Editor’s note: Eddie Wong (黄定中 Wong An Chung) was a UCLA student activist from 1968. He went on to co-found Visual Communications in 1970. After a stint of community organizing and editing East Wind magazine, Wong worked for Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns and the Rainbow Coalition. He later became the executive director of the Center for Asian American Media and then, the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation. He is now editor of East Wind Ezine: Politics and Culture of Asian America. For a video interview of Wong, see UCLA Asian American Studies Center Collective Memories Project: https://www.aasc.ucla.edu/aasc50/cm_eddiewong.aspx. This is excerpted from a GSJ Zoom interview of 29 May 2023.
Family Roots
What I know about our family history is hearsay. I think my mother’s grandfather, Yee, settled in the Sacramento area picking fruit in the late 1800s. He returned to Toisan (Taishan 台山). Grandfather Wong came to San Francisco and was a laundryman – and a gambler. He was successful as a gambler and returned to China and started a boys’ school.
My father was born in 1909. His name was Wong Moon Tung, and he came to the U.S. twice. He came under a false name at the age of 15. Someone informed on him which led to his arrest in San Francisco. He was imprisoned for a month on Angel Island before he was deported. Maybe an immigration official didn’t get paid off, or people were talking too much in Chinatown. After a few years, he bought the papers of another Wong. The papers were for a seventeen-year-old girl, and my father was already nineteen. He came with a false brother who was really his classmate from the village. They were able to pass the interrogation as they were asked how many chairs were in the classroom… As my father looked – and was – older, they took x-rays of his hands to check his bone development. My dad was on Angel Island for three weeks of interrogation. Finally, the case was submitted to a judge who determined that the bone scan science was not definitive. He landed in San Francisco on 20 December 1929 as the son of a U.S. citizen.
Dad’s paper father had a laundry on Larkin Street. Dad mentioned he had an uncle who worked as a cook at a Berkeley fraternity house. Based on his previous deportation experience, Dad felt that “people talk too much in San Francisco.” So, Dad went to Chicago where his brother was a partner at a noodle factory, and Dad worked there as a deliveryman. He told me how exciting America was for him. He joined a Presbyterian Church to learn English and went to church picnics. He got close to his English teacher, Mrs. Burns. In the mid-1950s, she even came to visit us in Los Angeles. He would see vaudeville and movies in Chicago. In fact, I’m named after Edward G. Robinson, his favorite actor. Frank Sinatra was his favorite singer. Dad was fairly well immersed into American life.
When World War II started, Dad got a job as a welder, first in Chicago and then in Indiana. Then he worked as a short order cook for a cousin in San Antonio. In 1947, he returned to China because he wanted a family. A lot of GIs and other Chinese American men went back to China at that time.
He met my mom through a broker, courted her for three weeks, and got married. When she married, Mom was considered an old maid at 26 years old. She had gone to teacher’s college and taught kindergarten. She was so dedicated that she taught in caves during the Japanese bombing of World War II. At times, she was paid in rice and vegetables as the farmers did not have any money. Mom really loved teaching. She had a more privileged background and grew up in a household with cooks and servants. And it was my dad who taught her how to cook when she came to America.
A funny story is that Mom asked Dad, “Why do you want to marry me? I’m an old maid.” He answered, “Because I don’t have to buy you candy.” That was his way of saying, “You are an adult, and I don’t have to buy you treats all the time.” Dad was frugal and penny pinching; he wasn’t going to spend money on frivolous things (laughs).
My older sister, Suzi, was born in China. But the communist revolution was coming, and in 1949, Dad decided it was better to return to California. He had some village friends in Los Angeles. He decided to start a laundry because he said a cook’s life is not for a family man. Cooks don’t get off before midnight. Mom thought she would go back to China after a few years. But Dad did not like the communists. He had supported the Kuomintang Party and made donations to General Chiang Kai-shek.
