Before Nancy Kwan was cast in 1960's The World of Suzie Wong, Hollywood routinely had Caucasian actors in yellowface playing Asian characters. Kwan writes of being at the vanguard of change in the engaging and sobering The World of Nancy Kwan: A Memoir by Hollywood's Asian Superstar.
Kwan was born in Hong Kong in 1939 to a Cambridge-educated Chinese father and an English mother. Kwan's first love was dance, and after graduating from an English boarding school, she attended London's Royal Ballet School. Back in Hong Kong in 1959, she decided to observe the auditions for the female lead in a Hollywood movie centered on a young Chinese prostitute with whom an American man falls in love. A scout spotted Kwan on the sidelines; she tested for the role and (eventually) won it. After she made the high-profile The World of Suzie Wong, Kwan starred in, among other films, Flower Drum Song, the first Hollywood musical with an almost all-Asian cast.
Like Yunte Huang's Daughter of the Dragon, The World of Nancy Kwan considers the particular difficulties faced by Asian actors in Hollywood; as Kwan puts it, she wanted to play parts that weren't "written for an Asian but for a person." She writes that she turned down a role in 1993's The Joy Luck Club because the producers refused to remove a line that she felt misrepresented The World of Suzie Wong as racist--a decision that may have cost Kwan professionally but reflects a principled life well worth reading about. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer