Editor’s note: Dr. Kenyon Chan is Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Washington, Bothell campus where he served from 2007 to 2013. He was Interim President, Vice President, and Dean at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has also served as Dean at Loyola Marymount University and the inaugural chair of the Asian American studies department at Cal State Northridge in 1990. This is from an interview on 21 August 2023 with GSJ via Zoom. It is supplemented by Karen Ishizuka’s interview of Dr. Chan on 9 November 2018, available on the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Collective Memories Project.
Family Roots
Our family did look into our immigration records. My Cantonese paternal grandparents had actually emigrated to Burma from Chazhou 槎洲村 village in Taishan台山. Grandfather, Chan Shing Fat aka Harry Chan, arrived in San Francisco in 1916 at age 28. Our grandmother, Chui Shee Chan aka Lily Chang, arrived in 1920 at the age of 32. My father was born and raised in Oakland. Their family kept bringing relatives over, some as paper sons. In fact, records show my grandmother had a son who was older than she was. In truth, this was her older brother. My grandfather, like his father, was trained as an herbalist, but I think what he did in Oakland was more sketchy. In fact, I remember being three or four years old taking walks with my grandfather in Oakland Chinatown. He kept stuffing tissue papers in my pockets. Years later, I realized he was a numbers runner. He figured that if the police came, they wouldn’t think to search a little boy for lottery tickets. He was lucky as I had bad hay fever and could have used the tissue paper to wipe my nose (laughs).
My maternal grandmother, Nellie Lucille Joe aka Joe Yet Moy, was born in Marysville.[1] We don’t know why her family was in Marysville. She married Lok Sing Hoy, my maternal grandfather. The American family used Hoy – instead of Lok – as a surname because of an error by Immigration Services. Grandmother had nine children after 1921 and then died. The family grew up in San Francisco. Like others, they returned to China during the Depression but came back before World War II. My mother was a teenager when she came back to the U.S.
I was born in Oakland to Gene and Martha Chan. At that time, my father was working in the orchards here and there. There were about thirteen of us living in a two-bedroom duplex. I have an older sister and a younger brother.
Chinese in El Sobrante, Contra Costa County
When I was about two or three, Dad leased a little store in El Sobrante, a little town north of Berkeley and Richmond. Then he bought a really small country store; we lived on the second story. A country store was very important in those days as many people didn’t have cars. Women would walk over or even come on horseback. We were the only store in a lot of distance. We had a terrific penny candy counter; we had milk, canned goods, some alcohol… My dad would go to a Richmond wholesale market, United Grocers, to get supplies. I remember getting up early to go with him in this old pick-up truck before school. We might get half a box of various canned goods and boxes of candy and cigarettes for the store. Milk and bread were delivered. My sister, brother, and I all worked at the store from a young age. I remember being very young and selling beer to customers. My parents ran that store for about forty years.
The community was all-White working class. Sometimes, my dad might sell one cigarette at a time. My mom might make a sandwich for a kid who was hungry. My parents took credit from the customers waiting for their next paycheck. The little town was a Standard Oil bedroom community.
Long before the freeways, we would drive to Oakland or San Francisco Chinatown once in a while to visit relatives, eat, and pick up groceries. In El Sobrante, we were the only Chinese family. We spoke English at home, and we were too far from any Chinese schools. In elementary school, I thought it was all-White except for us. But looking back now, I realize there may have been a Chicano family or two. De Anza High School was 7th to 12th grades. There were three or four Chinese families and two African American families. But years and years later, one of my neighbors said to me, “Wasn’t it hard growing up Asian in El Sobrante?” I didn’t realize until then that he was Filipino! If you see my yearbook, there weren’t too many dark-skinned people.
I was active. I was 7th grade class president, junior high student body president, 10th grade class president, high school student body vice president, and then high school student body president in my senior year. I think I was in student government as it protected me against a lot of racism; that was a powerful incentive. It also motivated me to do well in school. My high school counselor said to me, “I don’t know why you want to go to college. You can just work at your dad’s store?” Actually, I absolutely wanted to go to college, so I didn’t have to work at my dad’s store. I had been working there since I was three years old. I saw so much mistreatment of my parents at that store. Customers would be smiling at one end but… My parents lived in El Sobrante for forty years and were very very rarely invited to anyone’s home. My mother was very active in the PTA and all, but we were still not welcomed. At one point, the community was raising money for a swimming pool. My parents were very active in that campaign especially as I was on the swim team. Eventually, a private swimming complex was built, but we were never invited to become members in this private swim club. There was a lot of subtle racism. My father would give customers credit. And when they were about to move, they would just run up their bill and then disappear.
