Summary Of The Fifth Chinese Daughter By Jade Snow Wong

The Fifth Chinese Daughter by Jade Snow Wong is an autobiography about her being the fifth daughter of a Chinese family. The novel is written in the third person as she tells the readers her story of being born and raised in Chinatown, San Francisco. Throughout her story we watch her grow as she portrays her life growing up as kid and becoming an adult. Education plays the largest role in Wong’s journey to adulthood in both a formal and informal manner. She helps the readers understand the morals of Asian families, and the conflicts that the normal Chinese community and person may face when dealing with foreign issues. What I liked the most about her book was that even though it is her autobiography she chose to write it in third person in

Specifically, in Chapter thirteen, I knew from the chapter heading she would start to rebel against her parents especially her father’s wishes. “A Person As Well As A Female” is the chapter heading and we see Wong affirm her independence with the closer she gets to her high school graduation. When she asks her father about continuing her education past high school he says, “You are quite familiar by now with the fact that is the sons who perpetuate our ancestral heritage by permanently bearing the Wong family name and transmitting it through their blood line, and therefore the sons must have priority over the daughters when parental provision for advantages must be limited by economic necessity” (Wong 108-109). She later told her parents that she would be going to a junior college and then go on to transfer to a university. After a stimulating sociology class, she changed her major to social studies. Wong spent her last two years of college at Mills College in Oakland, attending on a full-tuition

World War II began, and she found employment in a shipyard, she started off as a clerk and eventually worked her way toward special research projects. Wong worked on a project called “Absenteeism—Its Causes and Cures” which initially went ignored until she placed a revised essay of her project into the newspaper. She won the contest and earned national recognition for herself as well as for her family name. This was the first time Wong had seen any sign of excitement and respect from her father. In the last chapter, she realizes that in her father’s own way he also rebelled against Chinese customs. He left China and moved to America where he soon after became a Christian, where he then made sure his daughters had more than at least a middle school education. He made sure his family was not only educated in Chinese but in American customs as well. Despite many differences he had with Wong he did not try to stop her on her path but instead find her own way. In a since, she was much more like her father than she thought she