Chinese American Women Defense Workers in WWII

Chinese American Women Defense Workers in World War II Author(s): Xiaojian Zhao Source: California History, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 138-153 Published by: University of California Press in association with the California Historical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25177576 . Accessed: 10/07/2013 13:20
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Before the Second World War it was difficult for Chinese American women to get jobs outside Chinatown because of racial and gender discrimination. However, the nation’s wartime needs required that every able-bodied per son be mobilized, including
women and racial minorities. The result was an unprecedented hiring of Chinese
American women in the Bay Area’s wartime industries. This picture shows Nancy Lew Mar working as a riv
eter at the Pan-American Airways on Treasure Island. Nancy Lew Mar Collection.
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Chinese American Women
Defense Workers in World War II
by Xiaojian Zhao
In February 1945, Fortune Magazine published an article on the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, Cal
ifornia, including eight photos of the shipyards workers. One of the captions for the photos says, “Chinese Woman: she hasn’t missed a day’s work in
two years.” 1
This woman was Ah Yoke Gee, a
welder in Kaiser Richmond Shipyard Number Two.*
The weekly magazine of the Kaiser Richmond ship
yards, Pore ‘N’Aft, described her as one of the oldest crew members of Richmond shipyards. From July 31,
1942, when she started to work in the shipyard, to
April 20,1945, Ah Yoke Gee had missed only one day of work to spend time with her oldest son, a ser
viceman who was passing through San Francisco on
his way to the Pacific front.2 At a time when there was a shortage of labor, Ah Yoke Gee’s story was
apparently useful for the Kaiser company’s public relations. Here, a middle-aged Chinese American
woman was being recognized as a patriotic, hard
working defense worker, who was doing her best to
contribute to the nation’s war effort.
Ironically, this model shipyard worker had been
deprived of citizenship by her own government. Born in 1895 on the Monterey Peninsula in Califor nia, Ah Yoke Gee was a second-generation Chinese
American for whom U. S. citizenship was a
*The real names of some of my informants are not given in
this essay upon their request. I use the pinyin system in translit
erations, except for names of well-known persons. If a person’s name has been printed in English sources before, I follow the way it was in print to avoid confusion.
birthright. Her legal status changed, however, after
she married a Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong.
During the period of Chinese exclusion from 1882 to 1943, Ah Yoke Gee’s husband, an alien from China,
was racially ineligible for naturalization.3 Moreover, the Cable Act of September 22,1922, stipulated that
women citizens who married aliens ineligible for cit
izenship could no longer be citizens themselves.4
Though Ah Yoke Gee worked for the nation’s defense
industry, she could not vote as a citizen. Her daugh ters recalled that she had been very upset about los
ing her citizenship because she always considered
herself an American. At age forty-six, she finally had the opportunity to work in a defense industry to
demonstrate her patriotism to her country. It was also
during the war that Congress repealed the Chinese
exclusion laws and made it possible later for Ah Yoke Gee to regain her citizenship through naturalization.
Unfortunately, her husband, who died before the
war, did not live to see the happy day.5 Ah Yoke
passed away in 1973.
World War II marked a turning point in the lives of Chinese Americans. For the first time, Chinese
Americans began to be accepted by the larger Amer ican society. Chinese American women not only had a chance to work at jobs traditionally held by men, but were also allowed to show their loyalty to their
country. Although scholars have long recognized the
importance of World War II in the lives of American women, and there has been increasing popular inter est in the topic since the release in the late 1970s of a documentary?”The Life and Times of Rosie the
SUMMER 1996 139
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Riveter”?the existing literature has overlooked the
profound impact of the war on Chinese American women. Partly because of a scarcity of English-lan guage sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did
not share the experience of “Rosie the Riveter.”6
Based on sources from Chinese-language news
papers and reports, company documents, and oral
history interviews, this essay focuses on the unique
experience of Chinese American female defense
workers in the San Francisco Bay area. It examines
the racial discrimination and prejudice that had
forced Chinese Americans to isolate themselves in
their ethnic communities, and explores how second
generation Chinese American women, together with men of their communities, grasped the wartime
opportunity to enter the larger American society. I
chose the San Francisco Bay area as the setting of this
study because the area had both the largest concen
tration of defense industries and the largest con
centration of Chinese American women during the war.
The war created a favorable climate for Chinese
Americans to be accepted by American society, but
looking back, many Chinese Americans have mixed
feelings about the war. The bombing of Pearl Har
bor was one of the most tragic incidents in the his
tory of the United States. Without it, however, Chinese Americans would not have been able to
enter defense industries or the armed services. Since
the United States and China were allies against com
mon enemies during the war, American images of
Chinese began to change from negative to positive ones. Whereas, once, negative stereotypes of the
Chinese had dominated popular culture, the Amer
ican mass media now described the Chinese as
polite, moderate, and hard-working. On December
22, 1941, Time magazine, for example, published a
short article to help the American public differenti
ate their Chinese “friends” from the Japanese. The
facial expressions of the Chinese, according to the
article, were more “placid, kindly, open,” while those
of the Japanese were more “positive, dogmatic, arro
gant.”7 Also, because World War II was considered
by the American public as a “good war” against fas
cists who had launched a racist war, it was impor tant for the United States itself to improve its domestic race relations. Chinese Americans, too,
recognized the racial dimension of this war. “It is for
tunate,” said an editorial in the Jinshan shibao (Chi nese Times), a San Francisco-based Chinese-language
daily newspaper, “that this war has the white race
and the yellow race on both sides and therefore will
not turn into a war between the two.”8
Moreover, Chinese Americans were needed for the
nation’s armed forces and defense industries. In
May 1942, Bay Area defense establishments began to advertise jobs in local Chinese newspapers. Rich
mond shipyards, in particular, announced that they would hire Chinese Americans regardless of their cit
izenship status or their English skills. In a recruitment
speech, Henry Kaiser, president of Kaiser Industries, which operated four shipyards in Richmond, called
upon Bay Area Chinese Americans to work in his
shipyards to support the war effort. The Moore Dry Dock Company hired Chinese-speaking instructors in their Oakland welding school and started a spe cial bus service between the shipyard and Chinatown
for Chinese American trainees.
