Wong Liu Tsong, known professionally as Anna May Wong, was an American actress, considered the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood, as well as the first Chinese American actress to gain international recognition. Her varied career spanned silent film, sound film, television, stage, and radio.
Donaldina Cameron was a New Zealand-born American Presbyterian missionary who was a pioneer in the fight against slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown, who helped more than 2,000 Chinese immigrant girls and women escape from forced prostitution or indentured servitude. She was known as "Fahn Quai" or the "White Devil" of Chinatown, as well as the "Angry Angel of Chinatown" and "Lo Mo".
Li Bingbing is a Chinese actress. She gained critical acclaim for her role in Seventeen Years (1999) and received widespread success with films such as A World Without Thieves (2004), The Knot (2006), The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), The Message (2009), and Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010). Li has also starred in Hollywood films Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) and The Meg (2018).
This is an alphabetical index of topics related to Asian Americans.
All That Matters is a novel by Wayson Choy. First published in 2004 by Doubleday Canada, it is the sequel to his debut novel, The Jade Peony (1995), and was nominated for the Giller Prize.
Forbidden City was a Chinese nightclub and cabaret in San Francisco, which was in business from 1938 to 1970, and operated on the second floor of 363 Sutter Street, between Chinatown and Union Square.
Irene Tsu is an actress who started in the film Flower Drum Song in 1961. She was featured in an advertising campaign in the 1960s. She speaks English and three varieties of Chinese.
On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family describes 100 years of author Lisa See's family history, providing a complex portrait of her family’s hard work, suffering, failures and successes as they moved from China to the United States. Speaking of the Chinese side of her family, See has said: "Things were so fractured and wild at home ... But the weekends with my grandparents became the real center for me ... It was the side of the family I identified more with. It was fun, romantic, solid".
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a 2005 novel by Lisa See set in nineteenth-century China. In her introduction to the novel, See writes that Lily, the narrator, was born on June 5, 1824—"the fifth day of the sixth month of the third year of the Daoguang Emperor's reign". The novel begins in 1903, when Lily is 80 years old. It continues on to tell the story of her life from birth, childhood, marriage, and old age. During her lifetime, Lily lives through the reigns of four emperors of the Qing dynasty: Daoguang (1820–1850); Xianfeng (1850–1861); Tongzhi (1861–1875); and Guangxu (1875–1908).
Peony in Love is the fifth of Lisa See's novels. Her previous novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and Peony in Love emphasize the difficulty 19th- and 17th-century Chinese women had in achieving freedom and identity in a society that was both male dominated and rigid in its gender expectations.
Carolyn See was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for The Washington Post for 27 years.
Shanghai Girls is a 2009 novel by Lisa See. It centers on the complex relationship between two sisters, Pearl and May, as they go through great pain and suffering in leaving war-torn Shanghai, and try to adjust to the difficult roles of wives in arranged marriages and of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. This work marks a return to many of the themes the author addressed in her first major work, On Gold Mountain, a memoir of her family's history. The novel is set between 1937–57 and matches Parts IV and V of the memoir.
Beverley Jackson was an American writer on Chinese culture and fashion, as well as international travel, polo and style. Her published works cover life in 1920s and 1930s. She published a book called Dolls of Spain in 2017. As a freelance writer, her articles were published in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vogue Paris, British Vogue, US Vogue, and Time. Jackson lectured around the world, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Art Shanghai, and Civilization Museum Singapore. She was a featured speaker at the Shanghai International Writers Conference 2006. Jackson was a curator of Chinese textiles at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum for 20 years, and was a collector of Chinese imperial robes since 1975. She wove pine needle baskets exhibited at Casa Gallery and her collages had three major exhibitions in Santa Barbara galleries. Jackson also wrote a weekly column for The Voice.
John Jenkins Espey was a novelist, memoirist and literary scholar, born in Shanghai where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries. Espey returned to the United States to study at Occidental College in 1930, then went to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1935. In 1938, he became a member of the faculty at his alma mater, then taught in the English Department at UCLA from 1948 until his death.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a 2011 historical drama film directed by Wayne Wang, based on the novel of the same name written by Lisa See. The film stars Gianna Jun, Li Bingbing, Vivian Wu, Hugh Jackman, and Archie Kao.
Dreams of Joy is a 2011 novel by Lisa See. It debuted as #1 in the New York Times list of best selling fiction. In this book See completes the circle she began in Shanghai Girls. See's novel uses Mao's China as her background, but her story focuses on the change and growth of her main characters – Pearl, Joy, Z.G., and May. Susan Salter Reynolds suggests that “it’s a story with characters who enter a reader’s life, take up residence, and illuminate the myriad decisions and stories that make up human history.”
Laotong is a type of relationship in Chinese culture formerly practiced in Hunan that bonded two girls together for eternity as kindred sisters.
China Dolls is a 2014 novel by Lisa See. It depicts the largely forgotten world of Chinese American nightclubs and performers of the '30s and '40s. The book opens with a quotation attributed to Buddha: "Only three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth." See organizes her narrative around these three elements – The Sun (October 1938 – August 1940; The Moon ; and The Truth. The novel briefly concludes with a reunion of many of the main characters in 1988.
Gilbert Lester Leong (1911-1996) was a Chinese-American architect who designed churches and public buildings in the Los Angeles area. He was the first Chinese-American to graduate from USC with a degree in architecture. His designs helped shape the architecture of postwar Los Angeles and Chinatown. Leong was also a co-founder of the East West Bank in 1973. The bank was set up to serve the Chinese American community in Southern California.
The Jade Pendant is a 2017 American Western film directed by Leong Po-Chih and starring Godfrey Gao as Tom Wong, Clara Lee as Peony, following a tragic love story leading to the largest mass lynching in American history, of 19 Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles' Chinatown, in 1871.
