Interview with Fay Chiang
(cont'd)
By Jennifer Tan, Staff Writer

JT: How many brothers and sisters did you have?

FC: 2 sisters and a brother, and I was the oldest.

JT: I know that you went to Hunter College as a fine arts major, was there any opposition from your family when choosing to study art?

FC: Well, it was kind of like a compromise -- I think it was a class thing, because my parents were from these landowning families. And then my mother was really bent on my going to Barnard College and Columbia right? She kept pushing me to go to Barnard and then one of her best friend’s daughter, a year older than me, went to Barnard. So, actually, I had gone to Columbia during the summer when I was 16 to study Mandarin in some experimental program that they went around the high schools to develop the language program for the Board of Ed or something, so I spent about 7 weeks at Columbia and then the following year, on weekends we continued studying mandarin, and I just hated it -- these people are so stuck up, so racist, I’m not gonna go to Columbia or Barnard. So my mother was all bent on like, okay, if you go to Barnard, we’ll pay your tuition, if you go to art school, and I had gotten into School of visual arts, parsons, pratt for fashion illustration, and they felt I would do really well in fashion design. So, she said we’ll pay for Barnard but not for art school. And so the compromise was that I could study painting at Hunter. IT was like, we’re not going to pay for anything except Barnard, and I’m like I’m not going to Barnard, that’s it, you know, those people are so stuck up, so snotty -- forget it! So then I started at Hunter in the fall of 1969 and I was quite disappointed because it felt like high school -- I went to Newtown HS in Elmhurst Queens, and at that point, that was one of the top 10 high schools in the country academically, so our education was pretty rigorous so by the time I got to Hunter, it was like we did this in American history, we did this in English and I was bored out of my mind, but I had a 4.0 average or something and then I got put on the Dean’s list and then every Wednesday during Dean’s hours, they gathered all the young women who had these high grade points to have tea with the dean. So we had tea, and tea was basically lunch and we sat there and these people served us, and you know like we were served, and that was so gross to me, I was like why? So I was really put off and then at that point I had gotten involved in a lot of anti-war organizing citywide, but basically through this white group, Student mobilization committee, and then I’d go to these city wide meetings and I’m going there are no Asians around and I’m like -- again, but this time, there was a class difference here. And I was also going to all these women’s groups and I was like eww -- haha, you know and I can’t relate to these people, all these white, middle class people, just bored to death too, but in a different way. So then, after school I was also working at Macy’s part time, 3 nights and on Saturdays because my parents kept saying -- we’ll give you money if you just focus on your studies, -- but then I thought they’re not giving me enough money! Haha -- this is a ploy! So I got this job at Macy’s through a friend of mine, and I had my own bank account -- that’s all I can say, you have to have your own bank account. So then at Macy’s one night, I ran into Yuri Kochiyama, she was leafleting for this group called Asians against the war. So it was basically Yuri, Kazu Iijima (Chris’ mother), and Min Matsuda, who was Carl Matsuda’s mother, who’s Fay Chew’s mother in law. So these three women who had been in the camps and in the 30s had participated in the Communist Party movement and Civil Rights were, you know, kind of urging the younger generation to be more active as Asians, Asian Americans with their own agenda against the war. So that was interesting and you have to come to this meeting at Chickens Come Home to roost, which was a squat, up on Amsterdam Ave in the 80s -- so I would go from Queens to Manhattan, up to upper Manhattan and go to these meetings, and we were organizing against the Vietnam War. Then at school, I was working on Asian American Studies, trying to get through an Asian Studies History and Identity Program, I mean class, just a class, working with Professor CT Wu who had put out a book called "Chink," legislation against Chinese Americans. So, every semester we had to get signatures to reinstate the course, because it was in a category called "Experimental," but I was also trying to work with the black and Puerto Rican studies department to see if they would house it, but finally it was put under the Classics department -- the Chinese department, so it was kind of floating, and every semester we had to do this big support for the course thing, and I was also working on the Chinese Club...haha, because the Chinese Club at that time was very social, young women in my generation was supposed to get married, it was very social, you were supposed to meet someone by your junior year and get married after graduation, so that was the formula, and so there were all these socials between different Chinese clubs throughout CUNY, Columbia, whatever -- all these schools would have ice skating parties or social get togethers, and then I thought oh my god! This is terrible. So I thought, well let me see what these people are all about, so I would go to the club meetings, I was elected secretary and then president. So then when I became president, I said OK! We’re going to change the Chinese Club to ASIA -- Asian Students In Action. So, we became more involved and at the same time, to get the course supported all the time, some of us got involved with the student government. So I was on the course curriculum committee, and then in student govt, well, we had this student mobilization committee on campus, which was not like the one citywide -- we were more diverse, we were working in coalition with Black and Puerto Rican Studies department, Women’s Studies and the Gay and Lesbian groups, so we were a very progressive coalition of kooky people so we took over the student govt, then we took over the budget finance committee -- so we just took it over, so we were allocating -- so we were able to bring in guest speakers thru the club who would then speak in the course, also then the ASIA group, we also pressured the college to provide more financial aid, counseling services to the Asian student population. We were doing a lot, and then one of the things that came out of the Asian American Studies History and Identity course was that we were working in coalition too with the people, students up at City College, Queens college and Lehman’s college and the one that was really pushing for a program was City College, so we worked with them. And part of the idea was, how about community? Maybe we should go back to the community, kind of like the Black Panther idea of "serve the people," so it was like, let’s go back and learn more about our community, because the whole thing is once from the immigrant generation, then you’re supposed to move out of the community, this brain drain kind of thing. So we thought, let’s bring our skills and education back to the community and do some grassroots organizing, so that was pretty clear. So at the time, Basement workshop was forming in ’71, and we met Danny Young, who started Basement with a group of his friends, who were mostly professionals like Frank Chin and Margaret Lo-Kee, who were still reporters with the NY Times, and then also, Peter Pan, so they were mostly from Hong Kong, immigrant grad students who kind of met around Columbia, because Danny was in the Urban studies dept in Columbia, so Danny had gotten a grant in 1969 to do basic field work with the tenements -- gathering information about employment, education, social services and it was published as the Chinatown Report in 1969, so very basic -- how many people in the household, employment wage levels, education, all that stuff. So after he had done that study, he had all this material and Frank and Margaret were saying well let’s do a bimonthly publication, let’s call it Bridge magazine -- and then also, they talked about a resource center, the importance of starting an Asian resource center, that’s when some of the City College people got involved too, you know, we’re building all these Asian American Studies program and we have no curriculum, we have no books, you know?!

JT: Yea! How did you teach the class, what did you use, guest speakers?

FC: Well, the way I designed it was using guest speakers, so it was almost like their oral histories, and also there were some books out, like "To serve the Devil," a 2 volume paperback a lot of people used, and we used "Roots" the reader, and there was a journal published called Asian Women’s Journal that came out in 71, I mean that’s very basic. And then professor Wu’s called "chink," so between that and oral histories, guest speaker, plus some of the people were starting to do cultural work, Betty Li Sung had published mountain of gold. So I basically taught the course because prof wu was too busy being the geography teacher. So he fronted the course and I taught it; it was a little weird because we gave him the money, and I was teaching! Haha!

JT: And this happened while you were a sophomore in college?

FC: Yea.

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