and drawing, but it was Nanying who achieved
recognition for her artistic promise. While at-
tending Oakland’s Technical High School, where
teachers fostered her burgeoning talent, she won
three third-place prizes in the National Scholastic
Art Exhibition where her work competed against
7,000 others. When the curator of the Oakland
Art Gallery, William Clapp, happened to eat at the
Peacock Inn, the family restaurant, he became so
impressed with Wong’s work hanging on the walls
that he helped her procure a scholarship to the
California College of Arts and Crafts, where she
learned watercolor painting. Although a gifted vi-
sual artist, Wong also desired to become a writer,
so she simultaneously enrolled at the University of
California, Berkeley, to study creative writing. For
the next 70 years of her life, Wong attempted to
fuse the art of painting with the art of writing to
varying degrees of success.
Upon earning a B.A. from the University of
California in 1933 and a B.F.A. from the College of
Arts and Crafts in 1935, Wong attended graduate
school at Cornell University. Although she lived in
New York City for a short time designing costume
jewelry for Helena Rubenstein, Wong moved back
to the West Coast in 1940 to join the Bohemian
community of Chinese-American artists and writ-
ers who were doing pioneering ethnic artwork in
and around San Francisco’s Montgomery block.
Once here, she became a well-known Bay Area art-
ist, exhibiting her work at the San Francisco Mu-
seum of Art, the Palace of Fine Arts at the Golden
Gate Exposition, and the Pal Elder Gallery as well
as having painted a mural for San Francisco’s Fong
Fong Bakery and Fountain.
A decade after her return to California, Wong’s
writing career took off. In the late 1940s, she began
working on a novel that covered the lives of five
generations of two different immigrant families,
one Irish and the other Chinese, which allowed
her to explore the clash of Eastern and Western
ideas that occurred in central California during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Shortly after
beginning the book, she was awarded scholarships
to conduct research in Dublin and to work on the
novel at the Mexico City Writing Center, then run
by California writer Margaret Shedd. At about the
same time Wong developed an interest in bronze
sculptures, so she traveled to southern China to
research the subject and ended up transcribing
the oral wedding songs of elderly women from the
village of Toysun for her book’s opening chapter,
which depicts a Chinese wedding. Although her
groundbreaking novel never appeared in print,
Wong did publish her translations of the wedding
songs in the Chinatown issue of the short-lived
journal Number. This issue also included several
drawings by her, including the cover art.
Because of the failed reception of her novel,
Wong spent the rest of her writing career focusing
on poetry, which found publication in a variety
of magazines, books, and anthologies including
Bearing Dreams, Shaping Visions: Asian Pacific
American Perspectives; Peace and Pieces: An Anthol-
ogy of Contemporary American Poetry; and Ting,
Anthology of World Poets. As with the multicultural
emphasis of her novel, Wong’s poems rely heav-
ily on family, history, and immigration issues to
explore the ideological connections between East
and West. During the late 1960s, she also became
a political poet, writing, for example, “From One
Delta to Another” to illustrate her concern for the
destruction of the natural environment and “San
Francisco–Saigon” to criticize American involve-
ment in the Vietnam War.
Many of Wong’s poems are thematically dar-
ing for their times, having been written before an
audience existed for Asian-American writing. Aes-
thetically, they often rely upon the imagist theories
of William Carlos Williams, with whom she corre-
sponded briefly, and they are heavily influenced by
her background in the visual arts. Wong’s fusion
of these two different art forms became an integral
part of her artistic activities. She often reviewed
Asian-American novels around the Bay Area by
making sketches that illustrated their characters
and plots, an example being Lin Yutang’s A Leaf
in a Storm, and she used drawings to accentuate
readings of her own poetry, highlighting the artis-
tic process of both.
Because she never published a volume of her
own verse and since her poems remain scatteredWong, Nanying Stella 319