About
I am a retired print journalist, author, and amateur historian. A native of Oakland, California's Chinatown, I got my B.A. at the University of California at Berkeley and my M.S. at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. My print journalism career was spent primarily at The Wall Street Journal (1970-1979) and The Oakland Tribune (1979-1996). I also worked for The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco News Call Bulletin, and have written for the San Francisco Examiner, East West: the Chinese American Journal, and Asian Week, among other publications. In the mid-1960s, I served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines. In 1995-1996, I was a regional commentator for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. I am the author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America (Temple University Press, 2001), Images of America: Oakland's Chinatown (Arcadia Publishing Co., 2004), and co-author of Images of America: Angel Island (Arcadia Publishing Co., 2007).
Featured Work
Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America
Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America is an anthology of my journalistic essays and commentaries that address Chinese American and Asian American topics ranging from personal and family history to general history, politics, immigration, identity, class, culture, race relations, anti-Asian racism, and media. I was in the forefront of mainstream print journalism columnists writing about these topics, long before the public's attention was focused on them in the wake of the latest outburst of anti-Asian racist hate.
