The following is from Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong, Scholastc Book Services, NY: 1950. The 1963 reprint was done by Harper & Row. pp. 163-166. I found this book on the free literature shelf at the Chinese Cultural Center in Honolulu, and I will return it there next weekend (of 16 Jun). If any reader has guanxi at Harper & Row, please plug the reprinting of this. That would have huge benefits for inter-cultural understanding.
“There was a period in our American history in which parents had children for economic reasons, to put them to work as soon as possible, especially to have them help on the farm. But now we no longer regard children in this way. Today we recognize that children are individuals, and that parents can no longer demand their unquestioning obedience. Parents should do their best to understand their children, because young people also have their rights.”
The instructor went on talking, but Jade Snow heard no more, for her mind was echoing and re-echoing this startling thought. “Parents can no longer demand unquestioning obedience from their children. They should do their best to understand. Children also have their rights.” For the rest of that day, while she was doing her chores at the Simpsons’, while she was standing in the streetcar going home, she was busy translating the idea into terms of her own experience.
“My parents demand unquestioning obedience. Older Brother demands unquesitoning obedience. By what right? I am an individual besides being a Chinese daughter. I have rights too.”
Could it be that Daddy and Mama, although they were living in San Francisco in the year 1938, actually had not left the Chinese world of thirty years ago? Could it be that they were forgetting that Jade Snow would soon become a woman in a new American, not a woman in old China? In short, was it possible that Daddy and Mama could be wrong?
For days Jade Snow gave thought to little but her devastating discovery that her parents might be subject to error. As it was her habit always to act after reaching a conclusion, she wondered what to do about it. Should she tell Daddy and Mama that they needed to change their ways? One mement she thought she should, the next she thought not. At last she decided to overcome her fear in the interests of education and better understanding. She would at least try to open their minds to modern truths. If she succeeded, good! If not, she was prepared to suffer the consequences. In this spirit of patient martyrdom she waited to speak.
It came, surprizingly, one Saturday … ((I’ve edited out a page of detailed dialogue across the cultural interface, basically about how different an American guy can be, while finally probably being OK, anyway. -xp))
…Jade Snow was delighted. Her first movie with Joe! What a wonderful day. In happy anticipation she put on her long silk stockings, lipstick, and the nearest thing to a suit she owned — a hand-me down jacket and a brown skirt she had made herself. Then having tied a long black ribbon around her long black hair she was ready.
Daddy didn’t miss a detail of the preparations as she dashed from room to room. He waited until she was finished before he demanded, “Jade Snow, where are you going?”
“I am going out into the street.” she answered.
“Did you ask my permission to go out into the street?”
“No, Daddy.”
“Do you have your mother’s permission to go out into the street?”
“No, Daddy.”
A sudden silence from the kitchen indicated that Mama was listening.
Daddy went on: “Where and when did you learn to be so daring as to leave this house without permission of your parents? You did learn it under my roof.”
It was all very familiar. Jade Snow was waiting, knowing that Daddy had not finished. In a moment, he came to the point. “And with whom are you going out into the street?”
It took all the courage Jade Snow could muster, remembering her new thinking, to say nothing. It was certain that if she told Daddy that she was going out into the street with a boy whom he did not know, without a chaperone, he would be convinced that she would lose her maidenly purity before the evening was over.
“Very well,” Daddy said sharply, “If you will not tell me, I forbid you to go! you are now too old to whip.”
That was the moment. Suppresssing all anger, and in a manner that would have done credit to her sociology instructor addressing his freshman class, Jade Snow carefully turned on her mentally rehearsed speech.
“That is something you should think more about. Yes,I am too old to whip. I am too old to be treated as a child. I can now think for myself, and you and Mama should not demand unquestioning obedience from me. You should understand me. There was a time in America when parents raised children to make them work, but now foreigners regard them as individuals with rights of their own. I have worked too, but now I am an individual besides being your fifth daughter.”
It was almost certain that Daddy blinked, but after the briefest pause he gathered himself together. “Where,” he demanded, “did you learn such an unfilial theory?”
Mama had come quietly into the room and slipped quietly into a chair to listen.
“From my teacher,” Jade Snow answered triumphantly, “who you taught me is supreme after you, and whose judgement I am not to question.”
