Margaret Chung a.k.a Mom Chung

“Women of every nation, every country, should learn medicine, so that they can teach the women of their countries and their races how to care for themselves and their children—how to improve the coming generation.”

Happy (belated) birthday to Maragret Chung – aka Mom Chung! Margaret Jessie Chung (1889 - 1959), was the first known American-born Chinese female physician. After graduating from the University of Southern California Medical School in 1916 and completing her internship and residency in Illinois, she established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1920s.

Chung was the eldest of eleven children, born in Santa Barbara. By 1902, her family had moved to Los Angeles, however when her parents became ill Margaret was forced to support the family and help to raise her younger siblings when she was just 10 years old herself.  

Chung made a name for herself from a young age. In 1905, she was noted in the Los Angeles Herald as a promising student and for her planned future career as a newspaper reporter. A year later, she was noted in the Herald again for her poem "Missionary Giving," delivered at the eighteenth anniversary of the Los Angeles Congregational Chinese mission. Chung would write and deliver a paper entitled "Comparisons of Chinese and American Costumes" at the first anniversary of the Pasadena Congregational mission in 1907. By that autumn, Chung had graduated from the Seventh Street School and enrolled in the preparatory school at USC, being hailed as a "bright particular star" of the women's gymnasium class. In 1910, Chung won second place in a speech contest.

Chung won a Los Angeles Times scholarship to study at USC by selling newspaper subscriptions and worked her way through college as a waitress, a seller of surgical instruments, and by winning cash prizes in several speech contests. In 1909, Chung graduated from USC. Chung enrolled in the medical school in 1911, "the first Chinese girl to enter a medical school in this state."

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Chung graduated medical school in 1916, but was denied positions both in LA and as a missionary doctor in China. After numerous rejections, she left for Chicago, interning at the Mary Thompson Women's and Children's Hospital before serving her residency at the nearby Kankakee State Hospital. Chung would serve as the resident assistant in psychiatry for the first Juvenile Psychopathic Institute of the State of Illinois at the Cook County Hospital in 1917. She was later appointed state criminologist for Illinois for the next two years. In November 1918, her father passed away and she returned to LA to accept a position as a surgeon at Santa Fe Railroad Hospital. In 1922, Chung moved to San Francisco's Chinatown  where she treated the local Chinese-American population as well as local celebrities.

The Japanese invasion of China and the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) sparked new American sympathy for Chinese people. Consequently, a U.S. Navy Reserves ensign, Steven G. Bancroft, reached out to Dr. Chung to ask if she could help him get a commission in the Chinese military. She had no such influence, but she invited Bancroft and some of his pilot friends to her home in San Francisco for dinner, noting that they looked “starved”.

Chung and the squadron became firm friends, eating dinner together almost every night and going on camping and hunting trips. 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?’” Thus, she became “Mom Chung” and they were forever known as her fair-haired bastards.

Dr. Chung volunteered to serve as a front-line surgeon during the Sino-Japanese War, but instead was asked to secretly recruit pilots for a unit that would become famous as the “Flying Tigers.” These squadrons of American pilots from the Marines, Air Corps, and Navy flew under Chinese colours. Chung gave her "adopted sons" a jade Buddha to wear around their necks, which became away for them to recognise each other throughout the world.

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 Throughout the war, Dr. Chung used her influence and patriotism to work for the Allied war effort. She supported her “sons” at the front by sending them letters and Christmas gifts and connecting them to each other. She hosted weekly Saturday dinners at her home for their families. As her fame grew, she and her adopted family received significant media coverage as an example of American patriotism.

By the end of WWII, Chung’s surrogate family had swelled to more than 1500. Aviators were part of the “Fair-Haired Bastards” group, while submarine men were called “Golden Dolphins.” All others were known as “Kiwis.” Many of Chung’s “children” were American servicemen, but their ranks also included Hollywood stars, politicians and top military figures including John Wayne and Ronald Reagan (future US President). The pilot and adventurer Amelia Earhart was one of her few “bastard daughters.” She also treated seven Navy reserve pilots during this time, and even cooked their meals.

Dr. Chung also pressed for greater inclusion of women in the United States military. She pushed for legislation to create the 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. Although she succeeded in getting the WAVES established in 1942, her role was undermined and her repeated applications to join the corps were rejected because of her race and rumours about her sexuality. This shows that the government were happy to promote diversity in race, sexuality and  gender only so long as it fitted their purpose and “moral” stereotypes of women as cooks and mothers, not doctors and soldiers.

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In 1947, she retired from medical practice within ten years after the end of World War II, and her "adopted sons" purchased a house for her in Marin County.

In a surprising turn of events, by the early 1950s, Chung was involved with Virginia Hill, girlfriend of Bugsy Siegel, in the opium traffic in San Francisco. I couldn’t find much info on this (unsurprisingly) but it definitely adds a extra element of “bad-ass” to Chung’s credentials.

Chung died of cancer in January 1959 at Franklin Hospital in San Francisco. 

A pioneer in both professional and political domains, Chung led an unconventional personal life. As the only woman in her class, she adopted masculine dress and called herself "Mike," but after having established a professional practice she reverted to conventional dress and her female name.

Based on personal correspondence, she had close and apparently romantic relationships with at least two other women, the writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker. Although she was briefly engaged, she never did marry. As mentioned before, the US suspected Chung of having “gay relations” and thus she was excluded from many important posts that she was more than capable of having. Thus, she has become somewhat of a gay icon despite the unknowns surrounding her sexuality. Chung was commemorated with a plaque in the Legacy Walk project on October 11, 2012, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people.