Heels, lipstick and a painted crown: Miss Chinatown 1948 and other beauty queens on pageant’s early years and being Chinese in the US
- Penny Wong, 95, won the first pageant aged 23. She and other past winners talk about the event in a new documentary
- They describe how it reflected the ‘parallel world’ of Chinese in San Francisco. ‘Whatever was happening in the white world, we had our own version,’ one says
On July 4, 1948, a gold-painted cardboard crown was placed on the head of a Chinese-American woman at a picnic outside San Francisco.
In a scene from a new documentary, Penny Wong, 95, looks at a photograph of herself wearing the makeshift prize at that Independence Day gathering at the Old Hearst Ranch in Pleasanton, California.
“They really didn’t know how to go about buying a crown. It wore out after 60, 70 years, so I had to throw it away,” says Wong, winner of America’s first Miss Chinatown pageant.
Although the crown is no more, Wong and her pageant prize are remembered in an episode of You Are Here, a new documentary series by San Francisco-based filmmaker James Q. Chan.
The film picks up where Chan’s 2016 documentary Forever Chinatown finishes off. The Emmy-nominated short on the life of Chinese-American artist Frank Wong closes with snapshots of significant public figures in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of whom is Miss Chinatown 1948.
“I was so surprised when they called my name,” Wong tells the South China Morning Post from her care home in San Francisco, helped by her daughter, Janice Quan. “I was 23 years old, just five foot, two inches, and there were so many pretty, tall contestants. In those days, most young ladies didn’t wear a lot of make-up. I only wore lipstick.”
