Nellie Wong

Last updated
Nellie Wong
Born (1934-09-12) September 12, 1934 (age 90)
Oakland, California, US
Occupation(s) Poet, activist
Political party Freedom Socialist Party

Nellie Wong (born 12 September 1934) is an American poet and activist for feminist and socialist causes. [1] [2] Wong is also an active member of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.

Contents

Biography

Wong was born in Oakland, California to Chinese immigrants. [3] Her father had immigrated to Oakland in 1912. Wong is a Chinese American poet, feminist, and socialist who has organized and participated in activist groups working to create better conditions for women, workers, and minorities. [4]

During World War II, the Wong family worked in a grocery store in Berkeley. [5] The internment of her Japanese American neighbors left a profound impact on her intellectual development, sensitizing her to issues of racism and the concerns of Asian Americans. The family borrowed $2,000 to start a restaurant, The Great China, in Oakland's Chinatown, where Wong worked as a waitress during her youth. [6] [7] She attended public school, graduating from Oakland High School, and started full work as a secretary for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, a position she held until 1982. She later served as senior analyst in affirmative action at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

While in her mid-30s, Wong began studying creative writing at San Francisco State University (SFSU) and began to write and publish her poetry. Wong credits her feminist classmates at SFSU with encouraging her writing. A male professor had once told her to throw away an angry poem she had written. One classmate told her, "You don't have to listen to him!" [1]

While a student at San Francisco State University, Wong was involved with the campus Women Writers Union, which organized around issues of race, sex, and class. In the late 1970s, alongside Chinese American women writers Nancy Hom, Genny Lim, Canyon Sam, Kitty Tsui and Merle Woo, Wong co-founded and organized the feminist literary and performance group Unbound Feet. [8] [9] The group performed at colleges, universities, and community centers. During this time she encountered members of two affiliated socialist feminist organizations, Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, and within a few years had joined their ranks.

In 1983, Wong traveled to China on the first U.S. Women Writers Tour to China sponsored by the US–China Peoples Friendship Association with Tillie Olsen, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall. [10] Also in 1983 she was a major organizer of the Merle Woo Defense Committee. Woo, a lesbian Korean-Chinese American feminist, had filed a complaint against their former employer alleging wrongful termination based on discrimination. Working with other Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women members, Wong raised funds and awareness of the case. [4] Two legal cases were won against the defendant.

From 1983 to 1985 Wong taught poetry writing at Mills College in Oakland and playwriting at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco. [11]

During the 1980s and 1990s, Wong was keynote speaker at many national and regional conferences, including Third World Women and Feminist Perspectives, Women Against Racism, and the National Women's Studies Association. She has recited her poetry in China, Cuba, Australia, and throughout the U.S. She has also participated on panels concerning labor, Asian American literature, and poetry. Furthermore, Wong has taught Women's studies at the University of Minnesota and poetry writing at Mills College in Oakland, California.

In 2019, Wong, Genny Lim and Flo Oy Wong began performing together as The Last Hoisan Poets, conducting special poetry readings in English and Hoisan-wa (also known as Taishanese, a Yue Chinese dialect native to Taishan, Guangdong) to pay homage to their mother language which is at risk of fading from collective memory. [12]

Excerpts from two of her poems have been permanently installed as plaques at public sites at the San Francisco Municipal Railway. She has received awards from the Women's Foundation (San Francisco), University of California, Santa Barbara's Asian American Faculty and Staff Association, and the San Francisco-based Kearny Street Workshop, a multidisciplinary art collective. She served many years as the Bay Area organizer of the Freedom Socialist Party, and is still active with the party, Radical Women, and Bay Area United Against War. She currently resides in San Francisco.

