The Brooklyn Rail

Amy Kahng: Connie, it’s so nice to meet you—it’s an honor to speak with such a legendary organizer and fixture of the Asian American community. How have you been hanging in lately, with everything going on these days? Have you been finding ways to stay connected to community or political life in the Bay Area?

Connie Young Yu: I was at the No Kings Rally in Palo Alto. I didn’t go to the big one in San Francisco. It’s great that local communities could gather. It was quite well organized. My sign said “No Lying King,” you know, “no lion,” but “lying.”

Kahng: As someone who grew up in the South Bay, I love to hear it was happening in Palo Alto. Was there a big turnout?

Young Yu: Everybody’s lining all of El Camino Real, going “beep, beep,” with signs, and it’s really an expression of the people. I think everybody felt that it was something that we had to do to give ourselves some moral strength. We knew Trump would not listen, and we know we’re not going to change the Republicans, but we have to show that the people are the majority. This is the majority opinion. It was the struggle for democracy. Just opposed to fascism. I personally feel that we’re under an authoritarian regime, there’s no question about it. Now with the war, the US under Trump is the most dangerous force on the planet—the most destructive.

Kahng: It’s exciting to hear about Palo Alto and your background in the South Bay, because I actually grew up nearby in Cupertino, California.

Young Yu: Cupertino? So you’re part of that Asian American population in Cupertino that started happening in the seventies and eighties.

Kahng: When I was growing up there, it was the city with the highest density of Asian Americans in the continental US. Now, I think we’re, like, second highest. I think Milpitas just beat us percentage-wise. Generally, when I read about Asian American history, Cupertino gets talked about a little bit, and the South Bay gets talked about somewhat, but usually I’m reading about San Francisco or Berkeley, so it was just really lovely and wonderful to hear about the work that you do and the work in the South Bay, because it’s just so much closer to the places that I know, and my upbringing. Are you in Palo Alto now?

Young Yu: No, I live in Los Altos Hills. My three kids went to Gunn High School. When we moved here in 1970, it was, of course, very rural. Palo Alto was very elite, and it has a history of anti-Asian redlining. But the rural communities were so much better.

I wrote this book called Profiles in Excellence: Peninsula Chinese Americans in 1986, and I profiled, what, twenty-seven specifically Chinese Americans who kind of stood out and did different things from activism to high tech. But several of them mentioned that they tried to buy in Palo Alto. They couldn’t. There was prejudice, so they ended up buying in the hills, which is great, or in Los Altos.

I’m very proud of where we live, and I’m involved with the Los Altos History Museum, where I’m going to talk about the Bicentennial in relation to 250, so this is a real surprise to be interviewed by you about this subject and talk about this Bicentennial quilt.

Kahng: On that note, I’m wondering if you might be able to talk us through some of the basics around this quilt—how did it come into being? Where did this idea originate? Who was involved in this project from the beginning? What did the first steps look like when you were putting together this project?

Young Yu: It started, for me, with the anti-war movement. It was 1971, I was involved with the Peace Center in Palo Alto, and we had a little headquarters. We had draft counseling, we had a little store, our Peace Center was in Palo Alto, right downtown. And I was just really heavily involved with the anti-war movement, and also, that’s when I made my connection with the Third World movement, the whole connection with the Asian American activist groups—the Third World Strike at San Jose and San Francisco State.

It’s had such an impact on the anti-war movement, and it gave us a place, but I was very involved with Palo Alto, which was all white. I was the only person of color. But it was great, because we were right by Stanford University, and there was so much ferment going on. But anyway, joining us on our marches, and also contributing some of her craft work was Genny Guracar, a quilter and a cartoonist. She did cartoons, and just like myself, she was a housewife, mother, and she had two growing boys. I had three kids, and so there was a kind of camaraderie. The first thing she made in our group was the peace quilt. So there’s a large piece, and we did it for fundraising. Genny had pieces of cloth, which she sent to famous people, activists like, of course, Joan Baez, Jeannette Rankin, to sign, you know? We were sending them to just everybody prominent who was standing up and speaking out. We had these squares that they signed made into a quilt, and we tried to raise money through a raffle, and of course, the person who won it was somebody, an activist, who said, I’m going to donate it back. But the idea was that Genny was using her medium for activism.

Other people were making signs, they were doing draft counseling. I was writing. I was a good leaflet writer. I studied as an English major, I was going to be a novelist, and I ended up being very good at writing flyers. I thought, “Well, okay, this is what I do,” and so that was my thing—writing the newsletter for the peace movement. Anyway, after the end of the Vietnam War, we closed the Peace Center. This was our Peace Center, there are others. Our organization was called the Peace Union. We had this idealism that just like labor unions, ours would be Peace Union, Local Number One. And of course, you know, we never had a number two, but I mean, it was a nice idea. We were mostly women actually doing the organizing at the center. Well, you have to imagine what it was like when there was a draft.

The anti-war movement was very volatile. There was a lot of violence. There was activism. There were people burning their draft cards, and so the peace movement and the demonstrations were so different from the ones now. I mean, when you look at recent No Kings protests and the hands-off protests, they were huge, and the Women’s March, they were so peaceful. They were so full of joy, and they were so full of camaraderie. But imagine during a time when people are being drafted, and people are being put in prison. So it was a very different, very volatile, and very dynamic time. Well, you can imagine, because look at what’s happened in Minneapolis. And also, Kent State was a big catalyst. The killing of four students, and that galvanized our movements.

