Alice Fong Yu

Alice Fong Yu (Chinese: 尤方玉屏; 2 March 1905 - 19 December 2000) was an American schoolteacher and community organizer.

The first Chinese American to teach at a public school, she was a founding member and first president of the Square and Circle Club (方圓社), and was a prominent leader in the San Francisco Chinatown community.

Alice Fong Yu was born Alice Fong in the small gold-mining town of Washington in Nevada County, California.

Her Chinese name was Fong Yu P'ing, a variation of which she used as a pen name later in life.

She was born on March 2, 1905, to Lonnie Tom and Fong Chow (Suey Chang).

While in Washington, Fong Chow was superintendent of a leased gold mine and also ran a general store for Chinese miners.

Fong Yu was the second of ten children, seven of which were also born in Washington.

The youngest three were born after the family moved to Vallejo.

The family's eldest child was a son named Theodore, and Fong Yu's younger siblings were Minnie, who often went by Mickey, Taft, Helen, Albert, Marian, Leslie, Martha and Lorraine.

After many years of running the mine in Washington and making improvements, Fong Chow lost the lease when its owners decided to take it back for themselves.

Unable to support his family, Fong Chow relocated to Vallejo, California where he opened The Oriental Market on Georgia Street.

Fong Chow was a progressive and educated Chinese Nationalist, and encouraged all of his children, both daughters and sons, to pursue an education.

Encouragement for Chinese girls to get an education and join professions was not standard in Chinese and Chinese American families at the time, though it was more common in Chinese Christian households.

All six Fong sisters graduated from college and four of the sisters, including Alice Fong Yu, were the first Chinese American women to enter their chosen professional fields.

Of these women, Alice Fong Yu became the first Chinese American public school teacher and her sisters Mickey, Marian and Martha Fong became the first Chinese American public health nurse, dental hygienist and nursery school teacher respectively.

Alice Fong Yu became familiar with anti-Chinese racial discrimination at a young age.

In interviews, Fong Yu has recalled being taunted and shunned by white students as a child in Washington.

Of the experience she has said:

"'It is surprising, isn't it, that [in] just a small one room school and [among] just a handful of children, they still thought we were queer. They would sing 'Ching Chong Chinaman' and all those things to make fun of us and make you feel like nobody, and then when we would play games, they wouldn't hold our hands, as if they would be contaminated by our hands, and so they wouldn't accept us'."

The Fong siblings found comfort in the words of their parents and in the acceptance of local Christian communities.

The Fong parents encouraged their children to take pride in their Chinese heritage, calling their children's tormentors “barbarians” whose taunts shouldn't be allowed to bother them.

They assured their children that their people had a rich culture and a long history, and that once they gained an education, they would be looked up to when they returned to China.

Once the family moved to Vallejo, they were invited into the Vallejo Christian community.

The Presbyterian church first sent a Sunday school teacher to the Vallejo Chinatown to teach the community's children, eventually leading to the Fong's joining the larger, majority-white congregation.

This was unusual for the time, and Fong Yu has praised the congregation as “ the ones who accepted us in the early days... [and] gave us a chance to intermingle with other races."

Both Fong Yu's Chinese heritage and Christian faith would remain strong influences on her life.

Together, they would form the bedrock of her future career in community service.

Fong Yu did not perceive any conflict between these two facets of her identity, and indeed believed that the virtues of both overlapped.

According to Fong Yu, the teachings of Confucius “'contained all the virtues of Christian teachings'” and “'that only those who were unfamiliar with the heritage of China’s wisdom failed to see that'”.

When she had applied in 1922, she was personally introduced the president of the college, Dr. Frederic Lister Burke.

This introduction was made by the head of the local Red Cross, whom she had worked with and impressed with her fundraising work for the YWCA Girls Reserve.

She was initially denied admission to the college, being told by Dr. Burke that she would not be hired for a teaching job anywhere in the country because she was Chinese.

Fong Yu, frustrated because “”[She'd] faced so much discrimination’”, told Dr. Burke that she has no intention of staying in the US, and was instead planning on moving to China to “’teach my people’”.

After graduating from high school in 1923, Alice Fong Yu moved to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco State Teachers College.

This convinced Dr. Burke to admit Fong Yu to the program, and she graduated in 1926.

Alice Fong Yu never moved to China to teach, and instead was hired directly after her graduation by Commodore Stockton Elementary School (formerly known as the Oriental Public School).

On December 22, 1940, in Tucson, Arizona, Alice Fong Yu married Jon Yong Chang Yu, a writer and journalist who wrote editorials for the Young China newspaper.

The couple met through the Chinese War Relief Association, where Fong Yu served as the Square and Circle Club's representative and Yu served as the organization's secretary and news release writer.

They had two sons, Alon and Joal.

Jon Yong Chang Yu died of a sudden illness in 1966, while the couple was on a trip to Asia to visit members of Jon's family that he had not been able to see in decades.