Work

To mark her 90th birthday, poet and activist Nellie Wong's fifth collection of poetry, Nothing Like Freedom, published by HoongHoongLookLook Press, bridges the decades of her remarkable career, with work that spans the 1970s to the present (2024). [13] Wong's first collection of poetry, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (1977), was published by Kelsey Street Press. This book went through four printings and was the most successful release in the history of Kelsey Street Press. Her other titles are The Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), published by West End Press and Stolen Moments (1997). Her work has appeared in approximately 200 anthologies and publications. [14]

Wong writes directly from her working life; she states "A lot of my poems come from the workplace; that's where I've experienced a great deal of sexism and racism." Other themes include her family history and Asian American identity, about which she has said, "I care about the roots of Asian American culture and how and why they came here [...] It's something every Asian family has experienced." Her poetry spans issues of feminism, the fight against racism, workplace injustice, and finding identity as a writer and activist. [2]

In 1981, Wong participated with Mitsuye Yamada in the documentary film Mitsuye & Nellie, Asian American Poets, produced by Allie Light and Irving Saraf. The film recounts the experiences and hardships that affected the writers and their families. Significant to the film's focus is how World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor encouraged divisive perceptions of Japanese as "bad" Asians, while the Chinese were seen as "good" Asians. "Can't Tell," one of the poems Wong recites in the film, highlights the author's attempt to understand why her Japanese neighbors were being sent to internment camps when she and her family, as Chinese Americans, were considered patriotic citizens.

The film also shows lively exchanges between Wong and her siblings, highlighting the feistiness of her older sister, Li Keng, also an author, [6] and her youngest sister, Flo Oy Wong, an installation artist. Her brother, William Wong, is a journalist and the author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America.

Her papers are housed at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. [15] In 2022, she received a Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Oakland.

Bibliography

Books

Other

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cherríe Moraga</span> American writer and activist (born 1952)

Cherríe Moraga is an influential Chicana feminist writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. A prominent figure in Chicana literature and feminist theory, Moraga's work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class, with particular emphasis on the experiences of Chicana and Indigenous women. She currently serves as Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shirley Geok-lin Lim</span> American poet (born 1944)

Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.

Mitsuye Yamada is a Japanese American poet, essayist, and feminist and human rights activist. She is one of the first and most vocal Asian American women writers to write about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jewelle Gomez</span> American author, poet, critic and playwright (born 1948)

Jewelle Lydia Gomez is an American author, poet, critic and playwright. She lived in New York City for 22 years, working in public television, theater, as well as philanthropy, before relocating to the West Coast. Her writing—fiction, poetry, essays and cultural criticism—has appeared in a wide variety of outlets, both feminist and mainstream. Her work centers on women's experiences, particularly those of LGBTQ women of color. She has been interviewed for several documentaries focused on LGBT rights and culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elana Dykewomon</span> American activist and author (1949–2022)

Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marilyn Chin</span> American poet

Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lorna Dee Cervantes</span> American poet (born 1954)

Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pat Parker</span> American poet and activist

Pat Parker was an African American poet and activist. Both her poetry and her activism drew from her experiences as a Black lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke about her tough childhood growing up in poverty, dealing with sexual assault, and the murder of a sister. At eighteen, Parker was in an abusive relationship and had a miscarriage after being pushed down a flight of stairs. After two divorces, she came out as a lesbian, "embracing her sexuality" and said she was liberated and "knew no limits when it came to expressing the innermost parts of herself".

Alta Gerrey was a British-American poet, prose writer, and publisher, best known as the founder of the feminist press Shameless Hussy Press and editor of the Shameless Hussy Review. Her 1980 collection The Shameless Hussy won the American Book Award in 1981. She is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genny Lim</span> American poet, playwright and performer (born 1946)

Genevieve (Genny) Lim is an American poet, playwright, and performer. She is currently serving as the ninth poet laureate of San Francisco, California, and she is the first Chinese American poet to serve in this role. She served as the Chair of Community Arts and Education Committee, and as Chair of the Advisory Board for the San Francisco Writers Corps. She has performed with Max Roach, Herbie Lewis, Francis Wong, and Jon Jang among others in San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Houston and Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janice Mirikitani</span> American writer (1941–2021)

Janice Mirikitani was an American poet and activist who resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of her adult life. She managed the Glide Memorial Church with her husband, Cecil Williams. She was noted for serving as San Francisco's poet laureate from 2000 until 2002.

