Margaret Chung

Margaret Jessie Chung (, – ), born in Santa Barbara, California, was the first known American-born Chinese female physician. After graduating from the University of Southern California Medical School in 1916 and completing her internship and residency in Illinois, she established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1920s.

Early life Chung was born in Santa Barbara, the eldest of eleven children. Her father, Chung Wong, was the foreman of the Rancho Guadalasca in Ventura County. Her mother, Ah Yane, also emigrated from China to California in the 1870s where she spent time in a mission home before working in agriculture and sometimes as a court interpreter. She was noted in the Herald again in 1906 for her poem "Missionary Giving," delivered at the eighteenth anniversary of the Los Angeles Congregational Chinese mission. Chung wrote and delivered a paper entitled "Comparisons of Chinese and American Costumes" at the first anniversary of the Pasadena Congregational mission in 1907. By that fall, when she was 17, Chung had graduated from the eighth grade at the Seventh Street School and enrolled in the preparatory school at USC, being hailed as a "bright particular star" of the women's gymnasium class. In 1910, Chung won second place in a speech contest.

Chung won a Los Angeles Times scholarship to study at USC by selling newspaper subscriptions to raise funds for her education and worked her way through college as a waitress, a seller of surgical instruments, and by winning cash prizes in several speech contests. Chung enrolled in medical school in 1911, according to a 1914 profile that noted her belief that she was "the first Chinese girl to enter a medical school in this state." Chung would serve as the resident assistant in psychiatry for the first Juvenile Psychopathic Institute of the State of Illinois at the Cook County Hospital in 1917; she was later appointed state criminologist for Illinois. After two years in Illinois, Chung resigned from her position with Cook County in November 1918 and returned to Los Angeles following her father's death, accepting a position as a surgeon at Santa Fe Railroad Hospital, where she would go on to treat celebrities, including removing Mary Pickford's tonsils.

Chung moved to San Francisco's Chinatown in 1922 after experiencing the city while accompanying two patients, She treated the local Chinese American population as well as celebrities such as Sophie Tucker, Helen Hayes, and Tallulah Bankhead. which would become a token by which the pilots would recognize each other throughout the world. but she was secretly assigned instead to recruit pilots for the 1st American Volunteer Group, better known as the "Flying Tigers." and would set an American record by shooting down 67 Japanese planes in a single day during the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in June 1944. She also started a social network for pilots and other military personnel, politicians, and celebrities in California where she used her connections to recruit for war efforts and lobby for the creation of a women's naval reserve.

In 1947, 90% of Chung's medical patients were white. She retired from medical practice within ten years after the end of World War II, and her "adopted sons" purchased a house for her in Marin County. Among her pallbearers was Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, one of her "Golden Dolphins."

Based on personal correspondence, she had close and apparently intense relationships with at least two other women, the writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker, that some writers have speculated were romantic. Although she was briefly engaged, she never married.

An advocate of strong Sino-American relations, Chung was a neighbor, friend, and confidante of travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900–1939), who died in an attempt to sail the junk Sea Dragon, as a symbol of the bond of East and West, from Hong Kong to the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

Military "sons" Some of the notable "sons" of "Mom" Chung included:

Albert B. Chandler, Sr. (no. 98), Governor and U.S. Senator from Kentucky William F. "Bull" Halsey (no. 600), Fleet Admiral of the United States Navy Andre Kostelanetz (no. 434), conductor Melvin Maas (no. 447), Major General of the United States Marine Corps and U.S. Representative from Minnesota Chester W. Nimitz (no. 100), Fleet Admiral of the United States Navy Russell Randall, Brigadier General of the United States Army Air Forces Ronald Reagan (no. 131), actor and President Walter F. Schlech Jr. (no. 108), Rear Admiral and Chief of Military Sealift Command, United States Navy William Sterling Parsons, Rear Admiral and bomb commander of Enola Gay

Chung was commemorated with a plaque in the Legacy Walk project on October 11, 2012, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people.

A tunnel boring machine for the San Francisco Municipal Railway's Central Subway was named "Mom Chung" on March 7, 2013.