CONFUCIANISM AND WOMEN, Wei Min Bao July1974

WEI MIN BAO July-August 1974 Vol. 3 No. 8

Confucianism and Asian Women, pg.6

EDITOR’ S NOTE:

The following is the second of two articles on Confucianism and Asians in America. (See WMB June, 1974 for part one) Recent developments both at home ( the fighting back of working people of all nationalities against their exploitation) and abroad (the growing struggles of peo­ples of Africa and Asia, for example; against feudalism, Imperialist exploita­tion and oppression) have created a situ­ation which demands that we Asian Ameri­cans critically look at our feudal Con­fucian heritage.

We must understand that the Confucian thinking we were taught--with its rules such as passive obedience to authority and maintaining harmony at any cost-- that this kind of ideology has obstruct­ed our full and active participation in changing American Society for the better.

This second part is a compilation of some of the experiences of many older Asian women. Their real experiences clearly reflect the sometimes subtle but most often blatant lnequality suffered by women as a result of Confucian ideology.

The current struggles of Asian elect­ronics and garment workers here in San Francisco Chinatown are showing that women are important and vital, indeed, in participating in and leading struggles for all of us.

DUTY OF WOMEN UNDER CONFUCIAN TRADITION

Not too long ago at a local graduation ceremony, a middle-aged Asian couple sat watching as their son was awarded a col­lege degree. Clearly proud of this accomplishment on the part of his son, the man turned to his wife beside him as if to mark the momentous occasion at hand and said, “Wife, you have done well. In the 26 years of our marriage, you have succeeded in bringing honor to our family. Not only have you managed our household, but more importantly, you have produced two fine sons, the second of whom has aldo brought honor to our family.”

Our Confucian upbringing taught us that as women our goal in life was to marry and bear sons. How many Chinese Americans re­call the elaborate ceremony which took place when a male child was born, such as the countless eggs dyed red and given to friends and relatives who came to congratulate the father. Because according to Confucian tradition, males counted--not females.

There are many among us who have heard the countless praises heaped upon our brothers when they did anything well such as get good grades or win an award. And of us females, why we were lucky if we were even noticed (and then we were inevitably asked as we grew older, “When are you getting married?”).

Some of us have heard our fathers, when hard-pressed. to say something about our mothers, talk on]y of their kitchen abilities. For example; one phrase heard is, “My wife, why she has leaned to do the most important thing in her life--and that is to cook well !”

CONFUCIAN ETHICS AS IT RELATES TO WORKING WOMEN.

Confucian ideology demanded that females be subservient to males. In fact, the roles that females had were defined according to their relationships to males: As daughters (to their fathers), as wives {to their hus­bands). and as mothers (to their sons). Therefore, women were expected to perform those tasks which reflected their positions within the family. A good daughter was one who learned at an early age how to cook, clean, sew and mend. She learned that her brothers always came first. So if the family could not afford to send both her brothers and herself to school, she was the one who had to stay home, (“Girls don’t need an education, they need a hus­band.”)

Many older Asian women never even went to high school. Our responsibility was clear­ly defined to us: to take care of our husbands and children. And when our hus­bands had a hard time earning enough to support the family (which was often the case) we shared the burden by working outside as well. But with our limited education and skills, we were forced to seek jobs which reflected the kinds of thing we had leaned to do at home-- wash, cook, sew, etc. So we found our­selves employed as domestics, as cooks, waitresses, and as garment workers.

Many older Asian women never even went t high school. Our responsibility was clearly defined to us: to take care of our husbands and children. And when our husbands had a hard time earning enough to support the family (which was often the case) we shared the burden by working outside as well. But with our limited education and skills, we were forced to seek jobs which reflected the kinds of thing we had leaned to do at home-- wash, cook, sew, etc. So we found ourselves employed as domestics, as cooks, waitresses, and as garment workers.

Today .the majority of older Asian women remain in these jobs, which are low-paying and low-skilled, trying to help or totally support our families. Of course, our responsibilities to our families still exist after we have put in a work shift. We are still expected to do all the household chores and to take care of our children. Our mothers are the ones we remember the most from our childhood, Of course, our fathers were there; too; but it was a feeling of fear we remember feeling toward them because they were the stern disciplinarians at home. Our mothers were the ones we turned to for affection and compassion; perhaps they, too, were a little afraid of our fathers as well.

OPPOSE BACKWARD AND WRONG THINKING.

There is an old Chinese saying that “If you marry a dog, you follow a dog.” That meant that you always had to obey your husband no matter what kind of person he was. A wife had to respect and subordinate herself to her husband; she could not demand the same respect and consideration from him in return. As Asian women brought up in a Confucian tradition, we have many barriers of feudal thinking and habits which we must recognize and counteract. First, we must reject the notion that our ideas are not as good as those of men; that we must rely on them to always take the lead and make decision. (its an unfair responsibility for men to have to always decide.)

We must also stop thinking that we can only do things which relate to our homes and children. The home is not our only sphere of activity. We are also workers facing the same, if not worse, job conditions that our husbands work under. We cannot sit idly by when working people fight for decent wages and better working conditions. Those struggles are ours, too.

