Bill Wong
BILL WONG
Interviewer: Rose Huey
Support: Sandy Liao
Interview date: August 3, 2007
ROSE: When were you born and in what year?
WILLIAM: I was born in Oakland’s Chinatown, on Harrison Street between 7th and 8th Streets, in a house my parents rented. The year was 1941, exactly five months before the Pearl Harbor attack.
ROSE: Did that affect your family?
WILLIAM: It did in the sense that it started World War II, and Oakland became very busy with shipyards, which were near Chinatown, so the businesses got very busy. My parents opened the restaurant in 1943. As a result of that, they were able to begin moving towards the middle class. It is an amazing story about how World War II was so positively impactful on poor and working-class Chinese American families in Oakland.
ROSE: In our pre interview meeting, you talked about the Exclusion Act. I was wondering if you could explain that and its effects.
WILLIAM: Let me tell it this way. My father came to the United States in 1912 when he was a teenager from a village in the Toisan region of southeastern China, what we could call the greater Hong Kong area or the Pearl River Delta. The Chinese Exclusion Act started in 1882. That act banned Chinese laborers from coming to the United States.
Thirty years before that, during the Gold Rush and the decades after that, there were a lot of Chinese who came from the Pearl River Delta area of China. They came to the United States first to look for gold, along with a lot of other people from around the world.
The Gold Rush was an amazing event in California. The Exclusion Act was passed by Congress because there were Chinese laborers who were seen as cheap competition for white laborers. It was right after the building of the transcontinental railroad where the Chinese were the workers building the western half. Irish workers, who built the eastern half, didn’t like the competition, and an Irish laborer leader led a racist political movement that eventually led to the Chinese Exclusion Act.
My father came over in 1912 during the Exclusion period. He had to go through interrogations at Angel Island, which was the processing station at the time. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake comes into the play. In San Francisco, all the birth records were kept at City Hall, but the fire after the earthquake burned down City Hall and many other buildings. That meant the Chinese who wanted to come to the United States during the Exclusion Act era could claim that they were sons of U.S. citizens, since there were no longer birth records of Chinese living in California. If you were a son of a U.S. native, or citizen, that made you eligible for legal entry. My father claimed to be a son of a native. We don’t think that is true. We think he was an illegal immigrant.
ROSE: Why did your parents moved here?
WILLIAM: My father came for economic opportunities. He was a teenager, and we don’t know the full story, but we are pretty sure that his mother sent him to the United States because there were already people from his village and other villages from around the Toisan region who had come to America to work and make a little money to help their poor families in China. From 1912 to 1933, he went back to China four times. Each time he went back, he fathered a daughter. Then in 1933, he brought his wife and three daughters in the United States to finally settle in Oakland.
ROSE: When you were born in Chinatown, was your family separated or together?
WILLIAM: When I was born, we were together. But my sisters tell me that in 1933, when the three sisters and my mother and father first came here, there was a period they had to live separately. The reason for that is that my mother and father lied to the immigration authority about their relationship. They said they were brother and sister because at that time, Chinese men were not allowed to bring their China-born wives, but for some reason they could bring their sisters.
They were married, but the laws did not allow them to be married, so they claimed to be brother and sister. To keep up that deception, in the very early days when they were in Oakland, they had to keep separate households for a short period of time. By the time I came along, we were a family living on Harrison Street where I was born.
ROSE: So why did your family choose Oakland to settle?
WILLIAM: That is also a bit of a mystery. I think it had to do with the fact that the sponsor of my father had a store in Oakland. Since he was the one who said he was my father’s father, or there was some relative who had a place in Oakland that would be able to employ my father, my father settled in Oakland and later brought his family.
ROSE: So you said your father was sponsored. What does that mean?
WILLIAM: Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, in order for Chinese to come legally, they had to be sponsored by somebody who was here legally. In this case, Chinese who were merchants were
legal immigrants. Chinese merchants could say they have sons born in China. That was the basis of the so-called “paper son” system in those days.
In my father’s case, the man who sponsored my father was not truly his father. But he said he was his father. That was why my father said he was the son of a native to be classified as a legal immigrant.
That was why at Angel Island, when they went through the interrogation process, the inspectors were trying to make sure the story of the immigrant was the same as the story of the sponsor. And that is also why you get all these silly questions that were asked of my father and thousands of Chinese immigrants coming through Angel Island.
ROSE: So do you have any significant memories growing up in Oakland Chinatown?
WILLIAM: Oh, I have a lot. It might be a cliché saying that it takes a village to raise a child. That was how I remember Chinatown to be in those days, if not physically a village, a place where it was so easy for children of the business owners around 8th and Webster Streets, and 7th and Franklin, and 8th and Harrison, to just play on the streets when they weren’t required to work in the family business.
You kind of always knew there would be some adults who knew your family, who knew who you were, so you kind of knew you couldn’t be bad. There was an incubator feeling about Chinatown. I remember feeling so safe in Chinatown.
Another thing that I remember was the Chinese New Year when it was really a lot of fun. We would hear this weird music coming from the second floor of the Chinese associations. This was Chinese opera during Chinese New Year celebrations. You would hear it from the second floor association offices, but we didn’t know what it was because we were too young.
The boys would have a lot of fun selling firecrackers. I remember having firecracker wars across Webster Street. We just goofed off and threw lit firecrackers at one another. When the police came to Chinatown, we were very good about hiding our supplies in the tire wells of the cars parked on the street. That was another very warm, fun experience for all of us.
ROSE: Okay, so, speaking of traditions, did you have any specific traditions your family practiced?
