Activist for a New Era of Civil Rights

One of his admirers calls him a Chinese Martin Luther King. Another describes him as a visionary and a warrior who runs at full gallop without losing his balance.

He’s a respected professor and an uncompromising community activist. And a Princeton Theological Seminary graduate who sings Negro spirituals. And an accomplished French chef. He owns one suit and sports a perennial crew cut because “I consider combing my hair and polishing my shoes a waste of time.”

Pick any Asian American civil-rights cause during the last three decades and UC Berkeley professor L. Ling-chi Wang is bound to have had a finger in it.

Wang, 62, a soft-spoken Old Testament scholar who directs his university’s Asian American studies program, mobilized immigrant parents in a lawsuit that led to the landmark 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring bilingual education in public schools. He helped fight the height requirement that kept many Asian Americans from becoming police officers and fire fighters in San Francisco. He was part of an international campaign to hold Taiwanese officials accountable for the murder of a Chinese American journalist.

In the 1980s, when tougher admissions standards were imposed to curb a disproportionately high Asian American enrollment at the nation’s elite schools, Wang challenged his own university. He persisted for five years until 1989, when the university scrapped the standards and publicly apologized to the Asian American community.

For more than a decade, Wang chaired a UC Asian language task force that eventually persuaded the College Board to offer the SAT II achievement test in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

In the mid-1990s, he initiated an innovative Chinese immersion program in a San Francisco elementary school that has become popular with non-Asian parents, who value their children learning that language.

More recently, Wang has played a key role as a strategist in former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee’s battle against espionage charges.

“He is driven by the promise of America as a multicultural democracy,” says UC Berkeley historian Ron Takaki, who said Wang’s presence was one reason he joined the faculty in 1972.

Wang believes that more than 150 years after Asians settled in California, Americans of Asian ancestry remain “foreigners” in the nation’s consciousness.

“Being perpetual aliens is the first defining characteristic of Asian Americans,” he said. Americans of Asian ancestry are “presumed foreigners,” even if they are fifth-generation California natives. This prejudice, he says, is rooted in the master narrative of American history that tells us the nation was founded, settled and built by whites.

In Wang’s world, academic research and activism always converge. This summer he will put on an international conference, “50 Years of Denial: Japan and its Wartime Responsibilities,” that is making Japanese officials nervous.

The latest batch of Japanese history textbooks approved in April for the country’s middle school students justifies Japan’s aggression in Asia as an effort to help Asian countries avoid being swallowed up by Western powers. Storms of protests and demonstrations have erupted in China, South Korea, Japan and the United States, with demands that the books be pulled.

Focusing on Japan’s Actions in Asia

Wang timed the conference for Sept. 6-9 to coincide with the observance of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty between the U.S. and Japan, when dignitaries from around the world will be in San Francisco. Scholars from many countries are expected to share research papers and eyewitness accounts about wartime atrocities committed by militarist Japan throughout Asia.

Some of the most damning evidence of Japan’s wartime crimes was tracked down by Japanese researchers, who want their country, like Germany, to admit its errors, apologize and put the ugly past behind it.

To Wang, what Japan did to the people of Asia in the first half of the 20th century is also an Asian American issue because more than 70% of the Asian immigrants in the United States carry the scars from World War II. California is a natural venue, too, since nearly 40% of the nation’s Asian Americans are here.

Back in 1957, when a 17-year-old Wang sailed from Hong Kong Harbor for America on the steamship President Wilson, he planned merely to study music at Hope College, a Christian school in Holland, Mich. He’d attended elementary school in his native Xiamen, but moved to Hong Kong with his family five months before the Communist takeover of the mainland in October 1949, and completed his secondary education at a British school.

While doing graduate studies in Semitic languages at the University of Chicago, he fell in love with Linda Ying, a San Francisco-born Chinese American working on a master’s degree in social work.

A visit to her home in the summer of 1966 was a turning point.

As he delved into Chinatown and studied the Chinese American experience, he was struck by the relevance of Martin Luther King’s civil-rights message to Asian Americans.

Government-sanctioned discrimination against his people in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act had made Chinese feel like criminals long after the law was repealed. The egregious statute put the Chinese on the list of persons ineligible for immigration--which at the time included lepers, prostitutes and morons.

Wang chose to remain in San Francisco to learn more. He transferred to Berkeley and completed his master’s program in Semitic studies. With a five-year fellowship, he embarked on a doctoral program, specializing in Babylonian and Phoenician languages and literature.

But Wang never finished his PhD. He became too absorbed in community activities. His involvement with troubled youngsters from the city’s poorest neighborhoods propelled him to advocate bilingual and bicultural education. After the landmark case (Lau vs. Nichols) made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Wang kept working for the cause, helping to formulate bilingual standards.

