Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (24 page)

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. Inspired 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.

A number of fortuitous circumstances helped her along the way. She
found work as a live-in housekeeper to support her college education.
After completing junior college with honors (she won an award as the
most outstanding student in California and was chosen to give the commencement speech), she was introduced by the family that employed
her to the president of Mills College. With the president's encouragement, Jade Snow went on to attend Mills, living with the college dean
and supporting herself with scholarships and domestic work. She graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors in economics and sociology. When
opportunities opened up for Chinese Americans during World War II,
she landed a job as a secretary in a shipyard and wrote an award-winning essay on absenteeism that earned her the honor of launching a ship.
This time she made the front pages of the Chinatown newspapers. Despite the skepticism and disapproval of the Chinese community, she also
decided to start a hand-thrown pottery business in Chinatown, which
proved so successful that by the third month she was driving the first
postwar automobile in Chinatown.

By the end of her autobiography, Jade Snow had come to terms
with her cultural conflicts by selectively integrating elements of both cultures into her life and work as a ceramicist. Not only did she come to
appreciate Western thought and culture through her education and social life at Mills College, but she also returned to her community to rediscover the rich cultural heritage to be found in Chinese foods, medicine, opera, and the established artisans she came to know. Her pottery,
which combined classic Chinese and Western utilitarian motifs, reflected
this newfound bicultural identity. She was indeed at home in both cultures, having achieved personal autonomy and self-definition as a second-generation Chinese American woman. More important, Jade Snow
had proven her worth as a daughter to her parents through her many accomplishments, which had brought honor to them and earned her their
respect. Her father paid her the highest compliment when he acknowledged that her example had helped to wash away the former "shameful
and degraded position into which the Chinese culture has pushed its
women." Jade Snow ended her autobiography with the comforting
thought that she had at last claimed her niche in life: "She had found
herself and struck her speed. And when she came home now, it was to
see Mama and Daddy look up from their work, and smile at her, and say,
`It is good to have you home again."'23

While most of Jade Snow's peers took the same middle road of accommodation through bicultural fusion, there were others who either
acquiesced or rebelled against traditional gender roles. Jade Snow's own
older half-sister Esther Wong (Jade Swallow) initially chose the acquiescing route. According to a Survey of Race Relations interview conducted in 1924, Esther was born in China and immigrated to America
with her mother and younger sister, Ruth Wong (Jade Lotus), when she
was five years old.24 As with Jade Snow, Esther's childhood was one of
strict discipline and hard work. Her day started with Chinese lessons
with her father at 6 A.M., followed by public school and then work at her
father's overall factory from 3 to 9 P.M. every weekday, all day on Saturday. When only twelve years old, she was put in charge of supervising
twenty-five male workers. She also had to help with the housework, and
later, when her mother fell ill for a year, she had to nurse her at home.
Esther did not resent the heavy responsibilities or her lack of leisure time,
but what she found unfair was her father's lack of understanding and
the preferential treatment accorded her brother.

When I was 13 my brother was born and then he [her father] lost interest in us girls, did not care to bother teaching girls, and seemed to forget what we were like. When we were small he used to work at a machine
next to ours, and when we were all busy he would tell us stories as we
worked; but later he became very stern and cold and did not try to understand us at all. My brother has a great deal of spending money and
a bank account of his own and can do just about as he likes. We girls were
expected to do everything and to pay for our room and board, which we
thought was hard, as that is not the Chinese way, usually that is given to
children.25

Considering herself an "old-fashioned girl," Esther was always careful
about conducting herself properly in public.26

I was brought up in the very strictest Chinese way. I have never been to
a dance, never had a caller that I received, although some have come,
never had what is called "fun" in my life. Father did not believe in it. He was one of the prominent leaders of the Chinese National League of
America, and acted as Treasurer, handling large sums of money. I used
to be all alone in the office, receiving large sums, but was perfectly safe,
no one ever spoke to me except when necessary, because I had the right
Chinese manner, very cold and proper, which the Chinese look for in
women, and so I was not ever spoken to, except in a business way. These
League Teams always end in a feast, but though I was on many different
teams at different times I never went to a feast, and so I could not be
criticized. Perhaps you could not find a family that would better illustrate the conflict between the old and the new. We were brought up more
strictly than most girls, even according to Chinese ideas, and my sister
and I have kept these habits, never going to dances, or having company,
always working.27

What led Esther to challenge her parents' traditional expectations of her
were their efforts to arrange a marriage for her to suitors she found unacceptable. The havoc that the controversy created in Esther's life led
her finally to stand up for herself "I was 17 years old, and I hated them
both [the suitors], and I stood out against them all. I finally said that I
would pack my suitcase and go, if they did not stop this torture."28 Esther did indeed move out, found a job that supported her through Mills
College, and then went to China to teach, where she remained until war
broke out between China and Japan in 1937.

