Doctor Mom Chung

There’s little about Dr. Margaret “Mom” Chung’s story that you can call ordinary. From her status as the first known Chinese American woman doctor, to her secret mission to recruit pilots for the American Volunteer Group in World War II, to the ways she intentionally transgressed and presented both masculinity and femininity in her life in order to gain access and acceptance, to the thousands of soldiers and celebrities who gathered at her home, each new chapter in her life adds a fascinating dimension to her. In this episode of the podcast, part of our series on LGBTQ+ stories in aerospace, Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Professor of Asian American Studies and Associate Dean of the UC Irvine School of Humanities, sheds some light on this forgotten figure in aviation figure.

*Note from Sean* - The sound for this episode is a bit low quality due to a recording snafu on my part. Our guest sounds great, but I sound like I’m using a tin can for a microphone! The issue has been resolved for future episodes. Sorry about that!

Links and transcript after the jump.

Link to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s biography of Dr. Chung

Link to donate to The Museum of Flight

Link to The Flight Deck episode featuring Women Airforce Service Pilot Betty Dybbro

SEAN MOBLEY:       The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain the Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the museum’s other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast.

Hello and welcome to the Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I’m your host, Sean Mobley.

Now, today’s topic is a glorious reminder that not everyone who leaves a mark on the aviation world is a pilot or even directly connected with aircraft. Margaret Chung was a doctor, and her story as the first known Chinese American woman to become a physician collided headfirst with that of the American Volunteer Group, the legendary Flying Tigers of World War II. She secretly helped recruit pilots for the Flying Tigers before the U.S. officially became involved in the war. And once the U.S. formally entered the conflict, she became a major figure on the home front for hundreds of aviators and other military men who passed through her home in San Francisco.

00:01:10

As you’ll hear, she also used both masculine and feminine gender expressions at different points in her life and in really interesting ways, which perfectly ties into this season of the podcast, where we’re exploring LGBTQ+ stories in aerospace. I met with Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, professor of Asian American studies and associate dean of the UC Irvine School of Humanities, who published a biography of Dr. Chung, to learn more of the story.

Judy, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Dr. Margaret Chung.

00:02:24

SM:     Yeah. And I saw that you’ve been involved in a PBS documentary about her, and National Park Service has also done some writing about her — Library of Congress. And I think, as we were talking before this in e-mail, you sent me the New York Times even did an obituary. They have a series where they kind of bring obituaries back of people who really people should know about.

JTW:   It was exciting to discover that. And actually, one of my former dissertation advisors said, “Congratulations. I just saw something about Margaret Chung.” And I hadn’t even seen it yet, so it’s wonderful to have, like, a Margaret Chung fan club.

SM:     How did you come across her story? You said it happened a little bit later in your process.

JTW:   I was really interested in eugenics and the connections that that movement might have had with immigration exclusion laws. So I often discuss Asian Americans as being the first undocumented community or population in the United States because you can’t really be undocumented unless there’s efforts to restrict you from coming into the country. And the first groups that were targeted for exclusion from the United States were people from Asia and specifically Chinese people.

And I just thought about immigration exclusion laws as a way to manage the population of the nation, stopping people from coming into the border. And for Chinese immigrants especially, there was such a skewed gender ratio — at one point, there were 19 men for every 1 woman — that those immigration exclusion laws also very effectively stopped reproduction, kind of biological reproduction in the United States.

00:04:01

So I started looking at Margaret Chung’s papers because she was a doctor. And I wondered if there might be any information in there related to efforts to restrict biological reproduction through eugenics efforts. And I just was not expecting to find her in the historical archives because she became friends with all these celebrities, with these actors, with musicians, with all these people in the U.S. military. And I was expecting stories about exclusion and their restriction, and to find someone who was a celebrity, basically — and that was something that was really unexpected for me. And I shifted my attention to try to understand her life as a result.

