Yellow Seeds newspaper collection

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When I worked for the Asian American community organization/non-profit Asian Ame
ricans United in Philadelphia, the Executive Director graciously agreed to let m
e photocopy original newspapers of the Yellow Seeds that she had for a paper I w
as writing on Asian American anti-imperialist organizing for a political sociolo
gy course. Considered an important precursor to progressive Asian American polit
ical activism in Philadelphia, Yellow Seeds was an Asian American anti-imperiali
st organization established in 1971 that focused on the local Chinatown as well
as city, national, and world affairs.
According to Dandan Liu, “the earliest use of the Chinese newspapers in activism i
n Philadelphia’s Chinatown was related to a radical social change group, Yellow Se
eds” who “published their own newspaper, Yellow Seeds (1972-1977), during their ‘Save
Chinatown’ movement in the early 1970s.” While future research may reveal Yellow See
ds as an inheritor rather than originator of Chinatown newspaper activism in Phi
ladelphia, the organization and its newspaper are nevertheless significant to hi
storical accounts of U.S. anti-imperialism activism, a history in which Asian Am
erican anti-imperialism is relatively absent. This absence, which is increasing
ly being addressed by Asian American scholars, is noticeable for several reasons
.
First, many African American veterans of the Civil Rights and Black Power era, s
ome of whom inspired or organized with Asian American anti-imperialists, have ce
lebrated Asian American figures such as Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, Mo Nish
ida, and Richard Aoki. Indeed, one wonders if these individuals would be rememb
ered as well or have become as significant to today’s Asian American left if it we
re not for Black support or the work they did in and with Black communities. De
spite African Americans’ efforts to emphasize the import of such individuals even
in the face of questionable directions in Asian American politics—or perhaps beca
use of it given how Black politics and Black people are often intellectually neg
lected or pathologized by non-Blacks—radical Asian Americans continue to be relati
vely absent from most scholarly and popular accounts of anti-imperialist movemen
ts.
Second, as indicated in the growing scholarship and in important collections suc
h as Asian Americans: The movement and the moment, as well as in memoirs of vete
rans of Asian American anti-imperialism, some of whom continue to be part of rad
ical and progressive activism, many Asian Americans were critical of U.S. action
s at home and abroad and organized for decent housing, work, and living conditio
ns, provided services to the community, and protested against racism, the draft,
police harassment, gentrification, and war.
Third and related, the relatively recent passings of Asian American activist Kaz
u Iijima and people’s historian Him Mark Lai engendered publications and commentar
y reflecting on the significance of their work and their relevance to today’s pol
itics and approaches to studying Asian America. Also, Arizona’s recent draconian p
olicy against ethnic studies as well as a climate that supports such gestures am
ong other states and their universities have been the subject of op-eds regardin
g the purpose and future of ethnic studies. Current debates about whether Asian
American Studies and Asian American politics will or can maintain an oppositio
nal posture in the face of increasing cooptation generally trace the origins of
Asian American Studies to the anti-imperialist ethos that animated third world a
nd ethnic studies strikes at California colleges; such moments of reflection oft
en measure ethnic studies’ status and relevance by its degrees of separation from
the field’s anti-imperialist roots. Basically, the spirit of (Asian American) anti
-imperialism that girded Asian American Studies is on enough people’s minds, but w
ith few exceptions, this history is generally neglected by non-Asian scholars st
udying anti-imperialist social movements or community organizations.
