The Making of Miss Chinatown
Notes From the Telegraph Club #2
This is the second installment in my series Notes From the Telegraph Club, which dives into the research I did to write my most recent novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. I do my best to avoid major spoilers, but I do mention some things that happen in the book in order to explore the historical context. I don’t believe that knowing some plot points will spoil this book, but if you’d like to avoid all potential spoilers, you may wish to read the book before reading these essays.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club opens on July 4, 1950, at the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Independence Day Picnic, which featured a Miss Chinatown beauty pageant. The scene in the novel was inspired by the real-life beauty pageant that took place on that date in Los Altos, a suburban community south of San Francisco.
George Kao, a Chinese American journalist, described the event in his 1950 column “Cathay by the Bay,” published in The Chinese Press, a San Francisco-based English language weekly:
“The time was two in the afternoon, on a good old summer day—the Fourth of July, it happened to be. The backdrop: the green hills of Los Altos. The spotlight: a bright and warm California sun. And before more than four thousand pairs of popping eyes the curtain went up on the greatest (to us males anyway) show on earth.”
The Chinese American Citizens Alliance was founded as a civil rights organization for Chinese Americans. Starting in 1948, the CACA added a beauty contest to its annual summer meeting as a way of demonstrating the organization’s Americanness. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, these events also provided an opportunity to show that Chinese Americans were anti-communist.
But the early beauty pageants revealed what should have been an unsurprising conflict. Traditionally, Chinese culture has valued modesty and self-effacement in girls, but beauty pageants demanded the opposite. Additionally, Chinese standards of feminine beauty differed from American standards. During the 1950 contest, this resulted in boos from the crowd when the winner, Cynthia Woo, was chosen.
Kao wrote:
“As Cynthia stepped forward unbelieving, she had all she could do to blink back the tears. The hubbub of increased applause (not unmixed with a few scattered boos), congratulations, the presentation of many awards, the whirring of the newsreel cameras and the clicking of shutters, and shouts for the crowds to stand back.”
In A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930-1960, historian Shirley Jennifer Lim argues that “The controversy over Cynthia Woo’s victory occurred because of the clash between American and Chinese femininity.” In other words: Was she too tall? Was she too American in her choice of dress? She had worn a strapless swimsuit; was that too daring? Was she not Chinese enough?
In 1950, nobody had agreed, yet, on what a Chinese American beauty queen—a model for her community—should look like. It would take several more years of beauty pageants to strategically construct a Miss Chinatown ideal that was both Chinese and American, that referenced an imagined Chinese past while embracing an idealized American future.
East Meets West
Although San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown contest first took place during the Fourth of July, in 1953 it was moved to Chinese New Year to coincide with the city’s first official Chinese New Year festival and parade.
Contestants for the 1954 Miss Chinatown New Year Festival in San Francisco. Left to right: Frances Fong, Margie Yee, Gloria Leong, Maye Leong, Bernice Wong and Florence Young. (SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY)
Chinese immigrants had celebrated the lunar new year in America since they first arrived in the mid-1800s, but until 1953, these were largely private or intra-community events. However, after World War II, a number of situations converged to convince Chinatown leaders that they needed to do something to support their community and change the way whites thought of them.
Due to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Chinese Americans were acutely aware of what could happen if the U.S. government decided they weren’t American enough. Add in the fight against communism—brought into sharp focus by the Korean War and the rise of McCarthyism—and Chinese Americans were in a precarious situation. In the early 1950s, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service routinely stopped and harassed Chinese Americans on the streets, and business in Chinatown was declining due to this harassment as well as the embargo against importing goods from the People’s Republic of China.
The organizers of San Francisco’s first official Chinese New Year festival, led by Chinatown businessman H. K. Wong, were very clear on their goals, which they stated openly in Chinese World, a major local Chinese American newspaper. They wanted to show Chinatown’s opposition to communist China, which they falsely claimed had halted the celebration of Chinese New Year in the PRC. And they aimed to celebrate American democracy and revitalize Chinatown businesses, while also unifying the Chinese American community. In short, the festival committee wanted to show how Chinese Americans were model citizens.
The 1953 Chinese New Year festival was a one-day event that included a fashion show, street dancing, parades, an art exhibit, tennis and volleyball matches, music, and a beauty contest. The winner, Pat Kan, who was selected by a panel of non-Chinese reporters, was named “Miss Firecracker” and was photographed wearing a string of firecrackers around her bare shoulders.
Miss Firecracker was a one-time beauty queen; by 1954 the beauty contest once again crowned a Miss Chinatown. And although Miss Firecracker had not worn a cheongsam—the close-fitting cap-sleeved dress marked by a slit up the sides—by 1954 the cheongsam was well on its way to being a central component of the beauty pageant.
The cheongsam is not actually a traditional Chinese dress. It was developed in Shanghai in the 1920s as a modern reaction to traditional Chinese women’s clothing, and was originally much looser than the garment we recognize today. Nevertheless, by the early 1950s, the cheongsam had become associated with Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan, and soon became widely adopted in the West as a supposedly traditional Chinese dress.
