Pat Sumi (1944-1997) a third generation Japanese American, discovered linkages between African farmers in Nigeria and her own family in Japan, then worked in Mississippi and Atlanta in 1966-67 doing voter registration, organizing, attending black churches, and demonstrating for equality. Subsequently, Sumi began to organize American soldiers against the Vietnam War.

Warren Mar, currently a labor policy specialist at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, chronicles two decades as a union organizer with the AFL- CIO Organizing Institute, the California Nurses Association, and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union in San Francisco. Mar “was born in 1953 in San Francisco and raised in heart of Chinatown,” one of the first of the baby boomer Chinese American generation to become involved in Left student movements.

Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz recounts her experience of becoming politicized in the Philippines, and living “sixinches away” from shantytowns of “children in shabby clothes, living in the alleys in dark houses with roofs that leaked in rain.” During the Martial Law period under Marcos, Abarquez-Delacruz migrated to the U.S. and joined movements to oppose and end Martial Law.

Corky Lee, New York-based photographer, is the eldest son of a New York laundryman got his inspiration from John F. Kennedy and Muhammad Ali. “Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Muhammad Ali claimed he was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. I refer to myself wryly as the “undisputed, unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate.”

Miriam Ching Yoon Louie has devoted three decades to organizing grassroots women in anti-sweatshop and anticorporate movements for social change. Of biracial Korean and Chinese ancestry, Yoon states: ‘Being bi- and female in the Asian Movement also means putting in double, triple, quadruple time—as women of color who have our hands, heads, hearts in multiple movements because of our race, gender, and class status.”

Nancy Hom states: “I drink tea with both hands/boil a chicken on holidays/I celebrate old traditions/dancing wildly.” Hom tells her story, a first-generation Chinese American “who grew up in New York City in a small, cluttered railroad flat on the Lower East Side of manhattan.” She later entered the Pratt Institute and is now the executive director of the Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco, a multi-disciplinary Asian American arts organization.

Tram Quang Nguyen, the youngest contributor to the book, is a writer and editor who graduated from UCLA in 1996 and now works for Colorlines, in Oakland, California. She first came from Vietnam to the U.S. in 1978 and lived “in a flaking green duplex in Wichita, Kansas.” Her essay chronicles the history of Vietnamese Left Activism outside of Vietnam—from 1940s national liberation struggles in New York against French colonialism, to the 1960s anti-war activism of Vietnamese students and early immigrants.

Daniel C. Tsang is the Asian American Studies, politics, and economics bibliographer at U.C. Irvine. Tsang, a civil rights and gay activist, publisher, and scholar, documents three decades of gay and lesbian Asian American political
organizing in the U.S. Tsang also weaves his own story, of “seeing myself as both homosexual and Chinese” into his wide-ranging survey of gay and lesbian Asian
Americans from the 60s through the 90s. His essay, “Gay Awareness,” published in 1975 in Bridge Magazine, served as the first gay Asian male manifesto.

Brenda Paik Sunoo, a journalist and writer, helped to organize the first street demonstrations for Korea unification at the United Nations in 1972. She “sewed a South and North Korean flag that flapped in the wind on First Avenue—the first public display of solidarity for one Korea,” she states. Her essay is written in memory of Helen Foster Snow, the co-author of a memoir Song of Ariran, about an unknown Korean patriot in pre-1949 China. Sunoo is inspired by Snow’s “daring, scholarship, and tenacity.”

Harvey Dong teaches courses on Asian American contemporary issues, Third World Racial politics, and civil rights and protest movements at U.C. Berkeley. As a student organizer, Dong says: “I read Malcolm X’s autobiography and emphasized with his life, his example, and how he came to the Understanding that it’s beyond just race itself, but having to do with the whole system.” Dong surveys the influence of both community and mainstream politics—including the anti-war ,ovement, the Black Panther Movement, and his own participation in the Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy presidential campaigns in his genesis as an activist and scholar.

EDITORS:

Steve Louie was active in the Asian American Student Movement and anti-war movements, working with Los Angeles’ Asian American Political Alliance, and helping to start the Asian Alliance at Occidental College. He was an active member of the U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association. Active in working-class organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area, he works as a business systems analyst.

Glenn K. Omatsu is a staff member of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, where he serves as Associate editor of Amerasia Journal. He also teaches classes in Asian American Studies at California State University, Northridge, and Pasadena City College. He is active in Community and labor struggles and international solidarity movements.

DESIGNER:

Mary Uyematsu Kao is the Publications coordinator and production designer for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press.