SM:     Yeah. You’ve given a great, like, preview for the listeners of what’s about to come with her story. What’s the one-sentence summary? Right? If you’re pitching her life to movie producers, which — her life should really be a movie. Right? How would you summarize it, just kind of in bite-sized pieces?

JTW:   It’s so interesting. I think about her life as having maybe three different aspects of it, but, you know, I think there’s multiple ways that you can try to understand her. First, there was her — the professional life. So she was, as far as I know, the first American-born woman of Chinese ancestry to become a doctor. There were other Chinese women who came from China and who had been especially recruited by American missionaries to become medical providers, but she was, as far as I know, the first one who was born in the United States. And so I think that in itself is really fascinating. Because what does it mean to be the first — right — to be the first woman, the first Chinese American, and to be in a very white and male environment? So I think that is fascinating.

00:05:54

I also became really interested in her because of her political life. During the 1930s and 1940s, United States really shifted some of its perceptions of people from China. I mentioned earlier that they were the first ones to be targeted for exclusion. They were seen as contaminates. They were seen as the Yellow Peril. They were seen as a threat on American society. But during the 1930s and 1940s, as Japan invaded China and as United States entered World War II, China becomes, now, this friendly nation, and so people who are Chinese are seen to be more sympathetic.

And during that time period, she really helped advocate for patriotic support of both China and United States. This is where she starts forming this surrogate family of mostly men in the military. Her home in San Francisco becomes the waystation. Like, they would go to her house before they left for the war. Her house would be the place that they would stop after they came back from a war. And I just thought it was so interesting that she becomes this adopted mother figure with, you know, thousands of these people in the military. She would write letters to them to support them. She would provide care packages. So just that whole phenomenon of forming this family, this interracial family for political purposes — I thought that was really fascinating.

And then the third aspect that I find really intriguing about Margaret Chung is that she didn’t marry and didn’t have children biologically. And that’s not so unusual for professional women because they have economic opportunities. They have economic assets, but it was pretty unusual for a Chinese American woman. I mentioned before there was such a skewed gender ratio that, even within immigrant communities, the second-generation Chinese American women might be pressured socially, culturally, to marry within their communities, just given how few women there were.

00:08:03

But she definitely made a choice not to do so, and I became really interested in her sexuality. I found these really intriguing pictures of her adopting male clothing. She also adopted a male name. So that opened up all these questions about her gender, her sexuality, her queerness, and how that fits with her professional life and how does that play into this kind of surrogate family that she created.

SM:     Tell me a little bit more about the world that she was inhabiting. She grew up in the early 1900s on the West Coast. What was the environment like for her, Asian Americans, Asian immigrants, and specifically Chinese and Chinese Americans?

JTW:   Yeah. She was born in 1889 in Santa Barbara, and then she passed away in 1959 in San Francisco. So just she lived for 70-some years, something like that, and it was sort of like a sea change of racial attitudes, gender attitudes, sexual attitudes. So being born in 1889, that’s only 7 years after United States passed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion law, and that really targeted Chinese workers as being unwanted by the United States.

00:09:23

Her father kind of moved back and forth in terms of his economic status. At some point, he was a merchant, which would have allowed him entry into the United States. At some point, he was seen more as a worker because, even as a merchant, it’s hard to maintain an economic line of work and sufficient resources to kind of maintain that life. So Margaret Chung recalled growing up very poor, helping her family. They would pick crops in the agricultural industry in California. They really kind of had to scrape by just to kind of live. So I think that kind of racialization of Chinese immigrants really shaped their early lives, and that compounds with their economic insecurity.

What’s really interesting to me is that, even though they — Margaret Chung comes from this community that’s racially despised, there’s, at the same time, Western missionaries who want to convert them, who want to provide skills for them to adapt to the United States. And sometimes, they also wanted to recruit people who could become missionaries themselves, so to go back to China and utilize medicine especially to help people gain a sense of spiritual healing as well as physical healing, that they could provide kind of medical skills as they’re engaging in proselytizing.

So that’s the avenue in which Margaret Chung’s family forms. That’s what inspires her to become a doctor. So there’s kind of avenues for, you know, economic advancement, even in this very difficult context in which she’s growing up in.

