The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [99]
Another American-born Chinese who pursued his career with relentless, single-minded determination was Chan Chung Wing. Born in Napa, California, he spent his early childhood in China, in the care of his grandfather, a merchant. When he returned to Napa at age nine, shortly before the turn of the century, he showed an early aptitude for learning, skipping from first to fourth grade within a single year. He continued his education in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from Lowell High School and Berkeley, where he studied engineering. His grandfather wanted Chan to be an engineer, but Chan opted instead for law. Upon graduation from the Saint Ignatius School of Law, he passed the bar exam with a score of 96 percent—one of the highest on record—and became the first Chinese lawyer to practice in California.
Friends warned Chan that as a lawyer he would starve to death. Indeed, he “found it very difficult to defend my clients, because there was a lot of discrimination against Chinese and many judges tried to throw me out of the courtroom,” he recalled. “But I was very persistent and soon found out that playing golf with the judges and district attorneys afforded me the opportunity to discuss the problems of the Chinese community with them.” Soon the Chinese community found Chan Chung Wing to be one of its greatest champions, a formidable defender of their civil rights. For instance, when Chan learned that the San Francisco police would habitually attack unemployed Chinese workers, striking them with their billy clubs and ordering them to leave town, he filed more than thirty lawsuits against the police, effectively ending the violence.
Second-generation Chinese American women also served as pioneers in their fields, but their struggle for acceptance was far more difficult than the men’s. Before the turn of the century, the majority of working-class Chinese families could not afford to educate their daughters beyond primary school, but after World War I, the introduction of compulsory education in the United States permitted Chinese girls to attend and graduate from high school in numbers equal to Chinese boys. College, however, remained out of reach for most. These women were only a generation or two removed from an era when it was unthinkable for a respectable woman—white or Chinese—to appear alone in public. As was true of other immigrant groups, and the majority of native-born white Americans as well, many Chinese American families employed a double standard, urging their sons to go to college while expecting their daughters either to stay at home or to marry, preferably an educated man. Jade Snow Wong, author of Fifth Chinese Daughter, wrote poignantly of her San Francisco youth in the 1920s, and of how her father refused to finance her college education so he could send her brother to medical school instead.
Even if an ABC woman had financial support to pursue her degree and the encouragement of enlightened parents, she had few role models to inspire her. During the nineteenth century, the number of ethnic Chinese women—either American- or foreign-born-who had graduated from college could be counted on the fingers of one hand: between 1881 and 1892, a total of four Chinese female students, sponsored by missionaries, obtained medical degrees from American universities. They are believed to have been the very first Chinese women to study in the United States. Even at the secondary school level, it was difficult to find female mentors for Chinese girls. It was not until the 1920s that the San Francisco public school system began hiring female Chinese schoolteachers. Any Chinese American woman who wanted higher education needed extraordinary persistence and dedication to achieve her goal.
And education was only the first hurdle. The labor situation, dismal as it was for American-born Chinese men, could be even worse for their sisters, who occupied the lowest tier of a labor market stratified by race and sex. In the early