The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [100]
The American-born Chinese women, however, enjoyed better—slightly better—opportunities than their immigrant mothers. With education, fluency in English, and familiarity with American culture, they could move out of labor-intensive industries and into jobs that required specialized skills. By the 1920s, there was a detectable pattern of gradual upward mobility for talented female ABCs. Bilingual and high-school-educated women, overqualified for factory jobs, began working in gift shops and local businesses in Chinatown. Some became operators for the Chinatown Telephone Exchange in San Francisco, where they were required to speak fluent English, several Chinese dialects and subdialects, memorize 2,200 phone numbers, because the exchange handled an average of 13,000 calls a day.
Landing work outside Chinatown, however, remained a challenge. A few found employment in so-called pink-collar positions: as secretaries, clerks, or stock girls for large white corporations, largely because of the popular view that the Chinese were a hardworking and docile people. Sexism magnified the problems of race. White firms hired young Chinese women simply to capitalize on their physical appearance, outfitting Chinese department store salesladies, elevator girls, theater ushers, and restaurant hostesses in Asian costumes to provide an exotic atmosphere for white customers. But for every Chinese American woman hired, countless others met a wall of resistance—they could not obtain even the lowest-paid, most dead-end jobs; they were told flatly that the company didn’t “hire Orientals.”
Nevertheless, in the first few decades of the twentieth century a female Chinese American professional class began to emerge. Second-generation Chinese women entered arenas traditionally dominated by white middle-class women, such as teaching, nursing, and library science. When hired by the San Francisco public school system in 1926, Alice Fong Yu became one of the first Chinese American teachers in the country. Three sisters from a prosperous San Francisco family became pioneers in their chosen occupations: Martha Fong was the first Chinese American nursery school teacher, Mickey Fong the first Chinese American public health nurse, and Marian Fong the first Chinese American dental hygienist. College-educated ABC women also stepped into careers normally occupied by men. Faith So Leung is believed to have become the first Chinese American female dentist in 1905, and Dolly Gee the first Chinese American female bank manager in 1929.
Given the obstacles, it took women with exceptional willpower to rise to the top. Bessie Jeong, one of the nation’s earliest Chinese American women physicians, was one such. Jeong saw what could happen to women who surrendered complete control of their lives to their husbands. In the 1910s, her sister Rose was told to choose between two marriage proposals from men she had never met—a man in his twenties and a fifty-year-old cook—with only their photographs and her family’s advice to guide her. She decided to marry the older man: “Better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave,” her parents advised. But her husband turned out to be jealous, suspicious, and tyrannical—a “hard taskmaster,” as Jeong described him. Sixteen-year-old Rose was far too Americanized and educated