WILLIAM: I remember the restaurant ran seven days a week during the World War II period. I don’t remember whether we got together for Chinese New Year, which was a very important time for Chinese American families.
We also did something called bai-sin (in the Toisan dialect), which means burning incense in honor of the memory of our ancestors. We would do that during special holidays and celebrations, especially Chinese New Year.
For kids even today at Chinatowns all over America, during Chinese New Year, adults would give young children hoong bao, red envelopes filled with money. That was the best time of the year for kids -- to be able to make some money. Sometimes we would get maybe $20 total. At that time, $20 was a lot of money because each envelope might only have a dime or a quarter in it.
Today we still carry on that tradition in my family. At my house every year, we have a family Chinese New Year dinner. It is a sit-down dinner for 30 or more people. My wife and I work for days to get the place ready. Our living-dining room is filled, sometimes part of the kitchen or our guest room or a spare bedroom is filled.
The unmarried children of our second or third generation all get hoong bao. We also try our best to have some of the dishes that are traditional to Chinese New Year. We sometimes cheat a little and are a little Western about it, but it is still Chinese food. We carry on Chinese New Year in a big way still in my family.
Another tradition, which isn’t necessarily “exotic” Chinese, is that our family gets together fairly regularly. I think that is an important tradition in Chinese American families where different generations will gather for big occasions. It could be a birthday party or it could be a graduation, or weddings or to celebrate the births of babies.
Subsets of our extended family get together too outside of special holidays or occasions. I have six older sisters, five of them are still alive, and four of them have children. So we have a large, extended family. I think that is a family tradition – getting together -- we carry on still.
ROSE: How did you spend your family time when you were a kid?
WILLIAM: Comic books, playing with marbles, and yo-yos. We were pretty poor as a family in Chinatown, and we didn’t have a Toys’R’us near us, so we had to make our own toys. I remember we used to make a leather-bound thing with cut-up newspapers, and we would bounce it on one foot while balancing on the other. It was something to play with.
We got into American sports too, especially the boys. Lincoln Square was close by, so we learned to play baseball, basketball, and football. I am sure I spent some money on a ball, a bat or things like that.
ROSE: So, you said you played with your friends around the family’s restaurant? How did you guys communicate around?
WILLIAM: When we were young, many of us would go to Lincoln School until mid-afternoon. Many of us would go to Chinese school together from 4 to 6 every day, and Saturday mornings. There were children of our own age, so we had a nice group of kids at various age levels who were together. But sometimes if we had free time, the boys would go to Lincoln Square to play ball or to have firecracker wars. Then during some down times in the evening or weekend, we would see one another on the street and hang out, or maybe try to go further out into downtown Oakland, which was a little scary.
As young Chinese kids, we were not encouraged to get out of Chinatown much. It wasn’t as though we couldn’t; it was a matter of how we felt and how people might look at you. I don’t remember any time when I was called a name, but I remember there was the feeling that Chinatown was our place. I go back to the image of the village raising the children and that was our comfort zone those days.
But I also remember going up to the Paramount Theater, when it was an actual movie theater. When I was growing up, the Paramount played double features for a quarter. We would go up Broadway for about 10 or 12 blocks just to go to movies. That was a lot of fun. There were some movie theatres closer to us like the T & D, and the Roxie. We would spend time going to the movies.
Sometimes we would go to eat American food. Our restaurant also served American food, but I didn’t think the French fries were very good. We would go to places around the corner called Hamburger Gus’s and Hamburger Joe’s. They introduced us to French fries. Or we would go to the T & D Theatre for the same thing.
The T & D Theater was on 11th Street, which was only three or four blocks from our restaurant. It served snacks and candies and popcorn and French fries. We would walk up to the T & D Theater and not have money to go to the movie, but we would go there just to buy French fries.
ROSE: So how old were you when you moved out?
WILLIAM: Our family moved from Chinatown, from the Harrison Street house we rented, in 1948 when I was seven years old. We moved about two miles away to what today is called China Hill, a neighborhood just east of Lake Merritt, not too far from Oakland High.
In those days, we were about the third or fourth Chinese family in the neighborhood. This neighborhood, along with a lot of other Oakland neighborhoods, did not allow Chinese or African Americans or Mexicans to buy homes. But after World War II, everything began to change.
Even though this was our new house where we slept, we still had the restaurant, so we continued to spend a lot of time in Chinatown. But my father would drive us home and we would sleep there, then we would still go to Lincoln School in Chinatown. I went to Lincoln School until the eighth grade. I also still went to Chinese school. Even after we moved from Chinatown, Chinatown still remained the center of our lives.
ROSE: You keep talking about the restaurant, would you just explain what it was like?
WILLIAM: The restaurant was called the Great China. Its address was 723 Webster Street. The site is still there, and it is still a restaurant, but it has gone through numerous ownership and style changes. The Great China opened in 1943 when I was about two years old. Remember that was in the middle of World War II, and there were shipyards about half a mile away so there were a lot of workers who were not Chinese, who had come to Oakland and Bay Area to work in the war industry, the shipyards.
That’s why it was a good time for my family to have a restaurant, because my father and mother were struggling before World War II. My father ran an illegal gambling operation. He maybe ran a grocery store somewhere in the 1930’s. But my family was always hand-to-mouth poor.
Our family’s legend is that my father borrowed $3,000 from relatives to open the restaurant. He was able to pay that back in a matter of months. That shows you how busy the restaurant was during the war years. Since I was too young, I was told that during lunch or dinner hours, people lined up behind the counter just to have a chance to eat at the restaurant. And ours wasn’t the only restaurant like that.
