Margaret Chung
Margaret Jessie Chung (Chinese: 張瑪珠, October 2, 1889 – January 5, 1959), 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.
Chung was one of eleven children and worked her way through college as a waitress. As of 1947, 90% of her medical patients were white.
A pioneer in both professional and political realms, Chung led an unconventional personal life. As a female medical student in an otherwise all-male school, she adopted masculine dress and called herself "Mike," but after having established a professional practice she reverted to conventional dress and her female name. 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 did marry. An advocate of strong Sino-American relations, Chung was a 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.
Chung was commemorated with a plaque in the Legacy Walk project on October 11, 2012, as well as being the namesake of a tunnel boring machine for the San Francisco Municipal Railway's Central Subway on March 7, 2013.
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