We must take ourselves and our responsibilities seriously if we expect others to do so as well. But that does not mean that we separate ourselves from men and think that they are responsible for our low esteem and status in society. Men, too, have been taught the same Confucian virtues and values that we women learned. Neither one of us can combat our Confucian thinking alone. Together we must work to oppose this ideology which looked back to the past and not ahead to the future; which promoted and maintained inequalities among people; which favored the interests of the few over those of the many; and which taught that to know one’s “place” was the highest virtue and good.

Instead we must see that we, too, have played and continue to play an important role along with men in building this society. That together as equals we can work toward making this an even better and truly equal society for all people.

Wei Min She notes on women 1974

In 1974 Wei Min She women tried to educate the organization to improve the way men and women worked together. Did they succeed in their efforts?

Excerpts from Wei Min She Notes 1974
WHY STUDY THE WOMEN’S QUESTION...

"Women under capitalism are oppressed as workers and as women. Asian and Third World women also face racism. Women are an important force in the revolutionary struggles; in order to fight women’s oppression and to involve and develop more women, we need to understand the nature of women’s oppression…The organization’s practice has not reflected much understanding and wholehearted attempt to develop women in the organization and with women we work with as well as in developing an understanding of the women’s question with men we work with. For example, in the Bookstore core, the men have not been conscientiously developing the leadership of its women members. This is manifested in daily examples, such as who has to do the miscellaneous tasks of running minor errands, calling up people, greeting new people etc…
On an overall organizational level, the encouragement and initiative to develop women’s potential and leadership has not been very conscientious. Generally, the men have not seen the women’s question as equally their responsibility in doing political work. They have left it to the women to raise and to deal with. And when criticisms have been raised on the women’s question in their workstyle, attitudes, or work ...men dismissed it as being politically naive...or the women are over emotional. A typical reaction is “yeah- yeah—yeah—yeah…” and then let the criticism slide. Women in the organization, who have raised the women issues and of chauvinism have been considered as over—emphasizing or focusing too much on the women’s question which would in turn “turn people off”. These attitudes and reactions are developed and instilled in how society has shaped the way we see the role of men and women. They may be blatant or subtle that we (men and women) may not readily see or willing to change. Men and women in the organization are taking notice to the need to find means to solve problems and move work ahead in our work areas in the organization overall…
Though we are Asians living in a capitalistic society we still are affected by ideas and traditions of feudal Asian society. It is necessary to analyze how male supremacy and private property was manifested in this stage of society to understand the totality of Asian women’s oppression and how it presently takes form in our communities and in our attitudes towards women."

A Wei Min Sister

I was invited to write down some of my memories of my involvement as a woman in the Asian American Movement. I decided to do it because there is so little written about the Asian Community Center and Wei Min She (Organization for the People) both of which were an important part of the leftist movement in San Francisco Chinatown and the Bay Area during that time period.

“Women’s Oppression Impacted My Life”

Women's oppression had a big impact on how I developed as a person. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time. And in fact, when I first heard the term “women’s oppression”, I didn’t think it applied to me. How am I oppressed as a woman? “I was free to be and do what I wanted” was the belief I had. In 1970 I went to one of the first Women’s Day celebrations in the Bay Area. But I did not fully grasp at that time how important it was to take on the women’s question. Only now, looking back, women’s oppression should have been one of the initial causes of why I became involved with the radical movement in the 1970’s. Also, it was my own experience of women's oppression that is behind the reason why I never had the confidence to step forward to make even more of a difference during that time of widespread turmoil and activism.

I not only did not see myself as a leader, but also shied away from that role. One of the most vivid examples of this was during a trip to Canada in the early 70’s to attend a Women’s Conference that presented women speakers from Vietnam. This was an important international conference to build opposition to the Vietnam War and expose the atrocities that were being committed by the U.S. military. There was a bus load of women from the San Francisco Bay Area and other West coast cities that went to the conference. For the final day of the conference, the women voted for a representative to read a statement that would put forward their stand with the struggle of the Vietnamese people and oppose imperialism. I got the most votes because I was a member of the respected Wei Min She organization. But I was too timid to speak in front of an audience and declined, letting the second runner-up take my place. Even a woman from I Wor Kuen tried to struggle with me to do it, since I would also represent the Asians from the U.S. who were there (the runner-up was not Asian.) Needless to say, people from Wei Min She were not happy with me when I got back. Not being proud of my action, I avoided speaking about my trip to Canada even though it was such an important event. But I think my bringing it up here, in the context of talking about women's oppression, makes a good illustration of how oppression can suppress a person, preventing the full development of an individual's abilities and as a contributing member of a society or cause.

Women’s oppression impacted my life. It also impacted my life through how it influenced my mother’s life.

