By Mia Kang



I recently sat down for an interview with my friend Fay Chiang, a longtime artist and activist who currently works with Project Reach, a youth center on the Lower East Side, and is finishing up the manuscript for a new book of poetry. I asked Fay to discuss her involvement with the Asian American community in New York City, as well as her work as an artist. The following is a transcript of our conversation.

Q: Do you want to start by telling us about your book?
A: Well, I’m coming out with a new collection of poetry that combines my old poetry and new. The old poems are from my two collections that are out of print – the first one called In the City of Contradictions, which came out in 1979, and Miwa’s Song, which came out in 1982. Both of the books were published by Sunbury press, a small press that was run by Virginia Scott up in the Bronx. They’ve been out of print for a while, but I’ve never stopped writing poetry, so the third section will be new work, and that section I’m going to call “Midnight Blue Sky.” And the whole collection is called Seven Continents, Nine Lives.

Q: How long have you been writing?

A: Oh my goodness! I’ve been writing since, I think, fourth grade. My parents are from China, and I grew up in the back of a laundry in Queens in the fifties. There was so much, kind of, racism in the neighborhood, because it was Irish-/Italian-Catholic, and Jewish; we were one of the three Chinese American families, and my parents ran the Chinese laundry. And when we first moved up there...the kids were really not nice. They were throwing rocks at us or trying to hit us with tree branches, to the point where my parents said, “Stay away from those kids and just play in front of the laundry.” Or my mother would take us to the playground.

I didn’t really speak English until I went to kindergarten; I learned English in kindergarten, and then I taught myself to read the daily news, because you know, we didn’t really have books at home. And then in fourth grade, I was trying to write poetry, and my teacher - I tell this story a lot - but my fourth grade teacher laughed at me in front of the class and said, “You write poetry?” and just dismissed my stuff… In junior high school, my English teacher, Mr. Adolf, submitted some of my writing to contests, and I won two contests.

…So I kept writing, you know, through high school, but…I always felt that I was an artist, a visual artist, and I just kind of wrote [on the side]. Then in high school, I wanted to go to art school, but my parents didn’t think that was really good, especially my mother. She said I should be a teacher, a nurse, or a social worker. And I was really angry, because I had done a portfolio by myself at school – my teacher was helping everyone else do their portfolio, but not me. So I did it on my own, and I took it to FIT, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and I got into all those art schools. They offered me partial scholarships, and I needed my dad’s income tax form to do the financial aid, but he refused to give it to me because it was dealing with the government - they were very cautious, because my father had come over to America as a paper son with false papers, so anything to do with paper and the government, they said no. My mother said, “Well, you could go to Hunter College, or one of the city universities,” because at that time it was free. “You could study art, but be a teacher – teach art, or maybe you could teach English.” I was so angry.

…At that time, for women of my generation – second generation, born here – there’s that formula. I talk about this a lot too. The formula was that we were the first generation allowed to continue our education in college, then by junior year we were supposed to find the boyfriend to be engaged to, and then get married after graduation in senior year, get the job as a nurse, a social worker, or a teacher, a good job with benefits, work for two or three years with the husband, who has to be Chinese American, of course, and then buy a house in Long Island, move there, have children, and by then the grandparents would have moved into the house too to take care of the children.

…I started college when I was seventeen, and after school, I worked at Macy’s, because I knew my family didn’t have a lot of money… So I’m working at Macy’s, going to these classes that feel like high school, going to the Chinese Club, which was a social club where Chinese students could meet each other, so they get along the track – getting married. And even though I was an art student, and that was more loose – painting, stuff like that, I couldn’t believe – “This is my life!”

Then my friend from third grade, who was my best friend, Carol (she was Chinese American), she said, “There’s this trip to Taiwan, let’s start planning for that.” So we started saving money… And then the summer of my eighteenth year and her birthday, she passed away, because somehow she had gone into a coma. I was really upset about this. And then I had the big questions, like, “What is the meaning of my life? Where is my life going? Why did I not die? Why did my best friend die?” She was like a sister to me. “What am I going to do with my life?” And then I decided, “Okay, I’m going to go on that trip for the both of us. I’m going to go.”

