Features

“Heck fahn” literally means “Eat rice” in Chinese, and the connotation is that it’s time to eat, time for something important and nutritious.  

I don’t know how to speak Chinese but I do know this: If you want an important and informed view of the Asian American experience in the last decade – read “Yellow Journalist” by William Wong. 

Wong, popular writer for The San Francisco Examiner, The Oakland Tribune, Asian Week, and The Wall Street Journal, and former regional commentator for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer; has collected 75 of his essays, columns, and commentaries into an anthology.  

Topics range from the complex dynamics of the Human Cargo Trade – in which profit-oriented pirates smuggle desperate people into America; and what Wong calls “The ‘Hottest’ Dating Trend” happening today: white men dating Asian woman.  

Wong views with distaste the views of one theorist: that white men can’t deal with strong, independent white women; and that Asian men are the most sexist of sexists. 

Wong shows particular interest in issues of political and social importance. He urges us to remember “The Rape of Nanking,” in which Japanese military efforts led to the death of more than 300,000 Chinese, biological and germ warfare and forced prostitution for thousands of women. Essays study the varying Asian American responses to the Honda resolution, and they describe the mocking anti-Asian diatribe made by former New York Republican Sen. Alfonse D’Amato against Judge Ito, who presided over the O .J. Simpson trial.  

In pieces titled “The Golden State of Bigotry,” “Swastikas in the Sunset,” “Yellow Chic” and “I am a Gook,” Wong takes on stereotypes, painful ill-fitting cliches, fear, intolerance, prejudice, greed and superficiality of all kinds. 

Wong has praise for organizations such as The Prime Time Performers, in which Asian American basketball players from a Buddhist league and African American players in Oakland joined to win a championship. 

Born in Oakland’s Chinatown in 1941, and now a resident of a spacious five-bedroom split-level home in predominantly-white Piedmont two miles away, Wong chronicles his personal history.  

He fondly recalls playing “Firecracker Wars” on Webster Street in Oakland, and watching the pastry chef in his parents’ restaurant, the Great China Café (“Aye Joong Wah” in his family’s See Yip dialect) make strawberry and banana whipped cream cakes.  

Wong worked as a sportswriter for the student newspaper at UC Berkeley, served three and a half years in the Peace Corps, lived in Asia, and in the 1970s he wrote about Asian American issues for The Wall Street Journal.  

As a media representative for all of Asian America, Wong tells the stories of ethnic Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Asian Indians, Cambodians, Laotians, Thai, Hawaiians, Samoans, Pakistanis, Burmese, Singaporeans and more. We read about Poch Seap, born in Cambodia and killed in Oakland at the age of twenty while defending his sister.  

We read about the efforts of Bay Area residents such as Sharon Lumho to keep alive the history of Hawaii, in which Queen Lili’oukalini was removed from rule by largely non-native interests – who favored various corporate and tourist industry causes. 

Wong talks of his yearning for Chinese soul food of salted-fish steamed pork patties and stir-fried boy choy. Reading Yellow Journalist qualifies as well. 

Sari Friedman, whose short fiction and poetry appears in various literary magazines and anthologies, teaches writing at Vista, Laney, and Merritt colleges, and at the College of Alameda.