My mother came to the United States on a boat from China at the age of 22, just married to my father, and pregnant with her first child. My father had gone to China after World War II under the War Brides Act. On arriving in China, my father was introduced to two young women, and of the two, he picked my mother to marry him. She would have two more pregnancies after that, each one year apart. The third one was me. So here she was, in a new country, couldn’t speak the language, with very little money, and three babies. What a scary situation. My father wasn't around much in those days since he was going to school on the GI Bill and working at night at various jobs such as janitor or washing dishes and cleaning up at restaurants.

Fortunately, she didn’t get pregnant again for another three years after that. But all the stress of having and taking care of three little babies must have been tremendous. This was quite common in Chinatown back in the 1950’s. People had big families back then. My mother ended up having a total of six children.

So this was the situation into which I was born. And from the very beginning was a disadvantage. I was the third child my mother gave birth to within three years. All three were born in the month of August, one year after the other. Looking back, after I took courses in Chinese Medicine, it became clear why my health was never very good. According to Chinese Medicine, after giving birth, a woman’s body becomes depleted of qi, blood, and other substances and needs to recuperate. A two or three year gap between children would be better for the health of the mother and children. But this is not what happens in real life. As a result, I was never very strong and had headaches all my life due in part to my mother having three pregnancies within too short a time period. A woman who is over-worked and depleted will not have enough qi and other vital substances to pass on to the next child for optimum health. Thanks to the women’s movement, women now have more control over reproduction, but there is the continuing struggle to keep the right for women to choose from being chipped away.

Another disadvantage was that I was born a girl into a Chinese family with traditional views on the value and role of women. Even though my father was politically progressive, both my parents placed more value on having boys over girls. This outlook was very typical of my parents' generation, much less of the many generations before theirs who lived under feudalism in China. I remember going out in Chinatown, when I was a little girl, and hear how some mothers would scold and call their daughters awful names. My mother used to point out how lucky I was that she didn't use those types of words on me. While my parents wanted me to have good grades in school, they didn’t expect me to go to a four year college like my brothers. What a shock it was to hear my father’s response to my applying to be admitted to S.F. State College. "Why would you want to do that?" my father asked me. He thought a two-year college was all I would need. Why waste the money? To lessen the pain I felt from his response, I excused him for it by being understanding of the financial pressure he was under, having four sons he wanted to put through college.

My mother’s treatment of me has never been very good because I was not a boy. I tried to explain this to my oldest brother a few times when we were adults, and he never believed me until one day he saw it for himself. My mother made soup for the family, and there were a number of bowls filled with soup on the table. I went over to get one and my mother said “No, those are for your brothers, go get your own.” My brother looked at me, and I said, ”See what I mean?” He understood then what I had been talking about. I was a second class citizen in my own family. It was unfair to be treated this way, but I understand that it was due to a cultural outlook that my parents grew up with in China. This was part of women’s oppression in Chinese traditional culture. Women were considered inferior to men, and women's role was to serve the men in the family. My mother was never able to break from this view of her role, and it is sad for me to see how much her interests in life is limited to the family. Mao’s China took on this oppression, liberating the women of China from this feudal outlook and even influencing the development of the women’s movement in the U.S. as well. Unfortunately, some of these gains for women in China were reversed after Mao’s death as the succeeding leaders in China embraced capitalism.

“I’m Going Too”

The 1960's was a time of social turmoil, both internationally and within the U.S. Countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America were fighting for freedom from colonialism. In the U.S. people were marching and demonstrating for civil rights and the right of Blacks to vote and ending Jim Crow laws in the South. There was the Free Speech Movement on college campuses. There was the start of the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement. With the start of the Black Power movement, similar movements arose in the Latino, Native American, and Asian communities. Militant groups like the Black Panther Party and Brown Berets developed across the country. San Francisco State College (now university) was one of the hot spots for the Free Speech Movement and the site of many demonstrations.

In 1968, I was 18 years old and it was my first semester at S.F. State. That semester, the first Third World Strike broke out. Among the demands were that education should be relevant to the community. That college education should be made accessible for minorities and the poor. That colleges and education should not be geared to the interests of making profits for the corporations and the military-industrial-complex. There should be ethnic studies so minorities could know their own histories and learn how to be of service to their communities. This was my start in becoming active in S.F. Chinatown and the Asian American Movement. It was here that I walked my first picket line and signed up to tutor immigrant school children in Chinatown. But the leaders of the strike did not reach out to involve me further and I was too shy to approach them myself. My further involvement would come from another direction.

Since junior high school (now called middle school) I was pretty much a book-reading recluse. I would borrow books from the public library and read on many subjects, fiction and non-fiction. In particular, I read as much science fiction as I could find. My particular heroes back then included astronomers Copernicus and Galileo and physicist Marie Curie. My two older brothers were more socially active. They went to Boy Scouts, drum and bugle corps, joined a kung fu club on Jackson Street, and played sports with friends. I was not into joining in with these types of activities. All my time was spent going to school, reading, and studying in my room at home. But this was going to change. Around 1968 I heard my brothers talking about going to Leeway, a pool hall for youth, where there were people talking about Mao Tse-tung, the Black Panther Party and reading from Mao's Little Red Book. This was where the Red Guard Party would form. Later on, my brothers would bring one of the founders of the Red Guard Party, Alex Hing, to our home to meet our father. The Red Guard Party wanted someone to translate their leaflets into Chinese. My father agreed to help.