Then in school, this professor, C.T. Wu, was writing a book called Chink. It was a collection of anti-Chinese legislation – federal legislation that he put it into a collection, and it was published. So the idea was, let’s get it out there, and let’s start an Asian American studies class, an identity and history class at Hunter. So I worked on that – getting signatures, petitioning, and organizing students. Finally, it passed as an experimental course in Hunter College’s administration. And I basically taught that course my sophomore year. It was an interesting situation – he was a geology teacher, and he had his course load, so I said, “Ok, you don’t want to teach it; we don’t have anyone here on the East Coast,” because everything was on the West Coast – Asian American studies, and urban studies really started happening heavily following the civil rights movement and free speech movements in Berkeley, so people were out there. So we made a deal – he could keep the money if I took the course. On paper, he was teaching the course.

At that time, I was very involved with the anti-war movement, the Student Mobilization Committee on campus… As a collective, we started a food co-op on campus, and we supported putting in the daycare center, and we supported, you know, the Women’s Studies, gay studies, black and Puerto Rican studies students. What we did, basically, was we took over the student government, and the finance committee, and we were allocating funds to support all these issues… Outside of school, I had met Yuri Kochiyama. I was coming out of my job at Macy’s, and there was Yuri, handing out leaflets! “Come to a meeting, Asians should be involved in the anti-war movement.” She was part of Triple A, Asian Americans in Action…and I thought, “This is cool. Here’s an Asian American woman; she’s working and an activist, and she has a large family.” So I went to the meeting…and I joined Asian Americans Against the War. That really opened my eyes – “Yeah, why should Asian Americans go to Vietnam and kill other Asians. For what?”

So I got involved there and then, before I went on that trip to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the summer of ‘71, I had dropped by a place called the Basement Workshop. I said, “What is this?” It was in the basement…of a tenement, and it was kind of – uh, wet. Not moldy, but it felt wet in there… I met Rocky Chin first, and he said, “Look, here’s our Asian American Resource Center!” and it was an orange crate with a couple of books in it. The group had done something called a Chinatown Report. That was led by Danny Young, and it was really the first study of its type, funded by the Ford Foundation, on the Chinese community. Level of income, number in household, like a census to show the need for social services… And there were issues of Bridge Magazine, just piled up on the floor, and there was like, an old door that was the table, in the middle of this tenement basement… I said, “Well, I have to go on a trip this summer; I’ll see you later.” I wasn’t really impressed.

…So I went on the trip, first to visit relatives in Hong Kong. Some relatives were really wealthy; they had a servant for each child, they had a driver, they had factories – plastics, all over Asia (Singapore at the time, because China wasn’t open yet, in ’71). Then I had another set of relatives who had a sweater factory, where all these machines were knitting sweaters, like acrylic sweaters, mohair sweaters, and all this stuff, lint was flying around, and they lived on one end of the loft, in bunk beds built out of wood. And this older relative, she was maybe in her seventies; she lived in a shack in a rented space on a rooftop. So I saw all these different classes of my relatives, and it made me think about class. So that was tucked in the back of my mind. Then I went to Taiwan for six weeks and studied Mandarin.

…Then by August of ’71, I was back in San Franscisco, and I stayed there for a couple of weeks, because my father’s side of the family…ran grocery stores in Chinatown on Stockton Street. I was also there because I was trying to collect curriculum for the Asian American Studies department at Hunter, and by then City College had started an Asian American Studies program there. So we were all looking for curriculum and resources to use as teaching materials… I went to UC Davis, I went to San Francisco State, I went to Berkeley, I went to UCLA… They were all saying, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m trying to collect curriculum.” So they’d say, “Oh, go in the file and xerox stuff. That’s all we have.” We were just so hungry for materials.

