Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong

Her pottery was exhibited in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other major museums around the country. government “wanted to show that I wasn’t just American propaganda,” Wong said.įor some years, she and her husband led monthlong art tours of China, and she continued the business when her husband died in the mid-1980s. “For someone in Hong Kong to learn that a poor Chinese woman had written and started her own business was something nearly impossible to believe,” Wong said in a 1981 interview with the Christian Science Monitor. She was sent there by the State Department in 1953 after receiving inquiries about her first memoir and her pottery. They also started a travel agency after Wong visited Asia. At times they collaborated on ceramic pieces. She soon began to exhibit her work at fairs around California where she won top prizes. She made pottery inspired by traditional Chinese shapes, attracting customers who stopped to watch her work. She persuaded the owner of the China Bazaar in Chinatown to let her set up her studio in his store window on Grant Avenue. to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women,” she said. To be an artist “was the option which would enable me. “For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture,” Wong told AsianWeek. Friends and neighbors couldn’t imagine why a college graduate would take a job that kept her hands covered with mud.

Her mother disapproved of her striking out on her own. “Since I had learned to love making pottery, why couldn’t I make a living at it?” “I knew that a young, Chinese female could never rise to the top in white male-dominated fields,” Wong said in the AsianWeek interview. Wong graduated from Mills with honors in 1942 and found work as a corporate secretary, but she quickly saw that corporate culture was not for her. “Up to that time I had no exposure to art, Chinese or American, nor to museums, as I was growing up in the Chinatown ghetto,” Wong recalled in a 2002 interview with AsianWeek magazine.

A college-level course in pottery helped change her mind. From the time she completed high school and entered Mills College in Oakland she had planned to be a social worker for the Chinese American community. In it, she recapped her younger years in the third-person but changed to the first-person voice typical of American autobiography when she described her adult life. Her second memoir, “No Chinese Stranger,” was published in 1975.

Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong