Jade Snow Wong

I nearly fled when I saw many familiar works in the American wing of TheMet. I realized that I was traumatized by the years of memorizing facts about hundreds of paintings to pass art history tests. I could feel the tension from analyzing details of content, materials, and each artist’s place in history. A few steps later, I noticed a familiar color and shape in my peripheral vision. I turned to see one of my mother’s enamel-on-copper bowls, dated 1948. My mother was twenty-six years old and not yet married when she made it. 

My mother’s name was Jade Snow Wong (1922–2006). She went to Mills College in Oakland to become a social worker. In the 1940s, it was assumed that a social worker had to be able to teach crafts to clients, so she was required to take a pottery class. Reluctant at first, she found that she loved ceramics so much that she chose it as a career. 

Since she couldn’t afford a studio after graduation, she persuaded a shopkeeper in San Francisco’s Chinatown to rent his windows to her. The crowds she drew and the sensation she created launched her into a rapidly ascending career. 

At about the same time, a book editor saw an essay that my mother had written for a school publication. That led to her first book, Fifth Chinese Daughter,* (1950) which is still in print. Who else has a sixty-year career as a self-employed ceramicist, author, retailer of Asian imports, and, with my father, travel agent? 

She added enamel on copper to expand her work beyond pottery. The effort was a collaboration with my father (they began their relationship at the end of World War II and married in 1950), who did the metal spinning† for her forms. When I was old enough, that became my job. I worked each day in her studio after school and before attending Chinese school at night. I sometimes spun hundreds of bowls a day for an order. After she enameled them, it was also my job to etch away oxidation with sulfuric acid and polish bare copper with a buffing wheel. When bowls were to be shipped, I packed them and took them to the post office. When crates of imports arrived from Asia, I unpacked them, cleaned them, priced them, and put them on shelves. 

I kept supporting my mother even into my fifties. I’m still her literary and artistic executor. Forty of her works are in the collection of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and two of her works were just donated to the Huntington Art Museum in San Marino. However, I hadn’t gotten any notice that TheMet was exhibiting her work. If I hadn’t traveled to New York, I wouldn’t have known that her bowl was on exhibition. 

She started in a Chinatown store window. I started in a garage. We both have Chinese names. But we are a part of the greater body of American Art, and it’s good to be recognized in that way. 

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* https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295745909/fifth-chinese-daughter/

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_spinning