The Red Guard Party was modeled after the Black Panther Party. They recruited mainly street kids as members. My father was very progressive in his politics. He was against the war in Vietnam, supported revolutionary China, and was persecuted during the McCarthy era by the FBI for being a member of Mun Ching, a progressive youth organiztion in Chinatown that had disbanded in 1959 when they lost their club house. The government carried out their anti-communist investigation into the Chinese community for many years begining in 1949 with the birth of New China under Mao. One angle to attack the left and progressives in Chinatown was through how many Chinese immigrated to the U.S. During the years when the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in force, many Chinese came to the U.S. illegally as "paper sons." My father was harassed for years, and when a cousin of his "talked", it opened the door for the FBI to act. My father's citizenship was taken away even though he had joined the U.S. army to fight against fascism in World War II. He would have been deported to China except for the fact that the U.S. couldn’t deport him to a country they didn’t recognize. I remember my father's response to losing his citizenship, he said that it's alright because he would rather be "a citizen of the world." So my father had been politically active when he was a young man, and after the Black Pather Party formed in the Bay Area, he used to bring home copies of the Black Panther newspaper that he bought on the street. So it was no surprise that he would help translate for the Red Guards. My father would later also translate material for the Asian Community Center and Wei Min Newspaper. I was proud of him for his hard work. He would go to work all day, and when he came home, he would stay up late to do the translations. He continued to do this even after he had a heart attack.

When the Red Guards started a free breakfast program like the Black Panthers, I volunteered to help during the summer of 1969. It was run out of one of the clubs on Broadway Street. But my long term involvement in Chinatown as an activist would not be with the Red Guards, but with a group of students from Berkeley who would set up the Asian Community Center and Everybody’s Bookstore at the end of 1969.

I didn’t know these students from Berkeley since I went to S.F. State. But both my older brothers went to U.C. Berkeley and they got pulled into action like many others. Berkeley had a history of student activism on campus. In the late 60’s Berkeley really heated up with protests. There were teach-ins on the Vietnam War, anti-draft actions, the Third World Strike, People’s Park. In response, the national guards were sent in with tear gas and even fired shots into crowds. The first time I saw some of these Berkeley students was in a huge anti-war protest in 1969 that marched from downtown San Francisco to Golden Gate Park. My brothers were going to the march with a friend. When I said, “I’m going too.” they didn’t object and I went too.

There had been many demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and now I was in one myself. My family was against the war but had never taken part in protest before. Now I was actually in one. It was very exciting with so many people. Along the way, we came across the Asian Contingent and marched with it. They had their own banners and signs. They raised opposition to the war from an Asian perspective, one I never thought about before. They said the Vietnamese people were our brothers and sisters. That the U.S. military called the Vietnamese “gooks," and that was how the military saw all Asians. I was amazed that some of them spoke Chinese, in fact they spoke Sze Yup like my family did at home, and not Sam Yup (Cantonese). As the march approached Golden Gate Park, we saw some Black Panther Party members passing out pamphlets by Mao tse-tung and selling their newspaper. We stayed to hear speeches and finally had to leave since we had nothing to eat or drink.

Surrounded By Banned Books

One day my oldest brother was talking about how he and a number of other students at Berkeley had chipped in $50.00 each to open a bookstore. At the mention of “bookstore” I immediately said I want to go there to work. I loved to read and had always wanted to work in a bookstore or library and be surrounded by books. He said he would find out for me and that was how I ended going to Kearny Street where I attended my first meeting. I was quite shocked when I was asked to give my opinion. As I mentioned, I was pretty reclusive and did not talk much.

The meeting was held in the basement of the building next to the International Hotel, at what was once the United Filipino Association Hall, 832 Kearny St. This would be the first location of the Asian Community Center. Later, we would be evicted and we moved into one of the basements in the I-Hotel at 846 Kearny Street. The bookstore was named Everybody's Bookstore and was in a storefront in the I-Hotel. Staffing for ACC and the Bookstore would all be done by volunteers, there was no money to pay for staff. Originally, the Bookstore was in a very small space, the size of a room in a house. It had very few books in the beginning, some were in English and some in Chinese. Many of the pamphlets and books were from China. The source of the books was probably China Books. I wasn’t involved with buying books for the store, but there was only one possible source for books like Mao’s red book and other writings.

China Books was the only importer for books, posters, and records from China in our area. I had gone to China Books before with my father and a number of his friends who used to be Mun Ching members. It was considered subversive to go to China Books because it imported goods from the People’s Republic of China, which was not recognized by the U.S. government. The China the U.S. recognized was Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China located on the island of Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek and the political party he led, the KuoMinTang had fled to Taiwan after the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s revolution in 1949. In fact Chinatown back then was polarized along the lines of supporting Mao’s communist China and Chiang’s KMT Taiwan. Back in the 1950’s when Mun Ching had their club house on Stockton Street, the KMT used to throw garbage in their doorway. Mun Ching had members who supported the People's Republic of China so they were accused of being "communist." So I remember I had gone to China Books with my father, and I was shown books that were stamped by custom officials with words indicating the material was “banned”. I didn’t quite understand the politics and what it meant at the time since I was young.

