Jade Snow Wong (1922–2006)

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.