalism during the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on three women who were popularly and publicly associated with China—Pearl S. Buck Anna May Wong and Mayling Soong—Leong shows how each negotiated what it meant to be American Chinese American and Chinese against the backdrop of changes in the United States as a national community and as an international power.
The China Mystique illustrates how each of these women encountered the possibilities as well as the limitations of transnational status in attempting to shape her own opportunities. During these two decades each woman enjoyed expanding visibility due to an increasingly global mass culture rising nationalism in Asia the emergence of the United States from the shadows of imperialism to world power and the more assertive participation of women in civic and consumer culture.
Karen J. Leong is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona State University
“An important venture into a little studied topic of Chinese American history and US cultural history. Through Leong’s work we learn how race cultural experiences class and political power allowed each woman to represent China and the United States."—Xiaojian Zhao author of Remaking Chinese America: Immigration Family and Community 1940-1965
“Not since Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound has a book so artfully interrogated popular culture US women’s history and international relations.”—Vicki Ruiz coeditor of Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States
260 pp.6 x 9Illus: 18 b/w photographs
9780520244238$34.95|£30.00Paper
Jul 2005