Daddy was feeling pushed. Thoroughly aroused, he shouted, “A little learning has gone to your head! How can you permit a foreigner’s theory to put aside the practical experience of the Chinese, who for thousands of years have preserved a most superior family pattern? Conficius had already presented an organized philosophy of manners and conduct when the foreigners were unappreciatively persecuting Christ. Who brought you up? Who clothed you, fed you, sheltered you, nursed you? Do you think you were born aged sixteen?You owe honor to us before you satisfy your personal whims.”
Daddy thundered on, while Jade Snow kept silent. “What would happen to the order of this household if each of you four children started to behave like individuals? Would we have one peaceful moment if your personal desires came before your duty? How could we maintain our self-respect if we, your parents, did not know where you were at night and with whom you were keeping company?”
With difficulty Jade Snow kept herself from being swayed by fear and the old familiar arguments. “You can be bad in the daytime as well as at night,” she said defensively. “What could happen after eleven that couldn’t happen before?”
Daddy was growing more excited. “Do I have to justify my judgement to you? I do not want a daughter of mine to be known as one who walks the streets at night. Have you no thought for our reputations if yot for your own? If you start going out with boys, no good man will want to ask you to be his wife. You just do not know as well as we do what is good for you.”
Mama fanned Daddy’s wrath, “Never having been a mother, you cannot know how much grief it is to bring up a daughter. Of course we will not permit you to run the risk of corrupting your purity before marriage.”
‘Oh, Mama!” Jade Snow retorted. “This is America, not China. Don’t you think I have any judgement? How can you think I would go out with just any man? “
“Men!”? Daddy roared. “You don’t know a thing about them. I tell you, you can’t trust any of them.”
Now it was Jade Snow who felt pushed. She delivered the balance of her declaration of independence:
“Both of you should understand that I am growing up to be a woman in a society greatly different from the one you knew in China. You expect me to work my way tharough college, which would not have been possible in China. You expect me to exercise judgement in choosing my employers and my jobs and in spending my own money in the American world. Then why can’t I choose my friends? Of course independence is not safe. But safety isn’t the only consideration. You must give me the freedom to find some answeers for myself.”
Mama found her tongue first. “You think you are too good for us because you have a little foreign book knowledge.”
“You will learn the error of your ways after it is too late,” Daddy added darkly.
By this Jade Snow knew that her parents had conceded defeat. Hoping to soften the blow, she tried to explain, “If I am to earn my living, I must learn how to get along with many kinds of people, with foreigners as well as Chinese. I intend to start finding out about them now. ((This had been the presenting issue that had started the entire fracus long before this narrative. Her father had refused to fund her education, forcing her to earn her way through school, unlike his sons, whom he valued more. –xp)) You must have confidence that I will remain true to the spirit of your teachings. I shall bring back to you the new knowledge of whatever I learn.”
Daddy and Mama did not accept this offer graciously. “It is as useless for you to tell me such ideas as ‘the wind blows across a deaf ear.’ You have lost your sense of balance.” Daddy told her bluntly. “You are shameless. Your skin is yellow. Your features are forever Chinese. We are content with our proven ways. Do not try to force foreign ways into my home. Go. You will one day tell us sorrowfully that you have been mistaken.”
___________________________________________________________
All of the these dreadful predictions would have come true quite inevitably if the family had been in fact Confucianist. But it was not Confucianist. It was a practicing and believing Christian family simply acting Confucianist out of habit. By the evidence of the rest of the book, Jade Snow departed from the Confucianist model, but not from her Chinese family or her Chinese world view. She never got married but never stopped relating with her parents. She never moved out of Chinatown. She spent the rest of her life breaking through the limitations on her own mind, and she was already a full-blown Seer at the age of sixteen. I’m sure she became a formative influence in a huge, prosperous, and thoroughly westernized Chinese-American family.
Jade Snow was second generation in America. She was not fundamentally different from my second-generation Irish mother. She was even as Christian as my mother. The perpetually flaunted uniqueness of Chinese language and history is beside the point in this. This is what the second generation in America is, and this is what it does: it sees through, and lives past the old world. The third generation of this family, who are my peers, are Americans, by citizenship, by birth, and by culture. Yes, they may pretend to be Chinese. But they are not Chinese. They are Americans of Chinese origin. And they are fundamendally hypocritical, and fundamentally wrong in every kind of way, when they refer to me in Chinese as a “foreigner.”
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
