OverDressed for Life

With great anticipation of a new day dawning, she dressed with care the next morning in what she thought the smart career girl should wear: her new gray tweed suit, a gift from Older Brother, a freshly pressed white shirt, shiny alligator shoes and brown bag, all of them graduation presents. She even wore precious nylons and spotless white gloves.

Jade Snow Wong (1922-2006), American ceramicist.

This quote is from Ms. Wong’s first memoir published in 1945, Fifth Chinese Daughter (Harper & Brothers). She made the unusual choice to write in the third person. In the quote, Ms. Wong is talking about her first day working for the US Government as a “typist-clerk” at the shipyard in Marin County. WWII was raging and there was a great need for all kinds of workers. (This was her first job after college.)

Ms. Wong grew up in San Francisco Chinatown, where her parents owned a jeans factory. She got her AA from City College of San Francisco and attended Mills College, from which she graduated in 1942. She had studied economics, but while there she took an art class and discovered a love of ceramics. After graduation, she was invited to stay on campus for the summer and take a ceramics class from Carlton Ball, who was an accomplished potter and taught at Mills from 1939 to 1950.

After she left her government job, Wong split her time between writing her memoir and pottery, which she initially made and sold in the window of a small Chinatown shop. She would go on to be become a renowned ceramicist exhibiting her work in museums around the country.