Born and raised in Oakland Chinatown, Nellie Wong is a proud “Cheong Hay Paw,” (a hoisan-wa expression meaning “Long Steam Lady,”) an elder with much to say. But ask Nellie if she plans to write her memoirs, and she will say that she has already done so — through her poetry. Nellie’s poems document the changes that she has witnessed in her ninety years of living and serve as a record of her resistance to erasure and invisibility.
Ask Nellie about one of her poems and you might also surface an amazing back story, one of many recorded in word and deed. Maybe a tale of visiting her family village in Toisan, when she traveled to China with Tillie Olsen, Paule Marshall and Alice Walker and others in the first US Women Writers Tour to China? Performing with Nanying Stella Wong before the founding of the trailblazing Chinese American feminist writing and performance collective Unbound Feet? Memories of sophisticated showgirls at Forbidden City or the time that she met the poet Ai Qing in Chinatown? Her organizing efforts and poems delivered at rallies and marches?
2025 marks Nellie’s 50th anniversary as a published poet, with her first published works appearing in San Francisco. “We Can Always” was published in Poetry from Violence, an anthology for the 1975 San Francisco Conference on Violence Against Women. “Drums, Gongs” appeared in East/West Chinese American Journal, Vol. 10, No. 8, San Francisco, California, on February 18, 1976. Over the years, Nellie has read in Chinatown, the Sunset, North Beach, the Mission, The Tenderloin, Japantown/Fillmore, Glen Park, Noe Valley, Bayview/Hunters Point neighborhoods and more.
This project gives Nellie an opportunity to reflect upon and record the stories preserved within the golden amber of her poetry for future generations to discover. As Nellie turns ninety in 2024, marking 50 years of writing, we invite readers to join in celebrating a true Bay Area treasure.