Born around 1902, Lily Yuen grew up not in Shanghai, China, but in Savannah, Georgia, and was famous during the 1920s and 30s as a dancer, singer, and comedienne. Beneath a headline proclaiming her “A Racial Puzzle,' an article in The Afro-American (June 20, 1925 edition) revealed that “Miss Lily Yuen, a tall, agile, brown girl ... is typically Negro, and yet she is the daughter of a Chinese subject and of a colored woman." It went on to say that her father was an immigrant from China named Ton Yuen [also known as Joe Yuen] who settled down in Savannah, opened a laundry business, and married an African American woman [named Josephine, also known as Josie].

Lily started dancing professionally in 1922 and a year later was performing with Jones’ Syncopated Syncopators, an African American vaudeville revue led by Joseph Jones, who was known as “the best Jewish impersonator among colored actors” (The Afro-American, October 5, 1923). She soon earned a reputation for her Charleston strut and “eccentric” dance steps which left audiences clamoring for encore after encore.

In 1926 she joined Irvin C. Miller’s “Brown Skin Models” revue, billed in newspaper advertisements as “The Greatest Array of Colored Stars Ever Assembled” and “The Ziegfeld Follies with a Palm Beach Tan”. Lily was one of the show’s leading attractions and “a fully recognized star in her line and exceptionally in the Charlestonian realm” (Pittsburgh Courier, February 13, 1926).

By the end of 1927 Lily had left “Brown Skin Models” to form her own trio called the Three Dance Maniacs. The next year a short profile of Lily appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier (December 8, 1928), summing up her successful career thus far: Fifty Thousand Dollar Legs ... This may be only a small part of the real value of the shapely dancing limbs of one Lily Yuen, good looking, fine personality and a stage favorite wherever she puts on her large flat shoes, sweater and cap that rests at a saucy angle upon her pretty tresses. Miss Yuen has been dancing about five years. Reaching efficiency of a charming type which placed her on many bills in big time white houses, where she never failed to score. Sometimes she works in a trio other times alone. But at all times she is earnest and a hard worker. She originates all her steps, many of which are now being copied and used by Broadway white girls.

Around this time Lily settled down in New York and during the next few years performed in such shows as “Ginger Snaps of 1929”, “Fidgety Feet”, “S’prise Me!”, and “Jazz-Mad”. She continued performing throughout the 1930s, including a stint with Ethel Waters in 1938. Lily was reported to have married in 1941, but that didn’t seem to stop her career. In 1946 she was headlining nightclubs in Baltimore and Washington D.C.

She was interviewed in the 1980s and told of how she once shared an apartment with several chorus girls one of whom was Josephine Baker. “People always say she was in the Cotton Club,” Lilly complained. “Josephine wasn’t in no Cotton Club. She was just a chorus girl, baby, we all was chorus girls.”

At this point I have yet to find a death notice or obituary for Ms. Yuen.

Sources: Penn Studio; softfilmblogspot, by duriandave