The Frank Wong Laundry on Melrose
Dad opened a laundry at 6105 Melrose in the Hollywood area as there were no other Chinese laundries in the area. Dad had to learn the business. He rented a fairly large storefront. He got the equipment and had his friend build the counter and the partitions. We would live in the back. We were a finishing laundry, so we didn’t really have the washers and the dryers. That work was sent out to a wholesale laundry. But our family did the ironing and pressing: sheets, shirts, pants, everything. Mom learned to sew and do alterations. When we were young, we would sort dirty clothes. We would have to go through the pockets and sometimes we found money or condoms! After we got older, we handled the counter. The back of the laundry had a kitchen section and a sleeping section. Six of us slept in one room. There was a toilet, but no bathtub. We would boil water and used a galvanized wash tub for sponge baths.
I was born in 1950 at L.A. Chinatown’s French Hospital, and my younger siblings were born in 1952 and 1954. We shared two bicycles and rode all around the neighborhood. This was between Highland and Vine Streets. One side of the neighborhood had nice older homes and a golf course, while the other side were apartments, small factories, and retail. There was a movie production office behind our building, so we saw actor Dale Robertson once in a while. The set for Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges was near. Some of the folks who brought us laundry were grips or electricians for the studios. Paramount Studios was within walking distance, and we got to go on the set of Bonanza once and met Little Joe and Hoss. Most importantly, the John C. Fremont Library was at the end of our block. That was our second home. After school or after chores, we went to the library. I read the L.A. Times and the Hollywood Reporter there every day. We knew all the librarians, and eventually, we all worked at the library.
Growing up in the 1950s-60s, we had a black and white TV, but our parents restricted our watching. We pooled our record collections and listened to all kinds of music. Dad took us to the opening day of Dodger Stadium in 1962. He took us to Disneyland once; the tickets were expensive. We might go to Echo Park or MacArthur Park on Sundays when the laundry was closed. He would do things like that with us because he thought it was part of being a good parent. But we could never go on vacation as we had to take care of the laundry.
We went to Chinatown almost every weekend. We watched Cantonese opera movies at Kim Sing Theater on Figueroa Street. When my father’s father died in China, my parents cleaned up the whole laundry, got a whole pig, and we dressed up, burned incense and bowed. We would spend holidays with a couple of other Chinese families. While the adults played mahjong, listened to Cantonese music, and gabbed, us kids would run wild. Dad was secretary of the Chinese Laundrymen’s Association and secretary of the Wong Family Association. He was a great calligrapher, so he wrote all these donation slips that were posted on the walls. Every Sunday, he practiced calligraphy and watercolor painting. He would also be asked to speak at a lot of weddings because he knew classical prose. People would tell us, “Your father was the smartest student at our school.” Dad had wanted to go to college and get an engineering degree, but he didn’t have the funds. He’d tell us about inventing flying machines and the like, and we kids would just laugh in his face.
At home, we always had Chinese food. I never ate Mexican or Japanese food until I went to college. We seldom went out to eat, not even McDonalds. I remember we kids had a mini rebellion as we wanted to try spaghetti. We bought a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli. It was really good (laughs). At the back of the laundry, we didn’t have an oven. In those days, girls had to take home economics at school and that’s when we really expanded. We made tuna casserole and pies and baked goods. Wow!
It was in 1957 that my parents saved enough to move us into a house. The laundry never made that much money, but they saved for that down payment despite sending money back to Hong Kong to support Mom’s father. There were still racial covenants in Hollywood. The first time I understood racism was when my mom came home crying from a house visit. She said, “They slammed the door in our faces.” We finally found this place in east Hollywood near Los Angeles City College. There was a White doctor who was retiring, and he liked us. He intentionally broke the covenant.
Growing Up in Fairfax
I had been bullied a lot in elementary school because I was Asian and a skinny little kid. I was terrified! I would be shoved to the ground. My sister got a black eye from being pushed into the water fountain. One time, my sister was walking home and kids on a bicycle threw eggs at her for being Chinese. When she got home covered in egg, my dad said, “Clean up. Get some eggs from the fridge, and we are going to find those f——.” They drove around in the car looking for those kids. I’m glad they didn’t find them as my father would have beaten them.
