July 20, 1948 – August 23, 2021

I’m writing in disbelief for losing our beloved Steve Wong, as well as sharing my condolences with his family for their loss.  

It was my privilege to have been associated with Steve or “Wonga.”  He was one of the older activists that I looked up to.  Back in the day, I was the youngest member who helped co-build Everybody’s Bookstore, the Asian Community Center, and then later, founded Wei Min She, the Asian American anti-imperialist organization.  

What is more memorable is Steve’s huge, unsung role in lofting and shepherding “Asian Studies 30: Introduction to Community Organization and Development” in the first year of Asian American Studies at UC Berkeley.  This was a seminal class that captured the spirit and ethos of Asian American studies and whose inspiration flowed from the Third World Liberation Front strike at Berkeley.  In that first year, as an impressionable 19-year-old, I was one of Wong’s first teaching assistants, where we helped build a bridge for college students to serve and learn from underserved Asian communities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  This filled a gap between campus and community, a hallmark of the ethos of Asian American Studies.

It goes without saying, but it needs to be repeated that Wong had a big passion for BOOKS. It was natural that he would become the stalwart in developing Everybody’s Bookstore in 1969 from a hole-in-the-wall little storefront that featured revolutionary and progressive Chinese language materials and transformed it into an indispensable destination where one could find historical and emerging Asian American works and rising literature that had firmly established the Asian American collective experience.

What a legacy to history and the fight for social justice!

Steve Wong Presente!

Steve Yip, New York City

November 14, 2021