This text is a part of Ignored, a sequence of obituaries about exceptional individuals whose deaths, starting in 1851, went unreported in The Instances.
Margaret Chung knew from age 10 that she wished to turn out to be a medical missionary to China. She was impressed by tales her mom had instructed of life in a mission house, the place her mom stayed as a baby after emigrating from China to California. She named Margaret after the house’s superintendent.
Faith was an necessary a part of younger Margaret’s life in California. She was raised in a Presbyterian family, the place her father insisted that the household pray earlier than each meal and sang hymns with the youngsters earlier than mattress.
So it was a blow that after graduating from medical faculty, on the College of Southern California, in 1916, her software to be a medical missionary was rejected 3 times by administrative boards. Although she had been born on United States soil, she was thought to be Chinese language, and no funding for Chinese language missionaries existed.
Nonetheless, following that dream led her to a distinct accolade: Chung turned the primary identified American lady of Chinese language ancestry to earn a medical diploma, based on her biographer.
She opened a personal observe in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It was one of many few locations that would offer Western medical care to Chinese language and Chinese language American sufferers, who had been usually scapegoated because the supply of epidemics and turned away by hospitals. (Her father died after he was denied remedy for accidents he sustained in a automobile accident.)
As a doctor and surgeon throughout the Second Sino-Japanese Conflict (starting in 1937) and World Conflict II, she was praised for her patriotic efforts, together with beginning a social community in California for pilots, army officers, celebrities and politicians that she leveraged to assist in recruitment for the warfare and to foyer for the creation of a girls’s naval reserve.
Each Sunday she hosted dinners for males within the army, catering for crowds of as much as 300 individuals, who known as her “Mother.” Her efforts caught the eye of the press, which portrayed her as representing unity between China and the U.S., allies within the warfare.
Margaret Jessie Chung was born on Oct. 2, 1889, in Santa Barbara, Calif. On the time, the 1882 Chinese language Exclusion Act was in full pressure. Her dad and mom, who had immigrated from China within the 1870s, had been barred from acquiring U.S. citizenship beneath the act. They confronted restricted job alternatives, so the household moved round California as they appeared for work. Her father, Chung Wong, was a former service provider who toiled on California farms and offered greens. Her mom, Ah Yane, additionally farmed and generally labored as a courtroom interpreter.
Margaret herself was no stranger to exhausting labor. She took on farming chores when her dad and mom had been unwell and helped elevate all 10 of her siblings, duties that disrupted her education; she didn’t full the eighth grade till she was 17. To fund the remainder of her schooling, she spent summer time evenings knocking on doorways to promote copies of The Los Angeles Instances as a part of a contest for a scholarship, which she received. It paid for preparatory faculty, which enabled her to realize acceptance to the College of Southern California Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons in 1911.
“As the one Chinese language woman in the usC. medical faculty, I’m compelled to be completely different from others,” she stated in a 1913 interview. She reinvented herself as “Mike,” slicking again her black hair and dressing in a protracted blazer draped over a shirt and tie, finishing the outfit with a floor-length skirt. She labored all through school, generally scrubbing dishes at a restaurant whereas learning textbooks propped on a shelf.
After she graduated and was rejected as a medical missionary, Chung turned to surgical procedure, performing trauma operations at Santa Fe Railroad Hospital in Los Angeles. Touring musicians and actors used the hospital; most famously, she eliminated the actress Mary Pickford’s tonsils.
Chung quickly established her personal non-public observe in Los Angeles, with a clientele that included actors within the film trade’s early days in Holllywood.
Whereas accompanying two sufferers to San Francisco, Chung fell in love with the town’s panorama, its dramatic hills cloaked in fog. After studying that no physician practiced Western medication within the metropolis’s Chinatown, house to the biggest Chinese language American inhabitants within the nation, she left her Los Angeles observe and arrange a clinic on Sacramento Road in 1922.
San Francisco was isolating. Individuals from the group invited Chung out, however she declined, writing in her unpublished autobiography, “I used to be embarrassed as a result of I couldn’t perceive their flowery Chinese language.” Rumors continued that as a result of she was single, she should have been fascinated by girls. She was protecting of her private life, however her biographer, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, stated Chung had frequented a North Seaside speakeasy with Elsa Gidlow, who brazenly wrote lesbian poetry.
Chung’s observe initially had issue attracting sufferers. However as phrase unfold, her ready room stuffed, in some instances with white vacationers curious to see her Chinese language-inspired furnishings and her session room, whose partitions had been plastered with photos of her superstar sufferers.
Years of planning and group fund-raising culminated within the opening of San Francisco’s Chinese language Hospital in 1925. Chung turned one in all 4 division heads, main the gynecology, obstetrics and pediatrics unit whereas nonetheless operating her non-public observe.
When Japan invaded the Chinese language province of Manchuria in September 1931, an ensign in the USA Naval Reserves, seeking to assist the Chinese language army, visited Chung at her observe. She invited the person, who was a pilot, and 6 of his associates for a home-cooked dinner. It was the primary of many who she would host virtually each evening for months. It was, she wrote in her autobiography, “essentially the most egocentric factor I’ve ever finished as a result of it was extra enjoyable that I had ever identified in all my life.”
Each Sunday, “Mother” personally catered suppers for lots of of her “boys.” By the tip of World Conflict II, her “household” swelled to about 1,500. To assist hold observe, everybody had a quantity and group: Main pilots had been the Phi Beta Kappa of Aviation; those that couldn’t fly (together with celebrities and politicians) had been Kiwis; and the submarine models had been Golden Dolphins.
She known as upon influential members of her community to secretly recruit pilots for the American Flying Tigers, an American volunteer group that pushed again in opposition to Japan’s invasion of China. She additionally enlisted two of her Kiwis to introduce a invoice within the U.S. Home and Senate that led to the creation of Ladies Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Companies in 1942, a naval group higher often known as the WAVES. Desirous to assist her nation, she sought to affix the group however her software was rejected.
Regardless of her efforts, no official recognition of her contributions ever got here. After the warfare ended, attendance at her Sunday dinners dwindled. However, Chung continued to observe medication, go to her army “sons” and write her memoir.
She died of ovarian most cancers on Jan. 5, 1959. She was 69.
