Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco
Page 15
Alice Sue Fun at the Canton Bazaar, where she worked as a salesgirl in 19 15. (Courtesy of Alice Sue Fun)
My mother lived a very sheltered life. Even up to her old age, she never trusted herself to go out alone. She was afraid that she'll get lost. And then she didn't like to exercise a lot, or walk a lot.... I would go out anytime I want and anywhere I want. Even in foreign countries, I wasn't afraid to go out alone. In Hong Kong, I went exploring all over on the bus.... I like to be independent. I don't like to always be accompanied by people. I guess I had enough of that when I was a young girl.
Whereas Alice was raised according to Chinese tradition, Florence Chinn Kwan faced fewer restrictions growing up in San Francisco Chinatown because of the liberal middle-class background of her parents. Her father was a missionary teacher who had come to the United States when he was twelve years old. He later returned to China to marry and was able to bring his wife back to America. Both parents were highly nationalistic toward their homeland and modern in their chosen lifestyle. After the 1911 Revolution, her father was among the first to cut his queue; her mother, to unbind her feet; and both, to allow their daughter to appear as a princess in the parade that celebrated the founding of the new republic. Whereas Alice always dressed in Chinese-style clothes, Florence wore Western dresses. "My father didn't want me to wear Chinese clothes. He said he didn't want people staring at me and saying you're Chinese, you're not American," she explained.6 Although she, too, was not allowed to go out alone, her parents were not as strict as Alice's. Her father took her along on his daily walks to the park, and often downtown or to Chinatown to shop. Also unlike Alice, she was rarely physically punished. The only time it happened was when she slid down a bannister and broke her front teeth.
Pauline Fong Woo (left) and Florence Chinn Kwan (right) as flower girls in 19o8. (Courtesy of Florence Chinn Kwan)
While Alice described her parents as uneducated, hard-working, strict, and distant to their children, Florence remembered her father as gentle, honest, and devout. "He would hold me on his lap while reading in his study. He was quite artistic and used to draw pictures for me when I was a child." Her mother was patient, alert, and humble, with a great capacity for learning. Like Alice's mother, she sewed at home to supplement her husband's income. But as Florence recalled, she was also quite active outside the home. Aside from starting the Women's Missionary Society at the Chinese Congregational church, "she was always helping the sick and the needy by going to their homes, cooking for them and caring for them all without compensation."7
Florence's leisurely life was a marked contrast to Alice's burdensome one. She had few responsibilities at home, aside from occasionally helping with the dishes. She recalled playing tennis on Saturdays with her brothers in the Italian section of town, where Chinese were not welcomed. "We would go early and climb the fence," she said.' To do her share for the church, Florence taught English to Chinese immigrants at home five days a week, contributing her monthly earnings of $5 to the Women's Missionary Society.
Whereas Alice's parents did not believe that girls needed more than an elementary education (nor could they afford it), Florence's father treated her like his sons and encouraged her to pursue college-at a time when it was still considered unusual for Chinese girls to finish high school. As a young girl, Florence was also one of the few Chinese Americans to attend school outside Chinatown. Her parents enrolled her at Denman Girls' School until the board of education insisted that all Chinese students be restricted to the Oriental Public School. After elementary school, Florence went on to graduate from Girls' High School in 19 15. Throughout her public school years, her parents also had her attend the Chinese school they had started at the Chinese Congregational church. Although her mother wanted her to marry and settle down to a domestic life upon graduation from high school, her father told her to continue on to college, earn a Ph.D., and then go serve China:
He said that people are coming over here and the United States was building things over there and they wanted better relations between [the two countries]. My father was teaching English to men here, and if I went back to teach, then when they came they would get better jobs over here.... And also, my mother had that missionary goal of bringing Christianity to China.'
In this way, the Christian and nationalist idea of serving China and her people were instilled in Florence at an early age. After attaining a bachelor's degree in English at the all-women's Mills College (she was the first Chinese woman to graduate from there, in 1919) and a master's degree in religious education at the University of Chicago, Florence de tided to try and serve the needs of Chinese women in San Francisco. For two years she worked as the associate secretary of the Chinese YWCA, and she also helped to start the Girls' Club at the Chinese Congregational church. Then she decided to marry a medical student from China whom she had met at the University of Chicago. She gave up her job at the YWCA to accompany him to China, where he worked as a physician and she volunteered at the YWCA for the next twenty-six years, thereby fulfilling her parents' wishes of serving China.