My second brother didn’t get involved in ACC. He worked with the International Hotel for a while and often hung around with two I-Hotel women friends. My mother was quite upset when he brought them home a few times, one friend holding his arm for a guide as she was blind. I had a good laugh over her disaproval. I think my mother was also upset that I started to get active and leave the house. "Mh nah ga!" - which meant "never staying home."

“What We Want. What We See. What We Believe”

The first time I went down the stairs to the basement was in December 1969. People were watching revolutionary movies and newsreels. The free community film showings was one of the first programs the Berkeley students set up. The newsreels were documentary shorts on things like the Black Panther Party. They showed movies like “Battle of Algiers” which depicted how the Algerian people organized to fight for liberation from the French. The film program was one of the ways to educate the people to become political and class conscious so they could organize themselves to change society. After ACC was officially formed in 1970, I would soon learn to run the projector myself, and help set up weekend movie shows. We often showed movies about revolution and films from China showing the struggle for socialism that came from sources in Canada, since Canada did have relations with China. I will never forget the time we showed "East is Red," a song and dance drama of the Chinese Revolution, one weekend. We showed it for a total of fourteen times and it was packed for each showing. There was so much emotional response from the audience. During one afternoon showing, when it came to a scene of a woman forced to sell her daughter in the movie, a woman in the audience started sobbing loudly. It was too dark to see who it was, but we wondered if something similar had happened in her family.

In the early days, many of the regulars who came down to the basement were elderly men. Later, people of all ages would come down, including grade-school children. Due to exclusion laws against the Chinese, many of the early immigrants could not bring family members to the U.S. The men grew old all alone, working here and sending money home to families in China. ACC became the daily hang out for many of these old men. Some supported Mao and China for the politics, and some out of pride seeing their home country strong. I spent much of my time in the 70's at ACC. At school, when I got involved going to meeings to discuss the very beginnings of the Asian American Studies program and the Asian Women's class, I was seen as someone coming from ACC.

At the Asian Community Center, we had meetings to discuss the center's aims and purpose. Many groups in those days had a program. The Black Panther Party had their Ten Point program. We wanted something of our own. After discussing the issues that plagued Chinatown such as the highest TB rate in the country, crowded living conditions, sweat shops and restaurants with low paying jobs, long working hours, we came up with “What We Want. What We See. What We Believe.”

WHAT WE SEE

We see the breakdown of our community and families.

We see our people suffering from malnutrition, tuberculosis, and high suicide rates.

We see the destruction of our cultural pride.

We see our elders forgotten and alone.

We see our Mothers and Fathers forced into meaningless jobs to make a living.

We see American society preventing us from fulfilling our needs.

WHAT WE WANT

We want adequate housing, medical care, employment, and education.

WHAT WE BELIEVE

To solve our community problems, all Asian people must work together.

Our people must be educated to move collectively for direct action.

We will employ any effective means that our people see necessary.

I learned a lot about radical politics in these meetings. One thing the Berkeley students raised was how to work together. We were going to work collectively. Everyone would have input on decisions. Another thing we decided was that we were going to base ACC on the working class, not the lumpen proletariat (street people) like the Black Panthers or the Red Guards. It was here that I became aware of different political lines between groups. People who had similar lines would be able to come together and do work, whereas people with different lines would not. The original group of students who formed ACC were all American born but was able to join with a group of Hong Kong born students shortly after. Later Wei Min She was formed as an organization to lead the work politically.

Eventually we started many “serve the people” programs such as: weekly film showings; the Food Program where we distributed government supplemental foods to pregnant women and young children; we put out a family newsletter; in the summer we had a Summer Youth Program for school age children with tutoring and field trips. We set up health screenings for TB and glaucoma for the community at ACC soon after we formed, and later helped organize health fairs with other Chinatown organizations at Portsmouth Square, the park located a block from the center. We took on housing issues such as improving conditions at the Ping Yuen housing projects in Chinatown and the International Hotel. We supported worker's struggles at restaurants, garment shops, and electronic factories.

There was so many areas of work that special work groups were set up at different times. There was labor, health, education, housing, the newspaper Wei Min Bao, the Bookstore, etc. We also set up study groups to carry out political education for ourselves and for the volunteers who were interested in working with us. We studied the writings of Mao Tse-tung and applied much of it to our work. We studied the current conditions in the world, in the U.S. and in Chinatown. We went out to the masses to investigate their situation and get their opinions. We tried to apply criticism and self-criticism as we summed up our work. We studied the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and books on the revolution in China such as Edgar Snow's "Red Star Over China." We read the writings of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon and many others in search of the direction forward for revolutionary change. We set up classes to study the "the women's question," and "the national question." In the summer of 1971, historian Him Mark Lai gave a series of six lectures on "Chinese in America" at ACC.