At the other extreme of responses to cultural conflicts was the rebel
who totally rejected traditional gender roles. Like the "flappers" of the
19zos jazz age, she was someone who defied social control and conventions, who was modern, sophisticated, and frank in speech, dress,
morals, and lifestyle.Z" The best-known Chinese flapper was Anna May
Wong, who broke convention by becoming a Hollywood actress. She
made more than one hundred films in her thirty-seven-year career, most
of which typecast her in the limited role of "Oriental villainess." The
image she projected in the movie magazines, however, was that of a beautiful and fashionable modern woman, who lived in her own apartment,
dressed in the most up-to-date fashion, and spoke the latest slang.30 As
for her counterpart in San Francisco Chinatown, according to Rev. Ng
Poon Chew, the Chinese flapper in her "bobbed-haired, ear-muffed, lipsticked, powder-puffed loveliness" was but an "Oriental echo of the
American manifestation of youth.... Today she not only wants to select her own husband, but she wants the freedom of the chop-suey restaurants, the jazz cabarets, the moving pictures and long evenings with her
beau, minus the chaperone, a i,ooo year old concomitant of Chinese
civilization."31

Flora Belle fan can be considered such a Chinese flapper. The third
child in a family of eight children, she was born in 19o6 in Fresno, California. She later moved to San Francisco to attend college in 19zS. Like
Jade Snow and Esther Wong's parents, Flora Belle's parents were immigrants from Guangdong Province; but unlike the Wongs, they were
not influenced by Christianity or Chinese nationalism in deciding how
to raise their children. Although relatively well off-they owned and operated the Yet Far Low Restaurant in Fresno Chinatown-they did not
encourage any of their sons or daughters to pursue higher education.
They were quite strict with Flora Belle, wanting to maintain control over
her comings and goings, to mold her into a "proper" Chinese woman,
though they evidently failed.

Influenced more by her teachers, peers, and mainstream culture than
by her tradition-bound parents, Flora Belle became a rebel at an early
age. As she described herself in a Survey of Race Relations interview
conducted in 192-4, she was not one to hold back her true feelings:

When I was a little girl, I grew to dislike the conventionality and rules
of Chinese life. The superstitions and customs seemed ridiculous to me.
My parents have wanted me to grow up a good Chinese girl, but I am
an American and I can't accept all the old Chinese ways and ideas. A few
years ago when my Mother took me to worship at the shrine of my ancestor and offer a plate of food, I decided it was time to stop this foolish custom. So I got up and slammed down the rice in front of the idol
and said, "So long Old Top, I don't believe in you anyway." My mother
didn't like it a little bit.32

To expose the hypocrisy that she saw in both Chinese and mainstream
American society, Flora Belle wrote scathing articles, poems, stories, and
skits, some of which were published in the Fresno Bee, San Francisco Examiner, and Chinese Students' Monthly. One article, "Chinatown Sheiks
Are Modest Lot; Eschew Slang, Love-Moaning Blues," used the latest
slang to poke fun at her male contemporaries, while another sketch, "Old
Mother Grundy and Her Brood of Unbaptized Nuns," ridiculed the
American flapper.33

Letters that Flora Belle wrote to her best friend, Ludmelia Holstein,
from 1918 to 1949 reveal a young woman struggling with generational
and cultural conflicts at home.34 Her parents obviously did not approve
of Flora Belle's writings, her plans to go away to college, or her active
social life. When they scolded her for leaving home for two weeks without permission, Flora Belle responded in anger by writing Ludmelia: "I
hate my parents, both, now, and I want to show them that I can do some thing in spite of their dog-gone skepticism, old-fashionism, and unpardonable unparentliness."3'

Like many other American girls, Flora Belle was interested in the latest fashions, romance, and having a good time-values promoted by the
mass media during a period of postwar prosperity and consumerism. She
wrote Ludmelia about accepting automobile rides with boys, of lying
to her parents in order "to keep pace with Dame Fashion," of how she
would "rather be a vamp and have a Theda Bar-ist time in S.F." than
spend $zo to attend a religious convention at Asilomar.36 She also had
aspirations to be a famous writer. Both Flora Belle and Ludmelia evidently wrote poems, stories, and songs, which they submitted to newspapers and magazines for publication. She took her ambition to write
seriously, for when admonished by Ludmelia for taking too much interest in boys, she wrote back:

Oh, dear me! Please, dear chum, don't say such an awful, awful thing.
You are going to discourage me, utterly dishearten me, and take away all
my ambition. Don't say that I will be married before you finish college.
It will be impossible to adapt myself to a settled-down condition. Oh,
how can I bear it, to be a mother and take care of children and live an
uneventful life, and die, "unwept, unhonored, and unsung," by the world
of Fame; only by friends and relatives! No, Luddy dear, I can not, simply will not do it. You must encourage me, and tell me constantly that I
must achieve fame and fortune before I consider my task is done. 37