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PW: You mentioned that students were getting arrested during this drive when they shut down the college, effectively, and that you were arrested. You also had this experience of being arrested at the Stop the Draft. Can you tell us about both of those experiences?

PY: Yeah. So Stop the Draft just, that becomes... all this is happening within months. So Stop the Draft is October of '67. I'm here less than sixty days, or ninety days. I'm living at the dorms at San Francisco State. Nobody that I knew in the dorms expressed interest in going, so I took a bus across Oakland very early in the morning. I actually fell asleep and ended up in Alameda, and I had to walk back. [Laughs] So I get to downtown Oakland a little bit late, just kind of... but for two days, just kind of like my first political experience was like shutting down downtown Oakland. Just being exposed to that kind of wide range of political experience. So inexperienced kid sees somebody getting arrested, and in an unusually physical way, and I tried to intervene. Stupid on my part, but anyhow, I was arrested. Spent a couple days in jail there, then you're out and then you await trial.

PW: You mean Oakland police?

PY: Yeah. And so I end up getting convicted and then doing, what, ten or twelve days in Santa Rita several months later. So these were all interesting and transformative things for a middle class kid from San Fernando Valley. And at that point, people who were incarcerated, mostly African American and Latino and white, had no experience with Asian Americans period. I mean, just like, "What the fuck are you?" And so Asian Americans are so unfamiliar that my first couple times in jail, before they knew my name, they called me Chief because they thought I was... the closest thing they could identify was to indigenous or Native American. So all that changes rapidly within just a year, year and a half later, spent a couple years in the legal justice system. Bruce Lee had hit the consciousness of young people of color. So, like, I'm in City Hall, and one of my colleagues there just kind of tries to pass me off as his bodyguard. Oh, my fucking god. [Laughs] Just for the simple fact that I'm Asian, right? Just, "That's my bodyguard." "What the fuck are you doing?" Just going to get me in a shitload of trouble. Fortunately, it never came to that.

So Santa Rita, must have been, done my time in the spring of '68, ten days... I didn't have a place to live, but I had a friend from, once again from the Freshman Program of Integrated Studies, we had a place up on Stanyan Street and was gone for the summer. And so I stayed there for a few days. So I spent the summer up here just kind of getting to know the city. There's so much immense cultural and political stuff happening. It was just like, you could spend part of the day at a Black Panther rally, come back to San Francisco, walk through the panhandle, and Janis Joplin or Carlos Santana playing free concerts. They hadn't hit big yet, so they were just starting to emerge to a larger national audience. But it's... you know, pay more attention to what's happening in the war, what's happening to the national left. And still barely kind of... I would have to say Asian American or Japanese American consciousness was still very embryonic at that point. So everything's happening really quickly.

I sit-in, so there's a sit-in in the spring of '68 at San Francisco State with a mixture of anti-war demands and also, like, participation by the Third World Liberation Front for all the pre-strike demands that we're putting out. And so for whatever, I didn't have any clear reason why, I decided to stay in and volunteer myself for arrest. Al Wong from Chinese Student Association saw me as, kind of, this Asian kid there volunteering for arrest. And so said, "Can we help you?" And I says, "No, man," like you're just, Al was thinking, okay, there's this Asian American there, and I wasn't thinking that way. So I kind of blew him off. So by the time the strike's starting to have this chic of my identity as a radical is more well-formed than it is as a person of color. And so like in that incident with Terry that I described earlier, it happens right around that time, just kind of in the late spring of '68. And so there was... I wasn't participating in this stuff, but like Penny and a lot of people in the Third World Liberation Front spent a lot of their summer getting ready for what would happen in the fall of 1968. They were planning for the strike and also at the same time bringing in the first group of EOP students from various high schools in San Francisco. So there was a lot of work going on which I was not aware of.

So I come back after having, spending a little time in jail, which I guess was developing a list of credentials in my mind at any rate, and knew that I was going to participate but then had very little idea of what that meant. Penny will give you a much better sense of what the serious work was being done at that time. So most of my thing was, like, doing what the group of younger people, mostly guys, like if leadership asked something to be done, you did it, and just feel that you're participating or contributing in some way. The jail stuff, helping getting people, was necessary work, but also the self-interested part was that it kept me out of meetings. To this day I still don't like going to meetings, but that was a legitimate activity that I could say, "I have to get down there." Got all these people busted today, and sorry, I can't go to that meeting.

PW: But the strike itself was a success in the sense that some demands were met?

PY: I think we'd have to call it a tremendous success. We didn't get the college at that point, but it became the formation of what became the first College of Ethnic Studies in the United States, which continues to this day, the scholarship that's coming out of that school, and the influences of that particular college is, I think has influenced Third World studies in College of Ethnic Studies throughout the United States. And the generations of scholarship that we're seeing from young scholars of color throughout the United States, I think a large part of that resides, that was the seed that helped get a lot of those things started.

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