Jordan: Maybe we could start with you growing up, your childhood and how you made your way to Philadelphia. Working in activism in Philadelphia. And then I’d also love to talk about Yellow Seeds and your experiences fighting in the seventies for Chinatown, and some of the ideas behind Yellow Seeds that relate to today. Other than that, it’s really open, just want to hear about your relationship to Chinatown, what it means to you, what the different people and places mean, what the community adds to your life. And also, what Chinatowns in different places mean, different Asian communities throughout the country.

Mary: I'll start by saying I was born in Rutland, Vermont. Second generation Chinese American. My family was an immigrant family that was documented but illegal because we were here on papers. My father ended up in a small town in Rutland, Vermont because his father had started a Chinese hand laundry there. Actually, I'm not sure how he got there. But my father was drafted during World War Two and afterwards received citizenship. So he brought my mother over and  that left two other children and my grandmother back in China. But my mother came over and I was born here. And when I was about eight, we moved to Boston Chinatown. So we went from an all-white city except for us to a neighborhood which was pretty much all Chinese.

I went to a segregated elementary school called Quincy School, which was about 95% Chinese and 5% Lebanese because the Lebanese had moved out to the South End. We basically were a wave of succession after them. So in Boston, I grew up  in a neighborhood which was threatened by a large interstate at that time called the Southeast Expressway. It took down half of Chinatown housing and that dispersed the neighborhood; the rest that was left was pretty much desolate. So the rest of us left also. 

That meant that all of our social relationships were pretty much disrupted, except in as much as we might have seen each other in middle school or high school because we traveled around the city to go to school. I went to a magnet school called Girls Latin School, which is now called Boston Latin Academy. It was first an all girls school and then it became co-ed. In any case, we experienced dislocation to the south end of Boston. From there, I left Boston to go to college. I came here to go to Bryn for two years. I became interested in my own heritage, so I started taking Mandarin at the University of Pennsylvania. And as a result of that, I went to Princeton for initially a year abroad in a critical languages program to study Mandarin. However, I ended up staying there, for practical reasons because Bryan Mawr would have made me do a fifth year. 

But at that time, in my senior year at Princeton, what was revealed was that the Nixon Administration was basically lying about the war in Southeast Asia and that the U.S. had been bombing Cambodia and Laos even though they said they hadn't been. So when this was revealed, and because the anti-war movement had really grown and people were furious about the lies that had happened, about the lives that had been lost, and about the money that's been spent on the war that could have been spent domestically that on campuses all over the country, there was a massive strike.

Spring semester, there were no exams, maybe a third of the way into the semester. Classes stopped because people stopped going to classes. Instead, what happened was, there were a lot of teachings and other education that informed us about the war, about imperialism and about the impact on communities.

And there are two things that happened that are important for me politically. One was that the Asian students there–which were few in number then, not like today–maybe there were 20, 30 of us undergrads and some grad students. We coalesced and we were definitely all anti-war and we also experienced racism because of the war. We pulled together and we actually bought a full-page ad in the Daily Princetonian, the university newspaper, protesting the war and announcing our solidarity with the Vietnamese people and so forth. So that was the beginning of my political education about Asian American history because, at that time, there was no Asian American history being taught on the East Coast, maybe just starting on the West Coast.

And luckily one of my colleagues, Gordon Chang, who's now at Stanford, who's done a lot of work around Chinese railroad workers, brought a lot of material from the West Coast. And so, that was the first time I learned about the Japanese American incarceration and about a lot of the history of anti-Chinese legislation and the killings that happened in very small towns.

So that was one thing. On the other hand, the African American students also gave teach-ins and they talked about how our communities of color were being neglected, and that the money that was going to the war could be used in our communities to build up our communities. And we realized that we had a lot of similarities, in that Chinatowns did not have quality educational facilities. The school that I went to as an elementary school student was built in 1848. It didn't have a boys' bathroom really. And the toilets were the old pool chain toilets, no cafeteria, no library, no auditorium. We also had no health clinics, you know, no parks. And no good housing.

