This post was written by Dianne Choie, Educational Program Specialist at the Library of Congress.
Did you know that the Library of Congress has a wealth of materials related to Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Island heritage in many of its collections? In celebration of Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month this May, let’s take a look at the Jade Snow Wong Papers that are part of the AAPI Collection in the Library’s Manuscripts Division.
Jade Snow Wong was born in San Francisco, California in 1922. Her parents immigrated to the United States from Guangdong, China and spoke both English and Cantonese with their nine children. In 1950 at age 28, she published her memoir “Fifth Chinese Daughter” about her experiences growing up and going to school in San Francisco’s Chinatown. This year marks the book’s 75th anniversary. Let’s see what we can learn from the memoir about Jade Snow’s childhood in the 1920s and 1930s.
Jade Snow’s dad ran an overalls factory, and she shares in her memoir how that shaped her childhood. Passages like the one below give us a sense of the spaces she was in and the experiences she had in the factory. Note that Jade Snow wrote in the third person “she” instead of the first person “I” or “we.” The following quotes are all from the 1950 edition of “Fifth Chinese Daughter” published by Harper & Brothers in New York.
“The Wongs lived at the back of their father’s factory on Stockton between Clay and Sacramento streets. The factory-home was huge. To the right on the street floor was a room containing ten or more sewing machines of various kinds. Also on the street floor, to the left, was the office. A forty-inch-wide cutting table ran the length of the room to the kitchen and dining room at the rear…
The Wong daughters and the children of the workers played hide-and-seek around the high bundles of blue denim, rode on the pushcarts used for loading overalls, climbed onto the cutting tables to talk to the women as they worked (3-4).”
It’s fun to imagine the big space that Jade Snow and her siblings had access to so close to home. While her parents and other staff worked on cutting, sewing, and other overalls-making tasks, Jade Snow and the other children had some freedom to play in the factory space as well. As you read about Jade Snow’s life, talk about the following prompts with your family. Are there things that kids in your family have been able to see or do because of the work that the adults do? Have you or they ever asked members of your family about their jobs or their parents’ and grandparents’ jobs?
Jade Snow also wrote about her specific experiences as a Chinese American girl, as in this passage:
“Home life and work life were therefore mixed together. In the morning, Father opened the factory doors while Mother prepared a breakfast consisting of rice, a green vegetable or soup, a meat or fish, and steamed salted dried fish from China. For the rest of the day Mother was at a machine except when she stopped to get the meals or to do other housework (4).”
For some Americans, rice and fish might be an unusual combination of foods to eat at breakfast. For Jade Snow’s family, this was totally typical. “Fifth Chinese Daughter” was a bestselling book partially because readers enjoyed getting to know these kinds of details of everyday life for a Chinese American family. During the early 1900s, most Americans did not encounter many Chinese American people, who lived largely in cities on the east and west coasts. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 prohibited immigration from China to the United States, and this stopped the flow of immigration that had increased as people moved from China in the mid- and late 1800s to work on the transcontinental railroad and find other jobs in the United States.
These restrictions were gradually lifted by laws passed in the 1940s to the 1960s, but when Jade Snow was growing up, there were limited opportunities for many Americans to encounter immigrants from China or their families. Because of this lack of familiarity, Jade Snow’s descriptions of growing up both Chinese and American brought insight and wonder to many of her readers. Jade Snow’s writing conveyed both universal experiences and those more specific to her own community. Like her discussion of breakfast, see how Jade Snow’s learning about buying groceries in Chinatown conveys the types of food her family ate regularly:
“In shopping for groceries, Jade Snow soon learned which stores carried the best of a particular thing; and after scathing criticism from Mama, she learned how shiny a fresh fish should look and how firm it should feel; how solid a head of cabbage should be before it could be considered solid, how an old turnip looked as distinguished from a young one, how pink good pork was, how crisp a bean sprout should be, and how green a young onion (55).”
Talk with your family members: what kinds of produce do you buy at the grocery store? Have you been to stores that sell things like fresh fish or bean sprouts?
While some aspects of life in Chinatown might have seemed unusual to readers of Fifth Chinese Daughter, many of the experiences Jade Snow describes would be familiar to any child anywhere. For example, she wrote about how important books were for her when she was 11 years old:
“During the next two years, Jade Snow found in eager reading her greatest source of joy and escape. As she now understood a fair amount of English, she stopped at the public library every few days after school to return four books and choose four new ones, the number allowed on one library card. Every day she read one book from cover to cover while with one ear she listened to her teachers. 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 (69).”
Are there stories you like to read specifically because they’re so different from your own world? Readers of any background can identify with young Jade Snow’s joy in finding escape through books.
Jade Snow’s love of reading and exploring the world led her to become a student at Mills College, where she learned the art of ceramics. She developed a full-time career as a ceramicist and made pieces that were added to the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of the arts, and other museums and galleries around the world. When “Fifth Chinese Daughter” became a bestseller, the U.S. State Department sent Jade Snow on a book promotion tour of Asia in 1953. She published a second memoir, “No Chinese Stranger,” in 1975.
Despite her national and international success as a writer and an artist, Jade Snow stayed in touch with her humble beginnings as a typical young girl. It was helpful for her to have records like her childhood diaries, which she quoted from in her memoir:
“On January 21, 1935, Jade Snow made an entry in her first diary, one that Daddy had given her for Christmas. In careful English she wrote: “Today was my thirteenth birthday. Mama bought me a bowl of ‘won-ton’ (a filled Chinese paste bathed in chicken soup) for lunch. Daddy gave me fifty cents. Older Brother bought me a chocolate eclair, a chocolate roll, and a small sponge cake with whipped cream. Cousin Kee (who works for Daddy) gave me a quarter, and I spent it for ice cream for the whole family. So ends a beautiful day” (87).”
What moments from your life would you include in your own memoir? Whose memoir would you read if you had the chance?
You can learn more about Jade Snow Wong in these Library of Congress blog posts from 4 Corners of the World and Timeless.