Although both Alice and Florence ended up leaving the sheltered environment of Chinatown to go abroad, major differences in their upbringing led each of them to make that decision for their own reasons. Coming from a working-class background and raised according to traditional values, Alice was not given the same educational and social opportunities as Florence. But having to leave home to work made her a more independent woman, allowing her to marry the man of her choice against her parents' wishes and then take a job in which she could travel around the world. In contrast, because Florence's parents were middleclass and guided by Christian and Chinese nationalist values, she received a more progressive upbringing than Alice. Not only did Florence enjoy a more intimate relationship with her parents, but she was also encouraged to pursue higher education with the goal of serving China. Whereas Alice had to defy her parents, both of Florence's parents supported her choice of marriage partner and the decision to make her life with him in China. Indeed, it was her mother's "pin money" from taking in sewing for many years that paid for the young couple's passage to China in 19z3.
Cultural Conflicts at Home
As young daughters, Chinese American girls had little choice but to give unquestioning obedience to their parents. However, as they became older and more exposed to a Western lifestyle and ideas of individuality and equality through public school, church, and popular culture, some began to resist the traditional beliefs and practices of their immigrant parents, even to the extent of ridiculing their "old-fashioned" ways. Like most second-generation children, Chinese Americans experienced cultural conflicts and identity dilemmas when they tried to reconcile the different value system of their home culture with that of mainstream American society.10 Many disagreed with their parents over the degree of individuality and freedom allowable, the proper relationship between sexes, and choice of leisure activities, education, occupation, and marriage. For young Chinese American women, the cultural clash was often compounded by stricter adherence to traditional gender roles and by the parental favoritism bestowed on the boys in the family. Depending on the family's economic circumstances, daughters were usually expected to forgo higher education in deference to their brothers. They were also expected to stay close to home and do all the housework, while their brothers were allowed greater freedom of movement and had fewer responsibilities at home. Parents frowned on their sons taking up sports and partying instead of studying, but disapproved of their daughters going out at all, dancing, or even mixing, with the opposite sex. Adhering to the double moral standards in the community, they were more concerned about regulating their daughters' sexuality than their sons', of protecting their daughters' virginity and the family's upright standing in the community. I i
It is evident from written accounts that second-generation women of middle-class background were preoccupied with generational and cultural conflicts, especially those that revolved around gender. The same cannot be sai
d of working-class women, in the absence of comparable evidence. Most likely, working-class daughters also experienced such conflicts, but they were probably more concerned with making a living than with challenging traditional gender roles. As the following stories of Jade Snow Wong, Esther Wong, and Flora Belle Jan (all of middle-class background) reveal, there were at least three patterns of response to the conflict over gender roles: acquiescence, resistance, or accommodationcreating a new gender identity by combining different aspects of two cultures. Borrowing from Karl Mannheim's concept of the sociology of generations, we find that accommodation-as exemplified in the story of Jade Snow Wong's life-was the dominant response of the second generation under study.12
As she states in her first autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, Jade Snow Wong was the fifth daughter in a family of seven children. I3 Her father owned and ran a Chinatown garment factory and was an ordained Protestant minister on the side. Her mother was the faithful wife and benevolent mother, constantly hard at work at the sewing machine. The family was among the first in Chinatown to have a bathroom equipped with running water in their home. Although her father was progressive in many ways, he still believed in a Confucian upbringing for his children. From an early age, Jade Snow was taught her proper place as a daughter in a traditional Chinese family and insulated community:
A little girl never questioned the commands of Mother and Father, unless prepared to receive painful consequences. She never addressed an older person by name.... Even in handing them something, she must use both hands to signify that she paid them undivided attention. Respect and order-these were the key words of life. It did not matter what were the thoughts of a little girl; she did not voice them.14
So ingrained was this deference in her that even as an adult she chose to write her autobiography in the third person singular, signifying her understanding of her proper place in the Confucian hierarchal order:
Although a "first person singular" book, this story is written in the third person from Chinese habit. The submergence of the individual is literally practiced. In written Chinese, prose or poetry, the word "I" almost never appears, but is understood. In corresponding with an older person like my father, I would write in words half the size of the regular ideographs, "small daughter Jade Snow," when referring to myself; to one of contemporary age, I would put in small characters, "younger sister"but never "I." Should my father, who owes me no respect, write to me, he would still refer to himself in the third person, "Father." Even written in English, an "I" book by a Chinese would seem outrageously immodest to anyone raised in the spirit of Chinese propriety.15
As was true for most of her peers, Jade Snow's parents did not spare the rod. "Teaching and whipping were almost synonymous," Jade Snow wrote. "No one ever troubled to explain. Only through punishment did she learn that what was proper was right and what was improper was wrong." 16 It was expected that she excel in both American and Chinese schools, that she learn to cook and sew, that she look after her baby brother, work in her father's sewing factory, and help her mother with the household chores, and that she never go out unless escorted and with her parents' permission.
