<Begin Segment 21>

MA: I wanted to jump ahead a little bit and ask about the Asian American movement and your involvement in the Asian American movement. And was this the first time you had worked with a big number of Asian American activists?

YK: Yeah, I think so, yeah. But the Asian American, the first group, the Asian Americans for Action, they did start... I think it was 1968, so they weren't that far behind. And the people that were in that group were really well-oriented. Like Kazu Iijima had been in the movement since the 1930s. And I think several, her friend, Minnie... oh, what's the last name? I can't think of it. But they were maybe four or five years older than me. They had been active in California. And then the Asian American movement, we had Thais, Vietnamese, Koreans, we had all kind of Asians. But at first, when we had the young Asian Americans like our kids, all the young people, when they saw that most of the leadership were old, the parents, they didn't want to be under their parents. They all left AAA and they went to Chinatown and they started, they started their own group. We were Asian Americans for Action, AAA, and the young people were...

MA: Was this in New York?

YK: What?

MA: Is this in New York?

YK: Yeah. They went to Chinatown. I don't know what the name was, Third World something, or Chinese...

MA: Third World, was it Third World Liberation Front?

YK: Maybe something like that.

MA: So the young people, then, started their own organization.

YK: Their own, yeah. Oh, of course that would happen. I'm sure if I were them, I wouldn't want to be with elderly people who looked more like, not just parents but grandparents.

MA: And was there an effort during that time to do coalition building between, for example, Asians and blacks, Asians and Puerto Ricans?

YK: Not that much. But there were, in fact, several Asian groups, and the ideologies were a little different. But we tried more to, what do you call it, unite with Asian Americans, that we would be protesting the same things and supporting the same things. And we were as interested in what was happening even in, like, Japan. In Japan there was that big thing where Japanese farmers were losing their jobs because the Japanese government wanted to build an airport or something like that. And we were meeting even people from Japan, and we would ask them to be speakers to speak to the Asian Americans, what the issues were in Japan. And also we realized that there were Japanese in Japan who were anti-Japanese government, anti-capitalist, and who were pro-, what do you call it, socialism. And there were Japanese who had connections with some Chinese socialist groups and all that. And so we thought that was important to know.

MA: So you had, it seems, a more international outlook.

YK: Yes. And we had people, there was an Indian guy, he was brilliant. He was quite well-known, I think. And we didn't know anything about what Indians went through, especially against colonialism, being colonized by Britain and all that.

MA: What about the influence of the Black Liberation movement on the Asian American movement?

YK: Well, I think the Black Liberation movement had an influence on every movement. Because they were really more advanced. And I think all the other movements sort of followed suit, knowing what racism has done to this country and the ceiling of white superiority that has spread all over the world. Oh, yeah, I mean, the black movement really... and then, the black movement had such well-known leaders like Malcolm X. But there were no well-known Asian leaders. There were Puerto Rican leaders because that was a national liberation struggle there. But I think the Asian movements were good because they wanted to have some connection with Puerto Ricans and blacks. And we knew the Puerto Ricans and blacks were having a hard time because the U.S. government saw that both those two groups were much more advanced and much more radical and much more threatening, yeah.

MA: And I think that's, from what I've read, at least, the FBI infiltration of a lot of those groups started happening because they were so threatening and it was so devastating to those movements.

YK: All the movements were. Probably the Asian movement, too, must have been. Because the blacks were targeted, and I think a lot of those who... what's the word?

MA: Infiltrate?

YK: Infiltrated. I think a lot of those people, they were never sure which ones... but I think the black movement was really... I mean, because it seemed like whenever they planned a big thing, the police knew and they would already be at those places, yeah.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.