We demonstrated on the Stanford campus, where they were recruiting for the Army. The protests did make a difference. ROTC left. We demonstrated in front of draft centers. I took my kids to the safer ones. There were a couple times that the tact squad came when I was in a protest. So, after the end of the Vietnam War, when you think about it, Gerald Ford bringing the refugees and the babies in the baby lift, I mean… If you read the preface to The People’s Bicentennial Quilt, in ’76, we had a president and vice president that we did not elect. Nixon resigned. Nixon was impeached, but he resigned. There were all the hearings, we had Watergate.

But as for the Bicentennial, and how we got involved, I was always in touch with Genny during this time. She was helping with marches, and, you know, the peace quilt, and she did cartooning, and she had her books, and of course, we exchanged camaraderie over that. I’m not a cartoonist, but I certainly loved her work. I think we used some of it in our newsletters, but the idea was that this was our creativity at that time, and that after the activism, where we were actually visible, we started meeting and talking about other ideas to continue.

And so, the impetus for the Bicentennial quilt really came when we started seeing the promotion of the Bicentennial. And the promotion, you cannot imagine, you turn on the TV and you’d have “revolutionary” drinks and food and cosmetics.

We thought, “this is really terrible,” and it was all using the flag. There was a national organization for the Bicentennial, so that everything would be official and would have this special stamp. We thought, “our community, our friends, activists, and even the kids—they can’t relate to this Bicentennial after what we’ve been through.” So, Genny had this idea, “I think we should do a Bicentennial quilt,” because her thing is quilting. Themed quilts. And she called me and other people. She said, “Let’s meet at my house.” When I went to her house, of course, she had her fellow quilters there already. Several African American women from East Palo Alto, who really knew how to quilt, and then some of the activist friends who were involved with Up Press. Up Press did revolutionary work, and they printed the first Asian American issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1972—that’s how I first met them.

I wrote an article. And it’s funny, it was for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, written by a group of scholars, graduate students, actually, a number of them from Stanford, who gathered together to write articles that had the sensibility of Vietnam, the countries that were under siege from American imperialism. And so, they said, “Let’s have an Asian American issue,” with the editors, Victor Nee, and his wife, Brett. Anyway, he got invited to go to China, and so he asked somebody, a student he knew named Shawn Wong. Do you know Shawn Wong, the writer? He’s a professor, now retired, from the University of Washington. And then Victor asked me and I said I am a writer, and I’ve written about the Chinese on the railroad, he just said, “Would you be co-editors of this issue? Because we have a story about Japanese Americans in relocation camps and then we have a story about…” Well, my article, it turned out. I just said, “I’ll write about Chinese Americans in court,” and so this was an article, maybe a very early article, on Chinese resistance in American courts. And on the cover was my grandfather’s Geary Act certificate.

Kahng: Oh, amazing.

Young Yu: I did research for this, and it was so exciting. I was sort of basing it on publications during the era of the Chinese Exclusion law. But anyway, I had a personal thing, and my grandmother was on Angel Island. I have personal stories from the oral history of my parents, so that became my best attempt at a researched article, and truly by concerned Asian scholars. My husband said, “Well, two out of three ain’t bad. You’re concerned and you’re Asian.” I learned so much, you know, and so that was published by Up Press, so I went to visit this press, and it was run by women. And they were excited to have publishers or printers who are so excited about your work and putting together something.

So back to the quilt. So, we had this meeting, and Genny called a bunch of us, including the people from Up Press who were wonderful activists, and nobody’s trained to be a quilter. They worked the press, they did that, and, we were—well now we don’t say housewives, but, you know—maybe stay-at-home moms and other activists.

But, we’re a community of people, that’s what I wanted to say. So we all came and met together, and you had such a feeling when we were all in that room. And then Genny, you know, she sat around the table, and we just talked about what we’re going to do, what her concept was, and she said, “I think that everybody should have input. What do you think is important to put in this quilt? For the two-hundred-year anniversary of the United States, what are the movements?” Because we realize it’s going to be about movements about people. Her concept was that everybody should have input on what is important history for the two-hundred-year anniversary of the United States. It was going to be about movements, things that changed the spirit of America: people’s struggles, successes, triumphs, incredible defeats, and overcomings.

We were community people just having and doing this homespun activity. But it was very exciting, because everybody, I mean, I don’t think anybody spoke out of turn or interrupted one another. We just wanted to listen.

I just remembered one of the early women speakers was Marge Murphy, she just said, “Well, I want to talk about the riots, the Watts riots,” because she was really involved with those events. She’s white and she said, “You know, I was waiting at a bus stop, going to work, and suddenly, I was… there are, you know, Black workers standing with me, and suddenly, a squad came by and beat us all up,” She was so beaten up, and she was rescued by the people living in the neighborhood who were Black, and then she said that was her route, that was her experience with radicalization, and so she just said, “I’m gonna do that.” And then we’re sitting there mesmerized.

The early squares were all people speaking out from their personal experience, and of course, we had so many people who were in the anti-war movement, and we decided, let’s make that the student movement. And I wrote that one. And then people talked about, “Okay, what about the old days?” You know, somebody goes, “Oh, child labor. My grandmother was a child laborer.” When we went into history, I said, “Well, I’ll do the Chinese working on the railroad.” My connection was that my great-grandfather was a railroad worker. And I am a terrible artist. I had my husband do the line, and I stitched over it, because they said, “Any help you can get, you just do the square.”