After decades of isolation imposed by the larger American society, the Bay Area Chinese American
communities lost no time in seizing this opportunity. In various meetings and social gatherings, commu
nity leaders and organizations urged Chinese Amer
ican residents to participate in the war efforts.
Because military service would qualify immigrants for U.S. citizenship and some Chinese immigrants had been granted citizenship while in the Army, it was considered a breakthrough in challenging the
exclusion acts. Jinshan shibao published a number of
articles regarding the advantages of defense jobs. First, defense jobs were well paid. Second, these jobs could be used for draft deferment. Third, defense
employees could apply for government- subsidized
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housing, which provided a great opportunity for
Chinese Americans to move out of their isolated eth
nic ghettos.10 Because few companies recorded the number of
their Chinese American employees, the existing lit
erature tends either to overlook them or give inac curate estimates of them. In The Chinese Experience in America, Shih-shan Henry Tsai estimated that in
1943, Chinese Americans “made up some 15 percent of the shipyard work force in the San Francisco Bay area.”11 Since in 1943, the Bay Area had about 100,000
shipyard workers, Tsai’s estimate suggests that
15,000 were Chinese Americans.12 However, given the fact that the Bay Area’s entire Chinese American
population, including all age groups, was only about
22,000 in 1940, and only a small number of Chinese
Americans migrated to the West Coast during the
war, it was very unlikely that 15,000 of them (over 68 percent) were defense workers.13 On August 21,
1942, the Chinese Press, a San Francisco Chinatown
based English-language newspaper, reported that
1,600 Chinese Americans worked in Bay Area
defense industries.14 This was one year before the
peak of the war, before several of the Bay Area’s
major wartime shipbuilding establishments, includ
ing Richmond Shipyard Number Three and Marin
ship in Sausalito, began production. The number of
Chinese American defense workers would increase
significantly a few months later, after major defense
establishments ran their ads in Chinese community newspapers. Marinship alone, according to Jinshan shibao, employed 400 Chinese Americans in March
1943. At the launching ceremony of Sun Yat-sen, a Lib
erty Ship named after the leader of the Chinese Rev
olution of 1911, Marinship invited all the yard’s Chinese American employees and members of their
families. The ship was christened by Mrs. Tao-ming Wei, wife of the Chinese ambassador to the U.S., and
Madam Chiang Kai-shek was the guest of honor.15
Based on these scattered pieces of information and
interviews with old timers of local Chinese com
munities, a reasonable estimate is that by 1943, about
Born and schooled in Oakland, Elizabeth Lew Anderson, shown here, worked as a metalsmith
at Alameda Naval Air Station during the war. Eliz
abeth Lew Anderson Collection.
5,000 Chinese Americans were working (or had
worked) for defense-related industries in the Bay Area, and between 500 to 600 of them were women.16
For a number of reasons, there were fewer female
than male Chinese Americans in defense industries.
The Chinese population in the United States histor
ically has had an unbalanced sex ratio. Most of the
early Chinese immigrants were male, and the Exclu
sion Act of 1882 also forced male Chinese immigrants who had married women in their native provinces
SUMMER 1996 141
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to leave their wives and children in China. Only reg istered merchants and their families, students, teach
ers, diplomats, and travelers could be exempted from the exclusion. In order to bring their wives to
the United States, many Chinese laborers were eager to change their status to merchants. Some of them
accomplished this by saving a small amount of
money and then raising capital through a hui to start
their own businesses.17 Others listed their names as
partners in businesses of relatives and friends. In
exchange for such privileges, they sometimes offered
years of free labor. The 1906 earthquake in San Fran
cisco to some extent facilitated the immigration of
Chinese. Since birth records of the city were
destroyed during the earthquake and fire, many Chinese grasped the opportunity to claim U.S. citi
zenship and used their new status to send for their
sons and daughters.18 Not until after 1910 did fam
ily-oriented life begin gradually to replace the old bachelor society. By 1940, Chinese American citizens
finally outnumbered alien residents in Chinese
American communities.19 Nevertheless, that year there were still 285 Chinese American men for every one hundred Chinese American women.20
The precarious economic situation of immigrant Chinese families compelled the majority of Chinese American women to help earn an income, no mat
ter whether they were wives of business owners, wives of laborers, or daughters of immigrants.21 Women’s work in Chinese communities was often
integrated with family life and family businesses. In small shops, women worked alongside their hus
bands, between their households chores. Children of
shop-owners often worked from an early age, begin
ning by folding socks in laundry shops or cleaning vegetables in restaurants and moving
on to more dif
ficult tasks as they got older. While women and chil
dren did not earn wages, their work was
indispensable to the family business since few busi
nesses could afford to hire extra hands.22
Women whose families were not wealthy enough to own businesses found employment mostly as
cannery workers, shrimp cleaners, or garment work ers. Cleaning shrimp was a common job for women
with young children. During the shrimp season, some women would bring shrimp home and sit
with their children shelling the shrimp from morn
ing till night, sometimes under candlelight. Wages were based on the weight of the shrimp that they shelled daily. The most common employment for
Chinese American women was in the garment indus
try, which made up 58 percent of all industrial
employment in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the late
1930s. In the early 1940s, there were more than sev
enty garment shops, most of which had fewer than
fifty employees. At a time when unionized garment workers received $19 to $30 a week, workers in Chi
natown’s garment shops received only $4 to $16. A
typical garment shop was located at the owner’s
home, where family members of the shop-owner and
employees often worked together.23
During the war, in contrast to Chinese American
men, who were more likely to be encouraged to join the military or defense work, women’s primary
duties still consisted of being wives and mothers.
