Based on extensive archival research, this panel explores the powerful role that advanced American education and global circulation of Hollywood cinema played in the making of modern Chinese womanhood through the prism of the versatile careers of three trailblazers in medicine and performing arts. It recaptures the transpacific journeys of these extraordinary women against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow in the United States and waves of wars and revolutions in China. The panel uncovers uncharted terrain by connecting modern Chinese history with Asian American studies from a gendered perspective. It illustrates effective ways to pair regional history with studies of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and media through a multi-lingual and transnational approach.

Yi Sun’s paper focuses on Jin Yunmei (1864-1934), the first Chinese woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. It traces Jin’s groundbreaking contributions to medicine, health, nutrition, and education in both China and the United States. As a director of the Beiyang Woman’s Hospital in Tianjin, she founded a woman’s medical school and the first nursing school in China to train professionals devoted to woman’s health care. By fulfilling an official mission assigned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to find a new source of protein for American soldiers during WWI, Jin introduced the legendary dietary item tofu to Americans. Yunxiang Gao’s paper explores how Chinese American actress Soo Yong’s (ca. 1903-84) advanced American education under the noted educator and philosopher John Dewey and transpacific connections with Chinese diplomats, intellectuals, and artists such as “King of Peking opera” Mei Lanfang nurtured her ethnic dignity and artistic talent. Such a highly intellectual, aristocratically glamourous, yet asexual image of an Asian woman on screen and stage broke down dominant stereotypical images of Dragon Lady and Lotus Blossom/China Doll, defying and diversifying conventional narratives on Asians and Asian Americans. Yong’s legacy shines brightly as a positive media pioneer for Chinese Americans. At a time when being Chinese was associated with marginalization, ignorance and servitude, she instead showed a cosmopolitan “Chinese woman at her best.” Danke Li’s paper focuses on the transpacific cultural engagements of Gladys Li (1908-2003), a writer, film maker, and activist. Li’s remarkable achievements were capped by the 1941 documentary film Kukan on China’s resistance against Japan, which was awarded a special Oscar in 1942. Yet, relegated as “Tech Assistant,” her contributions went largely unacknowledged, while Rey Scott, the film’s white male photographer, received the academy award instead. Such incidents allowed Danke Li to explore the complicated racial and gender power dynamics to define modern multi-cultural Chinese womanhood.

By rescuing the stories of these three pioneers from the thick fog of history, this panel illustrates how education and cinema, powerful tools of globalization and modernization, shaped transnational Chinese womanhood, which radiates into larger pools of Chinese and American history.