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BY: So were you involved in any other organizations at Stanford, or did you take any other classes at Stanford that you feel maybe later influenced your political activism?

SS: I wasn't a big joiner. I did a lot of things through the Asian American theme house. I helped out at the People's Tea House. We manned, or the Asian American theme house ran a little tea house where we sold bao and ramen. And it was a favorite late night snack place because back then, there was almost no place to eat on campus even during the day but especially at night. And then I hung out with the cross country ski team which was more of a club, it wasn't an official sport. Because one of my sophomore trailer mates was on the ski team. So he said, "Oh, yeah, we're going to practice, do conditioning, so you should come out and join us." So I remember that's how I ended up running up and down the stadium steps, and then running up to Skyline, like literally drop us off at the bottom, and then we ran up to Skyline, which, I don't know, was a three or four mile uphill run. But let's see...

BY: Classes? Any other classes?

SS: Yeah. So I took some classes. I was interested in, I guess you could say kind of ethnic studies. So I took one sociology course from St. Clair Drake, he was a professor emeritus in sociology, and one of the few African American faculty that Stanford had at the time, and one of the few it had even ever had up to that point. And that was a really interesting course. I took another course, I think his name was Castillo, a Chicano lit course where we read things like Bless Me, Ultima. And I think I was the only non-Chicano in the class. I also took another sociology course from, he was a white professor, but we were looking at ways that you could systemically change things. So like we looked at what would happen if you had a universal basic income where you give everybody a thousand dollars, and at that time talking about giving people a thousand dollars is probably like giving people ten thousand dollars now. And he said yeah, actually they did this small-scale thing where they did that, they gave everybody in this group certain amount of money and he saw education scores that go up among the kids, he saw crime rates go down in the community, so all these positive things happened. So that also got me thinking. And then there was one Marxist economist at Stanford, Professor Gurley, so I took a course from him on Marxism and capitalism. And that kind of helped shape my view of capitalist economics in society.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.