At some point, I became friends with Eddie M. – the best fighter in elementary school. He became my protector. I just found him on Facebook a couple of years ago. He is now a retired firefighter in Las Vegas. He had been raised by a single mother who always said to watch out for those who were being bullied.
We continued with Bancroft Junior High and Fairfax High, as they were near the laundry. I was Lower Division Chair and student body president in junior high. I wanted to have friends. But student government was all lame (laughs). People were starting to protest hair length and skirt length codes. We would complain about the abysmal food in the cafeteria.
We had a bifurcated life. In high school, there were probably only three Chinese families. One owned a restaurant, and the other owned another laundry. Most of the students were of Jewish descent, children of refugees from World War II – including my friend, Michael. I remember at one back-to-school night, Michael’s father had numbers on his forearm. We didn’t know any African Americans nor Latinos then.[1]
The students at Fairfax were politically astute and quite liberal. We were doing a lot of readings about American imperialism. We read William Appleman Williams, Gabriel Kolko, Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake. At UCLA, we had teach-ins with Daniel Ellsberg. The L.A. Free Press was around. I was a member of our high school’s SDS chapter.[2] In 1967, my first demonstration was to support the UFW grape boycott. I worked on the Eugene McCarthy anti-war campaign. In a graduation speech, I got booed for speaking against the war. I was president of the Boys Honor Society. I was really looking forward to being a lawyer – until I got arrested (laughs).
My parents wanted all of us to go to college and get professional jobs. My dad wanted me to go to L.A. City College and study math to become an accountant. I had to remind him that I almost got a “D” in Algebra. I was always an English and History kind of person. I loved to write. My older sister was a great student. The counselors encouraged her to apply to Smith and the Seven Sisters. She went to UCLA as an English major, and we all followed. I graduated with a film degree. My younger sister studied art, and my younger brother was the math person. We all got scholarships and were responsible for our own tuition. We all had work gigs as teenagers. I sold shoes at Orbach’s department store on Wilshire Blvd.
Asian American Movement
I went to UCLA in the Fall of 1968. My older sister, Suzi, was there the year before and had gone to the Are You Yellow Conference.[3] It was phenomenal to meet other liberal Asian Americans. I really hadn’t known any Japanese Americans before UCLA. Immediately, I was on the committee to organize Asian American studies. I started writing for the newspaper, Gidra, in 1969.[4] It was all happening at once.
We were not “Orientals” anymore. We weren’t Chinese hanging out with Chinese. We were “Asian Americans” building alliances. At that time, it just made sense to band together and to fight for our rights. We allied with the Black Student Union and United Mexican American Students (UMAS). Later, there were the ex-Panthers in the Black Liberation Army. We were really conscious of the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Every night on TV, we saw “gooks” that looked like us being slaughtered. Like others, I knew if I stayed in college, I could avoid the military draft. I went through four majors.
My parents were really worried for us. We were still living at home. They noticed my hair got longer; I was wearing army field jackets… Their main concern was “don’t get in trouble.” But we did.
It was such an exciting time for an 18-year-old. I remember an all-night meeting at a restaurant with Professors Philip Huang and Yuji Ichioka to plan Asian American studies; I was being exposed to so many new ideas.[5] UCLA compromised by setting up “studies centers” instead of departments, but we started classes in Asian American studies. Soon, there was a lot of community outreach from tutoring to working with drug addicts. There were concerns about health, housing, childcare, and other issues.
In the fall of 1969, I got involved with the Asian Radical Movement (ARM). One of the members was also with SDS. There was a Black worker in food services at UCLA who got fired. We had sit-ins to demand that he be rehired. We barred the doors of the UCLA Food Service Manager and technically, that was kidnapping. LAPD came and charged 19 of us with kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap. One ARM member went to jail for six months, and I pleaded guilty to false imprisonment, paid a fine, was given a suspended sentence of six months, and put on probation for three years. I was almost expelled. That experience soured my dream of becoming part of the court system.
It was also a lesson in how not to organize. Getting arrested essentially ended ARM.
