Nancy Kwan tells the behind-the-scenes story of playing a Hollywood stereotype

This book cover image released by Legacy Lit shows “The World of Nancy Kwan” by Nany Kwan with Deborah Davis.

Demure, submissive and erotic, Suzie Wong is that bigger-than-life stereotype, that caricature Asian women grew up with in the U.S.

We may have also secretly hoped to play that geisha-like image to win our way out of our oppression. But over the years, some of us grew to resent it, fight it and reject it, hoping to claim our true identity and dignity as a person.

In “The World of Nancy Kwan,” a memoir by the pioneering Hollywood star, we hear from the real-life woman who played Suzie Wong.

We learn an Asian actor getting to play an Asian role was a victory back in those days, as the roles were taken by white actors wearing strange slant-eyed makeup.

Kwan was born in Hong Kong in 1939. Her father was Chinese, an architect with a love for movies. Her mother was English, a model and actor, although she left when Kwan was young, and she was raised by a stepmother. It was hard because being Eurasian was an anomaly, she recalls.

“I’ve broken barriers, celebrated achievements, overcome disappointments and survived tragedies, all part of my remarkable journey from Hong Kong to Hollywood and beyond. This is my story,” she writes in the prologue.

Her book is speckled with the big names of that era, Pat Boone, Katharine Hepburn, Dick Van Dyke. Some passages read like a gossip column, such as her accounts of her friendship with Bruce Lee.

But she also depicts the racial barriers of that period.

All women, especially in Hollywood, were trying to be beautiful and desirable. In fact, being dubbed “the Asian Bardot,” referring to Brigitte Bardot, was a genuine compliment.

She talks about how Jack Soo, a Japanese American who portrays a nightclub owner in “Flower Drum Song,” was incarcerated with other Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

Kwan believes her story is about hard work and advancement despite racism, not succumbing to it.

After all, Asian actors’ roles used to be limited to “Fu Manchu villains, hypersexualized Dragon Ladies and comic buffoons” and “shopkeepers, maids and houseboys,” according to Kwan. YURI KAGEYAMA