00:11:12

SM:     Tell me about the community around her. How did Asian, Asian American, Chinese, Chinese Americans kind of find each other and build? We think of the epic Chinatowns, for example, of the West Coast, places like San Francisco. Was she part of those? Was she alienated from those?

JTW:   It seems like her family really resided in areas that tended to have other Chinese families, so whether that’s in Santa Barbara, whether that’s in Ventura County, whether that’s in Los Angeles. And what’s interesting, both when Margaret Chung was growing up — but when she comes back and become a physician, there’s a certain commercial and cultural fascination with Chineseness, even as people who are Chinese are seen as racially despised. So places like Chinatown are not only neighborhoods where people, you know — that are racialized ghettos, but they’re also commercial centers. So not only are Chinese Americans going there and buying goods, but also, people from the outside are coming in because they’re fascinated by and sometimes repulsed by Chinese food. They’re interested in Chinese New Year.

And so there’s a certain kind of commercial orientalism that helps benefit people who are Chinese because then, at least, there’s an economic lifeline. There’s kind of a cultural role for them to perform. And it’s even more intensified in places like Los Angeles because you have the Hollywood movie industry and the ways in which they are looking for cultural difference so they can portray that in movies and in popular culture.

00:12:51

SM:     Using, of course, Asian actors — not really, for the most part.

JTW:   Right, right. There’s — they would often use yellowface casting, so white actors putting on making, pretending to be Chinese. So maybe some of the actors who are actually Asian Americans are in the background maybe, but the main characters are really played by white actors in yellowface costuming and —

SM:     So you talked about these forces that surrounded her. Was she able to harness some of that as she built her practice, some of that mystique or mysticism? She became, as you said, kind of this celebrity doctor, so her reach was beyond just her community. Tell me a little bit about that.

JTW:   Yeah — no. She eventually moves up to San Francisco. And what’s really fascinating to me is that I think her practice was next to a photography studio, so there’s a certain stage quality about that. She chose to specialize in a very kind of Western-oriented form of medicine, which is surgery. Chinese medicine is more about herbs and about balance, and so to cut somebody open, basically, in order to heal them, that’s pretty antithetical to kind of Chinese approaches to healing. So she’s offering a particular form of Western medicine, but at the same time, her office is located in Chinatown.

And I think, in terms of the patients who are coming, sometimes, maybe they don’t want to see their regular physician. Maybe they’re sort of interested in her because she’s so different, and certainly, healthcare in places like Chinatown is going to be — is going to cost less, compared to healthcare in a more mainstream community.

00:14:39

SM:     So her road to becoming a doctor — tell me a lit bit about that. And particularly, how did she use kind of masculinity? How did she play with gender on that road?

JTW:   Yeah. There’s a fascinating picture of her when she went to medical school at University of Southern California. And you can tell she’s different because she’s a woman, and she’s Chinese, compared to everybody else in the picture. But at the same time, she kind of looks like one of the guys. Like, she’s wearing a dark suit. Her hair is slicked back. She has these really thick glasses. And this is around the time where she’s signing her picture as Mike as opposed to Margaret, and so I think about it partly as protective coloring — kind of protective uniform. You just sort of adapt because you are — you stand out so much. You’re trying to figure out ways to be a chameleon.

But at the same time, there’s people who describe her, and she seems really ostentatious about her attire. She has a cane. She has a bowler hat. So she’s not just kind of fitting in, but she kind of wants to stand out as well. And other people talk about her being as one of the guys. Like, she liked to swear. She liked to gamble. She liked to drive. So there’s some things about being a man that she finds very attractive. Right? Maybe it’s the freedom. Maybe it’s the authority.

00:16:01

It’s interesting. I think, throughout her life, she creates different types of identities and different types of gender presentations, and she seems to really enjoy that process of performing those identities.

