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Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity
Mom Chung’s was not a restaurant or a nightclub. It was the private residence of Dr. Margaret Chung, the first known American-born woman of Chinese descent to become a physician. She hosted these weekly Sunday parties for 75 to 100 people at a time in her modestly-sized home. Then in her fifties, she cooked the food herself and made the rounds to ensure that her guests felt welcome. After all, almost all of them were members of her adopted family. The celebrities, the politicians, the highly ranked and the common soldiers were bound to each other through her, their surrogate mother. Their ties stemmed not from blood connection but from their mutual affection and common dedication to the Allied Cause. Chung’s family, which grew to approximately 1,500 members, served as a vital political resource during the international conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s. She recruited pilots among her “sons” for the Flying Tigers, the American volunteer force that fought in support of China during the Sino-Japanese War. Once the United States formally entered World War II, she used her contacts to lobby for the creation of WAVES, the Women’s Naval Reserve. Described as a serious, commanding, almost regal person, Chung nevertheless had a bawdy sense of humor. Because she never married and could offer no legitimate father figure for her mostly white and male children, they became known as Mom Chung’s “Fair-Haired Bastards.” A pioneer in the professional and political realms, Chung experimented with her personal life as well. She alternatively adopted masculine clothing as well as glamorous feminine attire. She also engaged in romantic relationships with other women, like writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker. Despite these colorful achievements, Margaret Chung has all but disappeared from historical memory. Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity is the first biography to explore Margaret Chung's remarkable and complex life. It offers an intimate portrait of a woman who invented and reinvented herself in a quest for influence and social acceptance. The book traces Chung's life, beginning with the Christian missionaries in the frontier West who converted her parents and inspired her career in medicine, continuing through the years of her professional training in the burgeoning urban centers of Los Angeles and Chicago, bringing alive the bohemian and queer social milieus of Hollywood and San Francisco, and concluding with the wartime celebrity community that she cultivated and utilized for political purposes. This biography draws from Chung's unpublished autobiography, correspondence from her admirers and friends, archival sources, and oral histories to situate the life of this extraordinary woman within the context of her times. It affords a rare glimpse into the possibilities of traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period.
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