That was an early meeting with the, let’s say, the younger community women, or quilters—not that age had anything to do with it. We were all different ages later on, when people invited other people. The second meeting, where we were starting, Genny had the cloth, and she said, “This is what it’s going to look like.” And then somebody brought a woman, an elderly woman, named Bea Keesey, and she happened to be the great-granddaughter of John Brown. She had with her the Bible that I guess her great-grandfather carried in the raid on Harper’s Ferry. And she passed it around, and we’re going, “Oh my god,” because we know about Harper’s Ferry. So she stitched the Harper’s Ferry square. It was very, very personal.

We were all given pieces of cloth. One square I love is the three-dimensional one of the Flint strike—I didn’t know about the Flint strike, that’s about the autoworkers, and it’s three-dimensional. And I guess the person who did it had relatives who were in Detroit. She talked about how the men held out for days and days and weeks and weeks, and the women would be bringing them food, and she did this in three dimensions, and it was very moving when she told us about it. You know, we were all kind of tearing up on some of these descriptions.

I decided we had to include the story of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, and a friend of mine, whom I was working with on textbook reform, was Jeanette Arakawa. She just passed away two years ago. As a child she was incarcerated at Rohwer Relocation Camp in Arkansas. And she was very, very quiet. She talked about it, so I knew. A lot of these things [in the quilt] were from friends who’ve told us stories before. When Jeanette and I were working on textbooks, she talked about how we have to have this story in textbooks. She lived in Los Altos Hills, and her kids were in my school district. And I just said, “Well, Jeanette could you come to this meeting? I want you to do this,” you know? And she just said, “Well, just tell me, just give me the square, and I’ll think of something.” And she did a beautiful square, you know, with a poem by Miyuki Aoyama, who was incarcerated at Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

We wanted to include things that were not mentioned in the national Bicentennial narrative. The Bicentennial that was celebrated was focusing on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—mainly the Declaration of Independence and, you know, Washington and Jefferson. Those were the icons and the people that were in all the advertisements. Oh, and another group wanted to have a People’s Bicentennial, but it was almost like the same established history. So we just thought—well, after we had the squares all together, Genny said, “We have to write a book about it,” and asked, “Connie, would you write about this?” And it seemed a little overwhelming , but I just thought, “Well, of course, of course!”

When I got the assignment to do it, I felt so excited and honored by all of these women that were going to give me their notes, but I had to research each square. I actually went to references. Like on child labor, I had the book Labor’s Untold Story, because it turns out, when we looked at the squares, so many of the squares involved labor, because it’s about the American people. I got this book called, Labor’s Untold Story, and it talked about all the struggles to have a labor movement, the Wobblies. And I thought, “Wait a minute, there’s not a single word about any person of color in this movement,” because early organized labor excluded them, and it was the biggest irony. I thought, “Oh my god.”

Kahng: That’s incredible. Wow.

Young Yu: So, okay, I’ll stop.

Kahng: No, that’s incredible. I mean, it’s really amazing how it was this really collective project, and there are all these different histories that you were able to tell with it, and everyone contributing these different histories. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you and these collaborators found each other. I mean, you mentioned how you already knew Jeanette Arakawa through the textbook review project, but how about all the other collaborators? How did you all find each other?

Young Yu: Well, I think that having Genny as my friend and involved with quilts, and also her sensibility in reaching out to other communities, having worked with the women from East Palo Alto. And at that time, East Palo Alto was almost 100% African American. Now it’s Latino and other ethnic groups. Everybody did live on the peninsula. In California, most people came from all different places—back East, the Midwest. A friend of mine, Cindy Wilbur, was born in St. Louis. She was involved with the antiwar movement. She is a very good friend of mine. And we first met at the Peace Center. She is part Cherokee, and she made the square, “Trail of Tears.”

Kahng: I see, so it was, like, largely a network—friends of friends, people within the community.

Young Yu: With Up Press, which was sort of an outlier or a radical maverick printing press that was in East Palo Alto, and those days, it was on Whiskey Gulch, which, you know, was right outside of Palo Alto. There were some community organizations. That’s now a big hotel: the Four Seasons. You can’t imagine what it was like. So I would say there were women from the press, from East Palo Alto, from Genny’s group, and from networks of other people who knew people or had relatives. There were people from San Jose, so that’s a large community, and then we had United Farm Workers.

Okay, that’s another thing. United Farm Workers. You cannot imagine. In Palo Alto and in all of California, there were people that were organizing for the United Farm Workers. There was the United Farm Workers Organization to support boycotting. We boycotted grapes, we picketed. You know, that was one of my first activist group demonstrations. My kids were holding picket signs in front of Safeway protesting their buying from corporate agribusiness—agribusiness was excluding organized farm workers. We had a lot of people that were connected with that. So many people wanted to do that square on the quilt, so it was a collaboration. But if you talked to anybody, they would go back in their background, and they would have something that was part of a struggle. Because of their background—especially if they lived in the Midwest, in the rural areas—and the populist movement. So anyways, it was more than just our community.

Kahng: I love that. It’s really a beautiful project, and such a beautiful way that all these different communities were brought together. Could you tell me, what were the directions people had for working on each square? What were the parameters?

Young Yu: They were given the square, and Genny just said, “However you want to do this,” and if you needed help with the stitching, she would stitch it all together. You know, she said, “I will help you, or the other women will help you, but it’s all up to you how you want to portray your square.”

Kahng: Can you tell me a bit more about the range of subjects the squares covered?

Young Yu: We made a list. Okay, I have to tell you, I don’t remember anybody saying, “Oh, that’s not relevant.” You know, because there were some things I never had heard of. I never had heard of, you know, Shay’s Rebellion, but somebody said, “Gee, that really was something my grandparents talked about.” And so we just said, “if you think that’s important.” We just had such confidence in one another. I think because if you came to the meetings, you had some feeling for the project. You already decided, you know, you care about making, creating something that would stand for American people’s history.