Throughout the war years, there were no articles or
editorials in Chinese newspapers specifically calling on Chinese women to enter defense industries. “It
is the servicemen who will do the fighting for us,” Madame C. T. Feng, chairman of the American
Women’s Voluntary Service (an overseas Chinese
organization) told Chinese American women. “We
must show our fighting men that we are…absolutely behind them.”24 As part of its war effort, the China
town branch YWCA in San Francisco started a spe cial weekly class for women to learn time-saving
ways for preparing nutritious food. In a speech
delivered to a YWCA open house meeting, the Y’s
administrator, Jane Kwong Lee, called upon Chinese
American women to support the country by giving their families “the right nutritional food.”25 What
open support existed for defense employment for women came mostly from the American-educated
second generation. As a matter of fact, only the Eng
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After the war, Elizabeth Lew Anderson married a Cau
casian merchant seaman. Most of the time she accompa nied him when he traveled and worked outside California, but she returned to work at the Naval Air Station during both the Korean and Vietnam wars. This 1983 photograph captures her at work. Elizabeth Lew Anderson Collection.
lish-language Chinese Press occasionally reported activities of Chinese American women defense
workers. In contrast, Jinshan shibao, a major local Chi
nese-language newspaper that had a larger circula
tion, paid little attention to the subject. On April 16, 1943, Jade Snow Wong, a San Francisco-born young
Chinese American woman, christened a Liberty
Ship at a Richmond shipyard and made the news in
the San Francisco Chronicle, but there was no cover
age of the event in Jinshan shibao. Not until three days later, after friends and relatives of the Wong family
made complaints, did the newspaper print Wong’s story and offer a public apology.
2?
It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to. Jobs in ethnic factories
were low paying. Nevertheless, the piece-work sys tem and the flexible working hours made it possi
ble for women to combine wage-earning with their
family obligations. Before the war, 80 percent of the women who worked in San Francisco’s Chinatown were married and 75 percent of them had children.
Married garment shop workers could take time off to cook meals, shop, and pick up children from
school. Garment shops also allowed women to
bring their small children with them to work. It was
very common to see babies sleeping in little cribs next to their mothers’ sewing machines and toddlers
crawling around on the floor.27 Jobs outside the eth
nic community, however, did not allow such prac tices.
The ethnically exclusive working environment, moreover, provided a place where immigrant Chi nese women could socialize. A married Chinese woman with children did not have much time for
social life. At work, however, she could chat with
friends. Since everyone at work spoke Chinese, women found the working environment agreeable, and intimacy in sharing experiences of life in the
United States developed naturally. The relationship between shop-owners and workers, if often eco
nomically exploitative, was nonetheless friendly.
Family members of the shop-owners often worked
side-by-side with the workers. Their children were
told to respect the employees, often addressing older workers as ‘Auntie” or “Uncle.” Garment fac
tory jobs, therefore, were in great demand in Chi nese American communities. Even the wives of
bankers or small merchants sometimes sought
employment there.28
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Thus, although most Chinese American women
were compelled to earn money to supplement their
family income, they did it while taking care of their husbands and children. Since the exclusion acts
made it difficult for Chinese women to immigrate to the United States and those who made it often did so after years of separation from their husbands, it
was extremely hard for them to take jobs that con
flicted with their household duties. Childcare was one of the major problems. Nursery schools were not
available in San Francisco’s Chinatown until the
early 1940s, and Chinese American women were not
accustomed to the idea of leaving their children at
childcare facilities. Since very few Chinese immi
grated to the United States with their parents, they usually did not have their parents helping out with childcare.29
The decades-long isolation had also limited the
ability of immigrant Chinese working women to
communicate with the outside world. Since they often worked between household chores, they had no time to participate in mainstream cultural activ
ities and little chance to speak English. After years of working at Chinatown jobs, they found the out
side world too remote from their daily experience.
They did not have any non-Chinese friends and did not know whom to trust outside their ethnic com
munities. For wives of shop-owners, their departure for outside jobs would harm the family businesses that depended on the free labor of family members.
Transportation was also an almost insurmountable
problem. Since very few Chinese families had cars
at the time (4 percent in the late 1930s in San Fran
cisco), the majority of Chinese immigrant working women were familiar only with the area within
walking distance from their homes. To these women,
commuting from one city in the Bay Area to another
was no different from traveling from one state to
another.30 Given the social isolation of the immigrant gen
eration, it is not surprising that the Chinese Ameri
can women who worked in defense industries were
mostly the second-generation daughters of immi
grant women.31 Among the eighty-two Chinese
American women about whom I found information
in various sources, and the twenty-seven women
whom I was able to locate to conduct oral history interviews, only four were over the age of forty at
the time they worked.32 Few of them were married
with children. Most of these women had gone to Cal
ifornia’s public schools; they had at least a high school education, and quite a few of them had
attended college. With relatively few household
responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had
the freedom and independence to work outside the
home.
Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese Ameri can women were among the first American women
to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force. As early as May 1942, the Chinese Press reported that young Chinese American girls were working in most of the defense establishments in the region. At the Engineer
Supply Depot, Pier 90, eighteen-year-old Ruth Law was the youngest office staff member in the company. Her co-worker, Anita Lee, was an assistant to the
company’s chief clerk. Fannie Yee, a high school
senior at the time, won top secretarial honors for her
efficiency at work at Bethlehem Steel Corporation in
San Francisco. She worked with two other young women, Rosalind Woo and Jessie Wong. The major defense employers in San Francisco for Chinese
American women at the time, according to the Press, were the Army Department and Fort Mason. In
Oakland, the Army Supply Base recognized Stella Quan as a very capable clerk. The first two Chinese
American women who worked at Moore Dry Dock
Company were Maryland Pong and Edna Wong. The
State Employment Bureau also had Chinese Amer
ican women on its staff. Before Kaiser’s Richmond
shipyards and Marinship began production work,
many young Chinese American girls worked at
Mare Island Navy Shipyard. Among them were
Anita Chew, Mildred Lew, and Evelyn Lee of Oak
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Pearl Wong (second from the right) worked at the Oak land Draft Board during the war. Third from the right is _
Army Major Farington. Pearl Wong Collection.
land. Both Jenny Sui of San Francisco and Betty Choy of Vallejo started as messenger girls in the yard,
but
they were soon promoted to clerk-typists.33 Some women even left their professional training
or occupations for defense-related work. Miaolan Ye, an Oakland-born Chinese American girl, was a col
lege student majoring in agriculture at the time. She
left school during the war to work as an inspector in a defense establishment in San Leandro. Hon
olulu-born Betty Lum had been a nurse before the war. She, however, thought “shipbuilding is the pre sent must industry of America” and resigned from
her nursing job to learn acetylene burning at a Rich
mond shipyard. According to Fore ‘N’ Aft, there were three reasons for Betty to support the war effort:
she was an American citizen, she was Chinese, and
she had a nephew who was killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is unclear when Betty Lum
moved to the Bay Area, but the Kaiser company used
her voice to urge other Chinese women to partici
pate in defense work. Betty also had two sisters
working in defense industries, one of them at Rich
mond Shipyard Number Three. Her brother, a den
tist at the time, was prepared to join the Army.35
Unlike single young women, it was much more difficult for married Chinese American women to take defense jobs unless they did
not have small children at home. After she married, Ah Yoke Gee spent most of her time at home tak
ing care of her six children. She kept her sewing machine running whenever she was free from
household chores. One of her daughters remem
bered that sometimes she woke up at two o’clock in the morning and could still hear her mother
sewing. By the time the war started, Ah Yoke was
widowed. Two of her older children had left home
and the rest of them were in either high school or
college. Although she still cooked for her family, her children had their own routines and did not expect to be served in a formal way. Every morning before
leaving for her swing shift job in the shipyard, Ah Yoke would cook enough food for the whole fam
ily for the day. On weekends she shopped, washed, and cleaned.36
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A few married Chinese American women man
aged to find defense work alongside their husbands.
In late 1942, the Mare Island Navy Shipyard decided to select a Chinese female employee to christen a Lib
erty Ship. Among the eight Chinese American nom
inees, two were married. The honor went to Mrs.
Yam, a Shop 51 electrician’s helper. Mrs. Yam had just
graduated from San Jose High School. Her newly wed husband, Fred Yam, was the yard’s pipe-fitter.
Having joined the shipyard in June 1942, the young couple took the bus to work together from San Fran
cisco’s Chinatown to Vallejo. On December 18,1942, Mrs. Yam, accompanied by six young Chinese Amer
ican girls, smashed a bottle of champagne at HMS
Foley’s launching ceremony and became the first
Chinese American woman in California shipyards to receive this highest wartime honor. She said she
felt like “the proudest and happiest girl in the world.”37
Other married Chinese American women joined defense work while their husbands were away from
home. Jane Jeong, a burner at Richmond Shipyard Number Two, started her job in the shipyard only
four months after her wedding. Before the war, Jane
Jeong had been a dancer and a nightclub manager.
She had also accumulated two hundred flying hours
and dreamed of being a pilot fighting against the
Japanese in China.38 After the United States officially entered the war, however, she realized that she could
support the war effort both in China and in the U.S.
by building ships. Since her husband was a merchant
seaman who was away from home most of the time,
Jane Jeong took a job at a Richmond shipyard.39 Coming from a farming community in Fresno,
Mannie Lee moved to Richmond along with her hus
band and children. At a Kaiser shipyard, her husband
Henry Lee was a graveyard-shift welder, while Man
nie worked with her two daughters, Henrietta Lee
and Hilda Fong, and a daughter-in-law, Lena Lee, in the yard’s electric shop. In addition to the five ship
yard workers of the family, Mannie Lee’s two sons
and her son-in-law were all in the Army. Although
born in America, it was a big change for Mannie to
move from her vegetable farm to Richmond. But at
least the family still worked and lived together. The difference was that everyone worked fewer hours
and made more money. Moreover, they enjoyed the
publicity from the company. Mannie and her family had never received any recognition as hard-work
ing farmers.40
Although the majority of the Chinese American defense workers had grown up in the United States, racial discrimination and prejudice before the war
had prevented their participation in many areas of
American society. Since sons in Chinese American
families usually had priority over daughters in
receiving family support for higher education, Chi nese American girls had to work harder than other
students to save money or win scholarships to go to
college. And despite the fact that these women were
educated in the United States and had a good com
mand of English, Chinese American children in
racially integrated public schools in San Francisco were excluded from most of the extracurricular
activities. They could not dance with white children
and few were invited to parties organized by peo
ple other than Chinese. The way they were treated
in the job market was even worse: engineering grad uates of Chinese descent from the University of Cal
ifornia, Berkeley, were frequently rejected by American firms. While white women with college
degrees and special training worked as teachers,
nurses, secretaries, and social workers, similarly educated Chinese American women could only find
service jobs as elevator operators, waitresses,
dancers, and maids. Outside Chinese communities
their professional degrees were meaningless, for
few people wanted their services.41 It was the war that opened the door to better-pay
ing jobs for Chinese American women. Aimei Chen, who came to the United States shortly after she was
born, had grown up in a small Chinese community in Stockton. Before the war, she had worked as a
waitress in a Chinese cafe while attending junior col
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lege. Some Caucasian girls her age got jobs in local
dime stores, ice cream parlors, and department stores. Aimei, however, had never applied for those
jobs because she knew no Chinese would be hired.
