in journals, books, and anthologies of varying
quality, Wong will be remembered more as a vi-
sual artist than as a poet. Toward the end of her
life, she was honored with many career retrospec-
tives including an exhibition of her watercolors at
the Asian Resource Center in 1995 and another,
posthumously, at the Chinese Historical Society
of America Museum and Learning Center in 2002.
She passed away on January 12, 2002, after a long
bout with a stomach ailment.
Bibliography
Brown, Michael D. Views from Asian California, 1920–
1965, 63. San Francisco: Michael Brown, 1992.
Holliday, Shawn. “Nanying Stella Wong (1914– ).”
Asian American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Criti-
cal Sourcebook, edited by Guiyou Huang, 311–312.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002.
Hughes, Edan Milton. Artists in California, 1786–
1940, 512. San Francisco: Hughes Publishing,
1986.
Poon, Irene. Leading the Way: Asian American Artists
of the Older Generation. Wenham, Mass.: Gordon
College, 2001.
Shawn Holliday
Wong, Nellie (1934– )
Writer and radical activist Nellie Wong was born
on September 12, 1934, in Oakland’s Chinatown
to new immigrant parents from China. She main-
tained close ties to the Bay Area throughout her life
through her activism and service, as reflected in
many of her poems featuring the Bay Area’s peo-
ple and history. Throughout World War II, Wong
worked as a waitress in her family’s Great China
Restaurant in Oakland’s Chinatown while also at-
tending public schools. The internment of Japa-
nese Americans during World War II influenced
Wong’s understanding of U.S. racism, a subject
which she later addresses in her poetry. After grad-
uating from Oakland High School in 1964, Wong
began work as a secretary at the Bethlehem Steel
Corporation, a job she held until 1982. Wong then
worked as a senior analyst in the Office of Affirma-
tive Action/Equal Opportunity at the University of
San Francisco until her retirement in 1998. Wong’s
writing and activism stemmed directly from her
working-class background and her working life, as
well as from her family histories in Oakland and
China. Her works address feminism for women of
color, struggles against racism, workplace injus-
tice, and the difficulties in forging a dual identity
as writer and activist.
In the early 1970s, when she was in her mid 30s,
Wong pursued studies in creative writing at San
Francisco State University. Here she found women
of color communities who supported her attempts
to bridge writing and activism. Wong became in-
volved with the Women Writers Union on cam-
pus, which was organized around issues of race,
gender, and class. Wong also embraced radical so-
cialist politics and joined Radical Women and the
Freedom Socialist Party. MERLE WOO, with whom
Wong formed a lasting friendship, Wong and sev-
eral others founded Unbound Feet, a writing col-
lective of Chinese-American women who read and
lectured at California universities in the late 1970s
and early 1980s. In many ways Wong and 1970s
San Francisco proved to be a generative match
for each other. Wong’s writing and activism chal-
lenged the predominantly white and middle-class
orientation of the women’s rights movement while
Wong furthered the cause of women’s rights by de-
manding that race, class, and gender oppressions
be seen as intersecting and overlapping.
Wong’s first collection of poems, Dreams in
Harrison Railroad Park, was published in 1977,
followed by two other collections of poetry,
Death of Long Steam Lady (1986) and Stolen Mo-
ments (1997). The themes and ideas captured in
Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park are emblematic
of Wong’s anger at the racial injustice suffered by
Asian Americans. Her poems paint assimilation
as a racist compulsion that forces immigrants to
reject the cultures of their homeland and to em-
brace the dominant culture. As such, these poems
challenge the dominant conflation of white culture
with American culture. Both angry and hopeful in
tone, her poems paint a powerful need to uncover
and recenter people of color, women, and work-
ing-class history. She also coedited Voices of Color
(1999) with Yolanda Alaniz, as well as Three Asian320 Wong, Nellie