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

JT: so what would you say was your biggest influence on your activism and writing?

FC: Umm -- this always sounds strange when I say this but it was my rage, my anger, haha. I was really angry because I didn’t fit in, in Queens because everybody was white, I went to church and I didn’t fit in either. And because things were still very segregrated then, I had a lot of friends in school, but I wasn’t really invited to their houses. So I was really angry, I was like "where is this going? Where is this leading to? Oh no! I have to get married, oh no" the whole idea of the formula! So, at some point, I was very depressed, I was like my life can’t be like this! So the question was one of identity -- right, who am I? And what am I doing here? I can’t believe it, you know, I went through 12 years of school, and 4 more years of college, then I’m gonna get married and have children. And that was very touchy for me because I was the oldest in my family and I took care of all my siblings, and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life taking care of babies, and then a husband -- I can’t handle this! But it was all moving that way, because when I graduated, my aunts all chipped in to get me a pearl necklace; and my mother had been collecting since I was little: jade jewelry, gold pieces, my dowry right? All in this little box -- totally freaked me out. So, I think what got me really thinking about this was that I just couldn’t see myself following what was prescribed to me as a young woman of that generation. In 1971, I had saved up enough money because one of my best friends, Carol, we decided we would go to Taiwan in the summer and after that we’d go across country. But in the summer of 1970, Carol went into a coma and she passed away that summer, so I decided that I would still go on that trip for us, for Carol. So thinking about identity-wise, I didn’t know where I belonged. But when I went to Hong Kong and Taiwan, I definitely didn’t belong there, because the language and the culture -- so I went through it and it was a good thing, to see the different sectors of my family. Some of my family members were wealthy! But on the other side, there was this family living in a loft, knitting sweaters -- fibers flying all over the place, their beds were like bunk beds, up against the wall, really crammed -- but they were really happy! And then there was another auntie who lived in a shack on a rooftop -- I was like Oh my god! This is my whole family -- the range of my family. This really forced me to think about class issues. From Taiwan and HK, then I went to California, and I was like oh my god, these people are so slow -- a whole day was taken up by one meeting then they go to barbecues. But I met some sansei -- 3rd generation Japanese Americans who were setting up Asian American studies at UCLA, and a lot of community groups like Amerasia Books, Yellow Brotherhood, then put out a newspaper -- it was a more assimilated 3rd generation Asian Americans -- organizing. So I said, this is where I belong, these are the people I can relate to, and they would go to all these rock concerts and stuff -- and then I went to SF, my father’s side of the family, to see my cousins and stuff, and then I hitchhiked with my cousin Ellen, my favorite cousin on my father’s side, we went to all these different places, so I said "that’s it." In my own thinking, in my own life, I had to skip a generation, I’m not going to follow the formula -- that became very clear on that trip, I’m not gonna get married when I’m 21; the pressure on me was to become an English teacher or an Art teacher -- to get a regular salary, pension, and all those benefits, and I said I’m not going to get that job -- it became very clear on that experience, that’s why I encourage people to travel, to get out there, to see how people are leading their own lives. You know, you can be pressured to lead your life a certain way, but you don’t have to do it, but then not knowing what’s possible -- you can also meet people, to see how they’re leading their lives, to see what might be an option for yourself. So then I decided I can’t live out here so I have to come back to new york and build something. That’s when I got really involved with Basement Workshop, because there I might other Asian American writers and artists, you know, people involved in the culture and we worked on that first project, Yellow Pearl, in the fall of 1971. We worked on Bridge Magazine, Yellow Pearl, and in January of ’72, I became the director of Amerasia Creative Arts. We had gotten a small grant to start an art program -- I started this with other artists grassroots artmaking workshops -- silkscreening, childrens arts and crafts, dance, video and film, creative writing. So I was working on that, and also at that point I started flying down to these quarterly meetings at National Endowment, so I was able to see what was developing culturally, on a grassroots level, across the country -- all 50 states -- so it was a great education that way. But then by the fall of ’72, there was this crisis within my family -- my father was diagnosed with cancer and being the oldest, I was like the caretaker, and so I had to take care of my dad, inject him, take him to the doctors, so at that point, I shifted out of hunter and worked more in basement, and took care of my dad. My grade point definitely dropped, because I was finding my education was really coming through my experiences, and in my art classes, at that time my art teachers were running around too, striking, acting against the war: what’s art in the time of war?! Haha, so it was a really horrible time for a lot of my art friends -- we were not painting at all, we were going to demonstrations, rally, so two of my best friends just left, one to SF to study painting, and the other to Italy, haha. So I stayed here, and it’s funny how things worked. Though I stopped going to art classes and painting and stuff, at that point, I started writing more, I had always written and done art simultaneously, but I started writing more because I started keeping a journal, and starting a journal was more a self kind of thing because I was getting like 3-4 hours of sleep and I couldn’t remember what was going on the day before -- haha, I had to write down, what happened this morning, who did you meet, what did you do, what did you eat? Haha -- I was living out of my bag! This sounds weird, but I always had an extra pair of underwear, my toothbrush because I never knew where I’d end up, except I knew I had to be home to give my father his injection, to take him to the doctor and to keep Basement workshop going, financially, and designing programs -- so that I knew. That was very clear, otherwise I was either at meetings or running things or whatever.