When I Was Growing Up is an autobiographical poem written by revolutionary feminist activist, Nellie Wong in 1973, describing her struggle to identify as an Asian-American girl growing up in the United States. Wong reflects on the universal representations of Western ideals of beauty advertised in American popular culture; from which, Wong expresses her desire to be white, to be normal. She states "...to become/a woman, a desirable woman, I began to wear/imaginary pale skin." The lack of and negative stereotypical representations of Asian-American women in Western popular culture denied Nellie Wong the agency to privilege her intersectional identity. The result of this patriarchal tool made Wong shameful of her Chinese heritage: "when I was growing up, I felt/dirty. I thought that god/made white people clean/and no matter how much I bathed/I could not change, I could not shed/my skin in the gray water."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Shuck</span> American poet

Kim Shuck is a Cherokee Nation poet, author, weaver, and bead work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and also has Sac and Fox and Polish ancestry. She earned a B.A. in art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making.

Merle Woo is an American academic, poet and activist who has been described as "a leading member of the Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party". Her essay "Letter to Ma" was selected for inclusion in the 1981 feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Sherman</span> American poet

Susan Sherman is an American author, poet, playwright, and a founder of IKON Magazine. Sherman's poems "convey the different voices of those who have felt the pang of suffering and burning of injustice."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucille Lang Day</span> American poet

Lucille Lang Day is an American poet, writer, and science and health educator. Day has authored or edited 20 books and is a contributor to over 60 anthologies. She is best known as a poet and writer for her award-winning memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, for her integration of science imagery and concepts into poetry and for advocating use of poetry as a tool in environmental activism. As a science and health educator, her many achievements have included promoting science education for girls and serving as codirector of Health and Biomedical Science for a Diverse Community, a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and aimed to make biomedical science more accessible to underrepresented minorities.

Willyce Kim is an American writer. She is generally recognized to be the first openly-lesbian, Asian American poet to be published in the United States. Kim published her first book of poetry in 1971 and continued to publish poetry and novels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She also contributed to a number of lesbian literary reviews throughout this time period. Her work is characterized by its celebration of lesbianism, strong women, and queer kinship.

Barbara Noda, is a third generation Japanese American poet. Noda draws upon her experience as a Japanese American Lesbian and Feminism, and also advocates for LGBTQ rights in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Karen Harriet Brodine was an American poet, dancer, educator, writer, activist, and typesetter, based in San Francisco and Seattle.

Shelley Wong is an American poet. In 2022, she released her debut poetry collection, As She Appears, after winning the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize in 2019, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and other publications. Her poetry has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fire Island Artist Residency, the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others.

References

  1. 1 2 "Nellie Wong". Voices from the Gaps. University of Minnesota. 2005-05-14. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
  2. 1 2 Güereña, Salvador (2002-10-22). "BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH". Guide to the Nellie Wong Papers. California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives. Retrieved 2007-04-18.
  3. ↑ "Nellie Wong". UCSB Library. 2011-08-19. Retrieved 2024-01-17.
  4. 1 2 Madsen, Deborah L. (2005). Asian American writers. Detroit: Thomson Gale. p. 318. ISBN   078768130X
  5. ↑ "Nellie Wong". UCSB Library. 2011-08-19. Retrieved 2024-01-17.
  6. 1 2 Memorymap.oacc.cc
  7. ↑ "Nellie Wong". UCSB Library. 2011-08-19. Retrieved 2024-01-17.
  8. ↑ "Kelsey St. Press- Poetry by Women". www.kelseyst.com. Retrieved 2021-11-30.
  9. ↑ "'Feet' to Unbind". Asian Week. 1980-06-26. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  10. ↑ "From China with words: A writers' tour". Oakland Tribune. 1983-09-02. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  11. ↑ Madsen, Deborah L. (2005). Asian American writers. Detroit: Thomson Gale. p. 318. ISBN   078768130X.
  12. ↑ "thelasthoisanpoets.ddns.net".
  13. ↑ Yu, Timothy (2024-09-13). "Survival as a Work of Art: Nellie Wong at Ninety". nelliewong.ddns.net. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  14. ↑ "Nellie Wong." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Biography in Context. Web. 17 Jan. 2016.
  15. ↑ Nellie Wong Papers at UCSB

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.