“The American Style of Life”

The contiguous 48 states have always been in awe of the Hawaiian Islands. Virginia yearbooks are full of prom themes like “Hawaiian Sunset,” “Island Paradise,” and “A Luau.” So, it is not too much of a surprise to open the 1923 edition of the Virginia Intermont College’s yearbook and be greeted with a very un-Virginia-like scene of tiny boats sailing towards a volcanic-looking mountain. Yet, who picked it? And why? And did it hold any meaning to the Southern young ladies attending? Did it mean anything to the one Hawaiian-born student far from home and family?

Founded in 1884 by a Baptist minister, Intermont promised parents to provide an education that produced the “highest type of womanhood,” and “a cultured Christian woman – such women as have upon their characters the stamp of nobility.”¹ Most years the young women dedicated and thanked their “daddies” and mothers in print for sending them to Virginia Intermont.² Helen Mow had not been sent to Intermont by her parents, she had been sent by her fiancé, and he had chosen Intermont in order for her to be “thoroughly Americanized.”³

Yew Char, Helen’s betrothed, had been born during a tumultuous political time in Hawaii. He was born in 1893, the last year that the Kingdom of Hawaii held sovereignty over the islands. After European and American plantation owners overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, the islands were a republic for a few short years, until the United States annexed them as a territory in 1898. As part of annexation, the United States granted (or forced) U.S. citizenship on most Hawaiian residents, and anyone born in Hawaii after 1900 held the same natural-born citizenship status as anyone in the then-45 states.

Yew, therefore, was a citizen from a very young age and Helen, born in 1905, was a U.S. citizen from birth. Even so, as a young man, Char felt that he needed to prove his American identity , learning quite quickly that many other Americans saw him as something less than a full American, perhaps because he came from Hawaii, but more likely because both he and Helen were ethnically Chinese.

Both Yew’s and Helen’s parents had emigrated from China to the Kingdom of Hawaii in the last few decades of the 19th century. Yew Char’s parents came on a contract to work on a sugar cane planation and by the time he was young had moved to Honolulu and operated a store.⁴ Helen Mow/Mau’s parents had arrived in similar circumstances, but her mother had died three months after her birth; while her sisters were adopted into the households of future in-laws, she was raised by members of her father’s family.⁵ Though the lives of Chinese contract workers were full of hardships, the Kingdom of Hawaii did not have the legal strictures against immigration that the territory of Hawaii inherited once it became part of the United States.

One of Yew’s first flights from his Chinese upbringing to a more American life was literal. Fleeing an arranged marriage, Yew secretly boarded a ship to San Francisco and then made his way to Chicago.⁶ An article in the Honolulu Bulletin quotes him as saying he “resented [his parents’] interference, declared he was strictly American, and would choose his wife when the time came.”⁷ Despite being an American citizen, because of his Chinese ancestry, Yew was pulled aside and interrogated when he arrived in California.⁸ Yew eventually made his way to Chicago, finished a photography course, won big at the lottery, and returned home to Hawaii, but not before having traveled all over the North American continent, visiting D.C., and meeting and taking a picture of “The Georgia Peach,” Ty Cobb.⁹

Back in Hawaii, he focused his enormous energy and ambition to many endeavors. He worked alongside his brother in a photography studio, served at Fort Shatner during World War I, and became closer to the salesgirl at Fong Inn’s Store, Helen Mow. Years later, Yew told his granddaughter that he had realized his love interest was “too young at the moment for marriage,” (she was 16, he was 28) and needed “more schooling” at the time, though, he additionally told newspapers that he wished her to be “thoroughly Americanized.”¹⁰

Perhaps Yew already had political ambitions; he later ran and served multiple terms in the Hawaiian legislature as a Democrat favoring statehood. Did he feel that his and his future wife’s Chinese cultural upbringing would hold back his ambitions? It would not have been an unwarranted fear. We don’t know how Yew heard about the institutions he chose, but he financed two years of education in Virginia for Helen. One year at the Fort Loudon Seminary for Girls in Winchester, Virginia, followed by a year at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. Was there a reason Yew felt these were the perfect institutions to instill Helen with American culture?