JT: I read your article about Basement workshop and reading about your difficulties in getting people to understand how art related to activism at that time, can you talk a little about that?

FC: In Chinatown at the time, there were two factions, one was on Market and Henry, more patterned after the Black Panthers, they were very caught up with what was happening in China -- the revolution, the other group was the Communist Workers Party, also influenced by what was going on in China at the time. But to me, that was not an American agenda, even though I couldn’t say it like that back then, to me they weren’t dealing with the whole class issues either -- my thinking was that people came from overseas to America, usually to even get to America, they had to be from a certain class, just to get the papers and stuff. Then when they come here, a lot of people worked in the factories, laundries and restaurants because of the discrimination in the US, but once the 2^nd and 3^rd generation were able to go to school -- right away, were filled with entitlement in terms of getting better jobs than your parents, access to education -- the formula then was to marry one another then move to the suburbs -- this possibility of moving economically and classwise, and any one in their right mind would say that’s a good thing because were creating more opportunities for our children and our families and with each progressive generation, were more assimilated -- language, politics, becoming part of the American party, despite the racism, you just move that way. So, to me it didn’t make sense that they were trying to follow this agenda that was more China based -- what does that got to do with America? You know, here we can move, whether or not we want to, we’re still moving from that immigrant generation, so to me, I always thought culture was the weapon, the psychological weapon, because once you meet the 3 criteria, my mother always said: food, clothing, shelter -- everyone, if you want, can get those three things, even if you have to work extra jobs -- so then I think you have to develop a cultural agenda, so basically that was our difference -- they were saying we have to go out there, demonstrate and fight, and yea, that was part of the agenda, but then what are you telling people to hold on to? What else, you cant keep talking about China, you have to come up with an American agenda. So for Yellow Pearl, it sounds crazy, but we would have these 5-6 hour meetings and talk about, "does asia America have a hyphen?" or does our work mean anything? And after all those hours of discussion, you come up with really good ideas -- yea we should be writing about our own communities, we should be writing about ourselves, our dreams, our possibilities -- so that became clear at basement, to talk about our own culture -- develop our own culture -- were not in China anymore, and we’re not white Americans, so where does that leave you? So, that was a big fight, they wanted to use basement as a vehicle to do organizing work, and I wanted to, with some other people and artists, use basement as a space for creating culture, and that wasn’t very well understood because I was part of the writer’s workshops and my friends, Tiru and Richard would write about their parents’ experiences with the FBI, Japanese American Internment camps, and the effects of that on themselves and their generation, and I was writing about living in the back of a laundry and Chinatown in the 60s. You know when we read this to our own communities at basement, people were saying this is so depressing, stop writing this crap, so we were stunned, haha, but luckily we kept writing, supporting each other’s work.

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