Chinese drill team helps girls find own rhythms

"I believe girls don't have enough role models," Cheryl Chow says. Suddenly, the former city councilwoman whips her Subaru around, practically mid-intersection, to nab a coveted parking spot in Seattle's Chinatown International District.

Whatever it takes to get the job done. Sometimes it's just a flip of the steering wheel; other times it takes an institution like the Chinese Community Girls Drill Team to turn things around. Next month, the team will celebrate its 50th anniversary, and while its story is one of cultural heritage, friendship and coming of age, it's also the story of Cheryl Chow, who for 36 years has led the team founded by her mother, former King County councilwoman Ruby Chow.

Former members know that when they finally marry and have their baby's christening, don't bother inviting Cheryl if they're only having a boy. It's a standing joke, but one that reflects the zeal behind her life's mission. "I only have a certain amount of time in my life to do certain things," she says. Boys "are useless to me. They can't join the drill team."

With elaborately sequined silk costumes and headdresses as ornate as a Texas rancher's bolo-tie collection, the Chinese Community Girls Drill Team is a fixture at Seafair and other summer parades and festivals statewide. While its beginnings in the '50s and early '60s were well decorated with trophies, times were different then. Event programs identified Ruby as her husband's wife, and within traditional Chinese families — "Chinese Chinese families," as Cheryl says — girls endured secondary status and opportunity.

"Back then women were just supportive," Cheryl says. "And if you don't have a son, you've disappointed your husband." This whole drill team thing, then, tested the culture. "One of the main reasons it's lasted so long is it was one of the few activities Chinese girls were allowed to participate in," she says.

Take longtime English-as-Second-Language teacher Betty Lau, a member from 1960-65. Her father, who ran a dry-cleaning business, wouldn't let her join the Girl Scouts, much less leave the front yard, as a young girl.

"He didn't want us outside the culture," Lau says. Western society was too liberal: "He thought 18-and-on-your-own was anti-family. Consequently, we weren't allowed to go anywhere."

But Ruby's leadership convinced parents that the drill team was culturally safe, and for scores of 12- to 20-year-old girls it became a social and cultural outlet for bonding and self-discovery. That's the spirit Cheryl is aiming to uphold since taking over as director in 1966, two years out of Franklin High.

Isabelle Gonn, a 1970-76 member, says Cheryl saw her when she was pregnant with her second child — the first was a boy — and told her: "That's a girl. She's going to be on the drill team." That baby turned out to be daughter Perla Josue, now 19 and captain of this year's golden-anniversary squad.

Trouble with customs

Whatever Cheryl learned about being a strong woman she learned from her mother, Ruby. In 1951, after Ruby got herself appointed as public-relations chair for the Chong Wa Benevolent Association, the Chinese community's male-headed social organization sponsored a Seafair performance by a Chinese girls drill team from Victoria, B.C.

It struck both Ruby and a local girls club called the Chi-Ettes that local girls could do just as well. Ruby negotiated the backing of Chong Wa and the expertise of policeman Ted Yerabek, a local beat officer and member of the Seattle Police Department Drill Team. ("Old officers still recognize our drills," Cheryl says.)

Ruby's husband, Ping, a former Cantonese opera singer, suggested costumes echoing the art's woman warrior; 40 sets were ordered from Hong Kong. But getting them and a 125-foot dragon through U.S. customs turned out to be tricky.

"Why all these headdresses?" the customs officer asked, suspecting the Chows hadn't made a commercial declaration. Ruby, who'd explained that the uniforms were destined for Seafair, was nonetheless flustered. She blurted out: "I like to wear one a day." Upon hearing that the Chows had a dragon, too, the officer seized it all, forcing Ruby to beckon customs collector Howard MacGowan, a friend whose family members themselves marched, kilt-clad, in the Seafair parade.

The Chinese Community Girls Drill Team took its first official steps in 1952, with a drum section and parents willing to trust Ruby and Yerabek with their daughters at weekly practices. "I think I had a reputation of being strict," says Ruby, now 82. "It was: 'We pick you up, we take you home.' "

She established her own pattern on top of the mélange of left-rights that Yerabek drilled into the girls — a value-rich system that gave Chinese girls a chance to build confidence, bond culturally and confide in adults other than their parents. It's a system that has continued under the direction of her only daughter, who became the team's first official mascot at age 6.

Fifty years later, recently retired from a Seattle Public Schools career as administrator and teacher, Cheryl Chow has served two City Council terms and spent the past two months doorbelling in her current bid for a state representative's seat. On her drill squads, she says, "There are no superstars. Everybody is part of the team. Then, when you go out into the world, you don't see other women as competition.

"In our society, girls are taught to compete for boys' and daddies' attention, to cheer for the boys. Here, we're cheering for each other. It's not so much the marching — it's all these other things, even if we don't win every trophy." She adds, with a sly smile: "Although we usually do."

Evidence of success

There's evidence: In the team's stockroom are more trophies than anyone knows what to do with — gold and silver flurries of wings and statuettes on tables, spilling along sills, bursting from the floor. Meanwhile, cocooned in garment bags are the flashy uniforms, red for Chinese good luck and familiar to anyone who's seen a Seafair parade.

The team is on its fifth set of uniforms, and at eight pounds apiece, they're no picnic for a girl in the summer sun. Drills call for precision-timed snaps of the head, and the headdresses grip tighter than a kindergartner dropped off on the first day of school. "I remember getting headaches from that," remembers Lori Pang, who braved the fit for nearly the entire 1970s.

With membership rich with rite-of-passage status and third-generation girls now on the squad, the costume was bound to fall prey to whim and irreverence. Lau, now a Garfield High instructor, once sneaked hers out for Ethnic Day as a student at Meany Middle School. Meanwhile, attorney Gloria Lung Wakayama, whose three sisters also were former members, remembers the girls — and two brothers — marching in uniform at a family wedding reception as a gag.

In formation, though, it's all business, 50 to 75 faces etched in seriousness. Says Pang: "We'd always joke: 'Don't ever smile, it's not allowed. Only at the Chinatown parade.' "

"We try not to march behind horses," says Gonn, a Nordstrom executive assistant and mother of the current captain. "Our uniforms scare them. All those drums and sparkling sequins."

Fortunately, team drills are designed for uncertainty, shifting on officers' commands to avoid sudden obstacles, equine or otherwise. Novice girls, then, start as banner-bearers while learning the rhythms and left-right routines, working their way up to pivot-girl and officer positions.

Five decades and 900 girls later, the drill team has altered the course of things within families and beyond. Lau's father, inspired to civic involvement, became president of the Chinese Community Service Organization. More women followed Ruby Chow's lead to attain positions on the Chong Wa Benevolent Association board.

The team's role as a social release shed the urge among some girls to dramatically rebel once free of overly strict, traditional households. And for Lau, so shy she'd pay two fares rather than ask a bus driver for a transfer, the experience broadened her world.

"When I look back, it literally was a lifesaver," she says. "I stopped because I started college. I didn't want to, but my dad said, 'You're just too old now.' "

You could say that the team's real trophies aren't packed away in a storeroom. Instead, they're scattered throughout the community, populating schools, universities and government and professional offices. "A lot of them come in so shy," Cheryl Chow says. "What's neat is to see them blossom and their confidence grow."

Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com.