The Great China had both a so-called American menu and a Chinese menu. I remember my older sisters and I would type the American menu every day on an old typewriter with purple ribbon and my father would make copies of that typed-up on a gelatin. The American menu would be in purple ink, and that’s how it was “printed.” We would clip the daily purple American menu onto a permanent menu that listed the Chinese dishes. I remember that permanent menu to be yellow-colored.
We would sell full meals for anywhere between 50-cents to about $1 – a full-course meal that included soup, salad, an entrée with rice or potatoes, and vegetables; a fresh-baked roll with butter, and dessert of either apple pie, custard pie, jello, or ice cream. I don’t remember if the full-course meal included coffee or tea, or just a glass of water.
That was for lunchtime, and dinner would be the same thing. We would serve things like beef stew, meatballs and spaghetti, roast beef, liver and onion, fried halibut, and hamburger steak. That was a popular menu because what I just described was full-course meals for from 50-cents to maybe $1.25.
My memory of the Chinese menu was that it was pretty pathetic. People would order it, but it wasn’t what we can get today at Chinese restaurants in the United States, or even in Oakland Chinatown now. The reason for that was that there wasn’t a critical mass of people who were demanding real authentic Chinese food.
The Great China was typical of a style of Chinatown restaurants in that time period. This kind of Chinese restaurant served both American stuff and Chinese stuff. We weren’t the only ones doing that. San Francisco Chinatown had some restaurants doing that. Quite frankly, I miss that kind of restaurant, because it was so Chinatown. I can’t think of a Chinatown restaurant today that serves a whole range of American meals, as well as some really good Chinese food, side by side.
My entire family worked in this restaurant -- my sisters, my parents, and then we had some hired help, some cooks, dishwashers, pastry chefs, a waiter or two. In the busiest days, we needed all those people. But as the business faded away after World War II and into the 1950s, it was not necessary to have as many staff.
After the war, we didn’t open seven days a week. The hours shrunk, and I knew that business was not as good as it used to be because that was when I had a chance to read the newspaper and draw. I would just draw horses, football players, whatever came to mind, and I even improved my vocabulary during the afternoon hours. I would use a paperback book that expanded my vocabulary.
I also learned how to type. At a table in the restaurant, when it wasn’t busy, my dad wanted me to learn how to type the American menus. I think one of my sisters, who took typing in high school, lent me her typing book. So I would sit there learning how to type. I couldn’t have done that during the war years because it would have been too busy.
Working in the restaurant was such a great experience. I mean, I say that now. But at the time, I probably wasn’t terribly happy working at the restaurant, especially during my teen years because as a teenager, you get a little feisty, kind of rebellious. We had friends who wanted us to go to the movies with them and I remember having to negotiate with one of my older sisters to take a shift that I was obligated to work so I could go out and have fun with my friends. We would always trade time.
As you can tell, the restaurant was such a powerful experience for me because that was where I grew up, but I didn’t have a chance to do a lot of other things American kids are supposed to do, like go to camps, summer vacations, and that kind of stuff.
I remember my first job at the restaurant was to wash water glasses. Then I eventually moved up to become a waiter. My sisters were all waitresses. Some of them made a lot of money with tips because some of them were quite charming and the men customers liked to be served by one or two of my sisters. I didn’t get that kind of treatment.
ROSE: What kind of people came into the restaurant?
WILLIAM: All kinds. Most of them were Chinese, Chinese Americans from Chinatown. But we had a wide range of customers. I don’t remember the World War II years, but I am sure shipyard workers came in and they were probably white men.
We had a family of Gypsies who came in. That was a memorable experience because when they came in, they were very demanding, and they liked to use a lot of salt, pepper, and ketchup on the dishes they ordered. Those little items in the restaurant can be costly for us because they are basically free to the customer. I remember my parents were quite upset when the Gypsies came in to order a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy and they poured a lot of salt, pepper and ketchup.
We also got white and African American customers. I don’t remember too many Mexicans or Latinos. We had some families coming in, but it was a lot of single men because Chinatown had a lot of single men and our restaurant was one of the more popular restaurants in Oakland Chinatown.
ROSE: How did the customers treat you?
WILLIAM: As I said, not as friendly as they treated my sisters. But it was fine. I remember having some arguments with some of the customers. It wasn’t over service; it may have been over baseball, or some topic. Later on, I remember having some political arguments with some of the customers. I remember one of them was pretty upset I would talk back to him, so he said, “You better watch it, Bill, someone is going to beat you up one of these days.”
Looking back, I am a little nostalgic and romantic about it, but when you are a young boy growing up in a big family as I was, I am sure pretty sure I didn’t see it as the ideal childhood. But I do look back fondly now because working in the family restaurant taught me something important. It taught me responsibility, and it taught me the importance of working as a team. I
took those lessons away, but it took a long time for me to realize that, long after I had stopped working at the restaurant.
I still love food, and I love cooking. That is the irony for me; I never had to or wanted to cook at the restaurant because that was for the adults. We had some professional chefs hired by my parents. My mother would be back in the kitchen doing prep work along with the hired cooks.
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what they did. All I cared about was we got some good food during our rushed meals in between serving customers. But when I got older and far away from the restaurant experience, I learned that I love not just to eat good food, but also began to learn how to cook. I must have absorbed some of that I experience at the restaurant, not any specific recipe, but just the love of exploring and experimenting with food. I love to watch cooking shows on television, on Channel 9. I read the food pages in newspapers and magazines, and I look at cook books.
ROSE: Did you mainly speak and hear Chinese when you were very young?