My parents encouraged us to see a wider world. They wanted us to get out of town. They wanted us to have a better life and not have to work as hard as they had to. Their store was open twelve hours a day, seven days a week – including Christmas and New Year. Actually, Christmas and New Year were good business days for us at the grocery store. Many times, people would just knock on our door even when we were closed so they could get whatever they needed. My parents hoped that we could get out. They said – like other parents, “People can take a lot of things away from you, but they can’t take your education away from you.” Friends of my parents’ generation may have had some college, but they couldn’t get commensurate jobs.
My older sister, Darlene Chan, went to Berkeley in 1963 and became one of the biggest jazz promoters from there. I don’t know how Darlene got into jazz. Even when she was a little kid, my mother would catch her listening to the jazz radio station under the blankets at night. As a student in 1967, she became founder and inaugural director of the Berkeley Jazz Festival which featured Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Gerald Wilson. Then she worked for the Monterey Jazz Festival. She was discovered by George Wein who took her under his wings; they worked together for fifty years. She produced Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, everybody. She’s probably doing something at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. When we were kids, she played the piano, I played the trumpet, and my brother played the saxophone – but we were all fairly terrible. My younger brother, Darrow, went to Stanford and then got his Ph.D. in Child Clinical Psychology. He has been a practicing psychologist specializing in children with Asperger’s syndrome and their families.
1966 – College at UCLA
I applied to Berkeley as my sister had. And my parents were fine with that. But after being accepted to Berkeley, I decided at the end of my senior year that I didn’t want to go there. My sister was already there, plus it would mean that I would have to come home regularly and work at the grocery store. I had heard there was this very tall guy, Lew Alcindor, playing freshman basketball for UCLA.[2] I decided I would go to UCLA too so I could be with Alcindor and also watch great football. My best friend from high school was going to Southern California, and he would drop me off.
I went to the Registrar’s to report for the two-day orientation. The clerk said, “But we started school three weeks ago.” I was shocked. She looks at my admissions letter and said, “Young man, you were admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles. This is the University of Southern California.” I had no idea these were two different schools!
I finally got to the right campus – and boy, was it different. I got to live in the dorms for the orientation, and everything looked great. I line up to get my room assignment for the quarter forthcoming. This lady said, “You don’t have a room; you are on the waiting list. You can probably get a room next quarter.” So, what am I supposed to do? I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles. All my stuff was in a cardboard box. She suggested I join fraternity rush on Gayley Avenue to get a bed.
I knew this would not be easy. In the 1960s, barber shops in Westwood still wouldn’t cut the hair of African Americans. Westwood was well known for their racist views. I’m walking up and down fraternity row, and I bump into this African American who was also looking for a room in the fraternities. I knew that if a fraternity would rush him, they’d let me in too. Of the 22 or 23 fraternities on Gayley Avenue, we found the only one that would accept people of color: Theta Xi. We stayed there for six weeks until their initiation fees were due. That would be $500 and there was no way in the world me and my parents could afford that. By then, we each found apartments and roommates. It was quite an adventure.
This was 1966. My freshman year was terrible. I was homesick, I was bored, I was terrible in science, but I thought I wanted to be a pre-med major. I was overwhelmed with the competition; everyone was the best of their high school class. I loved psychology and sociology partly because it was the only curriculum that even mentioned non-Whites. “Orientals” were never discussed; there was some discussion of African Americans as criminals or deviants. Curriculum at the university was very traditional, but this was during the anti-war movement and civil rights movements.
I wasn’t motivated until I fell in with classmates that were doing community service and political stuff. I started working with the UCLA Tutorial Project at Venice. We served about fifty African American and Latinx kids. We spent a lot of personal time with the kids. We took them on field trips, summer trips… We went all over California including camping in Yosemite and Big Sur. We even went to San Francisco Chinatown, and the kids had their first Chinese meal. At the time, the project was led by a group of young African Americans – who are still my good friends. I spent a lot of time with them, and then at Black churches and Black Panthers meetings. I was probably the only Asian. I found the project very rewarding. I am sure that the tutors got more out of this connection than the kids.
I got involved in the administrative end of the tutorial project and started a second tutorial site. In high school, I had volunteered to work with developmentally delayed children. The Exceptional Children Tutorial Project would bring UCLA students to tutor at McBride Elementary School for “handicapped kids” on Centinela Avenue. I spent a lot of time in Kerckhoff Hall, UCLA’s student center.
By 1969, May Chen, Pat Li and others started the Asian American Tutorial Project at Castelar Elementary in Chinatown. But I wasn’t identifying that much with Asian Americans as much as I was identifying with African Americans and the poverty-stricken. I couldn’t identify with the students of the UCLA Nisei Bruin Club or the Asian sororities. Maybe because I didn’t grow up amongst Chinese, and I couldn’t speak Chinese, I couldn’t see myself as effective in Los Angeles Chinatown. I certainly didn’t know much about Asian American history or experience.