While in college taking business classes, Aimei was
very pessimistic about her future. As a Chinese
American woman, it was unlikely that she could find a job outside Chinatown. Moreover, Stockton’s Chi
natown was very small and could not provide full
time employment for most of the women in the
community. But, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Aimei
learned from friends that defense industries were hir
ing, regardless of the applicants’ ethnic backgrounds. She went with a friend to the Stockton Army Depot and was hired on the spot as a secretary.42
Yulan Liu, an Oakland-born Chinese American
girl, had just graduated from high school in the summer of 1942. Her father, who had come to the
United States as a “paper son” in 1915, worked seven
days a week in a grocery store in Oakland’s China
town.43 Yulan’s mother worked in a laundry shop, where her four children spent most of their child
hood. Yulan also started to work in a laundry shop at age twelve. She did not have time to play with
other children, and she did not recall ever being invited to a Caucasian’s house. After she graduated from high school, Yulan began to work full-time. She
did not like the laundry shop job, but there were few other alternatives. Most of the girls in Chinatown
were waitresses and garment workers. Some of her
friends worked as maids in private homes. One day, her brother got a job at Moore Dry Dock Company in Oakland and told Yulan that there were many
women shipbuilders there. Yulan went to the yard the next day and got a job as a welder.44
Being employed in a defense industry gave some
Chinese American women a sense of belonging?of
finally being accepted by American society. At Marin
ship in Sausalito, Jade Snow Wong was happy that she was employed by an ‘American” company. A San
Francisco-born Chinese American girl, Jade Snow was the fifth daughter of a garment shop-owner. She
In the summer of 1942, Jade Snow Wong, above, grad uated from Mills College. When she sought advice at the college placement office for her job search, she
was
told not to expect any opportunities in ‘American busi
ness houses,” and to look only for work within her eth
nic community. U.S. involvement in World War II,
however, provided new
employment situations for
women of all ethnicities. Hundreds of Chinese Amer
ican women found work in Bay Area shipyards and
defense plants. Among them, Jade Snow Wong worked
in a Richmond shipyard. After the war, in 1945, Wong published Fifth Chinese Daughter, one of the first books about what it was like growing up
as a Chinese Amer
ican woman. Jade Snow Wong Collection.
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started to work in the shop when she was ten, help
ing her parents load garments on pick-up days. At
eleven, she learned to sew and worked next to her
mother. Although living in an ethnic community, she was quite aware of the differences between white
Americans and people from her own ethnic group and was eager to venture into the outside world.
Because of the financial difficulties of her family and her parents’ belief that it was unnecessary for girls to obtain a college education, she could not get fam
ily support to go to college as her brother had. With
determination, however, Jade Snow studied very hard and finally went to Mills College on a scholar
ship. In the summer of 1942, she graduated from
Mills College. As she stopped at the college place ment office seeking advice for her job search, she was
told not to expect any opportunities in ‘American
business houses,” and to look only for places within
her ethnic community. Jade Snow was stunned; an
honor student, she felt “as if she had been struck on
both cheeks.” She was, however, determined to get a job in a non-Chinese company. Her younger sister
at the time worked at Marinship in Sausalito. Jade Snow wanted to support the war effort as a citizen, so she went with her sister to Marinship. Twenty-four hours after she submitted an application, she was
hired.45
Maggie Gee, Ah Yoke Gee’s daughter, was born
in Berkeley. In a community where Chinese Ameri
can families were relatively few, Maggie grew up
among children from various ethnic backgrounds. As a teenager, Maggie delivered newspapers and
helped Caucasian women with their babies and
cooking. She thought the people whom she worked
for were nice to her. Nevertheless, as a Chinese, she
was not allowed to join white students’ clubs and she
could not swim in community pools. After she grad uated from high school, Maggie entered the Uni
versity of California, Berkeley. She paid the $28 tuition each semester out of her own earnings and
bought books and clothes with her own money. Her
mother had supported Maggie’s older brother in col
lege and had no money left for Maggie’s education.
But Maggie did live and eat at home while in col
lege. Maggie was a good student in school, but she
did not know what she could do with a college degree. She heard that many Chinese American
male college graduates, let alone Chinese American
women, had difficulties finding jobs in the fields in which they had been trained.