So we had a lot of things in common, and the cry was that we need to go back to our communities and organize and to help people in our communities get the services that they needed. So those two things, a basic understanding of the racist history facing Asian Americans, and also the call to return to our communities, was what prompted the  establishment of Yellow Seeds.

When it came to Philadelphia, a number of other people who had ties with people in Princeton also came. So there was a network at that time. I'm sure there's a network now, but  this is a network among college students. When we came to Philadelphia, we got to meet each other and we decided that we wanted to form an organization and to find out what was happening in Chinatown, Philadelphia. One of the people, Nelson Chan, who was from Chinatown, basically brought us down to meet PCDC. So there were a few of us–from Penn, besides myself, there was Howard Chin who was a grad student in architecture, there was Tony who was in urban studies, Nelson was in urban studies. Later on, there were some other people that were in architecture or urban studies, and also a couple of people from Philadelphia Chinatown, like Chris Chin, who's Howard's wife now, and her sister Madeleine, and then Jamie Kawano, who was Japanese American but was active in antiwar, anti-imperialist stuff as a high school student. So he also joined us. 

First we met PCDC and found out that they were being threatened by the Vine Street Expressway. And at that time, they had not yet incorporated. They were a committee but since I was going to urban planning school and Howard was going to architectural grad school, we had some expertise. We started working and attending the meetings with PCDC and then  through different connections, other architects and planners and engineers also joined on and off, and also  graphic artists who were important. On the one hand, we worked with PCDC, while Yellow Seeds, on the other hand, also participated in broader political movements, especially anti-imperialist struggles.

Of course, we could not go to a lot of places where at that time, there were a lot of Third World countries fighting for liberation. But because of our political education, we felt that we wanted to be an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and antiracist organization. And you'll find that pretty much stated in the Yellow Seeds newspaper. So we also started this newspaper, this bilingual newspaper, the first one in Philadelphia, that was basically all done by hand. I have to laugh now because things are so much easier done with desktop publishing. But at that time, we had to use a typewriter, we had to cut and paste, and the Chinese translation was done by hand and then photocopied and then pasted up.

We felt it was important to put out news about what was happening in Chinatown because, at that time, PCDC did not have people that were bilingual who could disseminate this information. We also felt it was an important organizing tool in as much as it gave us entree to a lot of the Chinatown workers in the restaurants or small businesses.

We would take the newspaper in and we would be able to have conversations with them both about what was going on with the Vine St Expressway, what PCDC was doing, as well as that time, what was happening in China. So it was actually a time of the Cultural Revolution. But  people were eager to hear what was going on in China. And we were able to actually rent a number of films that were about China, and people were interested because they were patriotic, but didn't mean they were communist or anything. They were concerned about their homeland and wanted to know what was going on in the villages and cities. 

Yellow Seeds thoroughly supported the community's struggle against the Vine Street Expressway. And so, we joined PCDC; I was co-chair and board member for quite a while. Other members of Yellow Seeds did the same. We did a lot of the flyers that announced meetings and protests and we also led the mounting of the rubble. That was an important way to actually get our concerns heard. Well, backing up a little bit. So Yellow Seeds was red-baited a lot in the beginning until after we got our newspaper and went out and met various people in the community.

The advantage we had at Yellow Seeds was, a number of us spoke Chinese. Whereas in PCDC for the second generation at that time, nobody spoke Chinese. I mean, very halting Chinese. So we were able to build some very good bonds with people in Chinatown, so much so that they donated a good amount of money to Yellow Seeds. We didn't have our own projector, so they donated money for a projector. We had these wooden benches to sit on. They didn't like that. So they said we're gonna buy some folding chairs. They gave us money to buy some folding chairs and then one winter, the boiler broke down. And even though we were runners, the guys downstairs wouldn't fix the boiler. So they also fixed the boiler for us. And when we had October 1st celebrations, we were able to get the restaurants and folks to donate food and we would have it at Holy Redeemer Church. At that time, to us it was a symbol of our acceptance in the community that the Catholic Church would allow us to have an October 1st celebration in their auditorium.

