Dr.Margaret Chung: Multidimensional Maverick (Part II)

Let us begin Part II of the remarkable life of Dr. Margaret Chung with her funeral.

She died from ovarian cancer on January 5th, 1959, at the age of 69. The music that serenaded her parting was light opera followed by hymns, and she had six pallbearers. All white men, including 2 admirals and the mayor of San Francisco. Those who came to mourn her included celebrities, notable politicians, and hundreds of sons who were adopted by Margaret. The wife of Admiral Nimitz recorded in her diary: “all creed, all colors, all types of people, rich and poor, came to pay their homage.”
There is a saying that how a person dies reflects how they lived. If this is true, then indeed, Dr. Chung lived an extraordinary and noble life.

We already know from Part One that she overcame incredible odds to become the first Chinese female doctor in America, that she cross-dressed and was rumored to be a lesbian, and all the while able to maintain her professional reputation as a highly skilled surgeon and physician.

So, what other trailblazing feats did she manifest to merit the respect and honor shown at her funeral?

In 1922, she moved from Hollywood to San Francisco and established her clinic in Chinatown, where she treated the Chinese American population and local white denizens, as well as the likes of Helen Hayes, Tallulah Bankhead, and Sophie Tucker. Incidentally, a romantic liaison blossomed between Sophie Tucker and Margaret.

Intent on protecting herself from damaging rumors about her sexuality, Margaret traveled outside Chinatown to frequent the bars, speakeasies, and cafes that formed a growing queer subculture in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Dr. Chung immediately volunteered to be a frontline surgeon but was refused. But that didn’t stop Margaret from expressing her courage and patriotism.

During the initial years of the Sino-Japanese War, there were many American pilots who wanted to enter the fight to support the Chinese, but since the United States did not enter the war until 1941, Dr. Chung became an important agent who helped those young Americans sympathetic to the Chinese cause join the good fight. The pilots that she secretly recruited would become part of the “Flying Tigers.”
(The Flying Tigers were a group of soldiers from three squadrons and trained in Burma under the Republic of China Air Force to help fight against the Japanese invasion of China before the United States formally joined WWII in 1942.)

This destined alliance of young American soldiers and our maverick Dr. Margaret started with a meeting when a U.S. Navy Reserves ensign named Steven G. Bancroft reached out to Dr. Chung to ask if she could help him get a commission in the Chinese military. She invited Bancroft and some of his pilot friends to her home in San Francisco for dinner, and they all immediately became fast friends.

At this point, Margaret again extends her amazing repertoire of humanitarianism and adopts these pilots as her “fair-haired bastards” and nourishes them with regular dinners at her home. They ate dinner together almost every night and went on camping and hunting trips. They started to joke about how to describe their unusual bond. As Chung recalled in her autobiography, one night, one of the pilots “spoke up and said, ‘Gee, you are as understanding as a mother, and we are going to adopt you; but, hell, you are an old maid, and you haven’t got a father for us.’ Feeling facetious that night, I cracked back at them, ‘Well, that makes you a lot of fair-haired bastards, doesn’t it?’”
The name stuck, and her band of “bastards” included John Wayne and Ronald Regan! She had one faired-haired daughter, Amelia Earhart.

All through World War II, Dr. Chung supported her “sons” at the front by sending them letters and Christmas gifts and connecting them to each other. She even gave each of her adoptees a jade pendant to wear as a good luck charm and also as a way for them to identify each other as members of her extraordinary extended family. Her home was always a welcoming place where she hosted Saturday dinners. Her fame grew, and her adopted family received significant media coverage as an example of American patriotism.

So, although Margaret never married and never had children of her own, she became a matriarch for hundreds of young people during a highly volatile time in world history.
And her extraordinary accomplishments were further celebrated in a comic book. Yes, that’s right, she has the distinction of being the protagonist of a graphic novel in 1942.

As if all her efforts were not enough, Dr. Chung somehow carved out more time and energy to press for greater inclusion of women in the United States military.
She was instrumental in the creation of WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service)*, a reserve corps for women in the Navy.
She drew on her connections to government officials and her network of adopted children to lobby behind the scenes. Ironically, although she succeeded in getting WAVES established in 1942, she never received the proper recognition for her role in its creation. Her repeated applications to join the corps were rejected because of her race and rumors about her sexuality.
There is so much more that we should all know about the truly remarkable life of Margaret Chung. If you want to read more about the many other amazing things that she accomplished, I highly recommend Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired BastardsThe Life of a Wartime Celebrity written by Judy Tzu chun Wu

*More than 100,000 women served in the WAVES during World War II. Most were discharged in 1946. In 1948, Congress passed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which gave women a permanent place in the regular Navy and the Naval Reserve. Although the “Women’s Reserve” ceased to exist, the acronym WAVES continued to be used in the subsequent 25 years.