WILLIAM: Yes, when I was young. We were born into a Toisan household, and that was the only language I knew for two or three or four years. When the restaurant opened, I was two or three years old, so I must have begun hearing English. My parents would speak to us in Chinese at home. I don’t recall if the sisters would communicate to me in that way, but I am sure there was a lot of Chinese in our house, the see yip dialect. It had to be when I started in Lincoln School, which was only in English, that I picked up English. I picked up reading in Lincoln School, and I began reading in English. At the same time, my parents sent me to Chinese School, so I was hearing not the see yip dialect only anymore, but classic Cantonese, what we called som yup.
At Chinese school on Saturdays, they would teach Mandarin, or what’s called Pu Tong Hua today. We had to somehow navigate in three different Chinese dialects, and then I was learning English at the same time.
Through the years, my English really overwhelmed everything else. Even though I went to Chinese school for six or seven years, I guess I lost interest in the last few years. I changed Chinese schools when the Oakland Chinese Community Center was built in the 1950s at 9th and Harrison. It was a big building with an indoor basketball court, and I was slightly rebellious. Me and some other guys would rather play basketball than to go to class; we were defiant about going to class. The result of that was my English overwhelmed it all, and today, my Chinese is pretty bad.
ROSE: Did you speak Chinese with your friends?
WILLIAM: I am sure we did when were younger. During the elementary school years, we were not encouraged to speak Chinese. All but one teacher at Lincoln School was white, so we had to speak English.
For some reason, my ear picked up English much better and I was even rebellion or I didn’t think Chinese was a big deal, or it wasn’t validated by the larger society, so it just happened that I gradually lost my Chinese.
I just did what was easiest and the most fun. I began reading English-language novels when I was a teenager during the down times of the restaurant. I would just pick up novel and read them. I guess that is why I have an affinity for the English language.
ROSE: How was Chinese School? What did they teach you?
WILLIAM: Chinese school was both a lot of fun and torture. A lot of fun because the kids we knew were all around and some of us took it seriously, while others didn’t. We would learn calligraphy; we would learn how to use the brush and black ink. I think there was some literature; there must have been some history.
I don’t remember a lot about Chinese school in terms of the curriculum except for calligraphy. We would use tissue paper and literally trace the beautiful calligraphy by hand with brush and black ink. So I am still pretty good at that. I can copy Chinese calligraphy pretty darn well.
I haven’t done it in many years, but I had a chance to try it again a few years ago. At the Hand to Hand Self-Defense Center, about eight or ten years ago, they wanted their sign repainted with four Chinese characters, so Joyce (my wife) either volunteered me, or someone suggested I do the calligraphy. I said, “Wow, I haven’t done it in a long time.” I found some brushes and black ink, and at my dining-room table, I practiced. The sign at Hand to Hand with the four Chinese words are mine. I didn’t create them, but copied them. That was one thing I learned in Chinese school.
The other thing I remember about Chinese school was the really tough discipline of the teachers. It was corporal punishment where the teacher slapped or spanked a student. That was routine in Chinese school. They would use bamboo rulers and hit your hand, or hit the back of your leg if you didn’t do something right or were goofing off.
That, to me, precipitated some goofing off because when the teachers weren’t watching, we wadded up some paper and threw it at each other. So Chinese school was a combination of some fun and some torture. The bottom line is that instruction never stuck with me, and that is one of my regrets -- that I didn’t keep in the Chinese language.
ROSE: How was Chinese school different from American school?
WILLIAM: It was the kind of discipline and rote learning. Lincoln School wasn’t exactly free and creative at the time either. The educational system of West and East are sometimes contrasted, by saying Japanese and Chinese schools are very rigid and learn by rote, while the Western-style education is more creative and individually based.
But that is a little bit overblown in my view. It was obvious that Chinese school only had Chinese kids, whereas Lincoln School had a lot of Chinese kids, but also had White, Black, and Mexican kids. It was freer; you can be more of a kid.
I just explained to you there were times in the Chinese school where we would goof off, but that wasn’t encouraged. I think there was a matter of asking questions more at Lincoln or high school, more of an encouragement to question, although the teachers would always, in both schools, be authority figures to us children because we were taught to honor them in those days.
ROSE: Okay, so we are going to jump ahead a little bit, and so you were talking about the civil war in China between the PRC and Taiwan, so how did that affect you?
WILLIAM: I don’t think it affected me directly. It affected Chinatown in a serious way because the Chinatowns that developed in the United States from the Gold Rush era on and through the early part of the 20th century were really a reflection of the Pearl River Delta Chinese, the Cantonese, the Toisanese, who came to America during the period when China was going through an awful period on its own.
The Chinese who were in the United States Chinatowns had an affinity much more to what was going in China and the big political revolution over there. They had to choose between what they could learn was happening in China at the time, but when Sun Yat Sen started the Chinese Republic in 1911, it was very popular in American Chinatowns. There were branches of the Kuomintang – the KMT, or Nationalist Party -- in the U.S., including Oakland Chinatown. When the Communists came along to compete with the KMT to rule China, the American Chinatowns naturally backed the KMT because the Chinese in American Chinatowns came from an area that supported the KMT and they didn’t like the Mao Zedong Communists.
During World War II, when the two sides – the KMT and the Communists temporarily stopped fighting one another and instead fought the Japanese invaders – the wife of Chiang-kai Shek, leader of the KMT, came to the United States -- including Oakland Chinatown -- to urge people to buy war bonds to raise money to support the fight against Japan.
What you had in Oakland Chinatown, along with a number of other U.S. Chinatowns, was an entrenched KMT and very little support of the Communist-led People’s Republic of China (PRC). But as PRC won the civil war in 1949, the KMT still had a strong presence in American Chinatowns. Gradually, more people had an open mind about the People’s Republic, because that was mainland China. There were a lot of internal struggles in Chinatown, including Oakland, about individual organizations and families that supported one or the other.
