| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. By Karen J. Leong. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. x, 236 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-520-24422-2. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 0-520-24423-0.)

Karen J. Leong explores the shift in American attitudes toward China that took place in the 1930s and 1940s, when a long-standing discourse of difference and inferiority gave way to a "romanticized, progressive, and highly gendered image" of China as a modernizing country and fledgling democracy that was following in America's footsteps (p. 1). Leong traces the emergence of what she calls "the China mystique" through the lives of three extraordinary women from the worlds of literature, film, and politics: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, and Mayling Soong (better known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek). Together they dominated the American media's representations of China, as authors and subjects of novels, essays, memoirs, films, celebrity magazine stories, newspaper articles, newsreels, and political pageants. Each woman served as a bridge between China and America and strove to represent the two countries as more similar than different.

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