ACC and Everybody’s Bookstore was also a part of a larger Kearny Street community. There was what was left of Manilatown, reduced from ten blocks to just the I Hotel, the barbershop, Mabuhay Restaurant and the pool hall across the street. There was the International Hotel’s fight against eviction which drew many people from the community and students from campuses to join in the struggle. There were various other organizations that rented space in the I Hotel throughout the 70's including Draft Help, the Garment Co-op, the Red Guard Party, Chinese Progressive Association, I Wor Kuen, and Kearny Street Workshop.

This period of time in my life was rich with experience and people. I learned to do things I never dreamed of doing before including leading group meetings and discussions. I changed from being timid to a community activist on the streets of Chinatown, selling newspapers, passing out flyers, and talking to people on the various issues we took up. We had such hopes then of revolution, of changing the world and all of the existing social relationships. We wanted a world without exploitation and oppression. Looking at the world now, there is still so much more work to be done.

A Wei Min Sister

So Long, Susie Wong, by Why K. Wong (c)

“I originally wrote the lyrics to So Long, Susie Wong as a poem that was published in an early AAPA newsletter in 1967-68. I adapted it into the song in the '80s while I was in the band, Repeat Offenders (along with Susan Wood, Cary Tennis, Mike Wineke, and Lliam Hart). It was recorded on several versions of demo tapes by different producers and recording studios. The final version was on the 45" single (with "Rage On" on the other side). It was on our first demo tape (including the songs, "Somoza Is Dead," "My Mother Taught Me Masochism," and "Motorola [Rapture in Box]") that won SF City Arts "Best Demo Tape of the Year" award. When the record came out it got local radio airplay on stations like KUSF, KPFA, KALX, et al, but I recall one dj at an alleged SF independent/alternative/new wave/punk rock station saying they wouldn't play it because there were already playing one Asian song - David Bowie's "China Girl"! So apparently there was a quota of 1 for Asian music back then in "liberal" SF Bay Area. Plus who knew David Bowie is Asian?!” Why K Wong

"So Long, Susie Wong"
Music and Lyrics by Why K. Wong (copyrighted, Victoria Wong)
Recorded by Repeat Offenders (copyrighted, Repeat Offenders)

You expect Susie Wong to slink on in
Black hair like silk
And a slant-eyed grin
Or maybe it's sweet Mei-Ling
Serving tea with a subservient bend
But
I say
So-o long,
So lo-ong, Susie Wong,
So solly, Charlie,
But this a-China dolly
Ain't a-takin' your wiki-wiki dollars, uh-uh!

You eat your ginseng
You stir fry your wonton skin
You tell your slopehead jokes - a ha!
Your fingers do the Oriental poke but
All the while
With her Mona Lisa smile
You can't penetrate
The moon gate
'Cause it's inscrutable
Oh, so long, so-o long,
So lo-ong, Susie Wong,
So solly, Charlie,
But this a-China dolly
Ain't a takin' your wiki-wiki dollars, uh-uh, ha!

You expect Susie Wong to slink on in
Black hair like silk
And a slant-eyed grin
Or maybe it's sweet Mei-Ling
Serving tea with a subservient bend
But, so lo-ong,
So-o long
So long, Susie Wong!
Good-bye to geisha gazes
Good-bye to eastern phrases
To meditation in a taiji pose so
So long, Susie Wong
Good-bye, Tokyo Rose
Arrivederci to the Dragon Lady
I bid adieu to all of you - huh!

Ma's work place, an Oakland garment factory

My Ma: fourth row up, fifth in from right side

I No Longer Have Eyes To See You , by CC

There’s a saying in Chinese that goes, “I no longer have eyes to see you,” that Ma always hit us with that at the end of arguments. She’d go into the lowest slump she could manage without actually slipping from the couch onto the floor, moaning into her hands about her children killing her. Her aim never missed and though we couldn’t find signs of withering on the chubby little body dressed perpetually in the flowered, home-made apron over the flowered, style-less home-made dress, we’d leave the room guilty, trying to look as guiltless as possible. My brother wouldn’t shave or get a haircut, my sister wouldn’t move back home, I wouldn’t submit to meeting the pharmacist she’s set up for me. On a couple of occasions she had spiced up the act by flinging herself onto the floor, the calloused hands and feet waving in the air like a frantic baby when she learned her first daughter was marrying the man with gout who only made eight thousand a year, and years later when she learned her second daughter was planning to marry the white haired caveman who made nothing. I am the third daughter, the youngest in my family.
“I no longer have the eyes to see you,” she whispered. She meant all of us. This time she really scared me. She had tried all day to get me to stay, pleading,
“There’s no use for you to go, no use at all. You will only starve.”
But I had packed my things. I was the only child left, and I was leaving in the morning. We were alone in the parlor-Daddy had already gone to bed. There were no more dramatics left for her to play. She just sat looking tired, an old lady; funny looking in faded mismatched pajamas her children had discarded that she couldn’t button over a yellowed nylon slip. I watched her for a while, not wanting to make the usual exit, waiting this time for her to go first, wanting to make sure that she went to bed. She wouldn’t go, though, I finally just left her there.

