<Begin Segment 18>

PW: So one of the more ironic parts of that whole history, though, too, was that the head of the college was a Japanese Canadian named Hayakawa. Do you have much to share about your memories of him and what that was like, having him at the top?

PY: I mean, Hayakawa was such a contradiction. He definitely had this kind of Bohemian cultural kind of thinking, he was a great appreciator of African American music. One of the hardest things for me during that whole period was that he brought Duke Ellington to perform at San Francisco State, kind of as a counter to what we were doing. I couldn't attend, would not attend.

PW: And what was his stance for people, again, who don't know about the history of this? What was his leadership like?

PY: Well, he was adamantly against any form of what we were doing. I guess you'd say his stance would be totally assimilationist, that there was no thing as, or should be a thing as Third World Studies or a College of Ethnic Studies. That if he took this very individualist approach, "If I can do it, why can't you do it?" kind of thing. And also kind of like, took the total binary approach that if he saw that we were trying to do is to be isolating when actually we thought of it as being very internationalist. So he tried to kind of have this authoritarian, no-negotiation stance. But success in the strike was forcing them to the table in part. And then the fact that we didn't get everything we asked for, but we got the foundation of what became. I was never academically inclined, but I know that a lot of people that I'm acquainted with were able to do the dual thing and make this immense contribution as well as develop a great substantial career based off of what they started. So I was kicked out of school because of my political activities, and I could have... those of us who were kicked out where reinstated about a year and a half later. But getting kicked out was kind of... I would have flunked out anyhow.

PW: Did you ever actually meet Hayakawa?

PY: I did.

PW: Can you tell that story?

PY: Yeah. Just, so this is... I'd spent somewhere between ninety and a hundred days in San Francisco County Jail. So I'd flown down to Los Angeles to see my parents. And on the flight back, Hayakawa and I were not just on the same flight, but we were in the same aisle. And he was in the window seat, I was on the aisle seat, and this poor young Filipino woman was between us. So we had actually a relatively polite conversation on the airplane, and he offered to give us a ride back into San Francisco, which we accepted, all three strangers to each other. And so on the drive back, our conversation got more animated, and his driving became more erratic. This poor woman must have thought, "Who are these two crazy motherfuckers?" [Laughs] Because he's driving, and he's yelling at me and I'm yelling at him. He dropped me off at Fourth and California where I was going to live for a while. That was kind of like the AAPA House.

PW: Was it revealed that you were a student at State?

PY: Yeah, we were talking about that on the airplane and we were talking about your differences. Like on the airplane, it was a relatively polite conversation.

PW: So what do you think turned the conversation to a point where he started getting agitated?

PY: I think given both of our personalities, it's just kind of like, it was inevitable that once the conversation became more substantial, that we're going to have a more heated conversation. Hayakawa was a flamboyant personality, he would try to actively stop the picket lines. He would jump up on sound trucks and rip out wires and all that kind of stuff. He did not behave like most university presidents would have behaved in those situations. And so he demonstrated that same sort of thing on the ride back. We both got both emotionally and personally engaged in the conversation. And it was clear that he was not a great multitasker because his driving became very erratic. That young woman must have been so happy when she finally got off the car. So I'm dropped off at, like, the AAPA House. We had two floors of this flat on Fourth and Cornwall. Cornwall's a little street just immediately south of California. It was a nice day, people were on the stoop. I told people, "Hayakawa just dropped me off." And with the exception of Francis, I haven't seen most of these people for the whole time I was incarcerated. So that was a pretty great homecoming in that sense.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.