Pearl Harbor finally brought Chinese Americans
and white Americans together on new com
mon ground. On December 7, 1941, Maggie was spending the afternoon studying in the campus
library. She found many students there talking very
emotionally. Maggie sensed that something unusual
had happened. To Chinese Americans, World War
II had begun on September 18,1931, when the Japan ese invaded Manchuria in northeastern China. Mag
gie had been in the fourth grade at the time. Her
mother had planned to send her and her sister to
China to study, and they had to cancel the trip after
the Japanese occupied Chinese territory. After July 7,1937, when the Japanese attacked Chinese troops at Lugou Bridge near Beijing, the war against Japan became a nationwide effort in China. Overseas Chi nese were actively involved in supporting their fel
low countrymen. Maggie often went with her
mother to San Francisco’s Chinatown to attend ral
lies and fund-raising activities. She remembered
how badly she felt when she learned about the out
rageous atrocities during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, but she was surprised to notice that her American
classmates knew very little about what had hap
pened in China. Not until Pearl Harbor did every one seem involved in the war effort. The Berkeley
campus offered classes for defense employment, in
which Maggie and many other students received
training. While still a full-time student at Berkeley, she got a graveyard-shift job at Richmond Shipyard
Number Two.
Wartime employment provided tangible benefits
to many Chinese Americans. “For people who used
148 CALIFORNIA HISTORY
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to have very little money,” recalled Aimei Chen, “the war was a time of great economic opportunity.” She
started to buy things for her family?food, kitchen
ware, and other household items. Aimei’s mother
also got a job in a cannery in Stockton, where many former employees had left for defense jobs. Yulan Liu, meanwhile, made $65 a week, four times more
than she had made before the war. She gave some
money to her mother and saved the rest for herself.
On her day off, she went to the movies and bought herself candies and pastries. As for Ah Yoke Gee, her
family endured great difficulties for many years after she lost her husband. During the war, with both
her and her daughters working in the shipyard and
her son in the service, the living standard of the fam
ily improved significantly. Jade Snow Wong, for her
part, contributed part of her income to her parents and saved money for her future education.
The ethnically diverse working environment pro vided an opportunity for women such as Ah Yoke
Gee to meet people about whom they had known
little before the war. For over forty years, ever since
her birth, Ah Yoke had lived in the United States, but as she moved from the Monterey Peninsula to San
Francisco and then to Berkeley, she had little con
tact with people other than Chinese. It was at work
that she met all kinds of people and gained respect as one of the oldest crew members of the yard.46 Yulan Liu was also very popular among her team
mates. A small figure weighing only eighty pounds at the time, she not only worked hard but was also
the only one of the team who could handle welding
jobs in narrow areas of the ships. Her teammates
liked to hear her stories about people living in Chi nese American communities. Upon their request, she
led a tour of the group to San Francisco’s China
town.47
Defense industries provided an opportunity for
Chinese women to put to good use their knowledge of the world beyond school. After months of
research, Jade Snow Wong produced a paper on the
absenteeism of shipyard workers. The paper won
first prize in an essay contest sponsored by the San
Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area defense industries.
In addition to a fifty-dollar war bond, she was
offered the privilege of christening a Liberty Ship at a Kaiser shipyard. When her picture appeared in
both English and Chinese newspapers, she gained respect from members of her family and from peo
ple in the community. Many people in Chinatown came to congratulate her parents for their daugh ter’s success in the ‘American world.”48
Although some women were doing traditionally male jobs, compared to what they had done before
the war, most of them did not think defense work was that hard. Joy Yee, a San Francisco-born high school graduate, was the second daughter of a gar
ment shop-owner in Oakland. Although Joy had
tried to sew with her mother and sisters in the shop, her mother thought that Joy was not good at sewing and that she would never make it as a seamstress.
During the war, however, Joy got a job as a mechanic at Alameda Naval Air Station. Excited at having “a
real job” in a defense industry, she learned to use dif
ferent tools and became very efficient at work.49
Before the war, Yulan Liu had worked ten hours a
day, seven days a week, at a laundry. “There was
nothing heavier than the iron,” she said. “Sometimes
my arm was so sore at night that I could not hold
my chopsticks.” On the other hand, “the welding torch,” as she remembered, “was lighter,” mainly
because she did not have to hold it for hours. Even on an assembly line, she was able to work in differ ent parts of the ships and she always had a chance to chat with people between assignments. In the
laundry shop, no matter how fast she worked, there was always more to be washed, ironed, and folded, and she could hardly find any time to rest.50 The big change for Ah Yoke Gee was that she did not have to sew late at night any more. She worked eight hours a day for most of the days and had Sundays off.51
For some women, however, a defense job was not
easy. Maggie Gee, for example, found working at
night in the shipyard to be tiring. Welding itself was
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_<_________? ___ ^____b /^l____________^ _#?_ _______ ___________________________ :Jff^^ ___.-__ _______ Maggie Gee worked as a welder at a Richmond shipyard and then as a draftswoman at the Mare Island Navy Shipyard during the war. In 1944, she joined the Women’s Air force Service Pilots (WASPs) where she was one of only two Chinese American women. Because Chinese families did not value the education of their daughters as much as they did of their sons, Maggie had to pay her own way through the Uni versity of California at Berkeley. After the war she earned a Ph.D., and, continuing her tradition of unprecedented accomplishments among Asian American women in the United States, she worked for many years as the only woman physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Maggie Gee Collection. not bad, but at night she did not have people around to talk to. It was difficult to stay awake at work, since she was still attending school during the day and could not get much sleep. When the job was slow, she sometimes fell asleep, but it was so cold at night in the shipyard that she could never sleep well. A year later, when she graduated from college, Mag gie decided to do something different for a change. She got a new job at Mare Island Navy Shipyard as a draftswoman. It was the job at Mare Island that led Maggie to the most exciting adventure of her life. Working in a big office with over thirty people, she and two young