Interview with Fay Chiang
By Jennifer Tan, Staff Writer

I interviewed Fay on a Saturday at Project Reach, the crisis counseling anti-discrimination youth center located in Lower East Side/Chinatown where she works as Program Developer. It was a day after her foot was run over by a car in Queens. Some young people at the center took her to a local Chinese herbal medicine store for treatment. She came in with a cup of bad smelling bitter tasting tea/medicine that I think most Asian kids have been force fed when sick (yuck!) - but that didn’t take away from her perpetual lively mood. Limping to the chair, we talked for a little bit before starting the interview. Sometimes I forget about everything she has done in her life -- her poetry, her art, her activism and her impact on today’s Asian American community -- she’s just such a down to earth, funny, wacky individual, always with something to say and something to laugh about (even if it is getting run over by a four by four). Fay was the Director of Basement Workshop for years, the first Asian American arts and cultural organization on the East Coast, and has published several books of poetry including, "In the City of Contradictions," "Miwa’s Songs," as well as other plays and anthologies. One of the first to be involved in the Asian American Movement, she was very instrumental in the development of an Asian American Studies class in CUNY in the 1970s; she taught the very first Asian American Studies class on the East Coast as a 19-year-old sophomore in college herself. Here’s what she had to say:

JT: Why don’t we start off talking about your experiences growing up, how your family life was like, how that influenced your life?

FC: I grew up in Queens, in the 1950s in what is now East Elmhurst, but back then they called it Jackson Heights. And we were one of maybe 3 Chinese American families; one of them was Charlie Chin’s family, I always like to say, the folk singer. He’s 9-10 years older than me, so he was a teenager. He was in front of the candy store, singing with his friends while we were on tricycles -- hahaha, and he remembers that too, so I think its funny. And my father came over as a paper son in the 19, late 30s, and ran a laundry in, first he grew up living in the back of a laundry with his older brother in Staten Island, and then when he was like 17 or 18, he started working in a laundry in Jackson Heights, that was a cousin’s or something. And during the war, he got work, business was so slow that he got work painting ships or something in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, I found a union card of his from Bethlehem Steel, so he worked for Bethlehem Steel during the War. After the war, he wanted to get married so he went over to China because he had met a couple, an older couple at church, who you know, my uncle Andy and aunt Ruth and their niece lived in China, in the village next to my father, so he went over and he checked her out basically -- hahaha -- and then their marriage was arranged, and my mother, for the rest of her life, was just furious because they only had tea, like twice, and then she was married off. And then, he stayed over there for a while, then they went to Hong Kong for their honeymoon, and they were in HK when the Communists took over their villages, and both my parents were from land owning families, so you know, they had a lot of land, and they had servants and all that kind of stuff so our relatives in NY said don’t go back to the village. So my father came back to NYC to make arrangements to bring my mother to America, so that’s what happened. And my father came back first, and then my mother came in 1950, so that’s how they came over. And, first they ran a shirt pressing family, my father, and his nephew and a boyhood friend of theirs named Bing. My father’s name was actually Peter, but everyone called him Bay: Bay, and then Paul and Bing, they were like the 3 musketeers, haha..Bing and Paul are neighbors out in Richmond CA, yea now -- because after the shirt pressing factory failed, then the idea was all 3 guys would bring their families to SF, to move into the grocery store business in Chinatown, in SF. They would go first and my father and my mother would go later after they established the business, while my father continued working in the laundry business. But then what happened was Uncle Andy and Aunt Ruth were meanwhile negotiating the papers for my mother’s father, mother and sibling to come over from Singapore -- my mother’s side of the family was coming over, so we stayed in New York, my mother wanted to meet her parents again, whom she hadn’t seen since she was 9. My mother’s father had ran off with another 2nd wife to Singapore and my mother’s mother ran after him and brought him to court, while my mother was raised by her grandmother back in China, in the village, in a house full of servants, so she actually hadn’t seen her parents since she was 9, and had never met her siblings, which was like another sister and 4 brothers. So we stayed in New York, and we lived in the back of the laundry.

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