The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [101]
Bessie Jeong resolved not to share her sister’s fate. When her father began to invite men to the house, and then asked her to return to China, she inferred it was her turn to be married off. “He was going to realize money out of it, or he was fulfilling his duty as a father,” she speculated. “But I still would be on the auction block. Prized Jersey—the name ‘Bessie’ always made me think of some nice fat cow!” In 1915, at the age of fourteen, she fled her parents’ home to live with Donaldina Cameron, the head of the Presbyterian Mission Home in San Francisco, which sheltered runaway Chinese prostitutes and battered Chinese wives. With Cameron’s protection and financial support, Bessie enrolled first at the Lux Normal School for girls, then at Stanford (where in 1927 she became the first Chinese American woman graduate), and finally at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. To help pay her way toward becoming a doctor, she performed a series of domestic tasks—cleaning and laundry, baby-sitting children, and serving dinners.
Like many successful people, Bessie Jeong approached life with a mixture of natural optimism and resilience. She harbored no bitterness toward her tradition-bound family and even reconciled with her father, who eventually came to terms with her refusal to return to China. (He visited her several times, but died before her graduation from Stanford and never saw her become a doctor.) She had a wide circle of friends, both Chinese and Caucasian, and claimed never to have experienced any racial prejudice in her entire lifetime. Jeong also proved adept at managing a career along with a family, balancing a happy marriage to an educated man of her choice—Wing Chan, the Chinese consul in San Francisco—with a private medical practice that flourished for almost forty years.
Women like Bessie Jeong, however, were rare. The majority of Chinese American women were still under enormous pressure to place family above their careers. But with the old traditions falling away, even aspiring young homemakers were uncertain about their roles in the arena of courtship and marriage.
Different expectations of courtship and marriage inevitably created misunderstandings between Chinese immigrant parents and their children. In the early twentieth century, the rituals of courtship fluctuated between old-country mores and American-style dating. Some ABCs submitted to arranged marriages brokered by their parents; others rebelled. “My parents wanted to hold onto the old idea of selecting a husband for me, but I would not accept their choices,” Lillie Leung told an interviewer for the 1924 Los Angeles Survey of Race Relations:
We younger Chinese make fun of the old Chinese idea according to which the parents made all the arrangements for the marriage of their children. Whenever a young Chinese goes back to China we tell him that he is going there to marry—that has come to be a standing joke, and even the older people join in with us.
As they entered the Western world of romance, many Chinese American youths invented their own rules as they went along. In the 1910s, teenagers in San Francisco Chinatown defied their parents by “spooning” along Dupont Street. Because single Chinese American women and men were not supposed to be seen together, the spectacle of youths openly kissing scandalized Chinatown.
A more acceptable form of social behavior was group dating: for instance, outings sponsored by respectable Western organizations like the YMCA. Such chaperoned activities—picnics, museum tours, church suppers—radiated a wholesome image and provided a setting where members