Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (32 page)

In 1930, the native-born group constituted 47 percent of the total
Chinese population; 19 percent of them were of voting age (2,3 3 6 males
and 784 females). Yet only 40 percent of those eligible were registered
to vote, and only 25 percent actually voted.13s Local Chinese American
organizations such as the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, Square
and Circle Club, and Chinese YWCA constantly reminded them to
exercise their right to vote: "The most important thing is to register
and vote," emphasized the Chinese American Citizens Alliance. "It is
the ballot that will win the political rights-and economic opportunities-for the future of American citizens of Chinese ancestry in the
United States."139 Special outreach to women included messages such
as "Women's suffrage in America was only won in 1920 after many years
of struggle.... We encourage Chinese women who qualify to vote to
take advantage of this right and come to the YWCA to register." 140 As
their political consciousness became aroused, a few second-generation
women began to participate in partisan politics. The Community Chest
1930 Survey reported that Chinese American women were active members of a political organization to elect Al Smith president in 1928.141
In 1931, the San Francisco Chronicle announced that the first Chinese
women voters' club had been formed to support Angelo Rossi for
mayor.142 These were but small steps toward political activism, though.
It would take the changing circumstances of World War II to motivate
the second generation to participate more fully in American politics.

Clara Lee registering to vote in 19 1 1 with (from left to right) Emma Leung,
Tom Leung, Dr. Charles Lee, and deputy county clerk W. B. Reith. (Courtesy
of Dr. Lester Lee)

A Bicultural Marriage and Family Life

Sexism at hone and racism outside also affected the marriages and family life of second-generation women. The two forces influenced not only these women's choice of partners but also the quality of their married and family life, which proved to be markedly
different from that of their parents. It was at this stage of their lives that
Chinese American women's efforts to shape a new ethnic and gender
identity for themselves really struck home.

The marriage pattern of Chinese American women differed from that
of European American women. In 1920, only 14 percent of foreignborn women in America over age fifteen were single, but 37 percent of
the second generation remained unmarried. According to Doris Weatherford, the general pattern in the United States had been that immigrant
women often married young; third-generation women had the second highest marriage rate after the first generation; and those who were most
likely to be unmarried were second-generation women (those born in
America of foreign parents). She attributed the second generation's reluctance to marry to the harsh married lives of their mothers or the need
for daughters to delay marriage in order to help out their families, as in
the case of Irish women.143 This was not the same for second-generation Chinese women in the insulated community of San Francisco Chinatown in the 19zos, who still considered marriage and motherhood as
their destiny. Just when and how they married, however, depended upon
their class background, degree of acculturation, and the historical circumstances at the time.

Prior to the 1911 Revolution, it was not unusual for poor, workingclass parents to marry off their daughters early in order to better provide for the rest of the family. The marriage was arranged through a
matchmaker, and according to Chinese custom, the bride had no say in
the choice of her partner. She was not even allowed to see him until the
wedding day, when, dressed in red silk and beaded headdress, she was
carried from a carriage into her husband's home. Because of the skewed
Chinese sex ratio in America, the husband was usually older, China-born,
and conservative. Life for most of these young brides proved to be as
harsh and socially restrictive as it had been for their immigrant mothers.
The case of Rose Jeong serves as an example of such a traditional marriage. Her sister Bessie Jeong described how it all happened:144

In a way, she had two men to choose from, but as she had never seen either of them, only their photographs, she took her parents' advice. One
was young, about twenty, and her parents put it this way: "This man is
young, he has his way to make, and he has a large family of brothers and
sisters. You would be a sort of slave to all of them. This other man is fifty
years old, but he can give you everything, he has no family. Better to be
an old man's darling than a young man's slave," or words to that effect.
They told her, too, that a young man would not be constant, he would
be running around with other women, it was far safer to take an older
man, who would settle down. Of course she was married in the Chinese
way, that is, the man handed over to her parents a sum of money. Naturally that would be far larger with an older and richer man, but the parents did not speak of that.

Having already endured a hard life as the eldest daughter responsible for
housework and the care of her younger siblings, sixteen-year-old Rose
dutifully agreed with her parents' choice, even though the man was thirtyfour years her senior. After the wedding she followed him to the lum her camp of Weed, California, where he worked as a cook. He was a
"hard taskmaster," according to Bessie, who also went to live with them
in their poorly insulated log cabin. "He had a horrible disposition, suspicious and jealous, and my sister's life was one long tragedy with him."
Rose worked alongside her husband in his many business ventures. He
first ran a boardinghouse, then a laundry, and at another time, five different dining places in town. When his businesses later failed, he sold all
of Rose's wedding jewelry. In r 918, Rose died during the flu epidemic
at the young age of twenty-six.

Learning from her sister's example, Bessie was determined not to suffer the same fate. When her father, who had returned to China with the
rest of the family after the 19o6 earthquake, came back to fetch Bessie
and, as she believed, marry her off in China, she refused to go with him.
"I knew that my father was determined to take me hack that time. He
was going to realize money out of it or he was fulfilling his duty as a father. But I still would he on the auction block. Prized Jersey-the name
`Bessie' always made me think of some nice fat cow!" At the suggestion
of her sister Rose, Bessie ran away to Donaldina Cameron and the Presbyterian Mission Home. "I had been away from my father for so long
that I was not much afraid of him.... I was resolved not to marry, to
have an education instead." With a bit of legal maneuvering, Cameron
was made her legal guardian, and Bessie was able to stay at the Mission
Home and pursue an education, becoming a physician. She later married a man of her choice, Dr. Ying Wing Chan, the Chinese consul in
San Francisco, and was in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area
for nearly forty years.

