- [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by.

(upbeat music) - [Rob] Welcome to Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, a Philadelphia Story.

I'm your host, Rob Busher.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a demographic that encompasses over 40 unique countries and cultures of origin, everything east of Istanbul and west of California.

As a mixed race Japanese American, I grew up learning about the history of my community through the stories of our elders.

Unfortunately, because this history is missing from most school curriculums, I knew very little about other AAPI communities until I became an ethnic studies scholar.

In this series, we will share the local history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through conversation with some of Philadelphia's most prominent Asian American community members.

Together, we will explore the unique experiences of being AAPI in Philadelphia.

On today's episode, we're discussing organizing and activism in the AAPI community.

Our conversation will focus on how Philadelphia Chinatown and the Vietnamese American community of South Philadelphia have advocated for critical issues in their respective communities.

I'm joined by panelists, John Chin, executive director of Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation, Dr. Mary Yee, founding member of Yellow Seeds and Asian Americans United, and Nancy Nguyen, executive director of Viet Lead and co-founder of Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance.

John, can you start us off by describing the origins of Philadelphia's Chinatown?

Specifically, the role that organizations like the benevolent associations and churches played and the origins of PCDC?

- Yeah, thank you.

Chinatown was founded in 1870.

And with any settlement, as immigrants came through this gateway that we call Chinatown Philadelphia, we discovered and we know from the history, that it was established in an area that was really undesirable.

No one living in Philadelphia wanted to be in this area.

It was an area that has been referred to as skid row.

But yet, you have this community of Chinese Americans that built a community, raised families, and opened up businesses in this area.

Along with this settlement came Chinese Americans from different regions of China and different relationships.

And as with all Chinatowns, you have this establishment of nine family associations.

Their role and their purpose was really to help with settlements.

They are sometimes referred to as benevolent associations.

And they have these groups of nine family associations that provided these social services.

As time went on, they came to realize that they could come together and coalesce because there were ongoing issues with the Chinese Americans living in Chinatown and what was happening outside of Chinatown in relation to government regulations.

And at that time, Philadelphia Chinatown, as well as Chinatowns across the country, formed these associations, these lead associations, called the Chinese Benevolent Association.

So this model of governing worked very, very well for Chinatown here in Philadelphia.

But as time progressed, our community saw that government looked at Chinatown as a blighted neighborhood and implemented plans basically for the destruction of our communities.

And in 1966, that's when my nonprofit, the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation was established by a group of community organizers, residents living in Chinatown because they understood and recognized that the government was implementing projects like the Vine Street Expressway that had detrimental effects on our community.

And that was really the beginning of a new chapter of organizing and advocacy for this community.

And this coincided with the same type of advocacy across Chinatowns across the country because they were also experiencing government highways in their communities.

They were experiencing dislocation of families and demolition of housing.

That is really the beginning of what you're seeing modern day advocacy and organizing.

- That's fantastic.

Thank you for fitting so much history into that short response.

I'd like to move on to Dr. Yee.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the role that each of those organizations played during the Vine Street Expressway struggle in Chinatown, Philadelphia?

- Well, since the existence of the community was being threatened, everybody in Chinatown rallied around this cause, which was to oppose the expansion of the Vine Street Expressway, which would take down the Holy Redeemer church and school and about 25% or more of existing housing.

So at first, the rallying point was to save the Holy Redeemer church and school.

So many of the parishioners and the alumni organized to do that.

But other people also joined the cause because Holy Redeemer was the only community facility, the only large space in the community, where there could be graduations, weddings, funerals, as well as basketball tournaments.

So Chinatown at that time was just a little blip on the city planning map.

And it wasn't until the Vine Street Expressway struggle that people realized that families, churches, schools, community organizations, fraternal organizations existed there, that we were a real live community and not just a tourist stop.

A place for eating Chinese food or buying some knick knacks.

At first, the Chinese Benevolent Association, being composed mainly of first generation immigrants who were not proficient English speakers, it was really up to PCDC, the second generation Chinese Americans, to lead the struggle, but it was rather difficult because it included a lot of negotiations with CBA, the Chinese Benevolent Association, which was used to being the lead organization and being basically the authority.

However, with a lot of dialogue and persuasion, PCDC was given the authority to represent Chinatown in matters of urban renewal and physical development.

So that opened the door to more active on the part of the community.

