Dr. Margaret Jesse Chung, the first known Chinese American woman to become a doctor, rose to national prominence during the 1930s and ‘40s for “adopting” more than a thousand servicemen, celebrities, and political leaders into an extended kinship network that supported the U.S.-China war effort.
Born in Santa Barbara, California in 1889, Chung was the eldest child of devout Christian parents, whose upbringing likely influenced her early dream of serving as a medical missionary in China. Her mother, Ah Yane, had been rescued from life as a mui tsai (or servant girl) at a brothel and placed in the care of the Presbyterian Chinese Mission Home in San Francisco as a child. Though less is known about her father Chung Wong’s early life, by the time of his marriage in 1888, he had become a merchant and was selling Chinese curios on the edge of Santa Barbara’s Chinatown and Mexican barrio. Although Chung remembered him as a “good, honest, decent, God-fearing Christian” who “tried very hard to make a living for his large family,” his business ventures unfortunately failed, and by 1894, he had moved the family to Ventura County and later Los Angeles, where he worked as a truck farmer and vegetable peddler. Her family’s precarious, itinerant circumstances meant that Chung’s education was sporadic and often interrupted. As the two eldest daughters, she and her sister Anna often helped their mother, who suffered from debilitating tuberculosis, care for their younger siblings. Chung also worked at a chop suey restaurant during seventh and eighth grade to supplement her family’s income.
She was thus nearly eighteen by the time she entered ninth grade. Through remarkable tenacity and a scholarship won by selling the most Los Angeles Times subscriptions, Chung attended the USC-affiliated Preparatory Academy, and in 1911, demonstrated enough ability to undertake medical study to gain admission to USC’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Unlike her more gender-balanced classes at the academy, medical school was a predominantly male space. Photographs of Chung from this time show her partially adopting masculine attire—a dark men’s suit jacket over shirt and skirt, a contrast to her previous long dresses and feminine blouses. She sought community among the few female students, helping to found the USC chapter of Nu Sigma Phi, a medical sorority, but was also known to join her male classmates in gambling, which along with a number of odd jobs helped fund her schooling. An acquaintance recalled seeing Chung “reading a medical book propped on a shelf while doing dishes in a restaurant.” While in medical school, Chung devotedly cared for her ailing mother until she passed in July 1914.
Dr. Chung in the Los Angeles Herald article, “Chinese Girl Here Studying Medicine”, 1914. Reprinted from Malindo Lo, “Dr. Margaret Chung’s Secret Identity,” May 25, 2021, https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2021/5/25/dr-margaret-chung.
After graduating in 1916, Chung applied for a post as a medical missionary but was not accepted “because there was no provision in the rules and regulations governing funds to send American missionaries to China that covered a case of an American of Chinese descent.” Chung accepted a position as a surgical nurse at the Santa Fe Railroad Hospital before eventually securing an internship at Mary Thompson Hospital in Chicago. The hospital, an all-female institution, provided women seeking entry into an exclusive male profession with much-needed opportunities for postgraduate training. One year into her internship, her father died unexpectedly, bleeding out from losing his leg in an accident when the local hospital denied him admission because he was Chinese, a not uncommon occurrence in those days. Wanting to send support to her younger siblings, Chung secured a paid residency at Chicago’s Juvenile Psychopathic Institute with the help of her mentors.
In 1919, she applied for a medical license and returned to Los Angeles as a staff physician at the Santa Fe Railroad Hospital. Treating railroad workers’ injuries honed her surgical skills, especially in plastic surgery, helping her to also attract clients from the then emerging Hollywood entertainment industry. With free use of office space from the hospital, Chung established her own private clinic and soon did well enough to purchase her first home in relatively affluent Pasadena. Her celebrity circle of friends grew at this time to include Anna May Wong as well as actors and filmmakers affiliated with United Artists, co-founded by her first celebrity patient, Mary Pickford.
It was during a trip to San Francisco, at the invitation of a United Artists manager and his wife, that she fell in love with the city and decided to move there in 1922. She became the first American-born Chinese and the first woman physician to establish a Western-style clinic in Chinatown, not far from the Presbyterian Chinese Mission Home where her mother had grown up. An outsider with limited Chinese-language skills, she initially struggled to gain the trust of the community. But after she saved the life of a patient who happened to serve as a translator for Chinese women during medical appointments, many who “were too shy to let a man examine them” began flocking to her practice. Chung played an important role during Chinatown’s baby boom in the 1920s, caring for the needs of women and children. She also helped found the Chinese Hospital in 1925, serving as head of Gynecology, Obstetrics, and Pediatrics. She was the only woman among the four Chinese American physicians trained in Western medicine who each led one of the hospital’s four departments.
