The following are major indexes which are worth searching for most topics.
Note that your search topic term might have spelling variations or even word variations. For example: cheongsam cheung sam qipao. Another example is: Chijin no Ai Fool's Love Naomi.
Check the footnotes and bibliographies to lead you to other useful materials.
If you find a key resource you might want to do a citation search in Goggle Scholar to see who is citing the source in their research.
When using Google Scholar use the link off either the Haverford or Bryn Mawr library pages (or the link on this guide). By doing this you will have full text links to the source if they are available.
Some topics will be hard to do because many of the primary and secondary mateials will be in Chinese or Japanese.