Wong, Elizabeth (1958– )
Born in an industrial section of Los Angeles called
Southgate and raised in Chinatown, Wong expe-
rienced a childhood full of hardship. Her father
died when she was only five years old, and her
mother was forced to work multiple jobs to sup-
port the two children. These difficult times led
Wong to intense reading and studying. Her escape
through books inspired Wong to learn more about
a particular role model: Anna May Wong, the first
Chinese-American actress. Through diligent study
and a desire to escape the ghetto, Wong finished
high school, received a bachelor’s degree in jour-
nalism from the University of Southern California,
and entered an M.F.A. program in playwriting at
New York University.
Before her playwriting career began, Wong es-
tablished a successful career in the 1980s as a tele-
vision and newspaper journalist in Los Angeles,
San Diego, and Hartford, Connecticut. Through
the mid-1990s, Wong continued to contribute oc-
casional opinion pieces to the Los Angeles Times,
although her primary focus remained writing, pro-
ducing, and directing her own plays. Her first play,
Letters to a Student Revolutionary (1989), not only
earned praise from audiences but also received
the 1990 Playwright Forum Award from Theatre
Works in Colorado Springs. In addition to Let-
ters, Wong’s most acclaimed plays include Kimchee
and Chitlins (1990) and China Doll (1995). Wong
also made history as a writer for All-American Girl
(1994–95), the first all Asian-American cast televi-
sion show, starring Margaret Cho.
Letters to a Student Revolutionary premiered
at the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York
City. The play commemorates the 1989 Tianan-
men Square massacre in Beijing. With minimal
props and a bare stage, Wong’s first play set a min-
imalist standard for most of her other plays. The
play narrates the story of two friends: Bibi, an “all-
American” teenage girl, and Karen, a girl in China.
Their friendship begins when Bibi travels with her
parents to China for a “back to your roots” family
vacation. During their 10-year friendship, these
two girls, Chinese and Chinese-American, share
the idealistic visions and misconceptions each
has of the other’s culture and nation. Culminat-
ing with the 1989 massacre, the play ultimately
underscores the characters’ difficulty in defining
American freedom and Chinese oppression given
the gross misconceptions each has about the oth-
er’s cultural reality.
China Doll and Kimchee and Chitlins also grap-
ple with cultural issues such as race and prejudice.
China Doll, Wong’s most widely acclaimed play,
creates a fictionalized life for the playwright’s role
model, Anna May Wong. Kimchee and Chitlins is a
comedy that questions media involvement in the
serious subject of the 1990 black boycott of Ko-
rean-owned stores in New York City.
In addition to Off-Broadway runs, Wong’s
plays have also been featured in prestigious na-
tional and international festivals in Los Angeles,
New York, Tokyo, and Singapore. More recent
plays, such as The Happy Prince (1997) and Pro-
metheus (1999) have continued to garner praise
for Wong’s ability to see what is left unseen and
unsaid in American culture. Wong views her writ-
ing as a form of social activism: “When respond-
ing to social issues, some people write letters and
write editorials; I write a play.”
Amy Lillian ManningWong, Jade Snow (1922–2006)
From the obscure position of fifth daughter of an
immigrant family in San Francisco’s Chinatown,
Jade Snow Wong became a ceramics artist, travel
agent, and author of two volumes of memoirs,
including Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), the first
work by a female Chinese American to receive
wide attention. Wong explained that she wrote the
book to foster American understanding of Chinese
culture; the U.S. State Department also saw its po-
tential to educate Asians about America. In 1953
she toured many Asian countries to speak with
people who had read her book in translation, and
Wong recounts her travels in her second memoir,
No Chinese Stranger (1975).
Fifth Chinese Daughter, although an autobi-
ography, is written in the third person, in modestWong, Jade Snow 317