However, Chung gradually lost patients to competition from other Chinese American female physicians and rumors about her marital status and sexuality. The bulk of her patient-base came to be primarily white men, and some white women, who were attracted to the lower cost and novelty of being treated by a Chinese woman doctor in Chinatown. One of these patients was Elsa Gidlow, author of the first collection of explicitly lesbian poetry published in North America. Gidlow pursued a romantic relationship with Chung, but Chung ultimately retreated, unable to reconcile an openly lesbian relationship with her aspirations for professional and social respectability. Chung soon got engaged to a wealthy man (who according to some sources was white), but the engagement fell through after he did not meet Chung’s expectation that he would help fund her sisters’ education.
Dr. Chung with a couple of her “adopted sons.” Reprinted from Malindo Lo, “Dr. Margaret Chung’s Secret Identity,” May 25, 2021, https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2021/5/25/dr-margaret-chung.
Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 unexpectedly brought a new family into Chung’s life. When Steven G. Bancroft sought her help securing a commission in China’s military, she of course at the time had no such connections. But moved by his enthusiasm to aid in China’s struggle, she invited Bancroft and his six housemates to dinner at her home. What began as a single meal evolved into many happy months of nightly gatherings, camping trips, and hunting excursions. The young men—all unemployed pilots, former football players, and recent graduates of UC Berkeley—came to regard Chung as family. When one of them affectionately quipped that she was “as understanding as a mother” and they wanted to adopt her but “hell, you are an old maid, and you haven’t got a father for us,” Chung famously retorted, “Well, that makes you a lot of fair-haired bastards, doesn’t it?” The name stuck. Chung’s family, bound together by their fervent support for the U.S.-China war effort, swelled to number approximately fifteen hundred members by the end of World War II, as “Mom Chung” and her unconventional kinship network received increasing attention in the local and national media and she came to be seen as a patriotic voice for the war effort in China and Chinatown. Chung even inspired fictional works such as Paramount’s King of Chinatown (1939), featuring an accomplished Chinese American woman surgeon played by Anna May Wong.
Published by Parent’s Magazine Press, the Real Heroes comic book series elevated real-life heroes such as “Mom Chung,” depicted here amidst her aviator sons and with the jade Buddha she gave each of her children as good luck charms. “Mom Chung and her 509 ‘Fair-Haired Foster Sons,’” Real Heroes, February/March 1949, p. 9. Reprinted from Meg Metcalf, “Dr. Margaret Chung: First American Born Chinese Woman Physician,” Library of Congress Blogs, May 31, 2022, https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2022/05/dr-margaret-chung/.
Throughout the war, Chung opened up her home to her adopted children, especially those in the military preparing to deploy or returning on leave from the war. Every Sunday, she hosted large-scale dinners regularly attended by seventy-five to a hundred family members, for whom she cooked up copious servings of her signature barbecue ribs, fried rice, and chocolate cake. Having reduced hours at her practice to devote herself to supporting the Allied cause, she spent much of her day writing letters and sending care packages to her sons on the warfront. Care packages usually contained everyday luxuries such as toilet paper, shaving cream, scotch, noodle soup, cigarettes, gum, and coffee candy. Her generosity and care extended to her sons’ families experiencing adversity. While her son, Lt. Commander Albert Hobbs Clark, was deployed then listed as missing in action, Chung invited his wife and children to spend the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays at her home and encouraged them to think of her kinship network as their own. Wanting to personally join the U.S. Navy, Chung also mobilized her network of adopted children in Congress to establish WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services) in 1942. Though Chung herself was ultimately not accepted, WAVES opened up opportunities for more than 100,000 women to serve in the United States Naval Reserve.
Chung with war relief supplies she planned to send to China, Chinese Digest, 1937. Reprinted from Nina Chhita, “Overlooked No More: Margaret Chung, Doctor Who Was ‘Different From Others’” New York Times, September 18, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/obituaries/margaret-chung-overlooked.html.
Just as she had expended generously to support them and the war—often to an extent that was to her own financial detriment—Chung’s children in turn valued her years of sustained care and support. Between 1942 and 1943, they collectively contributed to the downpayment of a three-story home for her as a token of their love and appreciation. And again, when she was in danger of losing her home at the end of the war, they raised the money she needed for the mortgage. In them, she also found a warm community in whose company she could spend time with singer Sophie Tucker, whom evidence indicates Chung may have loved romantically.
After the war, Chung received official commendations for her patriotic service, including the first “People’s Award” of China awarded to an American woman, a citation from the American Red Cross for establishing and volunteering her medical services at the San Francisco Downtown Disaster Station, and a certificate of acknowledgment signed by President Truman. With the nation no longer in need of a symbol of U.S.-China unity, Chung withdrew from the media spotlight and her wartime celebrity gradually faded from public memory. However, the bonds between her family endured. After battling ovarian cancer, Chung passed away on January 5, 1959 at the age of sixty-nine. Before she passed, she left explicit instructions with her sisters that her children were always to be welcomed in her home, and many came to mourn and pay their respect at her funeral.
Additional Reading:
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005).