SM:     I think one thing that I’ve come to learn is that pictures like that lose some of their power over time, like the pictures we see of Amelia Earhart, for example, dressed in pilot’s garb. We’re so used to them, and we’re so used to women or feminine people wearing male or masculine clothing today that it just kind of loses some of the umph when those pictures of Amelia, for example, were audacious. How did Dr. — was that true too for Dr. Chung? Like, was it a pretty bold thing for her to do at the time? Or was it relatively accepted by her peers?

JTW:   I think, looking at how her — the people around her reacted to her gives us a sense of how radical that it might have been. So one of the people who just became fascinated with Margaret Chung is Elsa Gidlow, and she just — I think some people consider her the first lesbian poet from Canada. She was based in San Francisco. She definitely had this orientalist fascination with Margaret Chung. Because she associated Margaret Chung with this kind of ancient culture, even though Margaret Chung was very modern in terms of her clothing and her medical profession. But she would comment about Margaret Chung’s clothing. She would comment about her sportscar. The comment I mentioned earlier about her bowler hat and the cane, it was from her — one of her medical mentors, so I think it drew attention to her, even for people at that time.

00:17:50

And somebody else in the community who also became a physician, would also, you know, derogatorily describe Margaret Chung, you know, dismissing her as a lesbian. So I think there were definitely rumors. There were kind of people who were talking about her because of the way she dressed but also the way that she formed relationships with certain people.

SM:     Well, speaking of relationships, how did she get involved with the Flying Tigers?

JTW:   So during the early ‘30s, there was a group of UC Berkeley alums then, who were out of work. It was in the midst of the Great Depression, and they wanted to find a way to utilize their skills and talents to support China. I’m not quite sure why they wanted to do that, but they did. And I think she had enough of a reputation that people thought, well, maybe she could help them. So they approached her. And then, like her — like the descriptions about her being one of the guys during the medical school days, there’s similar descriptions about her relationship with these young men, where they would go camping together. They would gamble together. They just had a really good time, and she was older than they were. So that’s when the idea of her being this maternal figure starts to surface.

Once they eventually got into the U.S. military, they would always bring their military buddies by her. So that’s how she started growing her family, and I suspect maybe that’s why she started making contacts with people who are in the Flying Tigers. Right? These are American pilots who are going to China to support that cause. So it’s very much in line with how she was envisioning her role in trying to facilitate this international friendship between the United States and China, especially through aviation.

00:19:46

SM:     And by that point, it sounds like she was a pretty established medical professional in her area.

JTW:   Yeah.

SM:     Who were some of the people that she treated? She had quite a list.

JTW:   Yeah. You know, there’s —

SM:     Doctor-patient confidentiality, of course.

JTW:   Right. I mean, supposedly, she treated Mary Pickford — right — this Hollywood actress, and one of her specializations was plastic surgery. She developed those skills because she was treating people in the railroad industry and trying to address their injuries. But that skill then becomes something that can be useful for those who are in the entertainment industry.

So Margaret Chung had three different branches of her family. She was really interested in pilots. That’s what the initial group of guys were. They were aviators. So she calls them the Fair-Haired Bastards, and she was Mom Chung. There was also a group of submariners, so they were called the Golden Dolphins. And then she had all these celebrity friends, who she met, I think, because they were [unintelligible 00:20:50]. She would provide these kind of after-show parties at her house, and they were called Kiwis because they did not fly. But like I said, there were about, you know, over a thousand of these individuals. And it’s kind of funny because she’ll say, you know, “Son number 640, I’m thinking about you. Here are some things I want to share with you as you’re flying and fighting, and just know that I’m thinking about you.”

00:21:19

SM:     So going back specifically to this kind of entry for her into the military side of thing with the Flying Tigers, what exactly was her role? What did she do to help prepare them — get them signed up, whatever it is — to head overseas and fly?