We would get ads for the newspaper from the different restaurants. They would buy advertising anyway. So I would say that I would characterize our relationship with PCDC as being the loyal opposition. In other words, we definitely stood in unity with them around particular issues regarding the Vine Street Expressway. But at the same time, we were also critical of them because a lot of times we felt that they were not aggressive or militant enough. Overall though, you know, there was definitely an appreciation of the contributions of people from Yellow Seeds or at least some people have said that to me. 

After that, there was a period of trying to stabilize Chinatown, so there was a fight for affordable housing. We went to City Hall, pushed the Redevelopment Authority to rezone Chinatown.  And then with the city, we developed the sister city relationship with Tianjin. That's how we got the [Chinatown] arch. So I helped manage that along with Sabrina Sung, who was an architect who's passed since. And then, I was away from Chinatown for quite a while because I started a family. 

Around 1985 or so, Debbie came back from Hong Kong. Let’s see, I can't remember how I met Debbie. But anyhow, a couple of us got together, and then about six of us got together and that was the nucleus for Asian Americans United. One of the things that was an issue was competing with PCDC, but we didn't see ourselves as dealing with urban renewal or physical development, but rather with other issues that had to do with discrimination against Asian Americans. And at that time, since Debbie was a teacher, she was very concerned about the education of the Southeast Asian immigrant students. We started out really doing work against anti-Asian violence in the city because there was all this racism against the newly resettled Southeast Asians, both in their neighborhoods and in schools.

And at that time, the police were picking up Southeast Asian kids, you know, for whatever. And then there was a really terrible incident at the McCreesh playground in Southwest, where I think three Southeast Asian kids or maybe four were convicted of killing a white kid. And this had to do with the fact that the Asian kids were being bullied in school. They finally got to the point where they weren't gonna take it anymore. That was a really bad incident, and there were some other bad incidents too where a Cambodian man [named Heng Lim] was beaten to death over a parking space. So we felt that the Southeast Asian youth needed more support.

At Asian Americans United, I started this summer program, which is the youth leadership development program, as well as an enrichment program for younger kids. So the younger kids maybe from first grade, up to fifth grade, and they would be taught and mentored by high school or college kids. So that's how that started. I was on the board of AAU for quite a while. I should back up–what happened was that Yellow Seeds had folded around 1975 or 1976. AAU was able to access its charter, so AAU really is a successor to Yellow Seeds in that sense, they took over its charter. So it basically then inherited an  incorporation and 501(c)3 status. I felt it was important.

Backing up, Yellow Seeds also had relationships with other activist organizations in the city, including  the Puerto Rican revolutionary workers organization, the former Young Lords Party,  Black United Front, the Revolutionary Union. And  to some extent, Philadelphia workers organizing committee. We often would see each other at protests, socialize with each other, especially with the Puerto Ricans. We would join up in antiwar stuff or community stuff. We thought it was important for us not only to work locally but to think globally, although that phrase did not pop up until much later. So one of the things that happened is, I left Yellow Seeds along with a number of other people to go into the working class to organize among the working class.

A lot of us worked in machine shops or garment factories here in Philadelphia. I was part of a  rank and file caucus in the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.  And then, at the same time, I was also active in the Third World coalition, the American Friends Service Committee, which at that time was formed of activists from all over the country. It was a great place to learn about other people's struggle and to build friendships and unity across color and ethnicities. So I worked with them for quite a number of years. 

