Content area
Full Text
Images from East/West are found throughout this volume.
In 1966 Gordon Lew's job was to translate English news articles into Chinese for the Chinese Times, one of four Chinese newspapers in San Francisco Chinatown. One morning when he arrived for work, he saw an astonishing sight-paper from a teletype machine flowing all over the floor. He immediately realized that either the machine had malfunctioned or there were major stories coming out of China.
The machine had not malfunctioned, and the story was the Cultural Revolution. Lew faced the considerable task of trying to make some sense out of the chaos in China and translate the stories on deadline for Chinese-literate readers in Chinatown and Chinese America.
That episode planted a seed that Lew and two Chinese newspaper colleagues, Kenneth Joe and Ken Wong, nurtured to create East/West, a bilingual weekly newspaper published out of San Francisco Chinatown for twenty-two years and nine months (January 1967 to September 1989). Lew became the publisher and editor, Joe worked in the Chinese section, and Wong was the principal writer in the English section.
East/West was born at a time of tumultuous changes in China and in the United States. These profound changes deeply affected Chinese Americans, and no publication was serving their need for focused, reliable information that was both wide and deep. The newspaper's founders wanted to give Chinese Americans news and views about the changing times in their own community and their ancestral country, speaking directly to their unique ethnic and cultural identities.
East/West fulfilled that goal by reporting and commenting on local community news. It also provided an invaluable forum for a wide range of Chinese American and Asian American views that shed light on historical and contemporary experiences. Stories from China and from the home front in the mid- to late 1960s connected in both direct and complicated ways to the Chinese American and Asian American communities emerging out of the shadows of segregation and discrimination since the mid-nineteenth century.
CHANGING POLITICS IN CHINATOWN
China's Cultural Revolution put into focus the internal politics of San Francisco Chinatown, whose purported leaders were loyal to the ruling Kuomintang (Nationalists) on Taiwan. These leaders of various Chinatown associations and organizations were rabidly anti-Communist. Chinese American progressives and...