She made pottery inspired by traditional Chinese shapes, attracting customers who stopped to watch her work. ''Since I had learned to love making pottery, why couldn't I make a living at it?" ''I knew that a young Chinese female could never rise to the top in white-male-dominated fields," Ms. But she quickly saw that corporate culture was not for her. She graduated from Mills with honors in 1942 and found work as a corporate secretary. Wong recalled in a 2002 interview with Asian Week magazine. ''Up to that time I had no exposure to art, Chinese or American, nor to museums, as I was growing up in the Chinatown ghetto," Ms.
A college-level course in pottery making helped change her mind.
From the time she completed high school and entered Mills College in Oakland, she had planned to be a social worker for the Chinese American community. In it she recapped her youth in the third person, but changed to the first-person voice when she described her adult life. Her second memoir, ''No Chinese Stranger," was published in 1975. Following Chinese tradition, she wrote her memoir in the third person, as it was considered immodest to write a story in the first person. But she was also respectful of her culture. She was candid about some of her frustrations growing up in a household where daughters were not as prized as sons. Wong wrote the book when she was in her mid-20s and still struggling to establish her identity. It also showed her to be skilled from childhood at ''dovetailing American ways with a Chinese upbringing," wrote a reviewer for The New Yorker magazine in 1950.
Wong's first book was praised for its details about life in the ethnic enclave where she came of age. Many of her friends, however, knew her by her Christian name, Constance. Her professional name, Jade Snow, is a translation of her given Chinese name. Her father owned and operated a manufacturing business in the family's basement-level home. Wong was born and raised, one of nine children of immigrant parents. ''Fifth Chinese Daughter," the first and better known of two such memoirs, re-creates life in the insular San Francisco community where Ms. She was a longtime resident of the neighborhood, where she operated a ceramic studio, gift shop, and travel agency.
Wong, who was also a well-known ceramicist, died March 16 of cancer at her home on Russian Hill in San Francisco, said her son Mark Stuart Ong. LOS ANGELES - Jade Snow Wong, whose memoir ''Fifth Chinese Daughter" offers a rare glimpse into San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1900s and often has been included on school reading lists since it was published in 1950, has died.
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