Becoming Chinese American
Virginia Lee Mead, a second-generation Chinese American, was born in 1922. She grew up in the bustling ethnic enclave of New York City’s Chinatown between the 1920s and 1940s. As a girl, her everyday life revolved around Chinatown and her interactions outside of the family primarily involved Chinese people. “When I was a child,” Mead said in a 1993 interview, “I really didn’t know I was American. I told you that, I had no idea. I mean, we lived in a Chinese community and everybody was Chinese, so we (were) Chinese. I didn’t think about it.”
Mead, however, didn’t live in a bubble insulated from other cultures. Her girlhood involved bridging cultures, with one foot in Chinese culture and another in American and Western culture. She constantly moved back and forth between the world of her parents and the Chinese community (to which she belonged) and mainstream American culture (with which she was equally immersed).
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Well, I enjoy all the things I know about China and to remember them and to look at them is fun because I lived with a lot of the customs, my mother being of that generation. We lived through a lot of those things. When we were at the beach and the moon festival came, which was the fifteenth day of the eighth month, by the Chinese calendar, which was lunar, it sometimes came in September. And she would observe certain things which had no significance to me except I know she traditionally did them.”
At the same time, as a girl Mead also left her family’s apartment in Chinatown and rode the subway to West End Avenue, where she took weekly piano and ballet lessons—not common activities for Chinese girls in her community. One of the highlights of her girlhood was taking ballet lessons from Michel Fokine, a renowned Russian ballet dancer and choreographer.
Like many Chinese immigrants in her community, Mead’s parents made a concerted effort to instill an appreciation of Chinese culture and customs in their children. They encouraged their children to maintain connections to their cultural heritage by sending them to Chinese language schools and by participating in important Chinese festivities and holidays.
Mead’s parents also sought to impart Chinese culture in their children through clothing. Her parents, Lee B. Lok and Ng Shee, imported both custom-made and ready-to-wear clothes made in China for the family. Although Mead and her siblings typically wore Western-style clothing as everyday attire, their parents encouraged them to regularly wear Chinese-style clothing at home and on special occasions.
This matching sleeveless vest and trousers is one of many outfits in the Virginia Lee Mead Collection. The outfit symbolizes how second-generation Chinese American girls embodied and fashioned a Chinese American identity. As an adult, Mead became more keenly aware of how ethnicity affected her life and often turned to clothing to express her Chinese heritage.
See Girlhood in 3D! Explore a model of the vest and trousers.
