Jade Snow Wong, 84; ‘Fifth Chinese Daughter’ Author, Ceramicist

Jade Snow Wong, whose memoir “Fifth Chinese Daughter” offers a rare glimpse into San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early 1900s and has often been included on school reading lists since it was published in 1950, has died. She was 84.

Wong, who was also a well-known ceramicist, died Thursday of cancer at her home in San Francisco’s Russian Hill, said her son Mark Stuart Ong. She was a longtime resident of the neighborhood where she operated Jade Snow Wong Studio, which included a studio, gift shop and travel agency.

“Fifth Chinese Daughter,” the first and better-known of two memoirs she wrote, re-creates life in the insular San Francisco community where she was born and raised. Wong was one of nine children of immigrant parents. Her father owned and operated a manufacturing business in the family’s basement-level home.

Her professional name, Jade Snow, is a translation of her given Chinese name. Many of her friends, however, knew her as Constance, her Christian name.

Wong’s first book was praised for its details about life in the ethnic enclave where she came of age. It also showed her to be skilled from childhood at “dovetailing American ways with a Chinese upbringing,” wrote a reviewer for the New Yorker magazine in 1950.

Wong wrote the book when she was in her mid-20s and still struggling to establish her identity. She was candid about some of her frustrations growing up in a household where daughters were not as prized as sons. But she was also respectful of her culture. Following Chinese tradition, she wrote her memoir in the third person, as it was considered immodest to write a story in the first person.

Her second memoir, “No Chinese Stranger,” was published in 1975. In it, she recapped her younger years in the third-person but changed to the first-person voice typical of American autobiography when she described her adult life.

Writing was not among her early goals. From the time she completed high school and entered Mills College in Oakland she had planned to be a social worker for the Chinese American community. A college-level course in pottery helped change her mind.

“Up to that time I had no exposure to art, Chinese or American, nor to museums, as I was growing up in the Chinatown ghetto,” Wong recalled in a 2002 interview with AsianWeek magazine.

Wong graduated from Mills with honors in 1942 and found work as a corporate secretary, but she quickly saw that corporate culture was not for her.

“I knew that a young, Chinese female could never rise to the top in white male-dominated fields,” Wong said in the AsianWeek interview. “Since I had learned to love making pottery, why couldn’t I make a living at it?”

Her mother disapproved of her striking out on her own. Friends and neighbors couldn’t imagine why a college graduate would take a job that kept her hands covered with mud.

“For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture,” Wong told AsianWeek. To be an artist “was the option which would enable me ... to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women,” she said.

She persuaded the owner of the China Bazaar in Chinatown to let her set up her studio in his store window on Grant Avenue. She made pottery inspired by traditional Chinese shapes, attracting customers who stopped to watch her work. She soon began to exhibit her work at fairs around California where she won top prizes.

Wong married artist Woodrow Ong in 1950. The couple had four children. At times they collaborated on ceramic pieces. They also started a travel agency after Wong visited Asia. She was sent there by the State Department in 1953 after receiving inquiries about her first memoir and her pottery.

“For someone in Hong Kong to learn that a poor Chinese woman had written [a book] and started her own business was something nearly impossible to believe,” Wong said in a 1981 interview with the Christian Science Monitor.

The U.S. government “wanted to show that I wasn’t just American propaganda,” Wong said.

For some years, she and her husband led monthlong art tours of China, and she continued the business when her husband died in the mid-1980s.

Her pottery was exhibited in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other major museums around the country.

In 1976, her personal story was dramatized in a Public Broadcasting Service special, “Jade Snow.”

Besides her son Mark, Wong is survived by another son, Lance; daughters Tyi and Ellora; and four grandchildren.