to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women,” she said. To be an artist “was the option which would enable me. “For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture,” Wong told AsianWeek. Friends and neighbors couldn’t imagine why a college graduate would take a job that kept her hands covered with mud. Her mother disapproved of her striking out on her own. “Since I had learned to love making pottery, why couldn’t I make a living at it?” “I knew that a young, Chinese female could never rise to the top in white male-dominated fields,” Wong said in the AsianWeek interview. Wong graduated from Mills with honors in 1942 and found work as a corporate secretary, but she quickly saw that corporate culture was not for her. “Up to that time I had no exposure to art, Chinese or American, nor to museums, as I was growing up in the Chinatown ghetto,” Wong recalled in a 2002 interview with AsianWeek magazine. A college-level course in pottery helped change her mind. From the time she completed high school and entered Mills College in Oakland she had planned to be a social worker for the Chinese American community. In it, she recapped her younger years in the third-person but changed to the first-person voice typical of American autobiography when she described her adult life. Her second memoir, “No Chinese Stranger,” was published in 1975.
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