Bild på författaren.

Jade Snow Wong (1922–2006)

Författare till Fifth Chinese Daughter

3+ verk 281 medlemmar 5 recensioner 1 favoritmärkta

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.
Särskiljningsinformation:

(eng) This is the second time I'm entering this biography. Please do not delete it. Thank you!

Verk av Jade Snow Wong

Associerade verk

Growing up Asian American: An Anthology (1993) — Bidragsgivare — 101 exemplar
The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American (1971) — Bidragsgivare — 58 exemplar
Asian-American Literature: An Anthology (2000) — Bidragsgivare — 30 exemplar
Teen-Age Treasury for Girls (1958) — Bidragsgivare — 5 exemplar

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!

Medlemmar

Recensioner

I came across this book via the 500 Great Books by Women Group on Goodreads. It’s a group that discusses the list in the book by Erica Bauermeister. It’s also a list on List Challenges if you like ticking off things online and that sort of thing.

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)
2 rösta
Flaggad
RealLifeReading | 4 andra recensioner | Feb 24, 2019 |
loved the book growing up. Lost my hardcover, called Jade Snow Wong and she sent me a paperback, signed, for 7.00 (sometime after 1983)
1 rösta
Flaggad
marilynsantiago | 4 andra recensioner | Jan 13, 2012 |
Fifth Chinese Daughter is an autobiography written in simple and straightforward language in the proper Chinese third person. As a result I read it in two day's time. It covers the first 24 years of a Chinese-American girl, Jade Snow Wong. From the very beginning, growing up in San Francisco, California, Wong struggled with cultural differences between modern America and the Old World Chinese of her parents. Everything from food, physical contact, gender discrimination, mourning the dead & burials, order of names, to education was contradictory and Wong had to wade through it all during her most formative years. While she didn't mean to disrespect her parents she struggled with independence in a new world, especially when she sought an education normally expected of males in her culture.… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
SeriousGrace | 4 andra recensioner | May 5, 2011 |
What I first thought might be a book strictly for the younger reader, has turned into one of my favorite books of all time. This is a story of a first generation Chinese American girl growing up in a traditionally conservative, materially disadvantaged Chinese family in 1920-1940's San Francisco Chinatown. Through her own will, perseverance, hard work and integrity, she charts her own course at a time in history when women had much less opportunity than today, and grows into a successful artist, author, and businesswoman. A true American success story, which left me wishing I had access to such a book earlier in my life. A warm, wonderful story which I highly recommend to readers of any age.… (mer)
1 rösta
Flaggad
chidori | 4 andra recensioner | Sep 22, 2009 |

Listor

Priser

Du skulle kanske också gilla

Associerade författare

Statistik

Verk
3
Även av
4
Medlemmar
281
Popularitet
#82,782
Betyg
3.9
Recensioner
5
ISBN
10
Favoritmärkt
1

Tabeller & diagram