"Loveliest daughter of our ancient Cathay!": representations of ethnic and gender identity in the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. beauty pageant

5. The title for this section is quoted from James H. Loo, "Who are the Chinese?" San Francisco Chinatown On Parade (San Francisco, 1961), pp. 6-7.

Beginning in the 1910s, San Francisco's Chinatown organizations sporadically sponsored community pageants as fundraisers for social services, such as the Chinese Hospital. In 1948, various merchant, family, and civic organizations initiated an annual Miss Chinatown pageant. Inspired by the earlier tradition of fundraising, the winners were determined by the contestants' ability to sell raffle tickets to benefit a social cause. H. K. Wong is credited with proposing the joint sponsorship of the beauty contest and the public celebration of the Chinese New Year festival in 1953. In the late 1950s, the CCC altered the format of the pageant so that a panel of judges selected winners based on such criteria as beauty, personality, and poise. Lim P. Lee, "The Chinese New Year Festival," Asian Week, 5 February 1981, p. 4, and "The Chinese New Year Festival II," Asian Week, 12 February 1981, [p. 2]; H. K. Wong, "Miss Chinatown USA Pageant," San Francisco Chinese New Year Festival, Souvenir Program, 4-7 February 1960; Alice Lowe, "Concealing-Yet Revealing," San Francisco Chinatown On Parade, pp. 26-27.

6. Julie Smith, "A Little Tiff At the Chinese New Year," San Francisco Chronicle, 18 February 1977, p. 2; the proportions of Chinese American in the labor force exceeded those for white women during the decade of the 1940s. Whereas 39.5 percent of white women worked for pay compared to 22.3 percent of Chinese women in 1940, 30.8 percent of Chinese women compared to 28.1 percent of white women worked in 1950. In 1960, 44.2 percent of Chinese women worked in the labor force compared to only 36.0 percent of white women. The gap in labor participation between the two groups continued to increase. Huping Ling, "Surviving on the Gold Mountain: Chinese American Women and Their Lives," pp. 134-135.

Following the War, the Miss America pageant increasingly gained popularity, culminating in its first national televised broadcast in 1954. Whereas previous pageants held significance mainly for the local audience of Atlantic City, television made the event a truly national one so that by 1959, every state was finally represented at the "Miss America" pageant. A. R. Riverol, Live From Atlantic City, p. 56.

7. "June Chin," California Living Magazine; Donald Canter, "In New Year of the Boar: Chinatown 'Moves West,'" 9 February 1959, clipping from Chinese Historical Society, San Francisco, Box 3, folder 16. The collection is located at the Asian American Studies Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Hereafter cited as CHS-SF.

8. Lim P. Lee, "The Chinese New Year Festival," Asian Week, 5 February 1981, p. 4.

9. Pageant souvenir booklets regularly included informational pieces explaining Chinese culture to audiences unfamiliar with the community.

Victor and Brett de Bary Nee use the terms "bachelor society" and "family society" to characterize the evolution of the San Francisco's Chinatown community; see Longtime Californ': A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (Stanford, 1972). The development of the beauty pageant coincided with the balancing of sex ratios among Chinese Americans. In 1890, when the Chinese population reached a 19th-century peak of 107,488 in the U.S., men outnumbered women 26.8 to 1. Due to the combined influence of natural birth rates and immigration, the sex ratio became 1.3 to 1 by 1960. (Huping Ling, "Surviving on the Gold Mountain," p. 127.) For further discussions of Chinese American family and community life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Peggy Pascoe, "Gender Systems in Conflict: The Marriages of Mission-Educated Chinese American Women, 1874-1939," in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, ed. by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York, 1990) and Sucheng Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870-1943," in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943 (Philadelphia, 1991).