amily and the culture. It must have been utterly incredible to them, then, when Wong defied them and fled the nest.
Again, however, as Wong would demonstrate in her later life and career, there was no danger that she would forget her heritage. Her choice for freedom meant only that she would pick and choose what parts of that heritage she would retain in her life and what parts she would discard. Her parents were such extremists that they saw cultural matters in black and white terms. To them, Wong was either going to obey them entirely and live the tightly controlled life which they had set out for her, or she was going to go out on her own and live an entirely dissolute Western-style life of corruption. Their own experience within the tight confines of Chinese culture had not allowed them to even consider a middle ground of free choice with respect to different parts of that culture.
To her parents Wong's disobedience was surely a shock, but in fact Wong's position is not unique. My interview with a young Chinese-American who made the same choice as Wo
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