The Chinese Christian Church was also active in all of this.

That was the second major church in the community.

And the fraternal organizations were part of the Chinese Benevolent Association.

That was an umbrella organization.

So PCDC was in the lead in this struggle.

Okay.

With the support of all the other organizations in the community.

And then Yellow Seeds played a large part in the governance of PCDC also.

I was co-chair many times and many of our members were on the board or on various committees.

- Thank you for painting a picture of the many people and organizations that were involved in that struggle.

And we're going to revisit that in a little bit more detail later in this conversation.

But for now, I'd like to bring Nancy into the conversation.

Nancy, can you tell us a little bit about the role that different organizations played in the resettlement of the Vietnamese refugee community here in Philadelphia and the history of organizing?

- For sure.

So I think, you know, similarly to what John was saying, that when initially Southeast Asian, so Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao folks were being resettled in Philadelphia in the 80s, late 70s through the 80s, there were a lot of organizations that came to fruition.

Some were formal, some were informal.

Associations, a lot of these organizations, I think, had a lot to do with like cultural preservation, like maintaining memory, historical memory, maintaining language, cultural practices.

And then there were organizations that were really trying to support new refugees in accessing like city services, like, you know, welfare benefits, et cetera, because these were folks that had just arrived, leaving, you know, sort of a war torn country due to the United States' involvement in Southeast Asia.

And I think the important thing that folks need to think about is sort of like historically what was happening in Philadelphia during the 1980s, right?

So this was a time period of high criminalization.

A time period of like high social unrest.

One parallel I like to make is as Southeast Asian, as Vietnamese refugees were being resettled into really like slum housing in west Philly, in 1985, you have the move bombing.

Right?

And I think a lot about how there was not the ability for how hard it was and how difficult it was for folks who are leaving sort of one battlefield, like folks like Ellen Maca would say, entering a different battlefield and having no understanding of the historical context.

And then what happens out of that is a lot of conflict, interpersonal conflict, to different communities.

And so, you know, folks now talk a lot about anti-Asian violence, but historically, you know, anti-Asian violence, the crux, or like the cause of anti-Asian violence in Philadelphia was honestly, Philadelphia was not ready to receive such a population.

And, you know, I think that when a lot of organizations that appeared in the later 2000s were of a different generation of activists and organizers following the footsteps of what was laid, you know, what was laid down by the history of what Mary Yee was talking about.

We started organizing in organizations such as like One Love and BPSOS and Viet Lead.

Organizations that started to try to look at like, structural causes of different forms of violence in our communities.

- That's great.

Thank you for that context.

And we're gonna talk a little bit more specifically about some of the campaigns that Viet Lead has been involved in recently, but I'd like to return to Dr. Yee.

As you were mentioning earlier, you certainly were the founding member of Yellow Seeds, and it's a very important role that that organization played in the struggle around Vine Street.

But I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the role that the youth played specifically in anti-urban renewal protests in general, and also the significance of the bilingual newspaper that Yellow Seeds published at that time period.

- Well, at that time, those of us in Yellow Seeds were considered youth.

So we were mainly high school students, undergrads, and grad students.

We actually came out of a lot of the campus activism at that time, which was anti-war activism.

And also what we call the national liberation struggles.

So that there was this growing consciousness in the Asian American community but this was following along the leadership of the African American and Latino communities.

So Yellow Seeds was really active in the Vine Street struggle in terms of one, publicizing what was going on in Chinatown through the bilingual newspaper.

Because at that time there were not the native language presses that exist now.

And as far as the youth were concerned, the youth that were, say, parishioners at the Holy Redeemer Church or the Chinese Christian Church, they were involved in three major ways.

One was that they rallied around with the support of the adults to go to city council and to go to other fora where they basically protested the impending destruction of Chinatown.

Okay.

The other thing that they did was participate in the production of a film called Save Chinatown by John Wing Lum.

And so a lot of these young people who were in middle school and maybe in high school were part of the film crew.

They went around with John Wing Lum to different protests, to film people on the street.

The young people also gathered thousands of names on petitions to support Chinatown.

And then perhaps maybe the culminating event was when Chinatown youth joined the members of Yellow Seeds to block the bulldozers at 10th and Winter Street.

When the state violated agreement with the community.

The community had an agreement with then governor Shab that no demolition would take place in Chinatown without the permission of the community.

