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Jade Snow Wong (1922-2006) http://tinyurl.com/JWong

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Fishing

From Fifth Chinese Daughter, 1950.

Reader: Jessica Teeter

Sport fishing has become such a big business in California—especially along the central coast—that it's hard to remember how much fun you can have with a simple fish hook, a bit of line, and a young person's innocent enthusiasm.

Jade Snow Wong grew up in San Francisco, attended Mills College, and became a highly successful ceramic artist. In her 1950 book, Fifth Chinese Daughter, she tells of episodes which "shaped her life," including an account of her first fishing trip along San Francisco's Embarcadero waterfront.

By afternoon, Jade Snow had gone through a gamut of new experiences. She had felt the keen disappointment of losing a fish after pulling it out of the water; she had known the joy of pulling out two fish at once; she had tingled with exasperation when her line became entangled just as the biting was good, she had found that careless handling of fishhooks resulted in bleeding fingers and snagged clothes; she had decided that it was better to have fish bite and not get hooked than to have them not bite at all, she had known the anxiety of having her line become caught in another's, and she had gloried in seeing a string of her own fish, her very own even if they were little ones, dangling in the water to keep fresh.

Yes, fishing was a pleasure of this world! There within smell of the salt water, with the bay breezes and the sunshine joining forces to brown one's skin, one could forget about housework, homework, family problems, and all other troubles for at least a part of a day.

Told in the third person "from Chinese habit," Fifth Chinese Daughter became the first book by an Asian American woman to receive national recognition.