Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (26 page)

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-Christians. 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.