And the idea of exclusion, well, certainly for me, the idea that Chinese were excluded from naturalization to citizenship just rankled… it’s always been part of my life and my thinking because of my parents and what they went through. Even though they were US citizens, we suffered discrimination in housing. It comes up, you know.

One square that I learned a lot from was Sacco and Vanzetti. It left an impression on me when I heard about it, and I thought “I will do research, and then tie it to the Rosenberg trial.” Several people who would have one incident would bring it into connection with the present day, which really impressed me.

There was one on lynching—oh my god. It’s the only one that was very upsetting. I remember it upset somebody very much to see that square with a black person hanging from a tree. I remember, it upset my mother very much. She put a cover over the book. But to the person who stitched it, you have to show it. It was very, very real.

And then, there were joyful ones like Bread and Roses. Oh, gosh. And that was by a woman from the East Bay who heard some folk singers sing about it, and of course there was the Bread and Roses Cafe. And that’s about women striking. It was based on a picket sign that said, “We want bread and roses, too.” These are very moving. The Flint strike was a success. The Farah strike was a success. You see a woman with her fist in the air—the woman at the very end, that stood for how we felt.

And then, years later, you know, we realized we didn’t have the Gay rights movement, because it hadn’t… it was just starting.

Kahng: It was just a little too early.

Young Yu: A little too early for this quilt. But several people who were involved with Gay rights. But they didn’t even call it that, you know?

Kahng: Right.

Young Yu: So, yeah, I’m just thinking, the women’s suffrage movement—a lot of the successful ones were on voting and segregation. That was really a very exciting thing. But when you think about the struggle and the sacrifice and the violence that led up to the Supreme Court ruling—after the Supreme Court ruled, the whole movement exploded. There was violence—think of the violence against the people trying to integrate the schools. But we showed the success, because in the end it did succeed.

Kahng: How did audiences encounter this quilt? How was it shown and circulated, and how did people respond to it?

Young Yu: Well, you know, when it came out, we had exhibits locally, like at De Anza College.

Kahng: My local community college. [Laughs]

Young Yu: Yeah! The exhibit was called The Power of Cloth, and I think the first exhibit was with other quilts. I think that we might have had our first exhibit at the Palo Alto Community Center, just of the quilt alone. And that, we organized ourselves. Well, let’s say, the first public one I think was all organized by ourselves. We didn’t have any support. So, yeah, De Anza was wonderful. We had an exhibit there at the Euphrat—I don’t know if you remember, they had a museum called the Euphrat. And the book sold locally—our black-and-white, simple book sold for $2, and it was not a bestseller.

Kahng: Do you remember how people responded to it when they were seeing it?

Young Yu: Well, everybody who saw it—it seemed like they were all either our friends, or total supporters. Not a single person said, “Oh, I don’t like that,” you know? It’s probably because we were showing at community places, and it was never sold at Books Incorporated or anything. You know, they don’t take books like ours. We can’t even talk about being overshadowed. It was just like… there was no way that we would have the attention, any attention that would connect this to this grand celebration, you know? And that’s very unfortunate, because it was so overwhelming—the parades. I remember in San Francisco, they had their big ships out there, and you could visit their ships, and big festivities.

We did this because we felt it was important. I was very excited about the book myself, because I really was so thrilled with what I learned, and how inspired I was by the quilt itself, so there was a lot of spirit in my writing. I mean, I really felt it just… there was no problem, no writer’s block. I just believed in each one. I really was excited, and I learned a lot, and felt good about writing each square, and then when the book came together, the introduction just flowed. I talked to Genny about it, and I just felt like, “Wow, we did it, we did it, we did it.” So I felt, you know… I think the satisfaction has to be in the work itself, and the fact that we did it because we believed in it, not thinking about, “Oh, are we going to convince anybody else?” It was our celebration.

Kahng: You referenced some of your family history and I’d like to ask you more about that. You’ve written about your family’s intersections with Asian American historical events like Angel Island and Chinese railroad labor. Could you share more about those histories and how they were passed down to you?

Young Yu: Like many Chinese American families, immigration is a very big thing in my family. Even though both my mother and father were born in the United States. My mother was born in San Francisco and she’s the granddaughter of a railroad worker. My mother’s grandfather, Lee Wong Sang, came in 1866 to work on the titlow—Cantonese for “Iron Road.” He was able to stay and become a partner in an import-export store in San Francisco’s Chinatown. That was how some people got a foothold, by becoming merchants. The Lee family was very big, so he eventually became the principal owner of the store, and he was able to send for his wife before the Page Act. Then she had three sons. One of their sons was my grandfather, Lee Yoke Suey. He was able to send for his wife during the Chinese Exclusion Act because he was a US citizen. At the time, he was able to go to China and come back with her, but even as a citizen, every time he traveled, he was stopped. There are many stories to do with how, even though you were a US citizen, (if Chinese) you would be stopped all the time. Anyway, he and his wife went back to China with their American-born children on trips for business, and on one trip he passed away on the ship. When his widow, my maternal grandmother, tried to return to the United States with her children, Grandmother was detained at Angel Island for over fifteen months. She was detained because, first of all, she was born in China, and she was a widow. And there was a law in those days that a woman, regardless of race, when she’s the widow, loses her husband’s status, and that was used against her. She had a re-entry permit because she was a wife of a citizen, which they said, “this is no longer valid,” so she was detained on Angel Island, and her children (one of whom was my mother) were allowed to land in San Francisco.