In the area of education, Jade Snow's father was more progressive than most other Chinese parents. As a Christian and a nationalist reformer, he believed in education for his daughters as well as his sons, at least through high school. Expressing the sentiments of a Chinese nationalist, he explained to Jade Snow:
Many Chinese were very short-sighted. They felt that since their daughters would marry into a family of another name, they would not belong permanently in their own family clan. Therefore, they argued that it was not worth while to invest in their daughters' book education. But my answer was that since sons and their education are of primary importance, we must have intelligent mothers. If nobody educates his daughters, how can we have intelligent mothers for our sons? If we do not have good family training, how can China be a strong nation?17
For the sake of a strong China, it was equally important that his children be educated in the Chinese language and have an appreciation of Chinese culture. Even before Jade Snow started kindergarten, her father began tutoring her in Chinese at home. By the time she was ready for Chinese school, she knew enough Chinese to be placed in the third grade. Jade Snow, in essence, had a bilingual and bicultural education, which would later help shape her ethnic and gender identity.
Once Jade Snow left the sheltered environment of home for public school, she began to notice subtle but significant differences between Western and Chinese ways. Creativity that had been stifled in the regimentation and rote memorization of Chinese school was given free rein in public school activities such as making butter, painting, and sports. Children were encouraged to speak their minds and expected to strike back in self-defense when hit. Whereas her parents believed in maintaining a distance and encouraging their children through negative reinforcement, her public school teachers practiced the opposite. When Jade Snow was hurt by a flying baseball bat, her teacher Miss Mullohand comforted her by embracing her. Unaccustomed to such intimacy, Jade Snow broke away in confusion and embarrassment.
Christian organizations such as the Chinese YWCA and library books also broadened her outlook on life. When she went to the Chinese YWCA for piano lessons, she experienced "American dishes of strange and deliciously different flavors" cooked by her older sister who worked there, and she found that to see other faces than those of her friends at school and at the factory, and "to play without care for an hour or two were real joys."18 Through reading, she discovered how different life was outside Chinatown: "Temporarily she forgot who she was, or the constant requirements of Chinese life, while she delighted in the adventures of the Oz books, the Little Colonel, Yankee Girl, and Western cowboys, for in these books there was absolutely nothing resembling her own life."" Later, as a live-in housekeeper with the Kaisers, a European American family composed of husband and wife, two young children, and a large dog, she was able to observe first-hand the different lifestyle of a rich family:
It was a home where children were heard as well as seen; where parents considered who was right or wrong, rather than who should be respected; where birthday parties were a tradition, complete with lighted birthday cakes, where the husband kissed his wife and the parents kissed their children; where the Christmas holidays meant fruit cake, cookies, presents, and gay parties; where the family was actually concerned with having fun together and going out to play together; where the problems and difficulties of domestic life and children's discipline were untangled, perhaps after tears, but also after explanations; where the husband turned over his pay check to his wife to pay the bills; and where, above all, each member, even down to and including the dog, appeared to have the inalienable right to assert his individuality-in fact, where that was expectedin an atmosphere of natural affection.20
Through these influences, Jade Snow unwittingly became acculturated into mainstream American life despite her parents' attempts to raise her according to Chinese tradition. Cultural conflict, not surprisingly, was the result. Her emerging desire for recognition as an individual erupted when her father denied her request for a college education because of limited family resources and because her brother-as the son who would bear the Wong name and make pilgrimages to the ancestral burial grounds-deserved it more. She bitterly questioned her father's judgment:
How can Daddy know what an American advanced education can mean to me? Why should Older Brother be alone in enjoying the major benefits of Daddy's toil? There are no ancestral pilgrimages to be made in the United States! I can't help being born a girl. Perhaps, even being a girl, I don't want to marry, just to raise sons! Perhaps I have a right to want more than sons! I am a person, besides being a female! Don't the Chinese admit that women also have feelings and minds?21
On another occasion, she dared to argue with her parents over her right to go out on a date. She was sixteen and had found a way to attend junior college by working as a housekeeper. Ins
pired by a sociology professor who advocated that young people had rights as individuals, Jade Snow decided not to ask her parents for permission to go out. When her father asked where she was going and with whom, she refused to tell him. "Very well," he said sharply. "If you will not tell me, I forbid you to go! You are now too old to whip." Rising to the occasion, "in a manner that would have done credit to her sociology instructor addressing his freshman class," she delivered her declaration of independence:
That is something you should think more about. Yes, I am too old to whip. I am too old to be treated as a child. I can now think for myself, and you and Mama should not demand unquestioning obedience from me. You should understand me. There was a time in America when parents raised children to make them work, but now the foreigners [Westerners] regard them as individuals with rights of their own. I have worked too, but now I am an individual besides being your fifth daughter.22
Her defiance shocked and hurt her parents, but jade Snow had made up her mind to find her own lifestyle, to satisfy her own quest for individual freedom and accomplishment, even if it meant going against her parents' wishes. It was in the pursuit of these liberating ideas that placed the person's needs over the group's that she became an emancipated woman in the Western sense. From then on, she came and went as she pleased.