So the youth were very active and because of their experience, different people in the community, for instance, Harry Lang, were committed to coming back to the community and serving the youth and the families.

- Nancy, I'd like to come back to you now.

Can you talk a little bit about the recent campaign that Viet Lead was involved in to save Huabin Plaza?

- Absolutely.

So Huabin Plaza was on 16th and Washington.

It was one of the first or I believe the first Southeast Asian supermarket kind of plaza to establish for the Vietnamese and Cambodian communities that were resettling in south Philly.

I believe it was 1990.

So it was like the first one.

I think, you know, when we heard about it being closed and the potential for demolition, we heard about it in, I think, newspapers.

And there was a lot of sort of chatter on social media about like folks sort of reacting to it.

And when we went to the actual plaza to talk to the business owners, what we found out was they also did not know that this was happening and they had also found out through a newspaper.

And so their landlord had not been upfront with them about what was happening.

And I think we ended up working with the business tenants on a two year campaign to try to support them in staying.

Primarily because there has been this larger sort of citywide conversation about who is Philadelphia for?

Like who, when the city of Philadelphia is facing development or gentrification, there's like, there's been conversations like this all around the city.

And we thought it was an opportunity to lift this very question that other neighborhoods, other parts of the city have been struggling with within our own community to raise consciousness about how gentrification is impacting Southeast Asian communities, Southeast Asian businesses.

I think that throughout this conversation, we've been learning about how development has impacted Chinatown.

And I think that we took a lot of lessons from that.

And in our work, we were very much trying to shape a public narrative because I think for Southeast Asian businesses, our community that have been so recently displaced, we've only been here for 40 years, 40 plus.

This conversation around displacement and erasure of history and erasure of all of the labor that people have put in for 28 some years to restore and revive the plaza and a lot of like Washington Avenue, you know, folks now come to Washington Avenue for a lot of different fare, right?

So I think we were trying to tell a story about or challenge story about what development looks like in Philadelphia and tell a story about how there could be a type of development that is community centered, that is ground up.

And that is what we were trying to contend with.

Then and even now, at this point, while the businesses have been displaced, the business owners still are in this fight with us because the conversation is, you know, will the developer get to just build whatever they want, not in conversation with not taking into consideration what community wants and needs around there.

So the near neighbors that like shop at, that did shop at Huabin Plaza have also been very supportive too because it's like for them, for them, like the developer that has been trying to raise Huabin Plaza has been trying to develop a building that would bring in like 44 luxury homes, like 160 apartments.

Folks in the area are worried about density.

Folks are worried about being displaced.

And so it's been a real struggle around not only protecting the businesses and trying to secure the businesses, but having this longer term conversation about who development is for in Philadelphia.

- Yeah, thank you for that explanation.

I think it really fills in a lot of the gaps between the present and the past.

So on this subject around gentrification and urban renewal, John, I'd like to comment again from you on the role that PCDC is playing in contemporary issues and conversations around anti-gentrification in Chinatown and some of the struggles that the Chinatown business members are feeling currently.

- Yeah.

You know, and in listening to Nancy and Mary talk about these issues, there's an underlying theme here.

It's that for the benefit of the greater good, urban renewal is necessary.

That's the narrative that we hear all the time.

And communities of color like Chinatown, like Huabin in south Philadelphia, is that they were referred to as they because we're not sometimes part of this collective that the majority see us in.

They are in the way of progress.

So we're gonna put the expressway through Chinatown for the greater good.

We're gonna put the casino in Chinatown for the greater good.

We're gonna move the bus station to Chinatown because West Market Street needs to be developed.

And then in Nancy's situation at 16th and Washington, the plaza is in the way of progress, but yet there's very, very little thought to the benefits to the people living in our communities.

And so PCDC's approach has taken those three prongs that Mary talked about.

Protest as a tool of organizing.

Communication, using the media to get our message out about why we matter and why our communities should stay here.

And third is a tool that people of privilege and influence use all the time and that's advocacy because there's financial money behind that.

But communities who are of color and communities who are low income don't have access to advocacy.

But we do provide advocacy and PCDC's role over the last several decades case has been to advocate for change in policy around housing, economic development, the preservation of our commercial corridors.

And we've done a lot around housing.

It was only in 2016 that we were able to participate in the government's program called advancing and furthering fair housing.