And then the Board of Inquiry questioner, and then she had a medical test, which showed that she had clonorchiasis. This is an infectious condition caused by liver fluke and the decision of the board was to deport her immediately, because that was ruled by the Island’s medical officer as a dangerous contagious disease. But she appealed. Luckily, her daughters went to their father’s former boss, Walter A. Haas of Levi Strauss & Co., and he hired a lawyer who took her case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But meanwhile, months and months are going by. After fifteen and a half months, she was finally released because the court ruled in her favor saying that the liver fluke was not contagious and she could be cured. Her lawyers also argued that she had American-born children who needed her care, and that she’s the widow of a natural US-born citizen. Anyway, she was released on probation and eventually won her case. My mother often told me about the heartbreak of separation from her mother, and I lived with this story for my whole childhood.

On my father’s side, my father always told us when we were growing up, “Your grandfather, my father, came to the United States in 1881.” My grandfather arrived in 1881, just before the Chinese Exclusion Act. My father always said, “If he’d come one year later, he wouldn’t have been allowed in.” So I grew up very aware of exclusion laws. I had the certificate that my mother showed me that the Chinese had to register and carry. And I found out much later, by seeing other certificates, even children who were born in the US had to register.

So I knew about this discrimination, even though I certainly felt very privileged. We lived in a nice middle-class neighborhood in the Richmond district, I attended good San Francisco public schools that were ethnically diverse and went to a private college and was privileged. Let’s say, I felt I was treated like an American citizen. But I knew that was my background. Knowing this history, and knowing the struggles, and knowing that in each case, the Chinese resisted. They appealed and challenged these exclusion laws. My parents and their relatives were members of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance that fought these laws. I was fortunate, and I realized I was fortunate, because a lot of my friends who, when I went to high school, their parents never told them anything, because you’re not supposed to talk about it, because you might be deported.

And then the railroad, my parents always wanted to say that we are from pioneer families. All of us worked the land, we worked, we were building, and my parents were very proud of their background of their ancestors coming to work. It’s labor again, you know? Which is very ironic, because you never would say it, because if you’re a merchant, you get, you know, a different status, but anyway.

Kahng: When you began researching your father’s community in San Jose Chinatown, what did that research process look like? How did you gather materials, stories, archives?

Young Yu: Well, my father, of course, had a lot of photographs. We have photographs dating back to the 1920s. I mean, we had the whole community captured in time, and then I interviewed my father’s friends. My father passed away at seventy-five in 1987, but I was writing the book, Chinatown, San Jose, USA in the 1990s. And my daughter, Jessica Yu, made a film, a documentary (Home Base: A Chinatown called Heinlenville) and she also interviewed former townspeople. And they came with photographs and stories and stories and stories that were just fantastic about what it’s like being in a Chinatown—with festivals and a rich culture—that’s surrounded by a fence, that’s segregated from the rest of the city. But I learned that they had one high school in San Jose, and that made all the difference. Everybody had to go to that high school. So they were saying that that made a difference in feeling that they were Americans.

My father grew up in this all-Chinese community, and he went to Stanford University. And the story of why he went to Stanford goes back to this thing. He attended San Jose State—it was a two-year college then, and he’d have to transfer, and he wanted to go to UC Berkeley, which was so prestigious. His mother said firmly to him, “no, you go Stanford!” because she had heard all the stories of the Chinese workers from Stanford coming to their store who were protected by Mrs. Stanford. This was during the time when, you know, there were labor movements who were organizing and threatening Chinese, it was just a terrible time, and Chinese felt they were protected working at Stanford. So my grandmother tells my dad to go to Stanford, meaning that’s the safest place for her son to study. My dad would be one of the few Chinese there going to school. But the university, you know, all the cooks, all the groundskeepers and gardeners, they were Chinese from the beginning. In fact, the university itself was built on the backs of Chinese railroad workers. And that part has been kept from history.

So, anyway, researching started with archaeology. The most important thing, the biggest factor in how San Jose even recognized that we had Chinatowns, and why we have Heinlenville Park is… it started with an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) process. It was for the building of the Fairmont Hotel in the 1980s that excavated this whole burnt-out area in the center of downtown. It was one of the largest Chinatowns in California at that time, the Market Street Chinatown, destroyed by arson May 4, 1887. It was home to merchants and families and a homebase for workers in the Valley. During the excavation, archaeologists revealed the burned remains of a large, established Chinatown, and the people in San Jose said, “We didn’t know there was one here.” A plaque was installed at the Fairmont Hotel (now the Hilton) tells the story.

I knew about it as a child, hearing my grandfather talk about it, living in the Chinatown that was burned, therefore the Chinese had to move to another Chinatown, and there was a struggle to build it. So all of that—they call it a collection now. All of the things that were burned-out, and a huge mass of material, is now at Stanford University, studied in the archaeology department. It’s been studied for, my god, twenty years.

And so, that’s how I started writing about the Chinatowns of San Jose. The Chinese Historical and Cultural Project (CHCP) restored the original altar of the temple in Heinlenville and was rebuilding a replica temple in History Park. The San Jose Historical Association (now History San Jose) said, we should have some history about it, and asked me to write a book, Chinatown, San Jose, USA. And then, the site of Heinlenville, which is miles away—the second Chinatown, where my father was born—was excavated much later, after the book, and now there’s a park there with a history wall and walkway. The history is written in stone, and I wrote the text, and the graphic designer Tamiko Rast, whose family has been involved in Japantown for generations, designed it.

