Daughter of Shanghai is a 1937 American crime film directed by Robert Florey and starring Anna May Wong, Charles Bickford and Buster Crabbe.

[1][2] A ruthless gang of people smugglers brings foreign nationals into the US illegally, and is prepared to drop their cargo from a plane to their deaths to avoid capture by the authorities.

Mr. Lang is shot dead and their car is dumped in the harbour, but Lan Ying Lin escapes and goes to the house of wealthy society matron and family friend Mrs. Mary Hunt, who introduces her to Burkett and government agent Kim Lee.

Lan Ying Lin turns detective, refusing the help of Kim Lee, and travels independently in search of Hartman to an island off the coast of Central America.

Meanwhile, Kim Lee gets a job on Captain Gulner's people smuggling ship and makes contact with Lan Ying Lin at Hartman's Café.

Lan Ying Lin and Kim Lee are taken onto the people smuggling plane to be dumped at sea, but they escape and swim to the shore unnoticed and come to Mrs. Hunt's house, where they are found by Jake Kelly, her chauffeur.

In addition, she was a star of the stage and a frequent guest performer on radio, and would headline the first American television series concentrating on an Asian character, The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong (DuMont, 1951).

In Daughter of Shanghai, Wong played the Asian-American female lead in a role that was rewritten for her as the heroine of the story, actively setting the plot into motion rather than the more passive character originally planned.

Anna May Wong overcame Hollywood's practice at the time of casting white actors to play Asian roles and became its first, and a leading, Asian-American movie star in the 1920s through the late 1930s.

In the story she uncovers the smuggling of illegal aliens through San Francisco’s Chinatown, cooperating with costar Philip Ahn as the first Asian G-man of the American cinema.