After the 1911 Revolution, the second generation-particularly those
of middle-class background-began to take a different course from that
of their mothers with regard to courtship and married life. Inspired by
the example of the "new woman" in China, many resisted arranged marriages and chose to follow Western courtship and marriage customs. 14",
Initially, their attempts were cause for social ostracism. "Remember when
young men and women were never seen together on the streets of Chinatown?" wrote Chingwah Lee in 1936. "Even as late as 1910, when
the bold experiment of `spooning' along Dupont Street (generally immediately after school, and always in droves) [happened], business
would be momentarily at a standstill, and there would be a lot of [rub-
ber]necking-on the part of the giggling spectators."146 In 1908, when
Rose Fong accepted a carriage ride through Golden Gate Park with her
suitor Tsoa Min, a Chinese schoolteacher, Chinatown was scandalized, and the Chinese Six Companies tried unsuccessfully to get the young
teacher removed from his post.147 By the 192os, however, the second
generation had successfully adopted the Western practices of courtship
and free marriage and formulated their own style of a Chinese American wedding. Said Caroline Chew, a daughter of Rev. Ng Poon Chew:

In these days, the young people in America no longer wait for a go-between to arrange matters and to draw up the betrothal contract for them,
but, in independent American fashion, if they have an inclination for one
another's company, they take matters into their own hands and arrange
things to suit themselves. They go out together whenever and wherever
they please. They see all they want to of each other. There are even occasional love letters when it is deemed necessary to have their spirits
buoyed up a bit. Thus betrothal is no longer a matter left for parents and
"go-betweens" to take care of, except in cases where the whole family
was born and brought up in China and then transplanted over here.148

King Yoak Won Wu, whose family was strongly influenced by Chinese nationalism and Christianity, claimed to be among the first Chinese
women to have a Western wedding, in 1913. She met her husband, Rev.
Daniel Wu, in church, where she worked as a volunteer rolling bandages
for Dr. Sun Yat-sen's army. "He came by often when we were rolling
bandages, telling us how patriotic we were. I guess he was impressed
with our dedication. At other times, I would attend his lectures in
church." After three years of meeting in church and at the park across
from the church, they decided to get married at Grace Cathedral outside Chinatown. "My family had switched to the `new way of thinking'
for a long time.... We did not need a matchmaker or any of the other
Chinese rituals. There was no loud crying or colorful layers of clothes.
We just decided to have a Christian wedding and I even made my own
wedding dress and veil."149 According to a newspaper account of the
wedding, the ceremony was conducted in Chinese and English, and the
large gathering consisted of both Chinese and European American
friends.150

Daisy Wong Chinn also met her husband, Thomas W. Chinn, at
church. A founding member of the Square and Circle Club, she recalled
that she and her girlfriends seldom went on individual dates. Instead they
went on group outings with boys, riding the ferry to Muir Woods, hiking to the top of Mt. Tamalpais, taking a hayride down the peninsula to
the new Moffitt Naval Air Hangar, and attending athletic events, musical programs, and dances. She and Thomas did not go out alone on a
date until they had known each other four years. Soon after, they be came engaged, and a year later, in 1930, they decided to marry. Typical
of other young Chinese American couples then, they opted for a wedding that was a combination of Chinese and Western traditions. The wedding ceremony, including an altar, upright piano, minister, flower girl,
and wedding party, was held at a Chinese restaurant and followed by a
Chinese banquet. Limousines were hired to pick up the guests, who were
greeted upon arrival by a Chinese musical trio consisting of a trumpet,
cymbals, and an erh-hu.1s1

Most large weddings in the 19 20S took place in either a church, a hotel, or a public hall. Caroline Chew wrote in 1926, "The bride and groom
and all the attendants appear in conventional Western garb and the famous Wagnerian and Mendelsohnian strains are played in true Western
fashion." After the ceremony, coffee and cake were served, and the bride
was driven to her new home in a limousine decorated with red paper
and silk. The day after the wedding, the parents usually hosted an elaborate wedding feast in Chinatown, consisting of fifteen to twenty
courses. Most important, the bride did not live with her husband's family after her marriage but established her own home, "where she reigns
supreme from the very outset."isz

Although more second-generation women were allowed to choose a
groom after 1911 than before, they found their decisions encumbered
by discriminatory laws that discouraged their marriage to foreign-born
Chinese and prevented marriage to white Americans. The Cable Act of
192.i reversed the Expatriation Act of 1907, which had required women
to assume their husband's nationality upon marriage. The 1922 act provided that a female citizen would no longer lose her citizenship by marrying an alien and, conversely, that an alien woman would no longer gain
U.S. citizenship by marrying a citizen. However, section 3 of the Cable
Act stipulated that "any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible
to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the United States." Although
section 4 allowed that "a woman who, before the passage of this Act,
has lost her United States citizenship by reason of her marriage to an
alien eligible for citizenship, may be naturalized," section 5 stated that
"no woman whose husband is not eligible to citizenship shall be naturalized during the continuance of the marital status."153 The Cable Act,
in effect, stripped any American-born Chinese woman of her citizenship status should she choose to marry a foreign-born Chinese with no
hope of naturalization, since she herself, by virtue of her race, thereby
became an "alien ineligible to citizenship." Moreover, once a woman
lost her citizenship, she could no longer confer derivative citizenship to
any of her children who might be born outside the United States. She also lost her rights to own property, vote, and travel abroad freely.154
Until these stipulations were repealed by the Cable Amendment of 193 1,
Chinese American women like Florence Chinn Kwan and Flora Belle
Jan who chose to marry Chinese foreign students fell victims to the Cable Act.