And that was the opportunity for us in the final year of president Obama's administration is to get into the Philadelphia city's government's consolidated housing plan, components that acknowledge that immigrant communities like the Hispanic community and Asian community are deprived of resources.

And there's a disparate allocation of resources.

So the plan that we see in today's city consolidated plan includes components that acknowledges the disparate allocation resources, acknowledges the investment, the need for investment, into Hispanic and Asian communities.

So it's this type of work that's necessary and required to actually educate those who are in power and to change policies so that resources are allocated more fairly.

And two years ago in 2019, PCDC carried out a program called equity lab, which Mary was a part of.

Which speaks to the ongoing inequities around housing and economics.

And the fact that gentrification is coming to Chinatown.

We're able to partner with two other neighborhoods on this, west Philadelphia and Strawberry Mansion.

And that government can implement policies in place to equalize the playing field.

- Well, it's very exciting to hear about these kinds of cross neighborhood collaborations so thanks for sharing that, John.

In our closing minutes, I'd like to turn our attention to one of the hot topics in our community.

I think given today's topic, we'd be remiss not to mention the March 16th Atlanta spa shootings and the impact that that has had in terms of organizing at a large scale in many of the Asian American communities throughout our country.

In our closing minutes, I'd love to hear from each of our panelists, what your thoughts are on how these movements and specifically Stop Asian Hate will impact the future of organizing in our respective communities.

And Mary, why don't we start with you?

- Thanks Rob.

Well, I think that the Stop Asian Hate movement is promising to bring into dialogue many sectors of the Asian American community.

We're very diverse.

And so that means that there are recent immigrants, there are long term immigrant families who've been here three, four, five generations.

There are those of us who are from suburbia, those of us who live in the inner city, those of us who are highly educated and those of us who are struggling to get our GEDs.

So I think because, you know, this wave of Asian violence has hit everyone across the spectrum, it has the potential of bringing more parts of the Asian American community together and making them more conscious of some of the issues that we face regarding race and class.

I think also important to see that because of this experience among large sectors of the Asian community, there is also the possibility of more understanding of what other communities of color go through, especially understanding the history of African American and Latino oppression in this country.

So I think that this means that there might be a foundation for dialogues to bridge some of the differences between our communities.

- That's great.

Thank you, Mary.

Nancy.

- Thanks Rob.

I think that the Stop Asian Hate movement is important.

It makes me also very curious, right?

Because there have been a lot of resources that have been mobilized into our communities due to this.

And I think that ultimately, what we need is sort of sustained interests, sustained organization because ultimately, anti-Asian hate happens in our communities, not only at the interpersonal levels, but also at the structural levels.

And so what I'm hoping is that we, as organizers, as folks who've been doing this work in the community for decades, are able to strategically, sort of strategically use this moment to figure out long term interventions into like structural issues that cause the oppressions in our communities.

What I fear is that though there has been tons of conversations about this, the level of conversation is about what people face interpersonally and unfortunately, addressing interpersonal violence in and of itself is not going to get at the root of what's causing this in our country.

- Absolutely.

Thank you for that Nancy.

In our closing minute, John, would you like to give us some final thoughts?

- Yeah.

Nancy used the word that structural.

There are structural challenges and barriers for the Asian American community in this country.

And it's very telling that the Stop Anti-Asian Hate was ongoing since the very beginning of the pandemic.

The barrier is that there's this myth that Asians are the model minority.

Attacks were happening from the beginning of the pandemic.

And when the Atlanta mass shootings happened, it shocked the world, it shocked the country.

It took the word mass shooting to shock everybody and awaken everybody.

Our community in Philadelphia immediately galvanized to protest what happened and to protest the statements made by law enforcement immediately afterwards that the perpetrator had a bad day.

So that's all structural.

I think... We in the Asian American community have known these struggles, but I think it has awakened the mainstream.

And I'm hoping that this is a door that's been opened to get more support and to get more organizing, not just from the AAPI community but from the larger mainstream community, because Nancy's right and Mary's right.

Organizing is gonna continue to be a really important tool to level the playing field.

- Well, thank you, John.

And thank you to all of our panelists today.

We're looking forward to continuing the conversation online.

Thanks again for joining us.

I hope this discussion has been engaging and informative.

You can join the conversation too.

Just email us at talkback@whyy.org.

For WHYY, I'm Rob Busher.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by.