The Chinatown known as Heinlenville faded because of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the buildings were torn down in 1931. The property was owned by the city and used as a corporation yard for fifty years. And finally, when it was sold to a corporation with plans for development, there was an archaeological excavation, and I was asked to be one of the community consultants. I had a hard hat, I was going into the digs, and it was very exciting. I was able to sift the stuff right at the site of my grandfather’s store, and I found a marble that my father probably had played with.

Kahng: That’s incredible.

Young Yu: And another place, it was a half of a jade bracelet, a lot of things, but, you know, not that much, because the Chinese, of course, they took everything with them. So, anyway, there’s enough to show a sense of place. I connected the stories, and we made a video, a documentary called Digging to Chinatown (2016), which was directed by Barre Fong. I’m the writer on it and it’s a forty-minute film about the history, and interviewing archaeologists and historians, and people, descendants like myself.

You know, one time I felt I was stuck in the same village, but I just realized what a big story it really is. I was stuck in the same village for decades, you know. It’s really a very wide story. It’s a story of the Chinese immigration, the story of the exclusion law, how Chinatown and the Chinese community survived. And, what their descendants have done, and the changes in immigration laws. One Chinese-American, one of my father’s friends, said “If you’ve seen one Chinatown, you’ve seen them all. There’s a temple, there’s a school, there’s a gambling house, there’s this and that,” but I realized it is about having a homebase and it’s how Chinese people survived and had the joy of tradition and culture and community.

Kahng: Does it feel different when you’re doing research on histories in the South Bay, like San Jose, Palo Alto, versus when you’re doing work or history in San Francisco? When you’re in those different regions, is the approach different? Are the people different? I’m just kind of curious, thinking as someone who’s from the South Bay, and who spends a significant time in the city.

Young Yu: Okay, definitely, I think that the San Francisco Chinatown was strict, you know, it’s Chinese people that are all involved with the commerce, and also everybody belongs to family and a district association. Okay, that’s a basis for the Chinatown. It was not mainly a home base for workers—well, yes, it was a cultural home base for Chinese all over. Whereas in the South Bay and all the rural communities, it’s about labor, and it became a refuge for other Asian Americans. We have the Filipino community, which came as agricultural workers, because, later after the Chinese, the Japanese came. They had no place to go. The first place to go, where they can get supplies and get credit was Chinatown, and we talked about it in our documentary. There was a beautiful symbiotic relationship and also support. And the Filipinos also, when their workers came, they went to Japantown, and then when the Japanese had to go to camp, the Filipinos stayed, but the Japanese were able to reclaim their stores because somebody had power of attorney saving it for them, so nobody could jump on it. And the Chinatown had already faded, but the idea is that the rural communities were home bases for working people. I went to a conference on rural Chinatowns, and, you know, the one connecting thing was the Chinese benevolent organizations, mainly the Chinese Six Companies, who advocated for the people.

I want to say, I’ve been working with the Japanese American Museum of San Jose (JAMsj), and we’re talking about how to define community. We’ve had panel discussions on this area, and we realized what has happened is that we’ve had Asian communities. It’s not Asian fusion. They were all separate, but they could live in the same area, and you don’t have that in San Francisco, because you realize it was a commercial city. US and China trade was so important, that’s why after the earthquake, they couldn’t kick out Chinatown, even though they wanted to. You have to have that commercial trade.

So that makes it very different, makes it more of a hub, you know? And one thing that connected all of the Chinese communities in America was the support for Sun Yat-sen and China as a republic. He went to every single Chinatown, and all the overseas Chinatowns supported Sun Yat-sen. And he was in the Chinatown in Denver speaking when the revolution succeeded. In October 1911, he was in Denver, Colorado. So that history has been largely ignored when people talk about it, but it’s very important to Chinese, part of Chinese-American culture and sensibility.

Kahng: It’s incredible to grow up with these histories firsthand, when so much of this history wasn’t taught in schools, I mean, as you know with your textbook work. Can you tell me about your work reviewing textbooks? How did the process work? How did you get into that kind of work? And what kind of steps were involved in that? What kind of revisions were made?

Young Yu: I was very fortunate in that I was asked to be part of the California committee on legal compliance in textbooks with Jeanette Arakawa and Eimi Okano, who started something in the 1970s in their own school district in Palo Alto. She was a real instigator, pioneer, path finder. She was just amazing. These were very unassuming, quiet, determined, steely women, who went to their PTA and said, “We’d like to talk about inclusion. We’d like to have a textbook review committee.” They started in their own school district. And I guess the word spread, and then somehow, she asked me to consult on that. Jeanette said, “There’s going to be a California legal compliance committee, and I think you should be part of it.” It was thrilling. There were people from all different communities.

These were groups in different communities meeting, and we would send our report, and I actually went to Sacramento, and I was on a panel, and we would read these textbooks by these big publishers. The textbooks by big publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt would arrive at my door. Every single one totally omitted anything about Japanese people or Chinese people or women. They were full of misconceptions and omissions. There wasn’t a single book that passed muster. And I remember going to face the publishers, and telling them what they did wrong. One said there was a Chinese Exclusion Act mentioned, but I noted that the book did not state the most critical part of the 1882 law: that it prohibited Chinese from naturalization to citizenship and was not repealed until World War I. And then the pictures in textbooks, another had no pictures of women at all. It’s kind of amazing. Well, we’re talking about 1980. They could have at least had Jeannette Rankin. We were just shocked with the wording and the depictions of people and the way they were dressed. When they’d have stories about women, it was just all these negative, snide attitudes, “not bad for a woman” or something, you know?