I remember my mother’s reaction to the split in China more than my father’s. My father died when I was 20, so I never had a real opportunity to get to know him as well as I got to know my mother. My mother complained about the Communists because she got letters from people back in our village or nearby saying the Communists were terrible. She would echo that sentiment. She might have been reading the Chinese newspapers also, which were pro-KMT. The fact that this big international struggle in China between forms of government was happening seven thousand miles away from the United States had a ripple effect on American Chinatowns.
I was a kid when a lot of this was happening, so it didn’t affect me much personally. When I was at Cal, in my freshman or sophomore year, I took classes examining the new Chinese government. It was much more of an academic setting, so I was exposed to an academic analysis of the struggles over there.
In truth, I was really an American kid by then. My interests were sports and American politics because I was beginning to become really interested in the Eisenhower era of the fifties. When John Kennedy became President in 1960, I was only 19 years old, going to Cal and my focus was on American politics, American culture.
ROSE: So then how did WWII affect you?
WILLIAM: Again, it affected my family a great deal because our family restaurant made money, lifting our family up from poor working class, to beginning middle class. It made possible our move from Chinatown to China Hill. We moved in 1948, four years after our restaurant opened. Family legend has it that my father paid $16,000 in cash for a five bedroom house on China Hill. Sixteen thousand is nothing today to pay for a house, but it was a pretty big deal in those days, and he didn’t have to go to a bank for a loan. That told me that the business that our restaurant did in WWII enabled our family to move from working class to middle class.
The war also had a way opening up opportunities for Chinatown people. After the war, Chinese people could move out of Chinatown and get jobs outside of Chinatown. I hear stories from older engineers who are now in their seventies and eighties who were very disappointed that they didn’t have the full opportunity to do what people in Silicon Valley get to do.
ROSE: How did Oakland Chinatown changed specifically?
WILLIAM: World War II was the highlight. Oakland Chinatown was very cozy and complex, but small throughout the first half of the twentieth century. A lot of these families that I talked about had started businesses and my contemporaries were young children at the time.
World War II really opened Chinatown up. It helped all of us make some more money, and therefore, the children of the immigrants -- in our case, me and my sisters -- began moving out in the late 1940s and 1950s. What happened to Chinatown in the 1950s was that it began to die. It lost population and businesses.
Chinatown’s loss wasn’t isolated because Oakland itself was once a thriving, industrial city with a lot of businesses downtown -- department stores, movie theatres, white middle class families all around.
World War II changed that because the African American population of Oakland grew exponentially during the war years because African Americans from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi came to Oakland because they found jobs. They worked in the shipyards. They were part of the Kaiser empire that had good jobs with benefits, and the Oakland population really began changing significantly during the war.
Chinatown changed right after the war too because businesses started fading away and they put in the Nimitz freeway, which cut right through the old residential neighborhood of Chinatown. Do you know what those freeways did? They helped white middle-class families move to the suburbs. Because in the 1940s and 1950s, places that we know today, like San Ramon, Danville, Livermore, Pleasanton, Contra Costa County, were farmland. People didn’t live there. But after the war, the freeway and cheap gasoline and businesses moving out created a lot of American suburbs.
The cities began to fade and lose businesses, so that impacted Chinatown. People moved out. In the 1950s, you remember how I talked about how I read novels, drew, and improved my vocabulary. That was because our restaurant during the afternoons was pretty empty. Families started moving out, so during the fifties and sixties, it was pretty depressed in Oakland Chinatown.
ROSE: What inspired you to write your book?
WILLIAM: I have three books. My first book, Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America, was published in 2001. This is a collection of 78 of my newspaper writings -- columns, stories, and commentaries collected from several news outlets that I wrote for: the Oakland Tribune, Asian Week, East Bay Express, San Francisco Examiner.
What inspired me to do it was in 1962, I started in journalism, spent a couple of years doing that, took a little break, and resumed my journalism career in 1970. I worked in journalism until 1996, so that is about roughly thirty years of journalism.
As I got older and more mature in journalism, I wanted to write about things that were really important to my community, which is Chinatown, Chinese America, growing up as Asian American. I got the opportunity at the Oakland Tribune to write a column. A column on a newspaper is really a good position because it gives you a lot of freedom to choose subjects and to write them the way you want, depending on who your editor is, but I had some good editors at the time my column began at the Oakland Tribune. I chose to really get into Chinatown and Asian American stuff.
After people began reading my column, I was encouraged to write a book about a number of different topics that gave an inside perspective on Chinese American thinking. An Asian American Studies professor at UC Davis had been reading my stuff. His name is Darrel Hamamoto, and I met him in 1999 at a conference. He encouraged me to collect my writings and he knew somebody at Temple University Press. I submitted a proposal and they accepted it, and I spent a piece of 1999 and 2000 looking through thousands of pieces I had written and picked the ones that spoke to me again.
When you are a writer, and you look at something you wrote five years later, you may say that was really good or you may be embarrassed by it, or something in between. I chose about 78 pieces and organized them in a way I thought would make sense to a reader who has no familiarity with Asian American culture, life and experience. Yellow Journalist came out in 2001.
It wasn’t a single inspiration I had but rather it was a combination of a lifetime of writing and thinking, because what was really behind it is me thinking out loud and analyzing and looking at my role and the role of Chinese American in America at a time when the United States was changing a great deal with more people from many different cultures who were coming to this country, and trying to figure out what “American” means.
