Biography
Wong was born and raised in San Francisco; she was the fifth of nine immigrant children. She was raised with the traditional beliefs and customs of her Chinese culture that her family and elders put upon her. Due to these traditional beliefs, her father forbade her to date and refused to pay for her college education (being a girl in a family of nine children). With Wong’s determination to educate herself, she attended San Francisco City College, then later at Mills College, where she majored in economics and sociology in hopes of becoming a social worker in Chinatown. Wong graduated from Mills College in 1942 with a hard-earned Phi Beta Kappa key. She worked as a secretary during World War II, and discovered a talent for ceramics. When she began to sell her work in a shop in Chinatown, it quickly found popularity.Wong married artist Woodrow Ong in 1950, they paired together in their art and later managed a travel agency together. Throughout her lifetime, Wong worked with many organizations including: the San Francisco Public Library, Asian Art Museum, Chinese Cultural Center, Chinese Historical Society of America and Mills College. Wong was recognized and awarded by Mills College with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Arts in 1976. Wong died on March 16, 2006 at the age of 84 of cancer; she is survived by her four children and four grandchildren.
Read more about this topic: Jade Snow Wong
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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