Was the “Americanization” successful? After two years, Yew arrived in Washington D. C. for a photography conference, picked up Helen, and married her in July of 1923. Their marriage, seen as exotic, was picked up by many local newspapers. The contrast between the headlines and the quotes from the couple are jarring. “Real Oriental Courtship Ends in Occidental Marriage Here” reads The Evening Star while The Washington Herald talks of a “Far East Love” with the sub-heading “Groom Intends to Observe U.S. Condition, Make Money and Be Good American Citizen.”¹¹ Yew is quoted in numerous papers as saying, “We’re Americans now, and we’ll be American,” yet The Washington Times doesn’t seem convinced, noting that, “both are natives of Honolulu of Chinese extraction, but proclaim with pride they are Americans.”¹²

While Helen wore a “sky-blue silk dress of Chinese cut”, Yew was dressed in “conventional American clothes” and both told reporters that they had decided to get married in D.C. to escape the “quaint Oriental customs” that the new Mrs. Char reportedly deemed “so unnecessary.”¹³ Back home, the Honolulu Bulletin reported that Yew, “[in] his desire for a ceremony as definitely American as good be,” had succeeded in a ceremony that “took place under circumstances novel to Washington.”¹⁴ After the ceremony, the newlyweds bought a car and traveled across the country back to California where they sailed home.

Back in Hawaii, Yew again threw his enormous reserves of energy into various endeavors. He worked as a photographer with his brother, filed patents for inventive new toys, and served as a Hawaiian legislator.¹⁵ He had a talent for marketing, offering perks such as a car to pick up mothers with small children so they would not ruin their clothes en route to the studio.¹⁶ Perhaps having provided photographs for Honolulu papers in the past, he seemed quite able to get himself a lot of news coverage. Outside of the papers, his name even appeared once in an internal Navy bulletin, noting that he had a disagreement about the United States exclusionary immigration policies that almost led to a physical altercation. He was deeply invested in his American citizenship, but he did not always agree with United States policies. He was acutely aware of the consequences of American immigration policies; for an unknown amount of time, his own father was not allowed back into the country.¹⁷

As he and Helen started a family, they named their two sons Washington and Lincoln, and their first daughter, Virginia, after the state. Yew turned his marketing skills toward marketing the continental United States to Hawaiians and Hawaii to the rest of the United States. Char’s Tour and Travel Service, the first travel agency in Hawaii, started in 1933 and specialized in months-long trips to continental North America, Europe, and Asia.¹⁸ When not with a tour group, Yew traveled around himself with a slideshow, and then a film he had produced called “Hawaii the Beautiful,” or showed the films from the commercial tours to prospective customers in Hawaii. When at home the Chars entertained visitors from the mainland with “typical luau[s]”.¹⁹

Virginia, her sister Josephine, and their cousin Aileen all attended Virginia Intermont in the late 1940s. The sisters were members of the small “Nostrae Filiae” club, composed of students whose mothers and/or grandmothers were also alums. Josephine later told her daughter that their mother was rarely at home, but when she was, Helen “never raised them according to Chinese custom but to the so-called “American style of life.”²⁰

Even so, the three young Char women appear in traditional dress in the 1948 Intermont yearbook in a special section called “One World” alongside another Hawaiian woman and two women from South America. The caption stated that these women arrived with their “strange beauty” and Intermont in return gave “to these girls who come from far away a spirit, an ideal, a way of thought and life that is the American woman,” even though four of the six women were natural-born United States citizens.²¹

One must wonder what Yew Char might have thought reading that. Continental America still didn’t see his family as truly American. Perhaps his travels changed his focus. He lived his company’s slogan, “See the world before you leave it,” while always staying in touch with Hawaii (he once announced his re-election campaign via cablegram from Idaho) and keeping Hawaiians informed about political news on the mainland.²² Later in life, Helen seemed to embrace her Chinese ancestry more. She specialized in tours of Asia. She told the local paper that Beijing, China, was her favorite place to visit, and she had a large number of options to pick from – by her granddaughter‘s count she had been around the world 21 times.²³ In her later years her granddaughter found it ironic that she began “encouraging, if not demanding, that her family learn Chinese custom and language” when she had never spoken Cantonese to her children or grandchildren.²⁴

The Chars weren’t ashamed of being ethnically Chinese, but as young people trying to navigate the prejudices of the majority white mainlanders, it could be tricky to know when to “assimilate”  and when to keep traditional cultural practices. Every young person goes through the same process, picking and choosing what to keep from their childhood, but not all have the United States government actively restricting the culture and people with which one grew up. The Chars’ (both Yew’s and his brother On’s) photography studios captured the Chinese community in Hawaii in all its beauty, now a record of American history. In Las Vegas, arguably the most American of cities, stands a giant statue of Buddha donated by the Char family to the California Hotel and Casino.²⁵

The Commonwealth of Virginia was never heavily featured in the Chars’ tours. It is probable that the Washington D. C. itinerary featured forays into Virginia, and in the early years one of the highlights was Luray Caverns. Yew ran the company until he was 80 years old and turned in over to his daughter, Virginia.²⁶ Closing it in 2004 at the age of 76, she said, “I don’t want to sell the business and let the name down.”²⁷