I thought I could contribute these 78 pieces. I’ve had very good reaction to it over the years, and thank goodness it is still available. It is not a best seller, but that doesn’t matter to me. I think it’s good that it is out there presenting a number of different topics, and in different forms. I used humor, I used satire and sarcasm, but I also used straight reportage.
ROSE: Can you explain why you want to write about Oakland Chinatown specifically?
WILLIAM: It was something I know. It was a topic that I felt the Oakland Tribune, where I worked, had not been covering much at all. It was something new that I could bring to the paper. I could introduce a new piece of the community to the community at large.
ROSE: What were your Chinatown related activities?
WILLIAM: Participating in this oral history project. I am not much of a joiner. I don’t belong to a lot of associations, but my second book, this photo history called Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown is my contribution to the history of Oakland’s Chinatown.
No one has ever done a book like this. Oakland Chinatown is in the shadow of San Francisco’s Chinatown. A lot of people in California don’t even know Oakland has a Chinatown. Chinese have been in Oakland since the 1850’s. My family grew up here. So I said, let me tell the story of my community in a way that would be easy to understand, with photographs and some text. I consider this to be Chinatown-related activity, even though I am not active in a lot of organizations.
ROSE: So how has Chinatown changed in your lifetime, or since you came to Oakland?
WILLIAM: It’s gone from a cozy little tight Chinatown to one that prospered during World War II, to one that almost died, to one that greatly expanded and grew very large and much more diverse. The Chinatown that I grew up in was mostly Cantonese, Pearl River Delta descendants. Today’s Chinatown has still some Cantonese, but has a much broader range of Chinese from different regions of China and from southeast Asia.
There is more Mandarin spoken in Chinatown than when I was growing up. You hear Vietnamese, you hear Southeast Asian languages, occasionally you would hear Tagalog, which is the national Philippine language. Chinatown is really a thriving community today compared to the 1950s and 1960s.
ROSE: So do you see Chinatown as an important part of Oakland?
WILLIAM: Very important part. Because its economy generates a lot of business, therefore, there are taxes paid by Chinatown businesses to the city. It is an important economic life stream. It also provides activities near downtown. Downtown Oakland is still depressed. Chinatown is one of the more active neighborhoods. I think the Chinese population in Oakland is maybe fifteen percent of the city, roughly speaking. The political participation of Chinese and other Asians in
Oakland has increased in the past fifteen to twenty years, as it should. Chinese and other Asians have been in this city for 150 years. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be a part of that.
ROSE: What kind of problem is Oakland Chinatown facing?
WILLIAM: It has some classic land use problems in the sense that there is a finite amount of space and people want to use the land and buildings for different purposes -- for commercial reasons, but there is also a need to serve the poor population in terms of affordable housing. Those issues are still out there. Occasionally you hear about crime problems in Chinatown, but Chinatown is still a major cultural center for Chinese and other Asians in the East Bay.
ROSE: At our pre-meeting, you said sometimes you feel like a foreigner when you referred yourself in or around Chinatown. Can you expand on that?
WILLIAM: Since I am a native of Chinatown, I felt when I was a child growing up that it was my place. I spoke a combination of Chinese and English. Now I no longer live in Chinatown and am not immersed in Chinatown. The Chinatown I just described has changed from the time I lived there.
I visit Chinatown frequently, at least once or twice a week. It is not a problem for me, when I go to shop or to a restaurant and speak English and maybe a little of my old village dialect. It is when I walk around and I hear various Chinese languages and dialects and also imagine the life and the worldview of many people who are in Chinatown, I say, “Geez, I am really different from that.”
I am a writer, I do English almost exclusively. I live in a nice city surrounded by Oakland called Piedmont. I have a wide range of friends and associates, not just Chinese. I live in an English-speaking world. When I walk the streets of Chinatown, sometimes I feel as though I am a foreigner, a visitor, even though I am familiar with the places and food. It is a really weird feeling I have, like I am an insider and an outsider.
Language has a lot to do with it, the fact I speak English and not Chinese anymore. But it is also what my lifestyle is. I don’t own a business, I am not a businessperson, I am a writer and a thinker, a social historian. There aren’t a lot of people who do that in Chinatown. Most people are running businesses, and being good parents. I am a good parent too, but it is a whole different thing.
ROSE: What do you think is the most important story to tell future generation? Are there anything particular people don’t know about Chinatown?
WILLIAM: It is a very basic thing, and it goes back to my statement about Chinese being in Oakland and in the U.S. in significant numbers for more than a century and a half. Many Chinese and other Asians have contributed in very positive ways to the building of this country, to the building of this community.
Often I don’t get the feeling that there is recognition of that. I am not suggesting Chinese ought to get awards and be specially treated. But to just be recognized that Chinese and Asians are part of America is really a motivating force for my writing, for the photo history book that I did, and for the historian work that I do. I really believe that is the most important thing I would like to contribute to the American experience.
ROSE: Why are you interested in participating in this project?
WILLIAM: It feels like home to me. I have a constant internal dialogue with myself about who I am, what I am doing, why am I doing what I am doing. This is a chance for me to express it with people who apparently are also interested, not necessarily in my stories, because each of us has a story to tell. Whether or not you consider it interesting or not interesting is not important to me. I think it is important for all of us to express ourselves, to learn and explore internally and externally who we are, why we exist in a way.
I don’t want to get too metaphysical about the whole thing, but because of the history of the country, and the institutional racism that Chinese and other people of color had to suffer in this country, it is really important that I and other writers and thinkers and artists and cultural people just say “Hey, this is who we are, this is what we do, we belong here, we have done something that you may not know about.” I don’t want to get your attention in a special way, but it has to be part of the record somewhere. I think that is really important.
