Module 5: A Modern Chinese American Woman
Can one family’s assertion of their civil rights become a “victory” for an entire community?
After his trial in Seattle, Washington, Frank Tape returned to the Bay Area in California. He expected to take his place as Joseph and Mary Tape’s “number one son” and Chinatown big shot. Few people in San Francisco knew of his disgrace in Seattle, but he was nearing forty and needed to transform his image from playboy to respectable businessman, one capable of running his father’s immigrant brokering and ticketing agency.
Frank achieved that goal by marrying Ruby Kim, a young, modern Chinese American woman. Glamorous and socially ambitious, Ruby also built an independent career and served in the US Army during World War II. This module examines Ruby Kim Tape’s life as an example of a new generation of modern Chinese American women in the early twentieth century.
Who was Ruby Kim Tape and what identities and roles did she adopt at various points throughout her career and lifetime?
In what ways did Ruby Kim Tape break gender barriers as a modern Chinese American woman?
How did generational ties and political events in China influence Chinese American activism and identity?
Growing Up in Marysville
Ruby Kim was the daughter of a prominent Chinese merchant in Marysville, a small city north of Sacramento, California, that was a thriving town during the Gold Rush and had a large Chinese community. Her father, Kim Wing, was a second-generation Chinese American and the son of a laundryman. He was one of the few Chinese in Marysville who spoke English well and became known to both white and Chinese communities as an informal interpreter. In 1893, Kim Wing married Woo Que, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in San Francisco. She was literate in both English and Chinese, unusual for a girl at the time. Kim Wing and Woo Que had nine children, of which six survived. Ruby, born in 1898, was the eldest.
Image 37.05.01 — Portrait of Ruby Tape, circa 1922.
Like Joseph Tape, Kim Wing was an entrepreneur who was good at seizing opportunities. When his father died, Kim Wing sold the laundry business and bought a cigar stand, and then a Chinese general store. He also owned the Busy Bee, a pork-chop house downtown that catered to white customers, as well as other properties. Woo Que, whose educational background was more advanced than her husband’s, kept his business accounts. Kim Wing also ran a poker table in the back of his store and, because he was trusted with other people’s money, was tapped to manage the gambling for the Suey Sing Tong, one of the four Chinese associations in Marysville. Kim Wing was considered “one who made it” by the Chinese community, and some white people even called him the “mayor” of Chinatown.
Life as Mrs. Frank Tape
Sometime around 1919 to 1920, Ruby Kim met Frank Tape at a function at the Methodist Mission house. Frank was twice Ruby’s age, he was loud and paunchy, and he smoked cigars. But Frank was heir to the Tape family business and fortune, which made him a dream catch. Ruby could have had any Chinese boy she wanted—she was beautiful and vivacious, and the daughter of a prominent family. Her decision to date and then marry Frank reveals the extent to which she desired social status and wealth.
Image 37.05.02 — Frank Tape poses with Ruby Kim. The two were married in 1921.
After marrying in 1921, the couple bought a house in the Richmond area of San Francisco, a white, middle-class neighborhood where most property deeds banned the sale to Black, Jewish, and Asian homebuyers. There were some complaints from the neighborhood about the Chinese couple moving in, but Frank, who acted and nearly looked “white”, stood his ground. In Richmond, Frank bought Ruby fine things, and the couple threw big parties. Ruby also became a devoted daughter-in-law to Joseph and Mary Tape. She and Frank took the elder Tapes on trips to the countryside where the men shot birds and the women gathered wildflowers.
Image 37.05.03 — Frank (left), Mary, Joseph, and Ruby (right) pose after a day of hunting in the country, circa 1925.
Frank and Ruby did not have a traditional Chinese marriage with patriarchal values. Echoing the growing politics of women’s individualism in the early twentieth century, their marriage was similar to the ideals of other modern, American middle-class relationships, in which companionship was more important than obedience. Frank called Ruby “his pal” and “the boss at home.” 1 He brought out the tomboy of her childhood and supported her independence. They loved to spend time at the Tape family’s ranch near Ukiah, California, where they hunted game, fished, swam, and rode horses.