In 1968, I left UCLA to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. UCLA sent a contingency of five students to work for Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Associated Students gave us a few dollars for travel, but we really didn’t stick together: the African American guy went his own way, and the other three were White students. Some professors would sponsor courses for us. We couldn’t be non-students as that would subject us to the military draft. We went to Stanford for some training. And two days before we were to leave, King was assassinated on 4 April 1968. It broke my heart. I was days away from working with King.
We went anyway to Washington, D. C., and it was a hell of an experience. The other Asians I knew of at that Poor People’s Campaign were Emma Gee, Alex Hing of San Francisco, and Charlie Cheng of the Washington Teachers’ Union. We didn’t know each other until we were at the Campaign. The idea of Asian American identity was still not prevalent. My assignment was to work with Charlie Cheng to establish the Resurrection City’s school. “Resurrection City” was this encampment of thousands of poor people and anti-poverty activists on the National Mall for weeks in 1968. Charlie was a union organizer with roots in Detroit. I was about 20 years old, and he was about 30. During that summer, he had a baby, and he had a house. I would go over there to take a shower and wash my clothes (laughs). Our school didn’t work very well because every time there was a demonstration, we would all go to the demonstration and forget about the school. But I learned a lot from Charlie. Afterwards, Charlie went to Harvard and then got a professorship at the UCLA Department of Education, when I was also there. He died a few years later in 1979 in an American Airlines crash. I was very close to him and his family.
Source: Wikimedia.
Emma (Gee) was like the big sister of our movement. She always kicked our asses and made us keep moving, keep thinking. When I decided to continue my education and get my doctorate, I felt guilty because many of my peers were spending all their time organizing the movement and working in the community. Emma said to me, “You can be part of the movement wherever you are. You can do the work even in universities.” Her support helped me a lot.
Resurrection City was smelly and terrible. We lived in plywood tents. 1968 had a very wet summer, and we were walking around in the mud. We protested every day somewhere in the city. I thought we were going to stay in Washington, D.C. until hunger ended. I really believed it. I lived in Resurrection City from 14 May to 14 June.
On 14 June 1968, the National Guard surrounded our camp and arrested hundreds, including Baptist minister and civil rights activist, Ralph Abernathy. We were all sent to jail. I was hot and miserable in this jail with fifty other protestors. I was scared to death. Many of the protestors were younger than me, and I was only nineteen. Many of them had been in jail many times from other protests. They had been exposed to police dog attacks and water hosing. We went in front of the judge. The leadership told us to plead “no contest” and get the maximum time to fill the jails of D.C. It was a sea of African American faces and me. The judge obviously picked me out. I told him I was a student from Los Angeles. He said sternly, “I’m going to ruin your life. You will never be able to become an attorney or get any license. Unless you leave town today.” What should I do? Everyone else is pleading “no contest,” but I got out. I left town. The guilt never left me. I had to figure out another way to re-commit to social justice and equity. In January of the next year, I read an article in the L.A. Times that the others arrested at the Poor People’s Campaign were finally released. I had already done another quarter at UCLA.
That judge completely changed me. It was a tremendous trauma for me to have faced so much conflict. It showed me the limits of what I was willing to sacrifice. While these sixteen-year-olds were willing to throw themselves in jail, I could not. It was such a test. I felt like I failed that test. I had to decide what my life would be about. I hope that every decision I made from then on was focused on social justice whether I was a dean, a vice president, or a president. I wanted to change institutions from the inside with some control over hiring, tenure, and funding.
That summer, I called my father from D. C. In those days, long distance calls were quite expensive. My father said, “Hey, I think we saw you on TV. You were getting arrested?” I told them I was alright. They were actually quite supportive. They were proud that I was part of this national movement. My parents, my sister, and my brother were/are quite liberal, but not as political. My parents were in a small town, and they were quite careful not to share their politics for fear of alienating their customers.
Clearly the Asian American Movement mirrored the African American and Chicano Movements. We used their verbiage, their clothing, their ideas. Our oppression as Asians was one of silence thanks to the internment camps and policies not allowing us to be citizens. But it started to break down in 1968 and 1969. At UCLA, we were starting to discuss ideas about being “Asian American”. We hung out at Campbell Hall, wrote articles in Gidra, and took and taught classes in the “experimental college”. The Japanese Americans who grew up in the Crenshaw area already knew each other and were leaders in many ways. We were so diverse, but we all had felt powerless. It was an exciting and dynamic period. But it was also very sad with the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy plus the Vietnam War. Perhaps the sadness also held us together.