ROSE: What are some of the similarities and differences between your generation and our generation?
WILLIAM: I think the degree of struggle. The Chinese Exclusion Act had such an oppressive feeling upon the psychology of the people who lived under it. Think about it: if you live in a place, and you know you can’t go outside that place, or you can’t get a job, or you get called a name, or in the extreme, you get beaten up simply because the way you look or the language you speak.
When I was growing up, that extreme behavior was beginning to fade out. But the psychology of being not first class, not a first-rate person, that works on you. You begin to internalize how you respond to one another, how you communicate with one another, and how you want to communicate with the majority or the establishment, whoever is in charge of things.
I have a son who is a little older than you, Rose. It’s way different how your generation can move around much more easily. I am not saying you still don’t get some questions about the way you look, or your name for whatever, but it is much less explicit or constant, and the fact you have much greater opportunities society-wide than me and some of my sisters did. That is a major difference.
ROSE: What lesson would you like to pass on to younger generation?
WILLIAM: I would like you and others who are a lot younger than me to think about learning your roots, where you came from. You should be interested in your family history, no question about that. But not everyone is, and I can’t force people to be, but it is a really interesting exercise of a life’s journey to say, “Isn’t it interesting that my parents or my grandparents came from this place and had this kind of struggle and kind of triumph.” It is just part of cohesive human existence. Otherwise, if we didn’t have that kind of curiosity, and that kind of interest, we would be pretty dull people, I think.
I am really interested in exploring the internal life of people and their thought patterns and behaviors and try to place them somewhere in the larger context of this very interesting country. I find America to be a tremendous interesting country. It’s got all sorts of problems; we know about that. It has a history of racism I need not to go over again, but it is really a place that has a golden opportunity to create a whole new kind of human being. I really believe that.
Because there are so few countries that allow people to be who they are, allow people to express themselves, and be the best they can be. There are other societies that are governed by their religion, or a certain kind of moral value, that is not as good as America, in spite of all the problems that we have.
ROSE: So why is it important to remember your heritage?
WILLIAM: I think it is because as human beings, it is good to use our brains and spirit that connect all of us in a continuum. If we were just interested in ourselves and our time, then you can’t learn very much and improve. I do think that by looking back you can learn something and improve, and do better.
There is a saying that we need to learn the lesson of history, or we are doomed to repeat it. Our government seems to be unable to learn from their history, but I think civilization is better today than 100 or 500 years ago and we can get even better. That is why on a family level, that builds into this continuum of improving life in the world.
ROSE: So what tradition is important for younger generation to carry on?
WILLIAM: There are superficial ones, things like Chinese New Year celebrations. I don’t mean to say superficial by putting it down, but those are the easy ones to pick out. I pointed out that our family gets together, and I am not saying our family is perfect -- there are no perfect families -- as we all have our quirks and sibling things that go on either below the surface or on the side. But the fact we still maintain relationship and respect for one another is a very important tradition that I would like to think is part of Chinese American culture.
It may not be. I am not a sociologist. I read things about China today which I think are fascinating and interesting, about what is happening with the new China. Who knows what the new China will be?
But that is not my concern. My concern is that Chinese America, if we can carry on that deep spiritual bond with one another, and then join in with people who don’t have similar backgrounds and share our stories in a positive, respectful way and they do the same with us, we can’t help but be a better world. I sound like a silly idealist when I say that, but we are still trying to do that.
ROSE: You said in our pre-interview meeting you use your skill to look at your roots. What affect has that had on your life?
WILLIAM: I learned to be a journalist and went to school for it, I practiced it, and the more you do something the better you get. It was a matter of asking questions and telling stories. With the combination of those two, I’ve been able to apply to my culture, my Chinatown, and more broadly, Chinese America and Asian America.
I am really pleased how I am able to use my professional training and skills to also tell stories that are very important to me personally and, from what people tell me. They are happy that I am able to share these stories with a wide group of people because other people have other skill sets.
They may be terrific in medicine, or science, or law, or architecture, or engineering. I have very few of those skills, but what that tells me is that we Asian Americans or Chinese Americans are like any other human beings. We have a range of skill sets and opportunities and some of them work at that, and others miss that opportunity, so we are part of the human race.
ROSE: So, what is your message to your children and grandchildren?
WILLIAM: This might sound corny, but I want them to be good people. We have spent a lot of time talking about racial and ethnic heritage. As you know, my son is half Chinese, half white. Half white sounds too bland, but his mother is part Slavic. My wife’s parents come from different parts of Europe, and they come with both cultural and religious traditions, which are much different from my parents’ background.
Sam has all of that in him, in his DNA as well as his cultural upbringing. To me, for Sam, it is less important that he carry on the Chinese side. He told me he doesn’t want to do just the Chinese thing because that would be disrespectful to his mom. I totally agree with him. To the traditional Chinese American culture, that may be heresy. Some Chinese are known to be inward and insulated, and not friendly to the outside. I am living a life different from that.
I say let that be. I want my children and eventually grandchildren to really instill in the next generation to be a good person, to carry on life in a positive way, and to do whatever they feel is beneficial to themselves and to society. Corny as that sounds, but that is how I feel.
ROSE: Is there anything you would like to add?
WILLIAM: No, I think I can go on and on. That is an interesting open ended question we can go a lot of direction, but I think we had a good conversation.
ROSE: Thank you very much
WILLIAM: You’re welcome.
POST-INTERVIEW INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW SUBJECTS: Rose Huey & Sandy Liao
INTERVIEWER: Angela Zusman
INTERVIEW DATE: August 3rd, 2007
ANGELA: Hello, this is Angela Zusman. I am now recording Rose Huey and Sandy Liao after their interview with William Wong. It is August 3rd, 2007 and we are still in William’s house. So girls I wanted to ask you after your interview with William, what did you learn today about history?