I graduated with a B.A. in Ethno-communications in 1972. Alan Nishio is actually the one who recruited me into the Ethno-communications program which was started in 1969 by an African American professor, Elyseo Taylor.[6] They just started this affirmative action project to make the UCLA film school less White. We were a class of 50 non-White students. The program ended in the mid 1970s. Bob Nakamura, Duane Kubo, Alan Ohashi and I started Visual Communications (VC) in 1970.[7] I hardly went to classes, and I was using my enrollment to borrow equipment. I submitted my VC films as my projects for my production classes. These included Wong Singsaang (1971, about Chinese laundry workers), Pieces of a Dream (1974, about workers in the Sacramento River Delta), and Chinatown Two-Step (1975, about L.A. Chinese Drum and Bugle Corps).[8] I entered the MFA program, but I didn’t finish until 15 years later in 1990 with Sound of Pleasure (1990, on three Chinese American musicians). Duane and I also did Something’s Rotten in Little Tokyo (1977) about redevelopment. At VC in those days, we would take turns going on unemployment.
I was in a Marxist study group in the mid-1970s, and we all decided that working in the factory would be the way to get proletarian experiences. For about four months, I worked at the Gillette Paper Mate Factory in Santa Monica. But I got into a bicycle accident and had to quit. I did learn a lot. It was a non-union plant, and the work was tough. I would carry 50-pound bags of resin to feed in the presses to mold pen barrels. On the first day of work, this older guy told me that if there was ever an explosion, to hit the floor and start crawling for the door because the toxic fumes would kill you if you were standing up. I learned that capitalism feeds on your dreams of material success. So many workers were hooked on the layaway plan. You can get jewelry, a big couch, and even a boat on the layaway plan. Workers will never “rock the boat” as they need those jobs to reach their material dreams. People love their families and want to give them creature comforts.
I Wor Kuen (IWK 義和拳) and Marxist-Leninism[9]
I was in a bunch of study groups. I studied Lenin’s What Is to Be Done (1902) twice! I joined I Wor Kuen, and they transferred my wife and I to Oakland. The I-Hotel had just fallen, and our Getting Together 团結報 newspaper didn’t have a home anymore.[10] IWK was merging with the Japanese American East Wind, the Chicano August Twenty-ninth Movement, a Puerto Rican collective, and a New York collective to become the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS). We were becoming the largest Third World Marxist organization. There were a lot of fantastic people in the organization, and it was exciting to be part of the LRS in 1978. In 1980, Amiri Baraka’s Revolutionary Communist League joined the LRS. My focus was publications; I wrote and edited for Unity Newspaper and edited East Wind, A United Front Asian American Magazine.[11] I was the head of the Asian commission for the League for a brief period. It was a very busy, exciting and intense period as we learned to work with one another. Sure, mistakes were made; we should have spent a lot less time struggling against other Marxist-Leninist groups and people.
It was also a turbulent period for me because my wife grew disenchanted with the LRS, left the organization, and we eventually divorced.
Other Projects
In 1984, I started volunteering for the Jesse Jackson for President campaign and was hired as one of the Northern California managers. After the campaign, I worked in several local campaigns and also did support work with the 1985-87 Watsonville Cannery Strike. I made a documentary video on the strike. By 1987, I was on leave from the League as they didn’t want red baiting to cloud the Rainbow Coalition as Jackson ran again for president in 1988. I was appointed the National Field Director for the Jackson campaign in late 1987.
I was remarried by then, and we had a baby in October 1988. But in late 1988, Jesse Jackson asked me to become his traveling aide, and I ended up spending all of 1989 on the road with him. By early 1990, my father had cancer. I left working for Jackson to concentrate on my family. I was with my parents for long periods of time helping out. I remember my dad had all four of us present and said, “I’m really proud of you. You are all working and have good families, and I’m really proud of you.” Most of us were in the arts or education; none of us were accountants… My mother insisted on living alone in Los Angeles after Dad passed in 1990. My wife and I would have another child in 1992.