...Then by the summer of the following year, ’72 – I had gotten involved with Basement Workshop as a volunteer; we were basically all volunteers – and at that point, August of ’72, we had been working all year almost, raising money and putting together the Yellow Pearl. The Yellow Pearl came out in May or June of ‘72. After that project finished, everyone just blew to the wind. Because it was so intense, working together on that project, that everyone just ran away – people went to the West Coast, people went traveling, people went back to their studios, and I felt like, “I don’t know what to do.” …I became a good artist, but as I had gotten involved in the student organizing and working at Basement, working on other issues, I didn’t have time to be in the studio. So I started writing things down; I started keeping a journal, because I couldn’t remember everything. I was doing so much, I couldn’t remember – “I better write this down.” And the whole thing about writing again came up, rather than doing the painting.

…In September of ‘72, my dad came down with terminal cancer, colon cancer, and he went in for surgery and the whole family just kind of fell apart… So I started running the laundry. I didn’t go to classes, I didn’t move out, I ran the laundry. My father needed an injection every day through a catheter in his stomach. My mother wouldn’t do it, so I took care of my father. I took him to the doctor twice a week for his blood tests. Ran the laundry, went into Basement in the early mornings or afternoons, worked on the paperwork or I did a lot of the proposal writing, because nobody wanted to do it – “Ok, I’ll do it.” …After three months, I said to my mother, “I can’t do this anymore – you have to run the laundry. I’m going to stay here for another thirty days, I’m going to teach you everything you need to know to run this laundry, and then I have to go back to my own stuff.” She started screaming and yelling, “You’re a bad daughter! How could you do this?!” And I said, “No, you have to be able to work.” So it was really hard, but she did it.

…Then in January of ’73, I started running AmerAsia Creative Arts, because out of Yellow Pearl we got two small grants, one from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and one from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). People were given small stipends to run workshops in silk screening, Super 8, dance, guitar, and we ran an after-school program for children in the arts. So it started growing, and I started going down to the NEA. I sat on their funding panels and the NYSCA and the Department of Cultural Affairs. I was on three funding panels, and that’s where I think I got my education about what community art is in this country. We’d get these proposals from all over the country, so I got a birds-eye view of what people were doing and I thought, my God, Basement Workshop – we’re so new, we’re so young… The idea all along, Danny’s idea, was to umbrella these different projects…so that’s how we started AmerAsia Creative Arts.

In the meantime, I was still taking care of my dad. Then in early ’73, my brother came down with Hotchkins. Then he was going to Memorial Sloan-Kettering with his tests. Then a month later, my grandmother dies. I’m running to three hospitals, trying to go to my drawing classes at Hunter, running the program at Basement Workshop, and at the time I thought I was going to just go crazy – like jump in the subway tracks crazy – but I just kind of plowed through it. I was sleeping like four hours, I wrote everything – so I could remember, I kept everything in my journal. “What’d I do yesterday?” And I just kept it up, for three years. And I was flying to D.C. every three months to review proposals on a panel. I wasn’t really getting paid. I was getting college workstudy at Hunter, and I was still living at home because I had to take care of my father and brother and help my mother in the laundry, which she really needed. I think I was on automatic. I write about that a lot, about choices. As a Chinese American young woman from the working class, there’s the whole thing about what do you keep from your family or your traditional culture. What do you keep and what do you not keep – buy into, and then what do you have to find for yourself? Say, the American culture… It becomes a series of choices that inform your thinking about where you’re going with stuff.

I worked with Basement for fifteen years, and it was kind of wild and rocky, as all organizations go. And my father passed away; that was hard. My brother had four nervous breakdowns where he had to go to the hospital. And then when I was 30 and he was 24, he committed suicide. That was hard, and that’s in my writing – about my father and my brother, my family. In ‘86, I decided to close Basement Workshop. When we started, we were the first Asian American cultural organization in Chinatown, in New York City, on the East Coast, but in ‘86, a lot of projects had split off to become non-profits in their own right. There was Asian American Dance Theater, which transformed into the Asian American Arts Center and still exists. Our literature program…became the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, which is still going on. …A lot of people started Asian Cinevision and ran Bridge Magazine. We had a folk arts program which – we told NYSCA the funding for it should go to the Asian American Arts Center, because they ran an arts program. Oh, and the Asian American Resource Center, our library collection, a lot of the initial documentations of stuff and collections of artfiacts went to – we donated them to the Chinatown History Project, which became the Museum of the Chinese in America. And at that point, in ‘86 – and also, the Children at Basement program became the Educational Equity project, which Don Kao ran with Linda Lee, who were all Basement people.

