Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1091802 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

From the Inside Flap
"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

About the Author
Karen J. Leong is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Arizona State University

Customer Reviews

THE CHINA MYSTIQUE: Perception, Transformation and Identity
China endured a series of dramatic, and often tumultuous transformations in the last century. The 1930's and 1940's, in particular, were decades of major political, social, economic and technological change, and consequently, of major shifts in perception and awareness of the Asian nation and its people by the United States.

Karen J. Leong's THE CHINA MYSTIQUE: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism, a work of solid scholarship and uncommon acuity, focuses on America's evolving images of China during these decades, specifically as reflected in the public lives of three diverse and singular women widely identified with the emerging nation: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong and Mayling Soong. Scrupulously researched, the book is academic in tone, and written with precision, perception and clarity.

Leong argues that the ability to travel, and the nascent global mass-culture of the day granted these women a broader field of recognition and enhanced form of celebrity than hitherto attainable, thus facilitating a greater sphere of influence contributing to the gendering (or feminization) of a distant country traditionally held to be completely patriarchal, alien and inscrutable to Western eyes.

Adapting the late Edward Said's notion of orientalism--a highly politicized analysis of European colonial perspectives of "the Orient," and the resulting and enduring power relations between Asia and the West--Leong defines "American orientalism" as a distorted image of the Chinese as "primitive, slavish, exotic, manipulative, and amoral." She writes that these images were diametrically opposed to the positive traits of modernity, freedom and fidelity celebrated in American nationalism.

These negative images began to erode with increased immigration and diplomacy between China and the United States, and also through the efforts of American protestant mission boards. As China evolved into a strategically significant ally in the struggle against Japanese aggression, the old images were replaced by a romanticized and progressive view of China. Leong defines this Americanized and "highly gendered" reimaging as the "China mystique."

The author posits these evolving perceptions of Nationalist China concurrent with the United States' own immergence as a world power, and identifies the transformation of "American orientalism" to the "China mystique" as adjunct to America's rise to globalism. This shift of perception is an underlying theme of the book, and Leong masterfully studies the nuances, inconsistencies, contradictions and real power of this change.

Ultimately, this is as much a book about America and Americans, as it is about China.

In the book, Leong examines these women whose "transnational" association with China rendered each a personification of a specific aspect of the Sino-American cultural and political axis: Pearl S. Buck, a European American novelist who spent much of her life in China and was recognized worldwide as an uniquely qualified authority on China and the Chinese, Anna May Wong, a Los Angeles-born Chinese American actress who endeavored to cultivate a hybrid identity embracing both cultures, and Mayling Soong, (more commonly known as Madame Chaing Kai-shek), an American-educated daughter of a westernized Chinese capitalist who garnered sympathy and support for the often repressive Nationalist government as the eloquent and charismatic "First Lady" of China.

If these women helped to put an accessible and very feminine face on China, it was hardly one of traditional timidity and subordination. Instead, it was a countenance that expressed the newfound independence and the fluidity of identity befitting a "New China" and its stature as an emerging democracy. In fact, their unique positions and development of multifarious identities granted each of the women elements of power not typically afforded persons of their gender and/or race at that time.

Buck, Wong and Soong each tested the limits of their transnational status, and Leong expresses their particular experiences within broader political, cultural and historical contexts. It seems that the distinct negotiations of the cultural and political landscape, and the fluid assumption of identity through self-definition evidenced by these women is their lasting legacy.

In the end, Leong exposes America's thorough reassessment and seemingly enlightened appreciation of China and the Chinese in the outward embrace of progressivism, modernity and democratization for an expedient and opportune stance assumed in its own transformation from an isolationist nation to a global power. She also demonstrates how Buck, Wong and Soong each encountered reversals and barriers in their individual careers despite this period of enlightened perspectives on China.

Still, Leong is adept at separating propaganda and hypocrisy from the actual experience and expressions of power manifested in the lives and words of Buck, Wong and Soong. She acknowledges the real long-term and far-reaching effects that these women had on the development of cultural pluralism and the myriad ways in which American citizens choose to define themselves as a national community.

Leong's book is narrow in focus and specific in scope, but expansive in themes and relevance. As an account of personae in a specific historical milieu, a cultural study of perceptions of Americans and Chinese (and Chinese Americans) in the 1930's and 1940's, and as a thought provoking treatment of themes of identity, race, gender and nationality Leong's book succeeds on all levels.

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