But they weren’t talking about movements. That’s the difference. If you don’t talk about people’s movements, you’re only talking about heads of state and statesmen. I mean, who’s in the Declaration? There’s not a single signer of the Declaration of Independence that’s a woman or a person of color, so that’s the history. And if you teach history in that way, of course, that’s all people are going to know. And that’s what the Bicentennial, the official Bicentennial did, you know?

Kahng: Right, exactly. It’s interesting to be able to see this kind of crossover with your challenges to the textbooks and the official Bicentennial, and then the People’s Bicentennial Quilt, the histories of movements, and this kind of democratic approach to writing history, the people’s history of the US versus the official history. It’s really so great.

Young Yu: See, official history has to be all the laws that were passed. The people who did them, and the leaders, so, you know, that’s the way it is.

Kahng: When you were presenting these revisions, were there obstacles you faced when you’re trying to change these narratives? How did you and your collaborators respond? How did the textbook companies respond? How did that process go?

Young Yu: The textbook companies were very upset, because the consensus of the review panel was that California schools would not accept their books. That was the most exciting thing.

Kahng: You had power.

Young Yu: So California was, you know, we had some very progressive action going on at that time. I mean, all the activists in the sixties, you had good results in California. Even though we had Ronald Reagan as governor later, who said, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” Well, anyway, that was very successful. I felt that there was a sense of overcoming. That’s why we feel so betrayed now. It’s unspeakable. Every day, every day.

Kahng: I also wanted to ask: you just have so much you’ve done in your life, so much activity, so much work. You’ve collaborated across a lot of communities, collaborated with figures like George Takei, you’ve done important cross-racial, cross-community solidarity, you talked about the Third World Liberation Front. I’m wondering if you could talk about the cross-racial solidarity work you’ve done, and how that has been important in your work.

Young Yu: Well certainly, working on the Bicentennial quilt was a major force for me, because it was able to visually put the movements of Asian Americans, and the Chinese, the milestone of the rail, into this pageantry of American history. It was so important to put the struggle of what happened to the Japanese—that cannot be denied—into the national narrative.

And the story of immigration, where we were able to tell, say, it’s not just about the Statue of Liberty—give me your tired, your hungry, your masses yearning to breathe free—and the fact that how people of color and, people of, well, different ideas, and had to struggle to even survive in their communities in America.

So, to be able to look at this and say, look, there it is, there it is, there. We’re making this statement. I just think that this object was so important that you have to see it. You can’t just have it in words. You just can’t have it in a concept. Essays are wonderful, speeches are wonderful, that we memorize, but it’d be great to have an image that was, you know, etched in our national narrative memory.

I met George Takei at the Democratic Convention in 1972. Well, you know, there were only six Asians out of like two hundred and something delegates. Well, it’s a huge number of delegates, and there are only six Asians, so we were in our little collective. And George was wonderful, of course, kind of rallying us together, and also saying, “Let’s unite. Let’s go with the Chicano group,” because we were so small, and the Chicano Coalition, they were big. That gave us a feeling of solidarity and also understanding. And so many of us were involved with the United Farm Workers, but they also said, that’s not just it. This is not just about a labor movement. This is about how we are regarded as people, as citizens. They called themselves Chicano at that time because they wanted to say, “We’re proud of this word that has been considered insulting to us. We’re proud of being called Chicano.”

So we had to show that we had a collective political voice. That was the first idea. We didn’t go very far with it. McGovern had the biggest defeat in US history as a presidential candidate.

Anyway, that was a time when we didn’t use the words “African American.” It was just “Black.” Black people. Black people, brown people. And, I don’t know, we didn’t say yellow. We just… I really like the term Asian Americans, and I know we’ve talked about it, asking “Do you like AAPI?” And I said, you know, Asian Americans, I’m happy with it. AAPI Heritage Month, it’s very important to have that.

Kahng: When you’re looking across all these projects, do you see crossover in terms of method or approach? Are there ways that you took lessons from other ones when you approached future projects?

Young Yu: I should talk about my ongoing project. So it’s whatever medium that we can use at this time. My current project is the Geary Act Project, and I’m just very excited about that. It started, Barre Fong and I, the filmmaker with whom I’ve done six or seven videos, all about community. You know, we did one with the Japanese American History Museum in San Jose, called Uncommon Ground. And that was talking about our communities living together at one time. But, back to the current project, the Geary project. This project is showcasing and collecting certificates of residence.

Remember I told you the one that has my grandfather’s picture that was required by all Chinese by the Geary Act of 1892? Do you know the book by Michael Luo called Strangers in the Land? He has a chapter on the Geary Act, and he asked me to read it ahead of time. I read it, and I go, “Yes, but you have to mention that the Geary Act, requiring certificates, even children, men, women, and children, it’s not just laborers, it’s all Chinese,” I’d like to send you some certificates, including one of a woman, one of a child.

Barre and I were both part of the Stanford Chinese Railroad Workers Project in North America from Stanford University. We were in charge of oral histories of descendants of Chinese railroad workers, and while we were interviewing a great-grandson of a railroad worker, we saw he had all these papers, a paper trail, and he had this certificate, and it looked just like my grandfather’s certificate of residence, 1894—and this is of his father’s grandfather, a worker on the transcontinental railroad.

