In my second year, San Francisco State exploded into daily demonstrations and when various college presidents refused to bring police on campus, they were all fired or resigned until S. I. Hayakawa was installed as president of the college and he brought police on campus. Riots broke out and students were arrested and beaten. Students went on strike. The campus closed down. One day, Kay stood defiantly between protesting students and police. She was not only a mentor to students, but also our protector. Disgusted with S. I. Hayakawa, I transferred to UC Berkeley in 1969, which was, of course, like jumping from the frying pan directly into the fire. Even though I left San Francisco State, I continued to work with Kay and stayed enrolled as a part-time student there while going to school as a full-time student at Berkeley. After I graduated in 1971, I went back to SF State, entered graduate school in creative writing, and moved in with Kay. I did work with other writers while in school—Herb Wilner, Leo Litwak, Stan Rice, and Jackson Burgess (at Berkeley), and even took a class from saxophonist John Handy—but none were as influential as Kay as teacher and editor.
When I started writing in college, I realized one day that I was the only Asian American writer I knew in the world and that no teacher in high school or college had ever assigned or even mentioned a book written by an Asian American writer. The whole field of study called Asian American studies was just being formed at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. It was Kay Boyle who introduced me to the first Asian American writer I ever met. Jeffery Chan was one of her graduate students and teaching in the newly formed Asian American Studies Department at SF State. When I met Jeff, he gave me the phone number of Frank Chin who lived just a few blocks from me in Berkeley. The three of us found poet Lawson Inada and eventually the four of us co-edited Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974). The publication of Aiiieeeee! marked the beginning of the rediscovery of Asian American literature. Franklin Odo, editor of The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (2002) called the anthology “a pathbreaking work of Asian American literature” and listed the preface to the anthology as one of 155 key historical documents of Asian American history from 1790 to 2001.
Also in 1969, Frank Chin introduced me to writer Ishmael Reed and Ishmael introduced me to a whole range of writers such as Victor Hernandez Cruz, Alex Haley, Al Young, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Silko, Ntosake Shange, and even musicians like David “Fat Head” Newman and George Clinton and Funkadelic. Ishmael later founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a literary organization dedicated to the promotion of American multicultural literature, where I served as one of the founding board members in the mid-70s and continue to serve on the board of directors today. Most of this activity happened when I was still in school. Imagine, as an undergraduate student at Berkeley: I was studying the dead white British authors—sitting in Spenser class, writing papers about Chaucer—and outside of class, I was encountering all of the exciting literary life going on in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, I think my real education was out in the arts and literary communities of the Bay Area where there were no grades, no credit, and no classes.
During my senior year at Berkeley, I took a job as editor of the Glide Urban Center newsletter, which was part of Glide Memorial Methodist Church. I doubt if there was any place in the Bay Area more exciting than Glide in 1971—it was the hub of community activism lead by the dynamic and charismatic Rev. Cecil Williams with Janice Mirikitani as the executive director of Glide Urban Center. It was Mirikitani who first invited me to read my poetry to an audience.
While still in graduate school in 1972, I was offered my first teaching job in the newly formed Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College in Oakland. The dean of the faculty at the time asked me what I could teach and I answered that I could teach a class in Asian American literature. I was offered the job even though I did not have any teaching experience, a graduate degree or any publications, and I was about to teach a subject that I did not learn in college, rather had taught myself. At the time, I was working as a part-time gardener to support myself, so I had a decision to make. I could continue working as a gardener or teach at a private women’s college. I was twenty-two and single; I took the job. Jeff, Frank, Lawson, and I had completed the manuscript of Aiiieeeee! and I used that as the foundation for the course.
After several trade publishers turned down Aiiieeeee!, Howard University Press decided to publish the anthology as part of their inaugural list of ten books in 1974. It instantly became the most reviewed book on their list with reviews in every newspaper and periodical from The New York Times to Rolling Stone to The New Yorker. Aiiieeeee! was later published in paperback by Doubleday.
I graduated from San Francisco State in the same year and started circulating Homebase around to publishers with no success. Ishmael Reed and Kay Boyle both introduced my book to various editors at large publishing houses, but all turned it down. While waiting to publish the novel, I rewrote it eight times, each time making the language in the novel work harder and using my training in poetry to get the most out the narrative. Finally, in 1979, Ishmael decided to publish the book himself with his own small press, I. Reed Books. The novel won two literary awards and was later published by Plume, a division of Penguin Books. In 1975, Frank Chin and I co-edited an edition of The Yardbird Reader, a literary journal started by Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and other African American writers and artists. It was no accident that my first three books were published by African American publishers. They were the first to recognize the legitimacy of Asian American literature.
In the early ’70s Frank, Jeff, Lawson, and I formed the Combined Asian-American Resources Project, Inc. (CARP) dedicated to the rediscovery of Asian American literature and preserving oral history interviews with writers and artists. Our CARP oral history interviews are collected at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. When we couldn’t find a publisher to reprint John Okada’s landmark 1957 novel, No-No Boy, we used our own money, borrowed money from several sources, and published a new edition in 1976. No-No Boy was published by the University of Washington Press in 1979 and recently sold its 100,000th copy.
The literary history cited here is, of course, not just about one novel, but rather about the dissemination, preservation, and promotion of a whole field of literature. As a young writer, who started writing Homebase almost forty years ago, I realized very early on that I was responsible for educating an audience to Asian American writing as well as for writing it.
SHAWN WONG
Seattle, Washington
November 2007
HOMEBASE
CHAPTER ONE
I
BACK IN THE EARLY FIFTIES, WHEN I WAS FOUR, MY FATHER AND mother drove from Berkeley to New York and back. The sound of the car’s little engine is still buzzing and working away in my head. My sense of balance comes from lying asleep in the back seat of that car, my unsteady heartbeat comes from my father’s night driving and my watching the chaos of passing headlights floating by on our car’s ceiling and gleaming tail-lights reflected and distorted in the windows. In those nights, sleeping in the back seat of my father’s car, I heard conversations my mother and father had, saw places I visited later, and remembered it all when I started driving. And the places I’ve never been to before were dreams, were whole conversations my father and mother had.
I will eventually travel to all the places I’ve dreamed about. I will meet my friends and know them as if I’d known them all my life.
I was named after my great-grandfather’s town, the town he first settled in when he came to California from China: Rainsford, California. Rainsford Chan (Chan is short for California). Rainsford doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no record of it ever having existed, but I’ve heard stories about it. I’ve spent many days hiking and skiing through the Sierra Nevada looking for it. I’ve never found exactly where it was, but I’m almost sure I’ve seen it or passed by it on one
