Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

by Judy Yung

  Although Chinese American students were finally allowed to sit in the same classroom with white students, they were not always readily accepted by their white classmates or white teachers. A 19 3 7 study of Chinese high school students in San Francisco by Shih Hsien-ju indicated that Chinese students were participating in social activities as much as their white counterparts, but their activities were more limited in variety and tended to be segregated. While Chinese boys gravitated toward Chinese school clubs and the Chinese YMCA, Chinese girls joined club activities at the Chinese YWCA.47 The situation did not improve in college. Often treated as foreign students, Chinese Americans were not permitted to join fraternities and sororities. Chinese students at Stanford University, expelled from the dormitory by white students, had to establish their own residential Chinese Club House. In the face of social exclusion, most participated in segregated organizations on campus, such as the nationwide Chinese Students' Alliance and the Sigma Omicron Pi Chinese Sorority, which was founded by Chinese women at San Francisco State Teachers' College in 1930.

  Their segregated social life stemmed from deep-seated racial prejudice. As Eva Lowe, who attended Francisco Junior High and Girls' High School in the r9aos, recalled:

  We used to have streetcars on Stockton Street. After school, some kids would ride streetcars home, instead of walking home. And those Italian boys pulled them down from the streetcars. Chinese and Italian boys always had fights. Then when we had lunch period, even in high school, if we sit in the dining room at a certain table, next day the Caucasian girls won't sit there. They see a Chinese sitting there, they moved.41

  Jade Snow Wong had similar experiences when she began attending a white public school at the age of eleven. She was never invited to any of the homes or parties of the other students. "Being shy anyway, she quietly adjusted to this new state of affairs; it did not occur to her to be bothered by it," she wrote in her autobiography. But one day she was delayed after school, and Richard, a white boy, took advantage of the situation. "I've been waiting for a chance like this," he said. With malice he taunted her, "Chinky, Chinky, Chinaman." Jade Snow was astonished but decided to ignore him. As she attempted to leave, he threw a blackboard eraser at her, which left a white chalk mark on her back. Although the act hurt her sense of pride and dignity, she chose to overlook it, reasoning, as her parents had taught her, that Richard lacked proper home training. "She looked neither to the right nor left, but proceeded sedately down the stairs and out the front door." Richard followed and danced around her, chortling: "Look at the eraser mark on the yellow Chinaman. Chinky, Chinky, no tickee, no washee, no shirtee!" But still Jade Snow ignored him, and he finally went away, puzzled by her lack of response. "When she arrived home, she took off her coat and brushed off the chalk mark," as if to erase it from her mind.49 Her passivity was a defense stance of accommodation that the second generation had been taught to assume when confronted by racial conflict.

  Access to quality education for Chinese Americans was further marred by insensitive teachers and vocational tracking into undesirable jobs. Until 192.6, when Alice Fong Yu was hired by the San Francisco public schools, all of the teachers were white. Many Chinese American women recalled teachers who took an interest in them and regarded them stereotypically as model students-quiet, diligent, attentive, and obedient. Daisy Wong Chinn, who attended the Oriental Public School in the early rgaos, has fond memories of one of her teachers. "My eighth-grade teacher was a wonderful woman named Agnes O'Neill," she said. "She really drilled English, spelling, and grammar into us, and she always sat me in the front of the first row." One of the highlights in Daisy's life occurred when Miss O'Neill selected her essay for a citywide Community Chest contest. Daisy placed first, and her photograph and essay appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Call.50

  Some women, however, also remembered teachers who were condescending in their attitudes or who were blatantly racist. Esther Wong, for instance, will never forget how she was mistreated by her French language teacher:

  All my teachers had been good to me, kind and helpful, but this one was an Englishwoman, and she did not like Orientals, and none of them could stand her, they always got out of her class, all but one Japanese girl and me, and I stood her the longest, for 15 months, then I had to get out of her class, although I lost credits by doing so.... Towards the last I had to do some sight-reading for her, and I was very much frightened. She was a very stern teacher, with very strict rules about everything. You had to stand just so far from your desk, hold your back just so, and everything. Well, I read for her, and there were no mistakes. She just looked me over, from head to foot, for a minute, and I did not know what was coming, but was frightened. Then she said very slowly, "Well, you read all right, but I don't like you. You belong to a dirty race that spits at mis- sionaries."51

  Such incidents, in combination with vocational tracking, inflicted irreparable damage on Chinese American students' sense of ethnic pride and self-esteem.