JTW:   Part of it was just personal comfort. So a lot of these men who are entering the military — during the war too, there was a massive population relocation, people coming from small towns or rural areas. And they’re now disembarking in these major cities like San Francisco, and they’re going off to war, which is so nerve-wracking. Right? There’s the possibility of losing your life. And so to have, like, a personal connection with someone that you can call — so-call your mom, to, you know, have a good meal with them before you leave, and for that person to write to you and support you, I think provided a lot of emotional comfort.

And what’s still kind of surprising to me is that I will sometimes get contacted — not by these men, necessarily, because many of them have passed away — but their biological families. They’ll say, “Oh, I remember spending Thanksgiving with Mom Chung,” or, “I remember my father talking about her.” So I think that personal connection was very, very intimate and felt, not just by those men, but also by their family members.

00:22:51

I think another aspect is just propagandistic. So I’ve come across some pretty shocking letters where she’s encouraging her sons to commit violence and using really racialized language. So, you know, “Go and get seven Jap scalps, and, you know, get seven for yourself. Get seven for me.” So she’s really trying to fuel their anti-Japanese sentiment and just even using the language of scalps — right — kind of evoking this idea of frontier violence against a racialized other. But, you know, she’s allying herself, basically, with white America, China with white America against the Japanese. So I think there’s that element as well of just kind of propagandistically representing this international alliance.

SM:     Maybe we can take some wider context about what was happening during the war for Chinese and Chinese Americans in the face of kind of this larger, much more known story of the Japanese American incarceration and how that spilled over into other Asian American communities.

JTW:   Yeah. There’s definitely a long-standing, anti-Japanese kind of political impulse or sentiment within the community. And not only are there international — you know, kind of long-standing tensions between the two countries but specifically because Japan was invading China. And you’re hearing about atrocities. You’re hearing about things are happening to their — people’s families. And so that’s setting the political tone for much of what’s happening in Chinese American communities, but it’s also in mainstream America.

00:24:34

There is these kind of humorous now but pretty disturbing propagandistic articles, saying, “How do you distinguish between someone’s who’s Japanese from someone who’s Chinese?” Right? I mean, racially or phenotypically, it’s very hard to do so, but there’s efforts to say, “Well, actually, well, the Chinese people are the good people, and the Japanese people are the enemies. Right? And so this is how you can tell, like, by the slant of their eyes or the way they walk.”

You know, a lot of this is reflecting the racialized propaganda of that time period. John Dower has written a very powerful book, looking at the ways in which wartime propaganda — and really distinguishes between kind of U.S. relationships with Germany as opposed to U.S. relationships with Japan, that’s it’s much more animalistic. It’s really about kind of racializing the other in terms of Japan, whereas even among Chung’s family members, they’ll say, “Well, the Germans are misguided.” But there’s somehow some — still a connection with them. So that — I think that effort to distinguish the Chinese from the Japanese both stems from what’s happening in the war in China and the relation with Japan but also was happening in United States.

And certainly, that anti-Japanese sentiment helps fuel the incarceration of Japanese Americans. They were — I think it’s about two-thirds of the individuals who were interned were actually U.S. citizens, and the one-third who was not, they could not become U.S. citizens based on racialized naturalization laws. So it’s not necessarily based on their actual actions, but it’s really the assumption that anybody who’s Japanese is racially guilty and potentially can commit treason.

00:26:25

SM:     So going back to her role more specifically, then, with the Flying Tigers and with the military, what kind of voice did she become for advocacy in the military? Were there any other Asian Americans who were really kind of prominent? And what kind of advocacy was she doing, and what kind of limits did she find for that advocacy?

JTW:   Well, that shift in a more positive attitude towards Chinese Americans and Chinese people more generally was not just something that affected Margaret Chung’s life, but the Chinese American community in general and even spokespeople from China. So Madame Chiang Kai-shek addresses a joint session of Congress. She becomes this kind of celebrity figure, political celebrity figure in the United States. There are efforts to raise money within Chinese American communities across the country, these rice bowls to send money for relief to support their kinspeople in China. So it’s really part of a broader cultural-political moment of that time period.