women, one a Caucasian and one a Filipina, quickly became close friends. At lunch time, the three of them would meet in the rest area adjoining the ladies’ room. They would chat, eat their lunches, and drink coffee. They all liked the idea of helping the country fight the war, but at the same time, they all wanted to do something more exciting. The Filipina had taken some flying lessons before the war, and the three of them decided to save money for aviation training. When Maggie finally saved enough money for a training program, she was so overjoyed that she tossed the money into the air. Although as a child Maggie had enjoyed watching airplanes at the Oak land Airport, she had never dreamed of flying an air plane herself. After she graduated from an aviation school in Nevada, she interviewed with the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). When she returned to her drafting job at Mare Island, waiting for a call from the Army, Maggie realized that her life had changed. Everyone?mostly men?in her work area was interested in what she and her friends had done. Some people were envious. A few months later, Maggie was called by the Army and became one of only two Chinese American women in the WASPs. Her mother saw her off at the train station. Ah Yoke Gee was proud of her daughter. She wished that she herself were twenty years younger because she would have liked to fly too. Maggie remained a WASP until the unit was disbanded in late 1944. While in the service, she transported military sup plies throughout the country.52 Although Chinese Americans were accepted in defense industries, they had little chance to be pro moted to supervisory positions. Many companies simply assumed that white employees would not fol low orders given by Chinese. For those who had upgraded their skills over the years (usually male workers), this could be very frustrating. One male Chinese American worker at a Richmond shipyard had years of working experience with an excellent performance record. But he, too, saw several less qualified white workers promoted to foreman posi tions with no chance being given to him. Although he complained, no one listened. Finally he got so angry that he quit his job.53 Because women were not expected to work in defense industries after the war, they were not in a position to compete with male employees for super visory positions. Therefore, unlike the Chinese Amer ican men, very few Chinese American women had direct conflict with other workers or their supervi sors. Some women recalled that better jobs usually went to Caucasian women. On the other hand, except for the few immigrants who did not speak English, 150 CALIFORNIA HISTORY This content downloaded from 130.86.12.250 on Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:20:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions most of the Chinese American women had at least a high school education, and therefore did not work as janitors.54 They were mostly employed as office clerks, draftswomen, welders, burners, and in other semi-skilled positions. Since not many defense estab lishments employed large groups of Chinese Amer ican women, it was hard for these women to socialize exclusively among themselves. This, in fact, gave Chi nese American women opportunities to meet people from different ethnic backgrounds.55 Other workers also showed a great deal of curiosity about Chinese American women, for few of them had met Chinese American women before the war. Leong Bo San, a middle-aged Chinese American woman from San Francisco, was described in Fore ‘N’Aft as “a tiny, doll like figure” who “walks with the dainty, mincing gait of the upper class Chinese lady whose feet once were bound” in her “flat rubber-soled shoes of the ship yard.” According to the report, Leong Bo San had drawn attention from “everyone” who rode “the graveyard ferry boat.” At Assembly Line 11, the report went on, Leong Bo San was “everybody’s favorite,” for she often came to the yard with Chi nese shrimp, fruit, and cake to share with other workers. Although she looked tiny and delicate, she worked with “an energy that amazes people twice her size.” Her boss, James G. Zeck, reportedly said that “I wish I had a whole crew of people like her.”56 Nevertheless, some women did find themselves trapped in a place where the future was dismal. For example, Jade Snow Wong’s talent and ability were recognized by her boss at Marinship. Every time the boss got promoted to a higher position, he would take her with him to his new office. But Jade Snow noticed that while many clerks, secretaries, and other office workers in Marinship were women, their bosses, those who read the reports prepared by their secretaries and made decisions, were all men.57 Asked later whether she would like to stay at Marin ship when the war ended if she had the choice, she answered “no” without any hesitation. “I decided to leave before they started to lay people off,” she said. “There was no future for me, no future for women in the shipyard.” At Mills College, Jade Snow had found a few female role models?her professors, the dean for whom she had worked, and the college pres ident. She wanted to be a professional woman like them. But “in defense industry,” she said, “a woman could only be someone’s secretary. The bosses were all men.” Before the war ended, she started search ing for a career in which she did not have to be treated differently because she was a Chinese Amer ican and a woman.58 Toward the end of the war, defense industries gradually reduced the volume of their production, and their workers were free to leave their jobs. Some Chinese American women had waited for this day to come. Jade Snow Wong was happy that she had done her part to support the war effort of her coun try, but she quit her job right after V-J day. With the money that she had saved, she started a business of her own in San Francisco’s Chinatown and began writing books.59 Alameda Naval Air Station was one of the few defense establishments in the Bay Area that was able to keep some of its female employees after the war. Some women in the station, neverthe less, decided to leave. Lanfang Wong, a metalsmith in the yard for over three years, quit her job for two reasons. First, she found it tiring to commute two hours a day from San Francisco’s Chinatown to Alameda to work. Second, she did not think her job was skilled work. After a while, she realized that it was not much different from making clothes except that metal instead of cloth was used. As soon as she learned that the war was over, she found a new job working for an insurance company in San Francisco. She later married a war veteran and moved with him to Napa Valley to work on a small farm.60 Only a few Chinese American women continued to work in defense industries after the war. Yuqin Fu worked as an office clerk at Alameda Naval Air Sta tion until 1947, when she got married. After a few years at home taking care of her children, she found a job at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph.61 Born and SUMMER 1996 151 This content downloaded from 130.86.12.250 on Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:20:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ^^^HF ; v”” %^ v^^HB^%m$’,<^&^J&Mt-^^.