She led me into the kitchen. We were both in our nightclothes and ready for bed. She opened a cupboard and pulled out a Skippy peanut butter jar in which something was wrapped tightly in aluminum foil. She opened the far and pulled the thing out. She said, “There is money in here. When I die, be sure to look all over the house for the money I have hidden.” She was so serious that I had to answer as though she wasn’t. “Gee, ma, do we all split it up or do I get it all?” She said she didn’t care what we did and turned away. The scene changes. The kitchen is dark and she is hanging there, near the spot where we had just talked.

I woke up shaking. It was almost morning. I went into the hall and looked into her bedroom to make sure she was still there, and standing half asleep at her doorway, I heard her voice call me from behind. Shivering, I walked to her to wake her. I wanted to tell her I’d look at the pharmacist for her. She peered at me from under the covers, like a bewildered child.

She said, “I had a bad dream…did I wake you with my noises?”

I wasn’t startled by the coincidence: I thought I was still dreaming.

“What was it about, ma?”

“My mother sent me into the village on an errand, and when I returned, she was dead.”

Our dreams were vanishing as she spoke, and before she had finished the sentence, we had already wakened to the tension that I would be leaving in a few hours. She resumed the deathly look that scared me earlier, but her dreams had softened her, and she looked at my face in the darkness with a mixture of sadness, love, and hate, that wasn’t entirely for me. As part of the compromise I felt compelled to make, I tried to say it all in Chinese.

“Mommy, I’ll try to look at things your way, look for success and money, get a good husband- I’ll even look at your pharmacist. I’ll try.”

She said softly, “That’s a good girl. Mama will be real happy.”

She smiled knowing, as I did, that we were both lying, and closed her eyes.

Learning from the Garment Workers

When my son was one year old, a brother from the Chinatown Cooperative Garment Factory came to visit me in my Berkeley apartment and asked me to volunteer. The alternative garment factory was located in the basement of the International Hotel in San Francisco. I had dropped out of UC Berkeley when I became pregnant in my freshman year, and I guess he thought I had plenty of time??

I decided to check it out and went down to the Asian Community Center where the Garment Co-op had a space.

The Asian Community Center was familiar territory for me. In my freshman year, while working as an office assistant for the UCB Asian American Studies Department, we students had temporarily moved the AAS office into a field office inside ACC to help out community fieldwork. ACC offered Chinatown a free food program, community film showings, youth program, and labor support. We used to call Kearny Street where ACC was located, “The Block”. A number of community organizations rented the retail and basement spaces below the tenant-controlled International Hotel. It was like Asians had seized this block, the way Native Americans had seized Alcatraz Island.

I had never been inside the Garment Co-op before. You had to enter through a dark unlit foyer. Behind its darkened closed door you could hear the whirl of sewing machines. I knocked and the door opened into a brightly lit room. Six women were chatting while they worked, and looked up at me from their machines. Vicci wearing an apron and her hair tied in a bandana let me in. Mrs. Lum, the co-op worker, stood up and warmly greeted me in Cantonese. I couldn’t speak or understand Chinese, so I didn’t do much but say hello. I could guess Vicci was thinking, oh no, another empty-headed student. The Co-op was run by the immigrant women workers, with no bosses. They were paid hourly wages, unlike the piece-rate sweatshops in Chinatown. The workers had full control of production and working conditions. Every day during break, they had English lessons, exercise, and current events classes. A few times a year, the Co-op had family picnics for recreation. The Co-op workers enjoyed working with the young people from ACC. They even gave friendly nicknames for some of the ACC volunteers. There was Shrimp Boy, and the three stooges; Stooge One, Stooge Two, and Stooge Three.

It was a new experience for me to watch these working class women laugh and joke around while they pushed the cloth pieces through the rapidly pounding needles. Don’t they worry about their fingers? These women could deftly sew scores of pieces in a non stop string, scissors flying as they rip the connecting threads, tie the sewn pieces together into a bundle, and pass it on to the next operator without missing a beat. They taught me to operate the machines and watch over my quality of work. Without a doubt they took pride in their production. Their conversations were filled with their life difficulties trying to make financial ends meet, trying to find jobs that paid a living wage, worrying about their families whom they loved so much that they’d work long overtime hours to finish the contracts, extending the workweek into the weekend. Work on Saturdays? Not me. Until I understood how much they relied on one another. If I didn’t help on extended hours then the next operation would not have enough work and would have to go home.

I took this experience with me to every garment factory I worked in for the next five years. Every factory was the same in the camaraderie of the women, working in teams and sections, with the factories as large as 100 to 300 workers. And I brought with me the fighting spirit of the co-op women. When the contractors tried to force low price rates on their work, the co-op workers would plan a group confrontation. Then when the contractor came into the factory, he was met by a united group of women demanding a fair price per garment from the manufacturer. At each factory since, I encouraged similar cooperation in fighting for better working conditions.