Margaret Chung’s impact on the U.S. military — she — during World War II, her kind of — her dress and her persona shifts from that earlier period of, you know, dark suits and dark glasses. She seems to have either worn a Red Cross uniform to kind of signal her support of the war and her commitment to the soldiers, or she would wear these very beautiful evening gowns, coiffed hair, fur. So she becomes a much more maternal figure.

00:28:08

But she, herself, wanted to go into the military, and it was a major controversy at the time. You know, can women be in the military? Can a lady be a soldier? And there were all these efforts to try to restrict women in the military so that they wouldn’t [unintelligible 00:28:23] have authority over male soldiers. So one of the avenues that Margaret Chung tries to advocate for is to create a women’s Naval Reserve called WAVES. There’s kind of some nuances between the women in the Army versus in the Navy, but the Navy tends to be a little bit more exclusive. The training, I think, tends to take place in college campuses, so it reflects, like, who are likely to be attracted to that [inaudible 00:28:51] branch.

And she had all these people in the military who she already had connections with, so Melvin Maus [phonetic 00:28:59], who I believe introduced the legislation, talked about, “Mom Chung, you’re the inspiration for this. I’m doing this on behalf of you.” But she actually never got to serve in the WAVES, and officially, she was too old to do so. But the WAVES tended to be more exclusive, so there were very few women of color who were in that [unintelligible 00:29:19] branch. There were more women of color who were in the Army as opposed to the Navy.

So I think there’s all these ways to try to interpret why she never entered the military branches she actually advocated for. There was also a lot of suspicion of women who wanted to go in the military were lesbian, that they were somehow abnormal in terms of their sexuality. So the rumors that were circulating around Margaret Chung and the fact that she was an older woman, the fact that she was a woman of color — these are all things that might have prevented her from actually being in the military.

00:29:54

SM:     It’s interesting, that last point. You talked about propaganda earlier. It’s interesting to look at the propaganda coming out of the women’s services, like of, you know, the drawings, the posters of — you know, women can join too. And their lipstick — they’ve got makeup on. Their hair is perfect. Then, you look at the pictures of the actual women who were serving, and certainly, there was some of that. But there was a lot of also just, like, more butch-presenting people who are there, elbow-deep in grease and very dirty and doing these kind of more masculine things too that wasn’t reflected in the propaganda.

JTW:   I can’t remember which branch it was called, but I remember seeing a picture of these four women who are pilots. So they couldn’t actually be in the military, but they were flying planes and supporting the military. And if you actually look at them, they look very tall. They’re wearing bomber jackets. They look kind of statuesque. And then there’s a graphic behind them that has kind of a Betty Boop kind of female character, highly sexualized with a pair of wings. So that contrast between the actual women who are flying versus those kind of cartoonish representation speaks to exactly what you’re describing, those kind of desire to maybe contain that female power by trivializing it and sexualizing it.

SM:     And for folks who have listened to the podcast — just referring to the Women Airforce Service Pilots. And we’ve done several episodes on them in the past, including an interview with one of those pilots who is, I believe, still alive too. So I’ll put some links to those episodes in the show notes for people who want to listen to more about that.

00:31:34

Who are some of the people that our listeners might know about? Are there any kind of big names — especially pilots, since that’s our focus — that she might have worked with or would be her kids?

JTW:   Yeah. That’s interesting. So I’m thinking — actually, a lot of the celebrities. So Ronald Regan was one of her sons. Andre Kostelanetz, who’s the conductor, was one of her sons. Helen Hayes, the actress — Margaret Chung was very close to Sophie Tucker, who was a vaudeville singer and performer. So I tend to think about the celebrities as opposed to the pilots. My apologies.

SM:     That’s okay. And for those who check out your book too, there’s all sorts of stories that they’ll be able to find in there. So what are some ways, though, that her influence was felt in aviation in the war? As her sons were going out into the world, how did they bring her with them?