He studied Ugaritic, a Canaanite dialect, because tablets dug up by archeologists were religious texts praising Baal, a native fertility god of Canaan, which Old Testament prophets denounced. “I wanted to know what the other side said,” he explained. Among the 20th century thinkers he admires most is German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed on a Nazi gallows for standing up to Hitler.

Wang shares a modest pair of flats with his wife, three children and 87-year-old mother, across the street from a housing project. His kids (two of whom he named Wei-min and Wei-lin, meaning “in service of the people” and “in service to the community”) attended public schools in a predominantly black neighborhood in San Francisco’s Western Addition.

San Francisco Superior Court Judge Lillian Sing, with whom Wang co-founded the civil rights group Chinese for Affirmative Action in 1969, says courage is Wang’s hallmark.

“He has never been afraid to speak the truth no matter how many people he may offend,” Sing said.

Wang did not flinch, despite death threats and virulent attacks aimed at discrediting him, during the five years he chaired the Committee to Obtain Justice for Henry Liu, the Daly City journalist who was killed in 1984 by gangs linked to Taiwan’s intelligence apparatus. In 1988, a jury in Redwood City convicted a member of United Bamboo, an international Taiwan-based gang, of killing Liu, a Chinese-language writer of books and articles critical of the Taiwan government.

There are some Asian American leaders who still will not speak to Wang because of the position he took during the the 1996 Democratic Party fund-raising scandal, in which about a dozen people of Asian ancestry were implicated. Refusing to join a united front in the Asian community, Wang criticized fund-raiser John Huang as well as Asian American groups for “capitulating to money interests.”

“He is a very tenacious fellow,” said retired UC Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman, who was on the other side of the university admissions debate.

A Strict Sense of Right and Wrong

Former Delaware Lt. Gov. S.B. Woo, a recipient of both Wang’s generosity and wrath, calls him a man “with a very strict sense of right and wrong.”

Last year, when Woo was organizing “80-20,” the first national Asian American nonpartisan political action committee, he sought to enlist former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien in his cause. When Wang got wind of this, he tried to talk Tien out of working with Woo.

Sixteen years earlier, Wang had organized a fund-raiser for Woo, then a little-known physics professor at the University of Delaware running for lieutenant governor.

As Woo tells it, a misty-eyed Wang gave him six stacks of checks totaling $45,000 (an impressive sum at the time), saying: “I am sorry, I didn’t do enough for you. Come back. Next time, I hope to do more.”

But after Woo was elected, the two had a falling out. Wang felt Woo had failed the Asian American community, while Woo believed his job did not allow him to directly help the Asian American community.

In San Francisco, where Asians approach 40% of the population, Wang criticized Chinese American parents who sued school officials for adopting higher admission standards for Asians at Lowell High School, the city’s most prestigious public high school. Asians, mostly Chinese, already made up almost 70% of Lowell’s student body.

Wang believed the parents were shortsighted, fomenting ill will with other ethnic groups. Instead of trying to get more Asians into Lowell, he said, why not improve the other 15 high schools? He persuaded the school board to let him restructure the curriculum of Galileo High School.

“That’s imagination,” said Sandy Close, executive editor of the San Francisco-based Pacific News Service. She calls Wang “the new steward of San Francisco,” who thinks of “the city entire,” not just Asian Americans.

This is Wang’s seventh year as a volunteer consultant. Three years into the effort, he helped initiate a new science lecture series and enlisted Tien, an internationally renowned engineer who designed heat-resistant tiles for the space shuttles, to kick off the series.

Wang’s dream is to transform Galileo into an academy of science and technology. It would befit a school with an observatory as its symbol, he said.

Even without a doctorate, Wang has been a tenured associate professor at UC Berkeley since 1981. And, despite his criticism of UC admissions policies, he has chaired both the Ethnic Studies Department and Asian American studies program for a combined 20 years. He is the lone minority on the Academic Senate’s influential Committee on Educational Policy and was its chair for two years.

On a full day, he teaches a class, chairs a meeting of the Academic Senate committee in Berkeley, drives across the Bay Bridge in a Toyota Corolla to San Francisco for a couple of meetings of community organizations in Chinatown, then attends a board meeting of the San Francisco Education Fund in posh Pacific Heights. He is vice president of this nonprofit group, comprising the city’s business elite, which supports public schools.

The many organizations he helped start in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s still remain; they provide an infrastructure for the Asian American community.

“He framed and built the foundation of the Asian American civil rights movement as we know it today,” said Henry Der, deputy state superintendent of public instruction.

“Ling-chi,” says Julie Tang, a San Francisco judge who has known Wang for 30 years, “is a Renaissance man with a heart of Buddha.”