At that point, I felt that, “Okay, that’s it. All these organizations exist.” Also, there was this tension, because our funders at NYSCA kept saying, “Oh, we’re funding Basement Workshop; you’re the oldest organization.” And it was like, “How about funding more of the younger organizations? …They are going to close if you do not fund them with general operating funds for their rent, their staff, their programs. If you don’t fund them, this is what will happen, they will close too.”

At the time, when it closed, I think I made $7000 a year. Before, it was like $3500. I was waitressing, I was doing freelance, I was working at an ice cream parlor, I was working at the Gap. All kinds of seasonal jobs or part-time jobs, just to get by. Because in ‘78 I had moved into the East Village, but I lived above a shooting gallery. The East Village then was drug-ridden. I remember there were two winters we didn’t have heat for about fifty days. All my neighbors and I thought we were going to go insane, it was so cold. To run to a funder’s meeting, I’d be boiling water in a pot so I’d look presentable, and I’d think, “What a life this is! What is going on here?”

…In August of ‘86, I went to see my friend Ana in Munich, and then I traveled through Italy on my own. It was in Rome that I said, “Okay, I’ll just start all over,” and I came back to New York. In the Village Voice there was an ad about working in a Christmas tree factory, so that’s what I did that fall and winter… Then I did some work for the Smithsonian Institute with my friend Margaret Ewan. We went around Chinatown, interviewing Chinese folk artists and collecting information for presenting Chinese folk artists and performers at the Smithsonian Festival on the Mall… Then I started a job at the Henry Street Settlement arts center… I worked there for three years, and I put on a really large Chinese American folk festival that ran five weeks or something.

…Then in the summer of ‘89, I gave birth to Xian, so that was a big event. I took her to work. The grant ran out in ‘90, I think, and then I stayed home doing freelance work, raising Xian until she was like four and a half. I made a choice – at the time I was 37, and this was my first child (I thought I was going to have more, but things didn’t go right with her dad). I wanted to be there for her and with her… It was tough, because I was counting quarters to piece together dinner. I was doing freelance editing at night, in the middle of the night, but when she was four and a half, she was in preschool – she was in kindergarten, so I got a job at New York News Day, in the publisher’s office.

…I worked there for a month, and then I felt two lumps in my breast. I went to the doctor and then I went to the surgeon, and then they took the two lumps – they found a third – three lumps out… They diagnosed it as breast cancer, so the doctor said to me, “What are you doing next Wednseday?” I said, “I don’t know. Why?” and he said, “Well, I could get you in for a mastectomy.” I said, “I don’t know.” …I started doing research on it, and felt I had more time. I got opinions, a second opinion from Sloan-Kettering in New York, and then I read an article about Dr. Susan Love in the UCLA Medical Center. Her approach, which was new at that time, was to have a team approach for a patient. There’s the breast surgeon, then there would be a pathologist, then there would be some psych person, then a wellness person, a nutritionist person, all in a package… I went out there and I met Doctor Susan Love. At first they suggested I get a mastectomy of a quarter of the breast; if it was contained in the first quadrant of the breast, I wouldn’t have to have a total mastectomy if the margins were clean. I did that, but then it showed that I needed – that it had spread, so I did a mastectomy in November ‘94. But like, four days later, I went back to work. I thought, “Okay, it’s not gonna get me.”

In ‘95, January of ‘95, we went to Puerto Rico for a weekend – me, Mark, and Xian – and then in the summer, we went to Mexico, to Oaxaca, Guadalajara. In December, we went down to South Africa to see Mark’s family, so we did a lot of traveling then. It was good, and I was still working till…the newspaper closed. I needed money, so I got a job at Poets and Writers. I was the director of the readings and workshops program, which funds – re-grants small grants to grassroots communities for readings and workshops. I did that for three years. I went around New York City; I went to – we also funded Detroit and Chicago, so I went to Detroit, never went to Chicago, and I was raising Xian. I think that’s all the energy I had.

