Jade Snow Wong grew up in a community, nation, and international context undergoing rapid changes as the Cold War escalated. Fifth Chinese Daughter testifies both to what it means to be Chinese American and what it means to play Chinese American.
Constance Wong Ong who I encountered in the late 1980s is perhaps one clue into the fascination that the work continues to hold for multiple audiences. The distance between the persona “Jade Snow” inscribed in these pages and the magisterial and strong-willed Mrs.
Despite aggressive exclusion laws designed to truncate its growth, San Francisco’s Chinatown was a vibrant place likewise occupying a curious duality as both tourist attraction and ethnic ghetto. The mainstream press responded positively to Jade Snow Wong’s “enchanting record of Chinese customs and Her writing, one reviewer noted, “exudes the delicate femininity only the Asiatic women The guileless appeal of the work’s slightly orientalist catalog of details-of herbalist’s shops, New Year’s celebrations, and recipes for tomato beef and egg foo young-exists in tandem with its portrayal of working-class Chinese American family life, one of emotional repression, constant toil, and penny-pinching. Understandably, “Connie” does not have the same ring. “Jade Snow” was another partial truth Wong rendered her Chinese name, Huang Yuxue, in its English translation, likewise eschewing her given name, Constance. Producing the impression of filial deference, the book introduces its protagonist through a strategic fiction. Jade Snow Wong famously-or infamously-distances herself through the third person, attributing this choice to Chinese convention in which the “submergence of the individual is literally practiced” (xiii). Now this is admittedly the opposite impression that one might take away from the persona appearing in the following pages. The truth was more prosaic: Jade Snow Wong scared me to death. I demurred, citing other demands on my time. Sometime prior to Wong’s death in 2006, the University of Washington Press asked me, a fourth-generation Chinese American from the Bay Area, if I would write a biography of Jade Snow Wong. A foundational text in Asian American literature, the work has lived multiple lives since its publication in 1950 and continues to spark debate in Asian American studies. “I do not think of myself as a writer,” wrote the now canonical Chinese American author and pioneering ceramicist Jade Snow Wong in Despite the posture of modest denial, postwar critics were uniformly charmed by her autobiographical Fifth Chinese which she began writing at the tender age of twenty-four. Jade Snow Wong’s Giftshop and Travel Service
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