And I said, “Oh my god, can you copy it? This is evidence, evidence of the exclusion.” And so we had a copy of it for the historical record. And then last year, after Trump was elected, we were so discouraged. Barre and I, we just said, “What can we do? What can we do?” We thought, “Well, we do what we can do in our capacity, the kind of work we’ve always done.” And I said, “Barre, let’s do a showcase of all the certificates we’ve collected. We have photographs, so let’s put them online,” and “Let’s ask other people to send them in from their collections,” because that’s how we get them. Some people have kept them all these years. And so, that’s what the project is, and we made a statement on why we’re doing it. Because now the US challenges immigration and birthright citizenship, we want to show that the people have struggled against this, and the Chinese actually fought this up to the Supreme Court, and they lost. The famous Fong Yue Ting v. United States and the Geary Act. And so with the Geary Act Project we collect and showcase Certificates of Residence required for the Chinese because of the law of 1882.

It’s exciting to have people send them in with the background of how they got this, and who people are. And then we also have a category called Special Projects, where people have written papers, like Laura Ng who wrote a paper on the Geary Act—how it affected certain laborers in Southern California—and Professor Gordon Chang of Stanford University. He has his grandfather’s, and was explaining the mystery behind it. And we’ve posted a paper by Professor Alexander Jin, called “A History of the Geary Act,” in which he talks in detail about the research he’s done on the resistance, and the opposition to it, and some other important facts about it. So, it’s a website, that’s what it is. We had a launch last year at the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco. We’ll have our one-year anniversary in May.

Kahng: Oh, that’s incredible. It’s this great way that you’re able to use this website to have a kind of open call with this project, whereas in the past, it was more of digging into different communities on your own, a little bit more on the ground. To close out, since I’ve taken so much of your time, I want to ask: With all you’ve experienced, how do you assess the present moment in relation to previous periods of exclusion or regression? Does it feel similar? Does it feel worse?

Young Yu: It feels worse, because I know that on our country’s path toward great demise, it is destroying other societies, other communities, killing people—you know, upending countries and the world economy. I don’t know how we can recover from that. The people’s power is very important. I think that what we do is we keep is telling the story. We keep the ideals and we keep documenting the struggles and working to save historic sites. I feel that if someone were to ask me what was the one thing that I’ve done that was so meaningful, but also made a difference, it would be working on the committee that saved the Angel Island detention barracks from demolition. Saving that evidence, and showing that the writing on the wall was people speaking, and that that was their activism. If the building were torn down, we would not have the monumental history now.

That’s how easily history can be erased, and how scary it is. I just am so thrilled to be part of the group that saved it, that made a difference, because I really felt that we saved this evidence, and the evidence of the other people, and the struggle, and it’s part of American history. So that survives, you know? Our stories have to survive for the future—for our nation itself, for the people in it. This kind of work is so important. Keeping our stories alive, keeping our culture. It’s our culture.

Kahng: What do you think is the most important thing that’s needed now? For people who are young scholars or activists like myself, what type of work do you think we should be doing?

Young Yu: Keep on publishing, keep on writing. So, the scholars, young scholars like yourself, keep on looking and finding and discovering and digging deep. Because you’ll bring something to light that will blow us away, you know? I mean, do you know, for instance, the history of Tulsa? The fact that a whole African-American community was destroyed by bombs that was struggling to be an American middle-class community? And they would not let it. That did not come to light until, what—ten years ago?

Kahng: One more thing I want to ask you, from one Bay Area Asian American to another: looking at the Bay Area, how do you think it’s changed over the years, and how do you see that that’s affected the broader community?

Young Yu: One thing I learned from a panel just last month, from a professor who’s Vietnamese, he said, “You Chinese and Japanese and Filipino, you talk about communities that are immigrants, ‘immigrant communities.’ We’re not an ‘immigrant community;’ we came on a jet plane. Other people came on a boat. You know, we were refugees.” So anyway, it’s just bringing the dynamic, a different discussion into it. But, the important thing is, there was opportunity here. This professor, he said, “President Ford didn’t want us to have a community. They wanted to send us all over the United States. We were in Connecticut, my family, but as soon as I got a job opportunity and I had my first bowl of pho in San Jose, I go, ‘I’m gonna stay here.’” So, you know, people came back. People want community. Asians want community. He said “There’s a difference between assimilation and acculturation.” He said “We’re not going to lose this, but it doesn’t mean we’re less American.”

This is very exciting to me. Maybe the future will be recognizing America as truly a nation of different ethnicities and experiences and cultural communities. They keep their ancestral culture or integrity, or they keep their own cultural genes. It’s very important that they do. In other words, America’s not a melting pot, and it never should be. That’s how I see it. And of course, I love the Bay Area, because it happens to have the concentration of Asian communities—because people want community. And guess what? It all goes back to Chinatown. Chinatown survived many attacks, including the earthquake. It survived because it was part of the Pacific—facing the Pacific.

Kahng: Before we go, there are all of these difficult moments in the present time that we’re going through. I’m wondering: after all these decades of documenting and shaping history—are there things that give you hope at this moment?

Young Yu: Yes, I do think that there is hope in the fact that people don’t stop. The people do not stop. I think that you certainly see this with the No Kings protests. People, with their signs, want to express how they feel. They are telling stories on their signs. Some of them are just, you know, defiant statements, but they want to speak out. You cannot suppress this—the people’s expressions. They keep saying, “We the people,” and they keep affirming their right to freedom of speech, and I think that’s our most important thing. That gives us hope, because, look—whether it impacts President Trump or not, even if he’s saying, “They’re paid by the media,” or, “They’re fake news,” well—it’s undeniable. Free speech and media cannot be suppressed. What they’re trying to do with the networks—people will show up, people will show up.

Kahng: That’s wonderful. Thank you so, so much, Connie, for taking so much time to speak with me. It was so wonderful. It’s such a treat to get to hear this history from you.

Young Yu: Well, I’m going to have hope in you, and I’m delighted that you’re going to go and do, and ask the question, “What can we do?”