A Woman in Between: Searching for Dr. Victoria Chung
By John Price with Ningping Yu
The Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia and The Initiative for Student Research and Teaching in Chinese Canadian Studies, 172 pp., $30.
Victoria’s best-kept secret might be a Chinese-Canadian woman who became a doctor and a revered legend in China.
If it weren’t for a photocopy of a February 1948 Peterborough Examiner newspaper clipping handed by a colleague to University of Victoria Prof. John Price in 2008, Dr. Victoria Chung’s incredible story of resolve might never have surfaced.
From that one act, Price, who taught Asia-Canadian studies at UVic, enlisted the help of Ningping Yu, who taught in Simon Fraser University’s Women’s Studies Department, and the pair embarked on a decade-long research and writing project that produced the interesting story of Chung’s life.
The Examiner headline read: “Chinese woman doctor to give address in city,” and it was about Chung and her exploits and medical work in China.
Price and Yu are somewhat hampered by the necessity to Anglicize names of people and places from both Chinese languages, Mandarin (the country’s official language) and Cantonese (mostly spoken in southern China, where Chung’s story is largely based).
But if the reader can be patient and slog through the initial phase of the names, the story becomes fascinating and tells about Chung’s life from Aug. 19, 1897, when she was born in Victoria, to May 17, 1966, when she died in China.
The book described Chung’s religious upbringing by mother Yin Han, who dedicated Victoria’s life to the service of the Lord and wanted her daughter to become a medical missionary, a wish that came true.
Despite Victoria school board efforts to make schooling difficult for Chinese Canadians in the fall of 1907 (mandatory English language competency exams were imposed but quickly rescinded), Chung was able to enrol at Central Middle School in 1909 and Victoria High School four years later. She and Harry Chan were the only Asian students at Vic High in 1913.
In her junior-matriculation exams at the high school, Chung scored 82 in algebra, 90 in geometry and 74 in chemistry. In 1916, she graduated with first-class honours.
At Victoria College, Chung scored 87 in trigonometry, and the president of the Women’s Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, who was visiting the city at the time, found a University of Toronto medical-school scholarship for Chung.
Chung’s arrival at the university was noted in the following fashion by the Toronto Star and U of T’s newspaper, The Varsity: “Among the girl freshies who registered at the university was an interesting little personage from Victoria, B.C., Miss Victoria Chung. Miss Chung is a very bright and attractive little Chinese maid who has come to this city with the intention of entering on the medical course, in the hope that she may go back among her own people as a medical missionary.”
After she graduated in May 1922, she was one of two women (and 34 men) appointed as Toronto General Hospital residents. That drew a Globe headline: “Chinese among staff medicos.”
The story then goes to southern China, where Chung headed the Marion Barclay Women’s Hospital in Kongmoon.
Chung returned to the city of her birth several times while on furlough, but she essentially remained in China and stayed through the brutal Sino-Japanese War and the equally trying Communist Cultural Revolution, sometimes at grave personal danger.
It is this part of the story that will be absorbing for most readers. The trials and tribulations of running a hospital and a medical clinic during hard times are painted in a stark and riveting manner by Price and Yu.
Don’t expect a Wayson Choy word-painting. Choy had the luxury of literary licence for fiction writers. Price and Yu were not afforded that luxury and had the added burden of trying to dig information from about a century ago until 1966.
But they did a terrific job in chasing down and telling the story of a strong and determined woman who, despite hardships, used her generous heart and medical skills to the best of her abilities.
A book launch for A Woman in Between is planned for Friday, May 24, at 6 p.m. at Victoria City Hall.
King Lee is a retired Chinese-Canadian reporter and a member of the Victoria High School Alumni Association.