The next thing that I remember is fighting the baseball stadium, which was in 2000. There was a big campaign, similar to what's going on now against the arena, except at that time, there was federal money involved. So we demanded an environmental impact statement. But then luckily, the Phillies decided it wasn't a good place for them. So hey went to South Philly. Then the next big thing–although there's some smaller things in between like the federal prison and at one point, they were going to try to relocate the African American Museum–the next thing was fighting the casinos. So I’d been away from PCDC, but when the fight against the baseball stadium and the casinos happened, I was asked to be part of a technical committee which I am now kind of co-facilitating for the arena struggle. When I've been involved because of my background as a planner, I've looked at a lot of the technical issues and issues that relate to the environmental impact statement, and have been able to get professionals, engineers, architects and etc. to critique the plans. The casino struggle was different in as much as it was really around, I would say, ethical and psychosocial concerns around pathological or addictive gambling that we know is an issue in our community, actually in a lot of working class communities.

So I worked on that, and at that time, there was some kind of unity that was brokered between PCDC and AAU. We formed a separate organization called the Chinatown Preservation Alliance, the officers of which were constituted by two people from Asian Americans United and two people from PCDC, and I was the nominal president. Luckily, we didn't have to do too much, but we put out some protests, information and they wrote a lot of letters and things like that. But anyhow, that was an attempt at unity and it worked well enough at that time. And luckily, the licenses were not approved for the casino near Chinatown and eventually the other casino went to South Philly.

Over the years, there have been a lot of different struggles. Every five to seven years, there's been a threat. And you know, it's definitely an issue that has to do with Chinatown being working class and being Chinese. We know about the history of anti-Chinese racism from way back, from before 1882 with all the anti-Chinese laws being passed, especially in California and other states out west. That continued up through World War Two–even though China was an ally, [xenophobia continued] because it was communist. Then the McCarthy era began, and people here were either imprisoned  or sent back to China. That basically squashed any activism in the Chinatown communities at that time. So today, when I think about Chinatown, I think of it as a symbol of our resistance to white racism and a symbol of our continuing resilience in the face of discrimination. I think it's important as a physical and material entity, because it's through our senses that we also understand the world around us and feel connections with other people. Chinatown is a complex community because of its history, and because it serves in many cities as a place for recent immigrants to go to school, to find jobs, and find housing.

But it's also very important as a spiritual and cultural center where those of us who are Asian, not just Chinese, can feel a sense of belonging. Where we can find common culture and heritage, and also build social relationships with each other. Find the institutions that are important for us, whether they're faith-based, fraternal, or location-based such as the county organizations from China. It’s also a place for younger people to learn about their history and to appreciate the struggles that have gone on. 

One of the issues is that recent immigrant families have no idea about the history of anti-Chinese racism. Therefore, a lot of people take Chinatown for granted. I know that a lot of recent foreign students don't understand this, and those that stay, don't understand this. They think Chinatown is kind of old, rundown, dirty; the vendors are on the street and they would prefer to go to maybe a spiffier shopping mall. In other cities there are really large Asian populations, but in Philly, we don't quite have that; so Chinatown is important because of its resistance to being displaced and its resistance now also to gentrification.

But it is a result of racism, of geospatial racism because we were there when it was a very undesirable place to live. Being next to Skid Row, which was more or less eliminated by the Vine Street Expressway. But before the Vine Street Expressway, Skid Row infiltrated Chinatown or the other way around. So at 10th and Race, there used to be four corner bars, there were still flop houses on Ninth Street, there were also other noxious uses. There was a rag shop, there was a chair factory. It wasn't necessarily a desirable place to live. But because we were close to Center City, and Center City grew, the real estate became much more desirable. That's one reason there have been all these continual attempts to infiltrate on Chinatown. It’s our proximity to Center City, our proximity to the Vine Street Expressway and I-95. All of those things put pressure on our community. One of the things that has been quite inspiring and amazing is that we're one of the few Chinatowns in North America that is still thriving and it's still able to really function as a neighborhood and community.

You know, Boston never really recovered. Seattle never really recovered. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, have all experienced a lot of gentrification or destruction because of major projects. 