  According to Shih Hsien-ju's study, Chinese boys in high school showed less vocational ambition than their white counterparts; none expressed interest in becoming lawyers, army officers, public officers, or policemen. Chinese girls displayed even less ambition than either white girls or Chinese boys. Although Chinese and white girls were interested in teaching, sales, and clerical work, the similarities ended there. Twice as many white girls as Chinese mentioned professional work, and only Chinese girls selected design, housework, and dressmaking as occupational choices. Chinese females were also more accepting of the idea of marriage over career. Interviews conducted with the students revealed that they were less ambitious because of their families' limited economic resources. More important, they were well aware of racial prejudice and their limited options in the labor market. A good number had even thought about going to China to find work. Shih concluded her study by recommending that the public school system join efforts with the Chinese community to provide vocational guidance and scholarships to Chinese students in need.5"

  By the time they graduated from high school, many Chinese American women, well aware of racial prejudice in the outside world, were discouraged from pursuing a college education. Moreover, few Chinese families had the financial resources to send their children to college. As second-generation Janie Chu pointed out, "Higher education is dearly loved by the Chinese, but what urge is there for the average girl to go on in school if economic conditions at home force her to employment and she feels that her prospects are not any better after years spent in higher education?"53 The University of California, Berkeley, which enrolled the highest number of American-horn Chinese in the country, had few Chinese women among its graduates in the 19zos, according to a study by Beulah Kwoh in 1947. Their numbers began to increase only in the 1930s (appendix table io). Most of the students surveyed by Kwoh came from middle-class, educated families, and their choice of majors was usually an attempt to accommodate racial prejudice in the work world. Aware of their limited options, most planned either to be self-employed in a profession or to fill job needs in China. Thus, men tended to major in engineering, chemistry, and the biological sciences, while women were concentrated in the social sciences and medical fields. n4

  In light of the fact that few Chinese American women pursued college in the pre-World War II period, the following stories of Florence Chinn Kwan, Alice Fong Yu, and Bessie Jeong are exceptional. Nevertheless, they bear repeating, not only because they provide a personal dimension to Kwoh's statistics and analysis, but also because they offer insights into how Christianity and Chinese nationalism influenced "the cream" to pursue higher education and professional careers.55 All three women were supported by progressive parents or Christian benefactors who believed in the importance of education for girls. As Florence pointed out, it was usually the Christian families in Chinatown who enrolled their daughters in school and who supported them through college:

  The Christian families usually did send their girls to school, but not the non-Ch
ristians. They were kept at home taking care of their brothers and sisters, learning how to sew, how to cook. Although I was the only girl in the family, my father was a missionary teacher, so I went to grammar school and Girls' High School.... All the girls then were marrying at around sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and I was eighteen after high school when my mother chose someone for me. He was a very nice bachelor from church. But my father said, "No, go to college and get your Ph.D. and then go back to China to teach English.""

  Alice Fong Yu credited her father, who was well educated and a Chinese nationalist with a progressive outlook, for encouraging all the children in the family to seek higher education. All six daughters in the family eventually graduated from college and pursued professions. As far back as Alice could remember, she was encouraged by her parents to become a teacher. The director of the local Red Cross, impressed by Alice's ability to fund-raise in the YWCA Girls Reserve, personally introduced her to the president of San Francisco State Teachers' College. The president tried to dissuade her by saying no school would ever hire a Chinese. Alice retorted, "But I'm not going to stay here. I just want the education to be a teacher. I'm going to China to teach my people."17 She was accepted into Teacher's College but never did teach in China. Upon graduation in 1926, she found a job awaiting her at Commodore Stockton Elementary School (formerly, Oriental Public School), where a new principal recognized the need for a Chinese-speaking teacher. Alice, the first Chinese American to be hired by the San Francisco public schools, taught there for thirty-one years. With similar support from their parents, her sisters did equally well as first in the country to enter certain professional fields: Mickey Fong became the first Chinese American public health nurse; Marian Fong, the first Chinese American dental hygienist; and Martha Fong, the first Chinese American nursery school teacher.

  Bessie Jeong, one of the earliest Chinese American physicians, did not have such supportive parents. On the contrary, her family did not believe education was important for girls. But she was fortunate to have the generous assistance of Christian benefactors. When her father tried to take her to China at the age of fifteen, Bessie ran away to the Pres byterian Mission Home, believing that he only wanted to marry her off in China. With encouragement and financial support from Donaldina Cameron and other Christian sponsors, Bessie enrolled in Lux Normal School, a semiprivate high school for girls. She was among the first at Lux to say, "Hey, we're not going to be homemakers, we're going to be career girls. We're not having babies, we're going out in the world and contribute." Because of her Christian upbringing and sense of mission, she planned to become a medical missionary:

  The Fong family in 1930. Front roue, left to right: Mother Lonnie Tom, Lorraine, Father Poy Mun Fong (a.k.a. Fong (:how); back row, left to right: Leslie, Marian, Alice, Taft, Albert, Helen, Mickey, and Martha. (Courtesy of H. Kim and Gordon H. Chang)

  I realized very young that China was overpopulated and that I didn't need to go to China and have children. For some reason, I seemed to know that China needed someone to help the people. And I didn't like the idea of just preaching. I wanted to do something constructive, and we [her sister and she] thought a medical missionary would be good.ss

  With the help of missionary women, a series of part-time jobs as a domestic worker, strong determination, and hard work, Bessie became the first Chinese American woman to graduate from Stanford University in 1927, and she went on to earn a medical degree from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