JTW:   They would write to her and say, like, “You’re inspiring me to fight in the war.” I don't know. I feel very mixed about that because, as I was saying before, that the violence that’s enacted during war is dehumanizing. And I certainly understand certain contexts in which that is necessary, but it’s also, at the same time, something that I find that I — it’s hard for me to support.

00:31:34

But her sons would say that, you know, “I think about you when I am engaging in this, in the war.” Some of her sons were also on the Enola Gay. Right? So I think there’s been all these questions. Like, would the United States have used the atomic bomb on the European enemy, as opposed to an Asian enemy? So I think it’s very complicated, the ways in which she’s fueling the war effort, but at the same time, that enactment of war is — are also acts of racialized violence.

SM:     I even saw that several crews named their planes after her. What an interesting honor.

JTW:   So in San Francisco, they named a tunnel borer after Margaret Chung. They were trying to create a subway station, and there must be something about her personality that seems particularly suited for some — like, a machine that’s boring through the earth. I think she certainly had a determination and — yeah — a kind of a commitment.

SM:     That’s funny. Here in Seattle, our big borer was named after Bertha Landes, the first female mayor, and first and only for many years. She was, like, a mayor in the early 1900s, and then there wasn’t another female mayor until about 40 years ago, so. But Bertha was actually the mayor when Charles Lindbergh landed here in Seattle, so we can always tie it back to aviation.

So you’ve talked a little bit about her relationships with the men around her and the military folks. Can you talk a little bit more about her relationship with some of the women? You mentioned a poet. You’ve talked about Sophie Tucker. What is it that we know about her and kind of how she existed in a feminine world?

00:35:03

JTW:   Yeah. I mean, there’s definitely rumors about her sexuality. So that, even when she was a medical intern or a resident, her mentor would say that Margaret Chung was so popular with the nurses that they made a rule about not having two people sleep in the same bed or two women sleep in the same bed. I mentioned before there were these kind of taunts about her being a lesbian, and I haven’t had — it’s hard to find evidence. And I was also saying before, like, well, we don’t need to have such a high bar of evidence for people who are heterosexual. Why do we need to have such a high bar for people who are queer?

And I think she was queer in multiple ways. So certainly, rumors about her sexuality, her decision not to get married, not to biologically reproduce but to form this surrogate family — I think that is also queer. And she seems to have formed really close, intimate relationships with other women. So Elsa Gidlow had an enormous crush on Margaret Chung, asked Margaret Chung if she loved her. And Margaret — it was in a professional setting, so Margaret Chung wasn’t particularly free to be able to reciprocate. But she does do so in a more private, intimate setting. And her relationship with Sophie Tucker, I think, is really fascinating. They were good buddies. Sophie Tucker would stay with Margaret Chung when she was touring in San Francisco.

00:36:32

But there’s something that’s a little bit different for beyond good friendship in the notes that Margaret Chung left for Sophie Tucker, and she describes wanting to be close to her, just like a nightgown is close to her. Or that Sophie Tucker was Jewish. Margaret Chung was Chinese. She talked about wanting — you know, choosing to be with each other, despite these differences. So there’s a certain intimacy and emotional longing that’s present in Margaret Chung’s communication with Sophie Tucker.

Margaret Chung was very aware of her public presentation, both during her life and, I think, afterwards. So the materials I’m finding about her intimacy with other women tend to come from sources beyond her own papers. So maybe it’s materials that Sophie Tucker saved, or it’s in the memoirs that Elsa Gidlow wrote. Or it’s in interviews that people gave about Margaret Chung. So I think Margaret Chung herself was concerned about these rumors and concerned about how people might perceive her, even as she was forming these really intimate, emotional, and perhaps physical relationships with other women.

It's hard to say. I mean, I think within Chinese American community, if other Chinese American physicians and especially other Chinese American women physicians are making these comments, then it’s likely, especially as Margaret Chung over time — even though she moved to San Francisco to be with her people and to provide medical support for them, a lot of her clients tend to come from outside. So maybe it’s a reflection of her medical practice and her choice in medical specialization, but it could also be a reflection of the people within the community wanting to create a little distance from her as well.