From 1992 to 1996, I went back as the Western Regional Director for Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition. We worked against the Prop 209 campaign.[12] Then I became the Executive Director of National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA, now Center for Asian American Media or CAAM). I produced a PBS series “Searching for Asian American” and helped produce the SF Asian American Film Festival. After leaving CAAM in 2006, I worked for Democracy Alliance as a media and social justice advisor to wealthy donors. In 2008, I became the executive director for the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation until I retired in 2012. I established the Immigrant Voices website, and I’m proud of the things we did there.
I still have a lot of projects in me. I curated “A Day in the Life of Asian Pacific American 2014” with the Smithsonian. I worked on the “Broken Blossoms: A Struggle from Servitude to Freedom” story and short play. We did a Visual Communications 50th Anniversary program, the 2019 “At First Light: The Dawning of Asian Pacific America in Los Angeles” at the Japanese American National Museum. After Trump won the presidency, I felt so frustrated. At my age, I can’t walk precincts and do rallies anymore; I’ve done at least a hundred demonstrations. I rebuilt East Wind, a magazine I founded and edited in the 1980s, now as an e-zine. I started with a piece on Jon Jang and Yuri Kochiyama. I want to take a break to work on a book project. Stay tuned. I still love to write.
[1] Fairfax High was founded in 1924. In the 1950s-1960s, it is estimated that about 90% of the students were Jewish. In the 1970s, Fairfax integrated very quickly as boundaries were shifted and students from L.A. High were bused in after damage during the 1971 Sylmar Earthquake. Source: https://scalar.usc.edu/hc/fairmax-project/fairfax-high-school-in-the-age-of-integration
[2] Los Angeles Free Press, or “Freep”, was one of the largest independent counterculture newspapers between 1964 and 1978. It is said to have printed what “Los Angeles Times wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole” including police brutality, Bob Dylan, and LGBTQ+ issues. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) began near 1959 as a radical youth group. It was fervently anti-Vietnam War in the 1960s and was a critical element in the civil rights movements of that era.
[3] The “Are You Yellow” Conference at Big Bear in the summer of 1968 was one of the first pan-Asian ethnic youth meetings. It was inspired by UCLA’s Black Power conference in the winter of 1968.
[4] Gidra (February 1969-1974) was a dynamic voice of the new Asian American movement. Most of the writers were at UCLA and concurrently organizing the new Asian American Studies Center. In 1971, Eddie Wong – along with Amy (Uyematsu) Tachiki, Dr. Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong – would publish Roots: An Asian American Reader, a keystone anthology in the Asian American Movement.
[5] Dr. Philip C. C. Huang 黄宗智 was a professor of history at UCLA (1966-2004) with primary focus on China. In 1968, Professor Yuji Ichioka founded the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and coined the term “Asian American” with his partner, Emma Gee. He taught UCLA’s first Asian American studies course.
[6] Alan Nishio (1945-2023) was the first interim director of UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Nishio retired as Associate Vice President of Student Services at Cal State Long Beach. He was also a longtime activist with Little Tokyo Peoples Rights Organization, National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, and Little Tokyo Service Center.
[7] Visual Communications (VC) is a non-profit dedicated to using film, video, media, and arts to empower Asian American stories. See vcmedia.org.
[8] To read a 50th anniversary retrospective on the film Wong Singsaang, see East Wind E-zine: https://eastwindezine.com/reflections-on-wong-sinsaang-on-its-50th-anniversary/.
[9] I Wor Kuen was a Marxist Asian American group established in 1969 in New York Chinatown partly by members of Triple A and AAPA. It is named after a 1890s peasant group that participated in China’s Boxer Rebellion. To see IWK’s 1969 12-point platform, see https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/12pointiworkuen.html.
[10] The International Hotel in Manilatown of San Francisco was low-cost housing for many Asians. Large coalition of activists struggled against evictions and redevelopment until 1977. l
[11] To see copies of East Wind and other Getting Together publications: https://unityarchiveproject.org/getting-together-publications/.
[12] Proposition 209 was a 1996 California ballot initiative to eliminate affirmative action. Prop 209 passed but legal debate over affirmative action continues.