^*1^B^H^^^^^E-“^^* schooled in Oakland, Elizabeth Lew Anderson worked as a metalsmith at the Alameda Naval Air Station during the war. She later married a Caucasian merchant seaman. Although her husband had to move from one place to another all over the coun try (and sometimes outside the country) and Eliza beth followed him most of the time, she was called back to work by the Naval Air Station during the Korean War (and later again, during the Vietnam War), when her family moved back to the Bay Area.62 Joy Yee continued to work at the Naval Station until 1955, when she was about to have her first child. But when she stayed at home, she missed her job and her friends at work. In 1968, she went back to work and kept her job for another seventeen years until her retirement. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the war, Joy Yee helped organize a reunion of Chinese American women who had worked at the Alameda Naval Air Station during the war.63 A few others, however, were reluctant to leave their defense jobs. Ah Yoke Gee loved her job in the shipyard so much that she would not leave it for any thing else. She knew that other jobs would not pay as well. Aimei Chen also wanted to stay at her defense job. Since so many white women were then also job-hunting, the chances for her to find a good job were slim. By late 1945, however, most of the Bay Area’s defense establishments were about to shut down, and large-scale lay-offs began. With limited training and skills, these women could not find jobs in other industries; they had to look for jobs that were traditionally held by women. These Chinese American women’s wartime work nevertheless had important consequences: their lives were no longer restricted within their ethnic com munities. Most of them found jobs outside China towns as race relations and the economy improved in the postwar years. Ah Yoke Gee took a job at a post office in Berkeley, where she worked until her retire ment. Meanwhile, she became actively involved in Berkeley’s Chinese American community.64 Aimei Chen married and moved with her husband to Berkeley. Under the GI Bill, her husband became an engineering student at the University of California. 152 CALIFORNIA HISTORY This content downloaded from 130.86.12.250 on Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:20:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Aimei found a job as an office clerk in a small firm, where she worked until her first child was born.65 Yulan Liu married her former shipyard foreman, a white man. The young couple bought a house in Vallejo, where Yulan’s husband worked in the Navy Shipyard at Mare Island. Yulan worked as a nursing aide on and off for over thirty years. Lili Wong, daughter of a San Francisco restaurant waiter, left her job at a Richmond shipyard and went to medical school. She later moved to Washington, D.C., and practiced medicine with her husband.66 Their wartime experience gave Chinese American women confidence and maturity. They found that they could do the things that men could. Maggie Gee left the WASPs and went to graduate school in Berkeley. She was not a shy Chinese American girl anymore and was soon elected president of the Chi nese Students Association on the Berkeley campus. Thereafter, she became active in local communities. She also decided to become a physicist, although most graduate students in physics were men. She later worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and was the only woman physicist there for many years.67 Jade Snow Wong, however, was no longer eager to work outside her ethnic community. After she left Marinship, she went back to San Fran cisco’s Chinatown looking for her own identity. Her first book was about herself; she wanted the outside world to know what the life of a Chinese American was like, especially a Chinese American woman. It was at that time that she decided to give up her Eng lish name “Constance,” a name that she had been known by in school and at Marinship. The girl in her autobiography was “Jade Snow,” translated origi nally from her Chinese name.68 While acknowledging that World War II brought significant changes to their lives, many Chinese American women noticed that racial discrimination and prejudice did not disappear after the war. They continued in subtle ways. When Maggie Gee and her sister tried to find an apartment in Berkeley in the early 1950s, they knew that some people would not rent their properties to Chinese Americans. So they told people their ethnic identity when they first inquired over the telephone. At least in one case, a landlady refused to show the sisters the apartment when she learned that they were Chinese.69 Limin Wong, a defense worker during the war, remembered calling a business firm in Berkeley for an advertised office position after the war. The person who answered the phone at first told her that the job was available. When he realized that she was Chinese, however, he changed his statement and said the posi tion had been filled. Limin later found a job at the State Employment Office. She worked there for thirty years and was the manager of the office before she retired.70 The young Chinese American women who par ticipated in defense work had had fresh memories of discriminatory practices in American society before the war, and they were fully aware of the polit ical implications of taking defense jobs. Although very few of them were able to keep their jobs after the war, and some of them might not necessarily have cared about the limited skills that they acquired, what they had accomplished was far more signifi cant than the jobs themselves. They were accepted, for the first time, as Americans, even though most of them were born in the U. S. and had been Amer icans since birth. To a large extent, the war provided an entry for Chinese American women into the larger American society, something for which their ancestors had struggled a hundred years. |chs] See notes beginning on page 182. Xiaojian Zhao is assistant professor of Asian American stud ies and history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. SUMMER 1996 153 This content downloaded from 130.86.12.250 on Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:20:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Article Contents p. 138 p. 139 p. 140 p. 141 p. 142 p. 143 p. 144 p. 145 p. 146 p. 147 p. 148 p. 149 p. 150 p. 151 p. 152 p. 153 Issue Table of Contents California History, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 113-192 Front Matter Milestones in California History: The 1846 Bear Flag Revolt: Early Cultural Conflict in California Fuel at Last: Oil and Gas for California, 1860s-1940s [pp. 114-127] Turbulent Waters: Navigation and California’s Southern Central Valley [pp. 128-137] Chinese American Women Defense Workers in World War II [pp. 138-153] A Tale of Two Hospitals: U.S. Marine Hospital No. 19 and the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital on the Presidio of San Francisco [pp. 154-169] Reviews Review: untitled [p. 170-170] Review: untitled [p. 171-171] Review: untitled [p. 172-172] Review: untitled [pp. 172-173] Review: untitled [pp. 173-174] Review: untitled [pp. 174-175] Review: untitled [p. 175-175] California Checklist [pp. 177-178] Notes [to the Articles within This Issue] [pp. 180-187] Corrections to Bloomfield, Moore, Blodgett and Lowell [p. 188-188] Back Matter