Meanwhile, Frank left behind his scandal in Seattle and enjoyed a new persona as an upstanding citizen and businessman. He became known as a colorful character who told stories to white journalists about his past life as a secret government agent. Ruby became active in community affairs and charitable circles, including the campaign to raise funds for building the new Chinese Hospital.
Image 37.05.04a — Frank with his hunting dogs. Both he and Ruby hunted game at the family’s lodge near Ukiah, California during the 1920s.
Image 37.05.04b — Ruby and her quarry at the family lodge.
By the early 1930s, though, the marriage began to sour. Ruby may have tired of Frank’s self-aggrandizing posture; there were also rumors that he had extramarital affairs. In 1933 the couple separated and Ruby returned to Marysville to help her widowed mother with her three younger siblings and to run the family’s grocery store, which was suffering during the Great Depression.
Wartime Work
Although Ruby Kim Tape’s mother had long been active in the Marysville branch of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, it was not until 1937 that Ruby became involved in political organizing. Up until that time, she had been preoccupied with running the family store, taking care of her three siblings, and participating in community affairs in Marysville. But in 1937, Ruby’s mother died, and in the summer of that year, the Japanese army launched a major attack outside Beijing, China. The northern regions near Beijing and Tianjin fell, and the Japanese were on the move towards Shanghai and Nanjing. Thus began a full-scale war, commonly referred to today as the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945. Ruby joined a whirlwind of activity in the United States in support of China’s war of resistance.
Image 37.05.05 — Ruby and her mother, Woo Que, in Marysville, California, circa 1931.
Chinese Americans had already been raising funds and organizing support for their homeland since Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. But with the formal commencement of the Sino-Japanese War, relief work in the US proceeded with greater urgency and on a grander scale from 1937 onward. Note that increased American involvement would later push the United States to enter World War II, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Chinese American participation in the war effort took on many forms. Communities raised funds for medical supplies and ambulances for the Chinese army. Women sewed cotton clothing and blankets for soldiers. Committees organized boycotts of silk stockings—as silk was a common product imported from Japan—and picketed American ships sending scrap iron to Japan.
Image 37.05.06a — “Rice bowl party” supporting China’s resistance to Japanese aggression, San Francisco, circa 1940.
Image 37.05.06b — Nellie Tom Quock, Lai Yee Guey How, and his son, Art, lead the picket line against sending scrap iron to Japan.
Ruby herself drove her old jalopy throughout the countryside around Marysville asking for donations. She also worked in a campaign organized by the YMCA in San Francisco’s Chinatown to make bandages for the front line. As part of the campaign, she arranged for the bandages to be sterilized at a local hospital and packed them using donated crates from a refrigerator company to be shipped out of San Francisco, through one of Frank Tape’s associates at the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. Overall, Chinese Americans raised an estimated 25 million dollars, about 300 dollars per person, to support China during the eight-year-long war.
Image 37.05.07 — Women and children making lucky coins for the war effort in China.
When the United States entered World War II, Ruby was working for the local draft board. However she wanted to do more, and after seeing a recruiting poster for the US Women’s Army Corps in 1942, she enlisted. At the time, Ruby was forty-four years old and the cutoff age was forty-five. Even though the local recruiter in Marysville rejected her when she applied, she went to San Francisco anyway to take the entrance and physical exams and passed. She was sent to Fort Des Moines, a military base and training facility in Iowa, where her intelligence, maturity, and practicality served her well. Ruby Tape was promoted to technical sergeant and finally landed a plum assignment at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, which housed the military intelligence training center.
Image 37.05.08 — Technical Sergeant Ruby Tape of the Women’s Army Corps, World War II.
Endnotes
1 “Former policeman and US investigator takes up new post,” undated clipping, Him Mark Lai papers, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley.
