Dr. Madeline Chung.Courtesy of the Family
Madeline Chung blazed a trail in Vancouver for more than 35 years as British Columbia’s first obstetrician-gynecologist of Chinese descent, as well as the first woman in B.C. to specialize in the field. She brought relief and comfort to thousands of Chinese-Canadian women, delivering their babies at a time many spoke little English and had only recently arrived in Canada. Spurning the comfort of a joint practice that would allow more regular hours, she was like an old-style family doctor, personally presiding at each birth, always on call, no matter the hour. She was gone from home so often, her husband, Wallace, joked that he had to learn to cook. “Otherwise, I would have starved.”
By the time she retired, Dr. Chung had delivered 7,226 babies, each birth meticulously recorded in black and navy notebooks, listing the mothers’ names and delivery dates along with the sex, weight and blood type of each baby, and any complications. They were diaries of the times. Arriving in Vancouver in the mid-1950s, just as immigration laws were relaxed and the city was emerging from its long history of anti-Asian discrimination, she was the right person at the right time. It hadn’t been long since Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) ended its practice of consigning Chinese women giving birth to beds in the basement.
Dr. Chung left a community legacy of teachers, lawyers, politicians, business professionals and working-class people, all ushered into the world as Chung Babies, now constituting an unofficial club. Her children remember family meals at restaurants constantly interrupted by customers coming up to thank Dr. Chung and wanting to pay the bill.
Politician and B.C. Liberal leadership contender Michael Lee is a Chung Baby. “It’s an honour,” said Mr. Lee, whose mother had just arrived from Hong Kong when she gave birth to him in 1964. “She was the go-to person for expectant mothers in the Chinese-Canadian community. At this very critical time, she provided them with culturally appropriate care in their own language.”
Pauline Lee, Mr. Lee’s mother, was directed to Dr. Chung by friends. “[Dr. Chung] was caring, kind, patient, and above all, she listened. She provided excellent care. I told many people about her.”
It was a career Dr. Chung first dreamed of as a schoolgirl. Deeply affected by what she saw around her in war-torn China, she vowed to do something to ease people’s suffering by becoming a doctor, a youthful promise that must have seemed preposterous at the time, but one from which she never wavered.
None of it was easy. After the difficulty of securing her medical degree without graduating from high school, she was denied a bank loan to set up her practice in Vancouver for fear she would become pregnant and unable to pay it back. She also had to overcome lingering discrimination from the medical establishment. Promotions came at glacial speed. VGH took years to accept her as a staff doctor, despite the large number of births she oversaw at the hospital. Teaching was also a passion of hers. But the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia relegated her to a clinical instructor for much of her career, until at last, a department change saw her promoted to full professor and eventually clinical professor emeritus. When Dr. Chung died on Aug. 22, from the effects of a stroke and dementia, flags at UBC were lowered in her memory. She was 96.
“Because she was the first, she had to change things,” said historian Henry Yu, also a Chung Baby. “To put up with the stuff she did and keep at it, when she could have just given up … I don’t think people today really understand. You have to love what you do.”
And Dr. Chung did. “I love newborns. Seeing their innocent faces makes me happy,” she told an interviewer in 2009. “A new life stimulates you.”
Dr. Chung did more than deliver babies. She helped found a private school in Richmond to instruct students in traditional Chinese culture and language, outside their regular school hours. For a while, she was the school’s principal, board chair, advancement officer and janitor. Skeptical that someone would work so hard as a volunteer, the Canada Revenue Agency audited her tax returns twice within a few months, prompting a rare fit of anger from Dr. Chung. She chastised the auditors for not believing there were people such as her who acted “from their heart, not from their wallet.”
Dr. Chung and her husband, Wallace, also a Chinese-Canadian medical pioneer, in the field of surgery, set up an endowment fund at UBC to finance an annual day for surgical students to present papers and visiting surgeons to lecture at the medical school. They are still known on campus as Chung Days.
The Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection, an astonishing accumulation of more than 25,000 rare and eclectic artifacts from B.C. history, including Chinese immigration, was donated to UBC in 1999. Abetted by his wife’s financial support, they were amassed by Dr. Wallace Chung over many years. Recently added to the registry of UNESCO’s Memory of the World program, the acclaimed collection is the largest repository of Chinese-Canadian items in the country, Prof. Yu said.
Madeline Huang was born July 3, 1925 in Shanghai. Her parents, Yoong Yih Huang and Alice Kwan, had met in Butte, Mont., where her mother was born and her father, a mining engineer, was visiting to take a look at the area’s extensive mines.
The couple married in Shanghai in 1924 and had three daughters. Mr. Huang, subsequently a minister in the Kuomintang government, was a rare Chinese father. He believed strongly that his daughters should be educated, ignoring associates who likened it to “educating geese.” As Japan’s invasion of China intensified, Mr. Huang sent his family to Hong Kong, where Madeline, the oldest daughter, attended the private True Light School for girls until the Japanese overran the British colony at the end of 1941. Their mother was injured in the family’s escape to the surrounding countryside. Madeline was forced to forage on her own for food and shelter to maintain their precarious existence.
After the war, she began pursuing her ambition to become a doctor, attending the Yale-affiliated medical school in Hunan Province. After graduating in 1948, conflict intervened once again. By then, China was consumed by civil war, and the aspiring physician opted to continue her medical studies in North America, with stops at Tacoma General Hospital near Seattle, Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria and St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal, before completing her specialty training at the Mayo Clinic.
During her year in Montreal, she met Wallace Chung, a soft-spoken McGill medical student from Victoria. He noticed her in church one Sunday and asked her to a dance. She turned him down. At the dance, he found her surrounded by young men. Yet hurdles were overcome, and the two remained a devoted couple for close to 70 years, totally supportive of each other in their landmark careers as Chinese-Canadian medical specialists in Vancouver.
By the time she hit Vancouver, the newly married Dr. Chung was ready to go. Fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese, and two regional dialects, she was soon delivering up to 290 babies a year as waves of Chinese immigrants arrived after the repeal of the China Exclusion Act. Unlike the city’s other Chinese-Canadian doctors, she deliberately located her office in central Vancouver, outside what she considered the confining silos of Chinatown. Although the vast majority of her patients were Chinese, she wanted to be a doctor for all.
Dr. Chung kept up her exhaustive practice into her 60s. One night, driving home after delivering three babies within 24 hours, she fell asleep and crashed into a telephone pole. Unconscious and severely injured, she spent days in intensive care before being transferred to a ward. Not long afterwards, doctors found her in a wheelchair visiting patients at the hospital. “Well, no one said I couldn’t do this,” she remonstrated, as they ordered her back to bed. But the accident was a sign, and Dr. Chung retired in 1992.
A few years later, she was able to realize her cherished dream of treating patients in her native China. Arranged through the Evangelical Medical Aid Society, she journeyed to Ningxia, one of the country’s poorest provinces, to train rural “Barefoot Doctors” in childbirth. Despite the sweltering heat and rudimentary facilities, Dr. Chung could not resist delivering babies, herself. “It’s what she would have envisioned, if the revolution hadn’t occurred,” said her daughter Maria Chung, also a physician, who went with her. “She was so happy to have gone.” One of the births took place by cesarean section. The parents were so grateful to Dr. Chung they named their healthy baby boy “Canada.”
Dr. Chung was made an honorary life member of the Canadian Medical Association in 1993. At the ceremony, her husband went on stage with the wives of the other recipients and was presented with the same memento: a necklace. A life member of Doctors of BC as well, she received a civic merit award from the City of Vancouver in 2013.
Dr. Chung leaves a sister, Dolores Dong; her husband, Wallace; children, Maria and Stephen; and grandchildren, Charlotte, Eleanor, Sophie, Julia and Kevin.