Jordan: I think something that came up a lot is Chinatown's identity as a working class community, and its connection to other working class communities in Philadelphia. I wonder, do you feel like Chinatown gets alienated from that because it's an Asian community? They're kind of pushed out of that unity of being a working class community and it makes it harder for it to be in alliance with other communities. 

Mary: I think that ought to do with the history of racism in the U.S. and also divide-and-conquer tactics by whoever is in power. We have talked about trying to fight anti-Black racism in the Asian American community. But you know, when Southeast Asian immigrants came, there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in the Black community because the way that people were resettled, they were put in poor communities. Their rent was subsidized, they were getting food stamps. There was misinformation about them, getting lots of business help. So African Americans felt, “Well, we, we fought in the Vietnam War, we fought against these people and now you're bringing them over here and you're giving them all these benefits while our communities are suffering, we're not getting all these benefits.” 

So that's the kind of thing that happens. And white working class folks on the group level have discriminated against people of color in the trades for a long time since [AFL President Samuel] Gompers. He felt that Chinese in particular should not be allowed into unions because they were barbaric, they ate dogs, they smoked opium, they were promiscuous, all kinds of stereotypes were pushed forward. And a lot of those have persisted. It's a question of like, “Oh, well, someone's here to take my job.” And you know, the whole issue with Vincent Chin's killing had to do with the people saying that the Japanese car manufacturers were taking business away from the American car manufacturers. So the white working class was feeling, “Well, you're Asian, you need to get out of my face.” But I have to say that, we probably have more in common with the Latino communities, especially the Puerto Rican community, because they've been here for about as long as we've been here. We have a lot of the same issues regarding [teaching the] first language in school, regarding traditional values, family values, respecting elders, food traditions. It seems to me personally that we usually have a lot to unite around with other Latino communities. The other thing is, I feel that Chinatowns, like in Philadelphia, are ignored for the most part except as a tourist attraction. So maybe we get on a map and we get a sign. But then we are ignored when it comes to getting city benefits or federal benefits.

When COVID happened, of course, you know, we were blamed. But that wasn't the first time because there was the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu, there's SARS, you know, and all those became connected with Asians. You know, other people got connected with other things too, like TB with Jewish people, but I would say that it definitely has been an issue of uniting across color lines in the working class and that's been a longtime issue with activists. Now, because there's so many immigrant workers here, whether documented or undocumented, that's changing somewhat because you're finding more organizing happening in places where people of color are working. So I'm hoping that some of that will change.

But in the more so-called “prestigious” unions, the higher-paid craft unions, that's not really happening too fast. In terms of neighborhood struggles at certain points in time, Chinatown has been able to make connections with other communities that were undergoing urban renewal struggles, especially in the seventies.

Jordan: I see it a lot now with SPOC (Students for the Preservation Of Chinatown) working with Save UC Townhomes as a big  project uniting them. But also at the same time, the developers’ narrative was to have 40% Black businesses in the arena–again, pitting Black people against Asian people.

Mary: Right. Right. Right. And not realizing that it's a tactic to divide and conquer. And that in the end–of course, can’t forecast the future–but the chances are that the Black businesses, unless they’re subsidized to the gills, they're not gonna be able to survive there because the rents will be too high. And the developers are thinking of only putting commercial businesses on the first floor. It’s also unclear what's going to happen to the rest of the Fashion District, since they won't have as many people circulating because the arena is not in use all the time. It doesn't mean there's gonna be more business for businesses. It's all something that really has to be looked at in detail. That's why we're asking for the impact studies.

Jordan: I wonder, having seen so many different fights, how have you seen Chinatown itself? Like the community change? 