We did have a lot of discussions and fights in Campbell Hall. We spent a lot of time together. I think that in 1969, UCLA was under pressure to start the African American Studies and Chicano Studies Centers, and the Asian American Studies Center was just thrown in. Yet, it has been one of the most successful units. We spent a lot of time in the early days just trying to figure out who were “Asian Americans” and the goals and structure of a studies center.
A few years ago, I was talking to the folks at Visual Communications. They can’t find a single image of me from the 1970s – and I used to hang out at VC quite a bit. I purposefully stayed shy of the camera. I was a little paranoid of FBI surveillance. Our office, Asian American Studies Central, was right next door to VC and Gidra on Crenshaw and Jefferson Boulevards. VC was established in 1970. Ron Hirano and I would eat with VC’s Bob Nakamura and Eddie Wong. All the Asian American studies programs chipped in a few dollars for the Asian American Studies Central: USC, UCLA, Cal State Long Beach and maybe Occidental with Franklin Odo. The money was to pay the rent and maybe a little salary. Our job was to propagate Asian American studies in other colleges. We would share resources, syllabi, and curriculum. Alan Nishio was at grad school at USC, and Lloyd Inui was at Cal State Long Beach. We also worked on the Asian American curriculum project sponsored by the JACL. This would be to get the history material into elementary programs in L.A. City schools. Bob Suzuki was the chair of that.
Asian American Studies Central lost direct funding after a year or two. But it is still the legal entity behind Visual Communications after fifty years. Ron Hirano went to the UCLA Asian American Studies Center as the Assistant Director. I graduated in 1970 with a degree in sociology and went straight into graduate school in the education department.
The Asian American activist community got into Marxist-Leninist analysis. But I was more removed from that. Truthfully, I wasn’t that ideological; I probably didn’t understand it well enough (laughs). The jail experience probably caused me to know my boundaries. That period did force a little separation amongst activists.
An Education Professional
I got a master’s in special education in 1972 and my doctorate in education psychology by 1974. I was Assistant Professor at UCLA School of Education from 1973 to 1981. There weren’t too many students of color in graduate schools; I can’t remember any around me. I think there were a few Asians at the UCLA Law School. In the School of Education, I had two great mentors. The civil rights movement and the anti-war movement had caused a lot of faculty to be supportive of paradigm shifts in education. I felt a lot of support for my research on the effects of poverty on learning. When I became a professor, people were supportive of my project with Ruby Takanishi comparing the learning patterns of Samoan, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, and Hawaiian elementary school kids. This was then innovative work on cultural and ethnic barriers. We were comparing how middle-class White kids come to school prepared for the “hidden curriculum”. Poor kids are disadvantaged by kindergarten as they don’t know how to sit still, stand in line, talk, etc. I went on to do some work with the National Center for Bilingual Research.
In 1990, CSUN Vice President Bob Suzuki asked me to chair the nascent Asian American studies department at Cal State Northridge. That was exciting work. It started out with one faculty: me. And we grew up to about half a dozen by the time I left. Now they are quite big.
I don’t really know if my parents appreciated what I was doing. They would still say, “Well, you get the summers off. Why don’t you come back and work at the store?” (laughs). I guess they thought I was a teacher. They knew I had a doctorate – but I wasn’t a medical doctor, right (laughs)? My mother is 102 now. She may brag a bit about her kids now. When my parents retired, they moved to the San Leandro area. After my father died, my mother lived with me in Los Angeles, and then came to Washington state with us. She now lives in a very supportive group family home in Washington, near my brother.
In my positions as administrator, I try to put people and resources together to get things done. I think I’m better in administrative positions than teaching and research, which I also loved. Each of us has our strengths. I tried to do my jobs for the right reasons. Some of my colleagues – including administrators of color – are more focused on ego or power; I’m sure you’ve met educational administrators like that. I hope I was more focused on serving the movement to make universities and colleges better places. I did get a lot out of my career. Just like my time with the UCLA tutorial projects, I admit I enjoyed the positions. But the goal is to change institutions to be more responsive to the needs of the community. Even fifty years later, there are administrators who want to cut women’s studies or Asian American studies because they are “redundant” academic programs. There are still a lot of continuing struggles. Some administrators have a more corporate style and are always looking for their next job. I never cared if I got fired. Heck, I started at a grocery store! I guess I could always go back (laughs). In fact, my volunteer work at the food bank these days reminds me of the skills I learned at my parents’ grocery store.
[1] Marysville is in California’s Gold Country. There was a significant Chinese American population dating back to 1850. Marysville Chinatown still has an active temple, three associations, and an old Chinese school.
[2] In 1971, Lew Alcindor changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.