00:38:28

I think she was very successful in creating this alternative family that might have had both kind of straight and queer people in it. But there was sort of an accepted political purpose and personal purpose for them to come together. So I remember describing her to one of my colleagues when I used to teach at Ohio State. And he said, “You know, she’s kind of all things to all people.” And I think, if you are a first, you kind of have to learn how to play to people’s expectations and, at the same time, create some space for yourself so that you can be the person that you want. So I think there was always that kind of — that doubleness about her.

SM:     A theme in this season of the podcast is a little bit of what you’ve danced around — is how the meta conversation — as public historians here at the museum, how do we talk about these people and respect the labels that they may or may not have applied to themselves and — while also kind of packaging these stories in ways that the public today that has a certain vocabulary looks at it? How have you kind of encountered that within your work, talking about Dr. Chung?

JTW:   I remember when I first found the materials from Elsa Gidlow, and I was like, oh my god. She’s a lesbian. I knew it. And [inaudible 00:39:56] who is a queer studies scholar. She’s like, “You know, take a step back. Right? What is implied by that term, lesbian? How might she have understood it at the time? In what ways did she distance herself from that?” So I think she was just trying to get me to historically contextualize these categories of identity and how they shift over time and then also how individuals negotiate those categories as well, especially when they are seen as very negative ones in that particular context.

00:40:29

So I feel like my work became more nuanced as a result of that kind of caution. But at the same time, I sometimes will just use shorthand because it’s something that people can recognize, that they can latch onto. So I kind of go back and forth between that kind of more nuanced historical approach and then, at the same time, naming something that I think people can recognize and claim.

SM:     Well, why don’t you leave us on a fun story about Dr. Chung?

JTW:   Yeah. Thanks so much for the opportunity to share. I was just thinking about the way she treated her military family. And she would have these elaborate Sunday family dinners for, like, you know, 75 to 100 people. But she would always get the people who were the ranked highest to clean up, so I think — you know, I just love that detail about her. Like, she was having fun with her family, and she also was trying to invert some of the power hierarchies.

SM:     Well, Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, thank you so much for joining us and sharing more about Dr. Chung’s story. Where can people learn more about her?

00:41:40

JTW:   Thank you so much for this opportunity. I wrote a biography that’s called Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity, and that came from UC Press in 2005. More recently, the series UNLADYLIKE2020 featured Margaret Chung, along with a more contemporary Asian American female physician. I recommend that entire series. I think it’s fantastic. It’s animated and deeply historically researched, so I recommend that, if people are interested. And there just seems to be a lot of interest in Chung. It’s been fun to be able to find her in different, unexpected settings, so I hope people will continue to be fascinated by her.

SM:     Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. The podcast is only possible thanks to our donors. You and your support make this show happen, so thank you to our donors.

This season of the podcast, we’re leaving space for our listeners to share their own story. If something you heard today sparked a thought in you, a reaction, or if something in Mom Chung’s history resonated with you in some way, or if you’re an LGBTQ+ person in aerospace who just wants to share an experience, you can contact us at podcast@museumofflight.org. If we get enough submissions at the end of this run of episodes, we’ll share some of your stories with your permission, of course.

Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s book, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity, is available for purchase, and you can find a link to that in the show notes. I’ll also leave a link to the interview we did with Betty Dybbro, who is a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, earlier on the podcast, several years ago now. You’ll find the full show notes at museumofflight.org/podcast.

00:43:49

After only three or so years of being on the air, the Flight Deck is now available on Spotify, and I saw several listeners left us five-star reviews on there already. That makes a huge difference. You don’t know how much that means to me. All these podcast apps give preferential treatment to highly rated shows, thanks to the algorithms, and so having a highly rated show helps a lot with people discovering the show. Thank you, thank you, thank you if you’re one of these early adopters who has left one of those five-star reviews on Spotify. It means a ton. And anyone out there, if you like what you heard, please rate us on whatever app you downloaded us from.

Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good earth, we’ll see you out there, folks.