Sandy: I learned several things about history. One of the things I noticed is that even though there are so many different generations of Chinese Americans coming in to America, a lot of times their experiences are similar. Such as the time William Wong talked about his time in the Chinese school where all the Chinese teachers demanded high discipline and rote learning. At the same time, Chinese parents now are also demanding the same thing. Even though it is at different time periods, the values they had back then are still very similar to the values they have now.
Rose: It was interesting how a lot of the traditions and cultures have continued to carry on. My family still gets together for every event we can possible think of. And how we celebrate Chinese New Year together, and how there is still a strong sense of community in the Chinese American culture, and how it has been preserved over the years. It is the thing that kept us all together and unified and made us feel safe. I also learned about Taiwan and the PRC and it is really interesting and the Exclusion Act, because I never heard someone talk about it, I just read about it in the internet, but I never did expose to felt the effect of it.
Angela: Let’s talk about it more for a minute. What is the difference between hearing history from someone who has experienced versus reading it from the internet or on the book?
Sandy: It is definitely a lot more interesting. You get to hear all the little details about it. You get to know the details behind PRC versus Taiwan. In history book, you would read about how it affected both sides of the party, but you don’t know how it affected the people’s lives. Especially text books don’t talk about how it has affected Oakland’s Chinatown. So it is very specific, and it is good to know about them.
Rose: It is more interesting, and it is easier for me to understand the personal, and easier for me to connect with. When I read things in textbooks, I feel like it happened but it really didn’t affect anyone I knew, so it didn’t really affect me. But when you hear someone you know talk about it, it is so much more real. It is like it happened and you can almost make it real for yourself.
Angela: That makes a lot of sense. Which story that Bill told stands out the most to you?
Rose: His story about working in a restaurant. Because my dad told me stories about working in his family’s corner store so they are from the same generation, so there is a lot of connection between my dad and Bill. That was kind of interesting.
Sandy: For me, that is not necessary a story, but more what he talked about, being an outsider and insider. Even though he had grown up in Oakland Chinatown, he still feels like he can’t personally relate to Chinatown, the people living there. Large part is the language barrier. That is very personal for me as well. In my case, I didn’t grow up in Chinatown, but I still feel that language is still a barrier, that bars me from knowing my own ancestors. So that was very interesting to me as well.
Angela: That sounds like you both learned things about yourselves after this interview. Can you tell me about what you learned about yourself and your family?
Sandy: I realized that family is a very large part of my life. Bill talked about it is very important for family members to be around him even though he has so much success in journalism and other areas, the most important thing he wanted to pass down to other people is to always be with your family. It doesn’t matter what race you are, or what culture you grew up in, family is always going to be a universal theme, and you can’t live without them.
Rose: I don’t know how much I learned. It was more of a realization I think. It is kind of strange because I never heard my family talk about coming here, so to have him tell his story kind of made me wonder if my grandparents had to go through all that, and what their process was, and how it affected my dad’s childhood. My grandfather was probably a paper son, but I don’t know so it was interesting to take his story and for me to fantasize and make up mine, and pretend that I have a story for my family
Angela: So are you going to now ask your family?
Rose: We’ll see. The language barrier is always there.
Angela: What would you guys like to say to Bill and to the other elders in the Chinatown community?
Sandy: I feel like many elders, not just the ones in Chinese community, but in this world as well, are not very willing to share their stories because they thought that the next generation is not interested. Life has advanced so much now that the young people now probably don’t bother to hear how they had to do hard work when they were kids, how they had to work in a restaurant. Kids now grow up in game boys and video games, so I just want to let them know that we really are interested. If you like to share your stories, please don’t hesitate to tell your grandchildren about it. The probability is that they very interested to learn about it, but that they are afraid to ask you.
Rose: Storytelling is such an important part of every culture and everybody’s life. It is something that is lost, but needs to be re-found because we are always on cell phones, and always emailing. We lose that face to face, person to person connection. It would be such an amazing experience for everyone to gather around and just listen to stories for hours. I think it is really important to just share that experience and bring that back the experience.
Angela: My last question for you guys is: has this interview to do anything? Has your experience in Oakland Chinatown Oral History project inspired you to do something else with your life?
Sandy: This project has inspired me to look deeper into my roots. As a person going through life, I always have daily activities, but never have the time to think about where I came from, ancestors came from. I take my life in America for granted, and I never think about why my parents came to America, what kind of hardship did they have to go through. It really made me want to learn more about it, and therefore, inspired me to hopefully ask my grandparents and my parents more about their life history so that I can preserve their history.
Angela; Just to follow up on that, did you have an understanding of how important your roots are to you before you participated in the project?
Sandy: I had a conception that roots are important, but I never took the time to think about what my roots are, and how they are important to me. I knew they are there, but never bothered to pick it up and use it, or think about it.
Rose: It inspired me to go and viciously hunt after my family’s history because everything keeps saying they will do it, but they don’t realize that every time they say it, it is a new year, and that means people are getting older. Their memories are going away and their stories are being lost one by one as each passing day goes on because our minds can’t contain things forever. And also just made me want to reconnect with my Chinese roots and also my mom’s roots too, she is white, European descent and I never really went after that because I felt like there wasn’t as much culture there but I feel like now I just have to dig deeper than my Chinese culture. My dad’s side of the family is so strong and always together, but my mom side is very disoriented and disconnected, so it made me want to find out who I am more than I have before.
Angela: Well, good luck to both of you, and thank you again so much.