In ’97, I felt a lump under my armpit… I did the surgery and they took out some lymph nodes. At that point, my doctor and surgeon were like, “You need to start chemo,” because I had resisted chemo… I said, “I don’t want to start chemo.” …I had seen what chemo had done to my brother and my father… I was like, “I have to trust my own gut.” This is what I tell people too – when you’re in a situation where you have to make a tough decision, go with your gut. Then after that, you never second-guess yoruself. You don’t go backwards, you just deal with what comes in your face. That was ‘97, in the spring, and in the fall I started at Poets and Writers and worked there for three years… In April [of 2000], I was going to start working on the book again, the collection of poetry, my third book again. Then I got a call from Don: “Reach is in a shambles; they might lose their contract.” So I said, “Okay.” I came to work and helped them get their paperwork together and their programming and stuff… I really believe in the mission of the organization. I like working with the young people a lot, because they remind me of my younger self, coming from immigrant families or working families or from the projects, trying to find a way.

…I write about that a lot, the commuity, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, 9/11, my family, my community or family of artists and writers and dancers and choreographers, you know, all the Basement people. When my friend died and I had all the big questions that everyone has – “What am I going to do with my life? Where am I going?” – one thing was clear. If I didn’t know where I was going, I would try a lot of things, and maybe by trying a lot of things I would find it. I thought, “Maybe through a process of elimination I’ll find out what I want to do or become,” and I think that’s it. You have to take risks, you have to make choices. You have to work hard. You have to be willing to learn stuff, be willing to say, “I don’t know.” Even at this stage, I don’t know everything. I feel like I’m still trying to find my way, and I think that’s maybe what it is – it is a lifelong journey.

...Last September, I started pulling the pieces of the manuscript together, looking at the older two collections and taking some of the old poems out and then going through as much of what was available to me of the new work… I said, “Seven Continents, Nine Lives.” That’s the way we should live. In a lifetime, we should go to seven continents, or as many places as we can, and we should live as many lives as possible… We have to allow ourselves to change, to transform… Your art comes from your life, so you have to live your life… I think I need to travel, need to write, touch base again. Need to see what’s going on out there.

Q: Given where the Asian American community is now, what’s your idea of the next level? In the seventies and eighties, the work was establishing all these cultural centers and organizations, but now I feel like a lot of those groups have maybe plateaued a little bit. So where do we go next?

A: They have, they have. …It’s based on how funding works for non-profit arts organizations in this country. We started getting funding in the late sixties, early seventies… Then there was a feeling that we should run our own organizations, and that’s the beginning of the non-profit organizations…that had money for rent, overhead and staff people, program money. And the program money kept shifting…and then getting cut by the government, which doesn’t value culture, because culture is – this is my other one – culture is our psychological weapon. Because culture allows you to remember the past, think of your present, and dream about your future, and when you can dream, that can become reality. If you can see it in your mind’s eye, it could become real. So it’s quite dangerous, culture and education. If you notice, we don’t really educate or nurture our children; instead we fund prisons… Even in the late eighties, they started questioning content…

The [organizations] who have survived all this switching around and changes and cuts and the inflation of real estate, they have plateaued. I think my challenge to organizations that now exist and have a space or some resources is to work intergenerationally with younger artists to provide resources and spaces, to support the work of the younger artists… I think that’s the next step in cultural development. So in December, [Zero Capital, a recently formed artists’ collective] did this first exhibit in collaboration with the Asian American Arts Center, the Asian American Arts Alliance, and the NYU A/P/A progam. We did that collaboratively… So we have scheduled, I think, another exhibition in May and another one in December. Now, we’re heading out to the Bay Area… At the time Basement was running, there was another group in the Bay Area called Kearny Street Workshop, so some of the Basement people moved out to the West Coast… We’ve been in touch on and off, so I’m going to go out there and talk with them and see if they have a space and talk to them about this idea, that maybe they could do an intergenerational project in one of their spaces out there. I’ll also to go to L.A…see if they want to do something, cross-community, intergenerational. And I think that’s the idea, what to do next.

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