In San Francisco Chinatown on Parade, published by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1961, the cheongsam was featured in a story titled “Concealing-Yet Revealing” by Alice Lowe:
A page from San Francisco Chinatown on Parade (1961)
“‘To conceal and yet reveal’ is the provocative intent of the Cheong-sam — (or ‘Kay Poa’ the classic term) the figure-delineating sheath dress with high-necked collar and slit skirt which is the national costume of Chinese women. … The dress itself has become a symbol of East-meets-West, with almost as many blonde and blue-eyed beauties favoring it as the daughters of Canton. As to the controversial slit up the side of the skirt? Aside from assuring ease of movement, the high slit is necessary, Chinese designers declare, to endow the basically simple Cheong-sam with a touch of intrigue. The degree of daring depends primarily on the good taste of the wearer. In essence, the slit is to the Cheong-sam what the strapless bodice is to the formal ball gown, a tantalizing suggestion about the beauty of its wearer.”
The Elusive Memory of Ancient China
In the early years of the Miss Chinatown contest, it was difficult to convince local Chinese American girls to enter at all, partly because Chinese families didn’t want their daughters parading around in front of judges, but also because initially the winner wasn’t selected due to her beauty at all. It was all about how many raffle tickets she could sell.
In historian Chiou-Ling Yeh’s Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Joan Lowe, a San Franciscan who remembers the 1950s Miss Chinatown contests, recalled:
“I have an older sister who worked for NY Metro Insurance Co., and they offered to sponsor her as a contestant. My parents said it wasn't a good idea. They said it doesn't matter how pretty you are. It is how many tickets you sell, and my sister was disappointed because she thought she could win with her looks.”
Both the 1954 and 1955 Miss Chinatowns won due to their raffle ticket sales, which demonstrated their connectedness within the community and their ability to raise money for the festival. It wasn’t until 1956 that the raffle tickets were eliminated from the competition.
In 1958, the Miss Chinatown contest went national, becoming Miss Chinatown U.S.A., and the notion of what made a Chinese American beauty queen began to come together. Writing in San Francisco Chinatown on Parade, H.K. Wong, the founder of the Chinese New Year Festival, described his “Concept of Beauty”:
“The elusive memory of ancient China’s greatest beauties might lurk in the judges’ minds as they ponder their decision. Their thoughts might linger on the centuries-old Chinese concept of beauty such as melon-seed face, new moon eyebrows, phoenix eyes, peachlike cheek, shapely nose, cherry lips, medium height, willowy figure, radiant smile and jet black hair. But these attributes alone are not enough to win. The contenders must have the looks that made China’s beauties so fascinating plus adequate education, training and the versatility to meet the challenge fo the modern world.”
In other words, Miss Chinatown should display traditional Chinese beauty as well as modern accomplishments; she had to be a true model minority.
In Making an American Festival, Yeh observes:
“Through this model minority identity, ethnic leaders attempted to transform Chinese Americans into ethnic minorities and integrate them into mainstream America. The new definition not only conformed to mainstream gender norms and economic values, but also fulfilled the Orientalist expectations of the mainstream society, which perceived Chinese Americans as exotic and different.”
What should a Chinese girl look like?
When I was researching Last Night at the Telegraph Club, I was fascinated by how Chinatown leaders in the 1950s were aware of the racism and stereotypes they faced, and then decided to use them to their benefit. Often, the histories we are taught about marginalized people—if we are taught any—present them as victims with little to no agency. The research I did showed me that while Chinese Americans certainly were treated cruelly, they also made decisions and took actions like every human being.
The Miss Chinatown contest is a perfect example of this. Chinatown leaders took those racist and Orientalist beliefs and twisted them to their own purposes, which were not without their own harmful results. The beauty pageant endorsed a middle-class, heterosexual, nuclear family ideal, which was most palatable to white, middle-class Americans. It excluded queer as well as working-class Chinese Americans.
San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 18, 1956
It also underscored Chinese patriarchal power by restricting women to traditionally subservient roles. The 1956 winner, Estelle Dong, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “The judges asked us if we believed in obedience to our parents in all things. I said I do . . . I guess I’m what you call a traditionalist.”
In the first draft of my novel, I planned for the main character, Lily Hu, to enter the Miss Chinatown contest. That’s why I did much of the research I’m sharing today. But as the book developed, Lily herself resisted my attempts to shoehorn her into the beauty pageant. Although I don’t believe that characters come to life on their own, there does come a time when the characters I’ve created take full, three-dimensional shape in my imagination. Then, they speak to me. Then, they stand up and say no, I’m not doing that.
Eventually I listened to Lily, and I stopped trying to force her into the Miss Chinatown contest. Although that meant I didn’t wind up using many of the specific details I’d researched, my research definitely informed the broader questions of the book, especially around what makes an ideal Chinese American woman.
At the beginning of the novel, when Lily’s watching the 1950 Miss Chinatown contest, she sees the pageant girls and is both transfixed and embarrassed by them. After the contest, her best friend Shirley drags her onto the empty stage, and Lily watches Shirley pretending to be a beauty queen:
“Lily retreated to the stairs, then turned back to see Shirley still standing at the edge, gazing out over the lawn. ... Lily wondered if this was what a Chinese girl should look like.”
This question haunts her through the whole book.
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References
Disclosure: Some links go to Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. If you click through and make a purchase, I will earn a commission.
Chinese Chamber of Commerce of San Francisco. 1961. San Francisco Chinatown on Parade in Picture and Story.
Kao, George. 1988. Cathay by the Bay: Glimpses of San Francisco's Chinatown in the Year 1950. The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Lim, Shirley Jennifer. 2006. A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women's Public Culture, 1930-1960. New York: New York University Press.
Yeh, Chiou-Ling. 2008. Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco's Chinatown. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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