Without exception, someone would always complain I was a communist, and then give me a lecture on how communists in China confiscated their family wealth. After arguing this point, the logic of uniting eventually banded people together as a group to take action and confront their supervisor for fairer rates. Their small victories encouraged others to do likewise. I was deeply respectful for these women who risked being fired by taking action and grateful for their patience enduring my broken Cantonese. It took me a while, but I realized I was speaking the wrong dialect even. Most spoke Sze Yup, with roots in Toisan or Hoi Ping provinces. Thankfully, standing up for your rights is a universal language.

When I worked in larger shops unionized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, workers were divided by race. The union officers who were White and African American had little understanding toward the immigrant Chinese women and didn’t try to break these barriers. In mandatory union hall meetings, the president Mattie Jackson would talk on and on in English, making no attempt to address the Chinese-speaking majority who couldn’t understand a word she said. As the first African American woman to hold the position, she had a loyal base within the pre-1965 era White and Black garment workers. Mattie wasn’t interested in defying the ILGWU’s conservative national leadership. ILGWU was in fact waging a BUY AMERICA campaign with patriotic fervor against cheaper imported goods from Asia and Latin America, ignoring the growing trend of American manufacturers themselves running away to overseas factories. ILGWU hierarchy couldn’t relate to a non-European immigrant workforce.

But things in the union began changing when 100 Chinatown garment workers went on strike to unionize. Their shop Great American Sewing Factory, or Jung Sai in Cantonese, was located right around the corner from ACC and the I-Hotel. Two of the Co-op workers had gone there to work after the Co-op closed. They suggested going to the young people in ACC for support. The factory was owned by Doug Thompkins who also owned Espirit de Corp, a popular fashion brand. The Jung Sai strikers came down to ACC to ask for assistance after the entire workforce was locked out from the factory for union activity.

While the Jung Sai women were fighting for an ILGWU union contract, there was a good number of them who were not about to follow the unions strategy of calling off their picket lines and waiting for Doug to come around to signing a contract. JUNG SAI MEANS FIGHT BACK became their battle cry. All of Chinatown, even the conservative associations and newspapers became supporters of the strike. Mattie Jackson counted on the language barrier to give her unchallenged control. Now she was faced with a group that wanted translations and wanted a say in decisions. They had been locked out from their jobs and they weren’t about to disappear peacefully. They voted to take their picket line to the Espirit headquarters and stop the delivery trucks. This led to twelve being arrested, including myself and another woman from ACC. To our increasing admiration, the Jung Sai women went to jail in the patty wagon, singing and chanting all the way through booking, fingerprinting, and being locked behind bars. They kept it up until their release a few hours later.

I got married between picketing at the Jung Sai strike. I bought a new dress and we went down to City Hall to a judge’s chambers for the ceremony. Immediately after tying the knot, my husband and I ran back to join the picket line again. The Jung Sai workers congratulated us and then teased me mercilessly. To my embarrassment, I had bought a scab dresses from Macy’s in my hurry to get a wedding outfit. The strikers immediately recognized it as one of the styles they had sewn.

While waiting for a NLRB back wages decision, Jackson refused to let the strikers attend the Local 101 membership meeting when they tried to bring their plight before the local members. This insult to the strikers was not unnoticed by the other union members. Why didn’t they have the right to attend the meeting? Weren’t they fighting for workers rights? In the Local 101 meetings, the Chinese women began asking those who spoke English to interrupt the agenda, and speak about their working conditions. Then they began demanding a Chinese translator for the meetings. It was a rebellion among the members for union democracy. Mattie had to relent and provide a union translator for every membership meeting.

When executive board elections came up, myself and another ACC member were elected by the union members to represent them on the board. The National ILGWU leadership was alerted. As executive board members we participated in the next ILGWU S.F. contract negotiation. Having us at the negotiations was painful for the officials. Then on top of that, we brought STOP RUNAWAY SHOPS picket signs to an ILGWU Buy America Campaign rally. The ILGWU National campaign avoided blaming employers running away overseas for the growing layoffs. With a plan to get us out of the executive board, the union officials took photo evidence of us holding these rank and file signs. In closed session without the consent of the members, the ILGWU officials brought charges against the two of us and accused us of not only being part of a rank and file movement, but also of being communists. It was like we were before Joe McCarthy and the 1950’s House of Un-American Activities trials. Using an old statute from the 1930’s purge of union communists, we were expelled from the executive board by a kangaroo court of Mattie’s officers.

I left the garment factories after having two more children during those years. As you can guess, I was eventually fired. The factory I worked for later closed and laid off its hundreds of workers. Since then, the majority of U.S. clothing manufacturers did run away and are contracting overseas where unprotected labor is cheaper.

Thirty years past, hopefully today’s ILGWU has a more progressive leadership. And today, worker centers like ACC, AIWA and many more, continue forming and have become important organizing bases for new generations of immigrant garment workers.