[4] Her mother, Ah Yane, also emigrated from China to California in the 1870s where she spent time in a mission home before working in agriculture and sometimes as a court interpreter.

[6] She was noted in the Herald again in 1906 for her poem "Missionary Giving," delivered at the eighteenth anniversary of the Los Angeles Congregational Chinese mission.

[7] Chung would write and deliver a paper entitled "Comparisons of Chinese and American Costumes" at the first anniversary of the Pasadena Congregational mission in 1907.

[11] Women of every nation, every country, should learn medicine, so that they can teach the women of their countries and their races how to care for themselves and their children—how to improve the coming generation.Chung won a Los Angeles Times scholarship to study at USC by selling newspaper subscriptions to raise funds for her education and worked her way through college as a waitress, a seller of surgical instruments, and by winning cash prizes in several speech contests.

[4] She also treated seven Navy reserve pilots during this time; part of her care was making them meals, and they reportedly soon began calling themselves "Mom Chung's Fair-Haired Bastard Sons" as a tribute to her.

[2] An alternative origin story for the "Mom Chung" nickname is that after eight pilots came to her in 1932, volunteering their services for China against Japan, she turned them down and fed them instead because "they looked starved".

[23] Her houseguests included high ranking officers and US senators and congressmen; leaning on these connections, she helped establish the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service although she was not permitted to join them, as the government suspected that she was gay.

[24] She also started a social network for pilots and other military personnel, politicians, and celebrities in California where she used her connections to recruit for war efforts and lobby for the creation of a women's naval reserve.

[26] She retired from medical practice within ten years after the end of World War II, and her "adopted sons" purchased a house for her in Marin County.

An advocate of strong Sino-American relations, Chung was a neighbor, friend, and confidante of travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900–1939),[29] who died in an attempt to sail the junk Sea Dragon, as a symbol of the bond of East and West, from Hong Kong to the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

[31] Chung was commemorated with a plaque in the Legacy Walk project on October 11, 2012,[32] an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people.