Remembering Nellie Wong, prolific poet and activist from Oakland Chinatown

"Nellie attended Oakland High School when her family moved to a neighborhood outside of Chinatown after World War II, the beginnings of integration for ethnic Chinese residents who'd lived under the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Her early life, into her late 20s, was rooted in the patriarchal culture in Chinatown and the white American mainstream. That oppression did not sustain her. Nellie's intelligence, creativity, and compassion yearned to break free."

"At Oakland High, she worked part-time as a secretary in the principal's office. She earned praise for her clerical and administrative organizational skills, a precursor to a future as a working-class advocate and organizer. From 1964 to 1982, Nellie worked at the San Francisco office of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in an administrative capacity. Her working-class life continued at the University of California, San Francisco, in various administrative assistant and analyst positions in the affirmative action office from 1984 to 1998."

"In her mid-30s, Nellie married James Balch, who, along with Nellie's sister Flo Oy Wong, urged her to write, given her enthusiastic oral reviews of movies and TV shows and her pithy, humorous family newsletters. (She later divorced James.) The world around her was changing to become more inclusive, a product of the 1960s civil rights movement that spawned the feminist movement and the empowerment of non-white communities, including her Chinese cohort."

Nellie Wong was born Sept. 12, 1934, in Oakland Chinatown into a family that ran the Great China Restaurant from 1943 to 1961. She grew up under patriarchal Chinatown norms and mainstream American oppression but developed intelligence, creativity, and compassion that propelled her outward. She worked as a secretary at Oakland High and later held administrative roles at Bethlehem Steel (1964–1982) and at UCSF (1984–1998) in affirmative action. In her mid-30s she married James Balch and was encouraged to write by family. The 1960s civil rights and feminist movements opened educational opportunities; she studied ethnic and feminist studies and creative writing in the 1970s. She died Jan. 2 at 91 from ovarian cancer.

Read at The Oaklandside