Finally, the absence of Asian Americans in accounts of the anti-imperialist move
ments of the 1960s and 1970s is a bit egregious given that Asian Americans were
deeply affected by the Vietnam War. Some of those affected served in the U.S. mi
litary that sought to slaughter Asians overseas. While being the face of the ene
my was not a new situation for Asians, Asian American soldiers found themselves
serving in integrated ranks; many of these Asian American veterans suffered from
high rates of PTSD partially informed by the anti-Asian racist treatment they r
eceived from other soldiers as well the psychic toll of being trained to kill ot
her Asians. The unwillingness to kill “other yellow people” and support the war mach
ine led many Asian Americans to protest (in) the U.S., and in the case of Asian
American men of military age, resist the draft and organize draft resistance loc
ally. Additionally, many Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated in concent
ration camps a generation earlier during WWII organized against the Vietnam War
due to the connection they felt to the Vietnamese as racialized peoples subject
to U.S. state violence. Yet most anti-imperialist accounts produced by non-Asia
ns depicts Asians as valiant resistors of U.S. empire in Asia but not here in th
e United States. The support shown by different groups to Asians in Asia during
the Vietnam War, sometimes at great risk of criticism, repression, arrests, and
incarceration, is a significant and highly appreciated gesture. Yet the ways in
which Asian Americans were active participants in anti-imperialism, often in loc
al ethnic contexts that required creative approaches to expressing anti-capitali
st or Communist politics as well as in multiracial coalitions, has received litt
le attention among the non-Asian left. This absence in leftist studies and films
also contributes to an image of an Asian America who did not physically exist i
n the U.S. until after the Vietnam War was over, serves to ethnicize Asian Ameri
cans and thus ignore gestures of panethnic racial solidarity among Asians predic
ated on critiques of state violence, anti-Asian racism, U.S. domestic and foreig
n policies, and the military, and promotes a hegemonic image—which too many Asians
unfortunately embrace as a positive one—of passive Asians who remain silent or do
not express political opposition to the state and capital.
To be sure, the unfortunate wholesale embrace of conservative or neoliberal poli
tics among many of today’s Asian Americans probably makes it difficult for some pe
ople to imagine Asian Americans as social justice advocates. Yet somehow, perha
ps because they control the left media and publishing houses, progressive whites
have been able to sidestep such correlations where being absent in intellectual
accounts of radicalism is due to empirical examples of bad politics among the r
acial group. In other words, there is no shortage of examples of white radicalis
m found in the history books about the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever the case, whil
e the absence of radical Asian Americans in historiography doesn’t cause the bad p
olitics among too many Asians today, it isn’t unrelated to a general categorizatio
n of Asian Americans as model minorities. By documenting and critically engagin
g political struggles in which Asian Americans were on the side of social justic
e, we can better interrogate the model minority image as a historical and politi
cal development (as opposed to a “natural” comportment) with real life consequences
for Asians and other groups, notably African Americans.
In the collection of Yellow Seeds, one will read about Asian American efforts to
resist the model minority myth as well as opposition to the Vietnam War and oth
er acts of state violence, white supremacy, and capitalism. Yellow Seeds was pub
lished in both Chinese and English and featured updates on Yellow Seeds’ programs
such as its Program for the Elderly and know your rights stories on issues such
as deportation. It also published stories and editorials on anti-Asian racism, l
iving and working conditions of the Chinatown working-class and poor, class tens
ion among political factions in Chinatown, Asian American feminism, conflict bet
ween Blacks and Asians in the United States and the Caribbean, third world unity
, city planning and its impact on Chinatown, the occupation of Palestine, labor,
and again, U.S. policy and warfare in Vietnam.
As someone deeply moved by Asian American anti-imperialist activism and apprecia
tive of the growing attention on the topic among scholars, I wanted the Yellow S
eeds’ papers to be more readily available to the public. A few years back I contac
ted the Asian/Pacific/American Institute of New York University and asked if the
y would be interested in making copies of the paper for its collection. The Inst
itute was. They were gracious enough to give copies of the pdfs they made from s
canning the originals and thus made it easier to share the papers with the publi
c.
These papers will hopefully serve as a source of documentation and “data” that contr
ibutes to the growing study of Asian American anti-imperialism. Such scholarship
is a welcome addition to a debate regarding the Asian American past and its rel
evance to the future of Asian American identity and politics. This debate concer
ns Asian Americans’ relationship to the color line, the state, and capitalism as w
ell as the acceptance and defense of white valorization, anti-black racism, cons
ervatism, neo-liberalism, Christian dogma, and free market ideology among many o
f today’s Asians in the U.S. and elsewhere. Also part of the debate is how lefti
st Asian Americans remember and narrate the radical past so as to situate and ju
stify our current political claims, especially as it relates to multiracial coal
ition and calls to go beyond black and white. As such, a critical engagement of
Asian American anti-imperialist critiques and politics as well as a re-examinati
on of the path from there to here may be useful for better understanding the lim
itations, ethical obligations, and possibilities of Asian American discourse and
activism in the 21st century.
Please note, given Liu’s aforementioned dates of publication (1972-1977), the coll
ection available here is incomplete as it only includes editions from 1972-1975.
The collection does include some Chinese-language versions, which are denoted b
y the term (Ch). Also note that when printing the newspapers, pages are large (1
1 by 17).