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BY: Okay, so you've alluded to your college years, so I want to get that down, sort of, officially. So what college did you go to?

SS: So I went to three colleges.

BY: Okay, first one.

SS: First one was Stanford University.

BY: And what dates were you there and what did you major in?

SS: So I was at Stanford from '72 to '76. I majored in biological sciences and barely graduated because I had, you needed one hundred eighty credits to graduate, and I had one hundred seventy-nine going into spring quarter of my senior year. And I had a two unit incomplete in this one lab course. So I had to go beg the professor of that one course to give me a pass so that it would have a hundred eighty-one units and could then graduate.

BY: And you talked a little bit about living in Junipero House your senior year. Was there anything else that happened while you were in college that sort of led to your later political activism or political awareness?

SS: Yeah. So I think I overlapped with David Henry Hwang by a year or two. So I don't know if I went to it, but I know that he put on a play, it might have been FOB, in his dorm. And Roger Tang was in Junipero House the year that I lived there, who, [inaudible] players, writer, producer, actor. And so I think that had some impact. The other two big things I remember is, one is the neighboring dorm put on a play, that was kind of a big thing that Stanford dorms would put on. Some kind of a performance thing, usually, oftentimes musicals. And they were doing Bye Bye Birdie. And there was one scene in there where they have, I don't know if it's in the movie or not, but where they had these, supposed to be Asian, I think, Chinese women coming onstage. And so they were doing it in a very negative stereotypical fashion, wearing coolie hats and dressed up. Which could be okay, but then they were putting their hands together and bowing and speaking the chop suey pseudo English, pseudo Chinese stuff, kind of like playing it up for laughs, I think, was the idea. But a lot of the people in the Asian American theme dorm found it really offensive. And they were all in the thing, and they were there at the opening show and they had no idea that this was going to happen. So they started booing which upset our dorm neighbors a lot, so then that created tension between the two dorms. I went over with two or three other people from my dorm to go talk to the director, who was a Pacific Islander, interestingly enough, to see if, "Maybe you could tone this down or cut it out or alter it in some way." So eventually I think they did. I don't think they got rid of it, but I think they stopped doing the really obsequious gestures and language stuff. So that was one thing.

Then the other thing was a group of us decided, the dorm decided that we should do an Asian American Studies course because there wasn't one at Stanford. So we went, formed a committee and we went out to meet Edison Uno in San Francisco to ask if he would teach an Asian American Studies course. So this was SWAPSE, I forget exactly what it stands for. But basically it was a student-initiated course the you could offer and you could get one or two credits pass-fail. So he was a little skeptical at first, but eventually he agreed. So he would come down one night a week and teach a two-hour course lecture, and he had a lot of, sometimes showed film, although it was difficult because there weren't really videos at that point. So mainly he would bring in guest speakers which included people like Frank Chin. And that was really enlightening because for a lot of folks, it was the first time we'd heard about the camps, it was the first time we'd heard about Chinese Exclusion Act, first time we really got exposed to a whole lot of Asian American art, theater and music. Oh yeah, Francis Wong was in my dorm, too. He's a fairly well-known jazz musician.

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