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During World War II, Mom Chung's wastheplace to be in San Francisco. Soldiers, movie stars, and politicians gathered at her home to socialize, to show their dedication to the Allied cause, and to express their affection for Dr. Margaret Chung (1889-1959). The first known American-born Chinese female physician, Chung established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1920s. She also became a prominent celebrity and behind-the-scenes political broker during World War II. Chung gained national fame when she began \"adopting\" thousands of soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, including Ronald Reagan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. A pioneer in both professional and political realms, Chung experimented in her personal life as well. She adopted masculine dress and had romantic relationships with other women, such as writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker. This is the first biography to explore Margaret Chung's remarkable and complex life. It brings alive the bohemian and queer social milieus of Hollywood and San Francisco as well as the wartime celebrity community Chung cultivated. Her life affords a rare glimpse into the possibilities of traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period.

Reputedly the first American-born woman of Chinese descent to become a physician, Margaret Chung (1889-1959) gained wide recognition as a supporter of the Allied cause during the 1930s and 1940s. This article examines the historical significance of her life, not in terms of her accomplishments in the public realm of work and politics, but by focusing on her private choices. Chung decided not to marry or have children during a time when the social pressure for Chinese American women to do both was intense. Instead, she developed erotic relationships with white women. She also experimented with gender presentation, adopting masculine and feminine personas. Wu explores Chung's gender identities as wells as her homoerotic interracial relationships, expanding the existing understanding of Asian American sexuality during the first half of the twentieth century and revealing the ways in which women of color negotiated shifting gender, sexual, and racial norms from the late Victorian through the modern eras.

In 2003 the American Historical Association found that Benson Tong had plagiarized Judy Tzu-Chun Wu's unpublished dissertation on Margaret Chung, the first Chinese-American woman to become a physician. In an interview, Wu discusses the case.

Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is reviewed.

Born in Santa Barbara in 1889, the daughter of immigrants, [Margaret Chung] was the eldest of 11 children. Growing up on the 24,000-acre Rancho Guadalasca in Ventura County, where her father was the foreman, Chung decided at an early age that she wanted to be a doctor. Her practice extended beyond Chinatown, though. At the beginning of the Depression, she was asked to conduct medical exams for seven hard-drinking crack Navy reserve pilots. More than that, Chung, who had a reputation for treating patients to home-cooked meals, fed the seven, who were soon referring to themselves as \"Mom Chung's Fair- Haired Bastard Sons.\" They were the core of what became nearly a thousand loyal wartime \"flyboys\" who called her \"Mom.\" As her fame grew, she became the inspiration for the 1939 movie \"King of Chinatown,\" a fictionalized bio-pic starring Chinese- American actress Anna May Wong. During the war, Chung shared the pages of Real Heroes comic books with the likes of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Texas Rangers, providing Chinese Americans with a patriotic role model.

Ling reviews Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu.

Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is reviewed.