Jade Snow Wong (1922–2006)
Författare till Fifth Chinese Daughter
Om författaren
Jade Snow Wong (1922-2006) is the author of Fifth Chinese Daughter and No Chinese Stranger. She was also an award-winning ceramicist and enamelist.
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Verk av Jade Snow Wong
Associerade verk
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Andra namn
- Ong, Constance Wong
黃玉雪 - Födelsedag
- 1922-01-22
- Avled
- 2006-03-16
- Kön
- female
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Födelseort
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Dödsort
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Bostadsorter
- San Francisco, California, USA
- Utbildning
- Mills College
San Francisco City College - Yrken
- ceramic artist
writer
memoirist
potter - Relationer
- Deng, Ming Dao (son)
- Kort biografi
- Jade Snow Wong was born in San Francisco, California, one of nine children in an immigrant Chinese family. She was raised in the traditional Chinese culture and beliefs of her family, who valued obedience, duty, respect, and conformity to the role of females. Wong overcame her father's refusal to pay for her higher education, and attended San Francisco Junior College and later Mills College, where she majored in economics and sociology and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1942. While at Mills, she discovered a talent for ceramics. She worked as a secretary in a shipyard office during World War II, and then became a well-known ceramic artist with her own studio. Her ceramics were displayed in art museums across the USA, including a major retrospective in 2002 at the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco. In 1950, Wong published the memoir Fifth Chinese Daughter, her first book. It became a bestseller and was selected for the Book of the Month Club. It was translated into several Asian languages by the U.S. State Department, which sent her on a four-month speaking tour of Asia in 1953. Also in 1950, Wong married artist Woodrow Ong, with whom she would have four children. The couple worked together on their art and later managed a successful travel agency and import-export business together. Wong wrote a column in the San Francisco Examiner and contributed to periodicals such as Holiday and Horn Book. She published a second volume of memoirs, No Chinese Stranger, in 1975. She received recognition for her work both as an artist and as a writer many times in her career. She received a Silver Medal for nonfiction from the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 1976. That same year, Fifth Chinese Daughter was adapted into a 30-minute special for public television.
- Särskiljningsnotis
- This is the second time I'm entering this biography. Please do not delete it. Thank you!
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Statistik
- Verk
- 3
- Även av
- 4
- Medlemmar
- 281
- Popularitet
- #82,782
- Betyg
- 3.9
- Recensioner
- 5
- ISBN
- 10
- Favoritmärkt
- 1
And like in Family Trust by Kathy Wang, a book I was also reading at around the same time, it’s a book set in San Francisco. Unlike the 2018-published Family Trust, Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong was originally published in 1945, and it’s quite telling of its time, with a 73 year difference between publication of these two books.
Fifth Chinese Daughter is an autobiography but is written more like a novel. And it has a rather educational tone to it, like it’s trying to teach the (presumably) white person reading it. So as a modern Chinese-Singaporean reading this book, it sometimes is amusing but more often it feels a bit heavy-handed and didactic.
I must admire Wong’s life and her determination to be educated and find a career. It wasn’t easy at that time for women, and I must imagine, even more so for a Chinese woman living in the US. Her father, while pushing education, especially Chinese-language education, when she was younger, is unwilling to pay for college, as he’s already paying for her brother’s medical school.
“You are quite familiar by now with the fact that it is the sons who perpetuate our ancestral heritage by permanently bearing the Wong family name and transmitting it through their blood line, and therefore the songs must have priority over the daughters when parental provision for advantages must be limited by economic necessity. Generations of sons, bearing our Wong name, are those who make pilgrimages to ancestral burial grounds and preserve them forever. Our daughters leave home at marriage to give sons to their husbands’ families to carry on the heritage for other names.”
She then begins working as a housekeeper for various families and manages to also find herself a scholarship to a college.
It’s an interesting account of various Chinese traditions, such as a funeral, a baby’s first full month with red eggs (which is something that Chinese families in Singapore still do) and pickled pigs’ feet (that was new to me).
Fifth Chinese Daughter may be a bit dated but it does offer an insight into the life of a young Chinese-American growing up in San Francisco at the time and trying to find a balance between her traditional Chinese upbringing and the more American lifestyle she’s becoming accustomed to as she goes to school and finds a career for herself.… (mer)