In the blandly named Autobiography of a Chinese Woman (1947), Yang Buwei begins by declaring that she is a “typical Chinese woman” who is married and has “four children, a very typical number for a Chinese woman to have”; she acknowledges that she has “such an amount of vanity as becomes [her] sex” (3). Yet, the subsequent pages would suggest that she is anything but a typical person, Chinese, woman, or otherwise. Yang was born in 1889 and came of age during the transition from late-Qing to Republican China. Her résumé during the 1910s to the 1920s is astounding: she was an anti-Qing revolutionary with Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui, one of the earliest Chinese women trained in science-based medicine, and the co-founder of a women’s hospital in Beijing...