Mary: Well, the community’s changed a lot. So when I first got here, there might not have even been 300 Chinese people living in Chinatown. There are a good number of biracial families too, which was proportionately pretty unusual. I mean, I came from Boston Chinatown and there were a couple mixed race families, but overwhelmingly, it was all Chinese and we all grew up speaking Chinese, went to Chinese school and all that. Here, it was very different because there weren't as many Chinese families here. There were a handful of restaurants and there were the fraternal organizations here and the Holy Redeemer Church, Chinese Christian church, two important institutions that were quite strong. A lot of families relied on them for support, social service support, and other kinds of support. When we started to fight the expressway, it was clear that, because some housing had already been destroyed for Independence Mall, that housing was an issue if we were going to sustain the community. So at the same time, we're fighting the expressway, there was the fight for affordable housing. And Cecilia Yep did a lot for that, in terms of helping to get the senior citizen housing built. The housing on the block of Race Street, the apartments there, the housing on Ninth Street, which was actually a result of bargaining around, well, not by relocation from the Convention Center construction and also the  housing in the back of PCDC’s Ninth Street office. So one of the issues too was expanding the borders of Chinatown beyond Vine Street. We started to look back in the seventies at Chinatown North. And luckily we did, and we met with the City Planning Commission to say that the planning boundaries of Chinatown should be much further north, say to Callowhill.

The people who were dislocated from Chinatown had first dibs on the housing that got built in Chinatown. This must have been the 1980s. Then in the 1990s, there is an influx of Chinese and other Asians to Philadelphia. It was probably nationwide. More migration from Taiwan as well as from the PRC, both legal and undocumented. A lot of those people had more modern ideas about business management and financing because the folks that were here in Chinatown, relatively uneducated, number one and, you know, kind of took over from one generation to another. Whereas, the new people that came in, some of them had run businesses in Taiwan or Hong Kong. And so on the one hand, they got a new vitality to Chinatown, another population of Chinatown but then that also created some division because a lot of those people spoke Mandarin or Fujianese rather than speaking Cantonese, or one of the other county dialects of Guangdong province.

But basically, that base helped make Chinatown properties owned by more Chinese. Properties within the boundaries of Chinatown properties, within the bounds of Chinatown, began to be bought up by Chinese people. A lot of these other places like printing places or garment factory buildings became Chinese-owned. That started in filling and then Chinatown expanded from Winter Street to Cherry, then to Arch and then to Filbert.

Chinatown is so much larger and so much more vital than it was, say, in 1970. That was 50-some years ago. There's just so much more going on, there's more street life, lots of variety of shops and the kinds of foods and produce you can get. It's really changed a lot, I have to say. 

Jordan: My last question: what changes would you like to see for Chinatown? What kind of community can you envision it becoming with its full potential?

Mary: I would hope that we would be able to continue growing and adding affordable housing. But one of the things that we talked about in PCDC long ago is we wanted to be a balanced community. And in one sense, some of the gentrification has helped with some of the condos on Arch Street; we wanted it not to be just a poor community, but a community that had working class people, middle class people, and maybe a few rich people, one that would have all the amenities that, you know, “nice” white communities have. That means better parks and playgrounds, health care facilities, a library. In the present situation, FACTS has wanted to start a high school, and that would be great if they could start a high school. There would be places for arts and culture. There are arts and culture organizations now, but it would be great if there were more opportunities for them to flourish and also for young people to find opportunities to express themselves through art, music, performance. And also, maybe there would be a place like, other cities have started to do more around documenting their Chinatown's history; even DC has, and the Museum of Chinese American in New York. San Francisco has a museum, LA has the Japanese American Museum. Seattle has the Wing Luke Museum. So maybe in Philadelphia, we could also have our own place to archive our history and to have a place where people can learn about other Asian communities, including Chinatowns, Japantowns and Little Saigon, and so on, and to have a place to maybe build relationships with other communities of color. I have been trying to do that by having different exhibitions that draw in people from other communities. Maybe we could do that on a different level. But I also would hope, since you mentioned the issue about unity across class and ethnic lines, that we work more towards that, that we do that through the organizations we have and maybe build new organizations.

Jordan: I don't wanna keep you too long, but thank you so much for talking to me today.