  Other exceptional Chinese American women who graduated from college and entered professions at this time almost all did so with the support of Christian parents or benefactors. Aside from Bessie Jeong, Faith So Leung, the first Chinese woman dentist in America in 1905, was also nurtured and supported by Protestant missionaries. Born in Canton in i 880, Faith was brought to the United States when she was thirteen by Mrs. F. A. Nickerson, a missionary who later adopted her and provided her with an education. It was Nickerson, who, seeing that Faith was "very dexterous with her hands and evinced decided mechanical talent," encouraged her to pursue dentistry.-59 The only Chinese and female graduate among forty students, Faith received an ovation from her classmates at the graduation ceremonies. She then established her practice in Chinatown and became the only female member of the Chinese Dental Club in San Francisco.60

  In the case of Soo Hoo Nam Art's family, all five sons and six daughters were encouraged to pursue a college education. Soo Hoo was an ordained minister and, according to one of his daughters, Lily Sung, was "much criticized for allowing a daughter to go to college."61 Upon graduation from college, all the sons became engineers, while the daughters became teachers; six of the children established careers in China.

  Most Chinese American women, in the face of racism and sexism and lacking economic means, were not able to pursue higher education or professional careers in the 19zos. Although they were better educated than the first generation, because of discrimination in the labor market this advantage did not necessarily lead them to better-paying jobs.

  Limited Work Opportunities

  Like their mothers before them, second-generation women generally had to work because of the denial of a family wage to most Chinese men. Indeed, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn points out in her study of Chinese American families, the small-producer family in which all family members, including children, worked without wages in a family business-usually a laundry, restaurant, grocery store, or garment shop -predominated from the 19zos to the 19605.62 For those families in San Francisco that did not own a small business, a family economy in which individual family members worked at various jobs to help make ends meet still prevailed. It was not uncommon for daughters to work part-time throughout their public school years and quit school in their teens to work full-time to help out their families. May Kew Fung, for example, began working at the early age of seven to help her widowed mother support a family of seven children. "I never had a childhood like other kids," May told her grandson Jeffrey Ow many years later. "I had nothing as a child. No toys, no place to go."63 She started out peeling shrimp, shelling clams, and stringing stringbeans, then moved on to sewing in her uncle's garment shop. At fifteen, although she enjoyed school and wanted to become a stenographer, May put the family's interest first. She quit school to work full-time sewing blue jeans during the day, and at night she worked as an usher in a Chinese opera house for an extra dollar.

  Second-generation daughters, less encumbered by traditional gender roles that dictated women remain within the home, were considered "liberated" in being able to work outside the home in the labor market.64 But once there, they found themselves at a disadvantage because of race and gender discrimination. Despite their English proficiency, educational background, and Western orientation, most experienced underemployment and found themselves locked into low-paying, dead-end jobs. One second-generation Chinese summed it up this way in the Chinese Times:

  So far as the occupational opportunities are concerned, the Americanborn Chinese is a most unfortunate group of human beings.... The Americans will not accept us as citizens.... We cannot get occupational status in the American community, not because we are not worthy, but because we have yellow skin over our faces. If we turn back to the Chinese community there are not many places which can employ us.... There is a barrier between us and the old Chinese who are hosts of the Chinese community. We cannot get occupational status there either. The Americans discriminate against us, and we cannot get along in the Chinese community very well; what opportunities do we have in the coun- trV?65

  Still, second-generation women, though forced to endure discrimination in the workplace, took advantage of whatever opportunities arose, tried to find meaning and purpose in their jobs, and worked doubly hard to prove themselves. Here again, because examples of educated, middle-class women are more abundant, their stories form the core of this section on the work lives of the second generation. The degree of economic independence that these women thus gained allowed some to shape new
gender roles as well as elevate their social status at home and in the community.

  Initially, second-generation women's occupations were not very different from those of their immigrant mothers. The z goo and 1910 manuscript censuses indicate that Chinese women in San Francisco, whether immigrant or native-born, worked as either prostitutes or seamstresses. By igzo, however, as increased numbers of the second generation became better educated and more Americanized, their work pattern was taking a path distinctly different from that of their mothers. They began to branch into clerical and sales jobs (see appendix table 6). As Rose Chew, a social worker and second-generation woman herself, observed in 1930, whereas immigrant mothers worked primarily in garment and shrimp factories, did hemstitching and embroidery work, and served as domestic day workers, daughters were working outside the community as waitresses, stock girls, and elevator operators. Within the community, a few were now employed as public school teachers, doctors, dentists, bank managers and tellers, nurses, and beauty parlor owners.66

  Although their work lives were an improvement relative to the drudgery and low wages of their parents, many of the second generation were disappointed by America's false promises of equal opportunity. They had studied hard in school, but despite their qualifications they were not given the same consideration in the job market as white Americans. College placement officers at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, for example, found it almost impossible to place the few Chinese or Japanese American graduates there were in any positions, whether in engineering, manufacturing, or business. According to the personnel officer at Stanford,