by Emil Amok Guillermo
While the news was more about how the U.S. lurches toward autocracy, the confluence of my life was in full display for me this week.
On Saturday, I went to a 40th anniversary of the SF Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association. Back in 1985, I was one of the founding members as the first Filipino American reporter at one of the three major affiliates in San Francisco at the time.
On Friday, I performed a ten-minute standup comedy set at the Filipino Comedy Festival at San Francisco’s Bindlestiff Studios in South of Market. I wasn’t at that Saudi Arabia comedy festival that opened the same night where the big name comedy killers were brought in by human rights abusers who executed a journalist on false charges. I didn’t get paid $375,000 to tell jokes at Bindlestiff. I just got to retain a sense of ethics.
But the thing that really rocked me this week and made me pause hearing that Belva Davis had died.
Belva Davis was not Asian American. But she knew us and felt us.
When I heard of her passing at age 92 this week, I stopped what I was doing.
You pause for Belva Davis.
There are not many people you do that for.
If you don’t know Belva Davis, she was a pioneering African American journalist who led the way for everyone who didn’t look like Edward R. Murrow.
That means we, the others.
When I first heard Belva, I was a kid in San Francisco’s Mission district listening to R&B segregated on the radio for listeners convenience. Would I listen to KSOL and Sly Stone? Or KDIA in Oakland?
It was always KDIA because they had a woman doing the news: Belva Davis.
I followed Belva as she made her way into broadcast television. At KPIX, I watched her cover all the news no one else would. She was at the SF State strike in the ‘60s on the front lines, my friend Prof. Daniel Phil Gonzales, who was a student striker told me. Soon, Belva made it to the anchor desk regularly.
Later, an Asian American named Chris Chow was at KPIX as a reporter. An Asian American? Like me? Belva and Chris were on-air—people on television who looked like me—reporting on life as if that was normal.
They were the feet in the door that enabled me and other seedlings of the diversity to enter the room.
By 1981, I worked my way up from Reno (where I was the only Filipino reporter) to Dallas (where they thought I was Mexican) to San Francisco (where I had permed hair). I found myself in the same newsroom as Belva at KRON, then the NBC affiliate.
We were colleagues by real estate. But I knew I had work to do.
But Belva didn’t pull rank. She was always kind, gracious and maternal. She gave me words of advice.
“Think of your career,” she’d say. “Don’t be a flash in the pan,” she told me. “You want a life as a reporter.”
Clearly, I didn’t always heed her advice. Sometimes I was more daring. And I was already a permed Asian. How much more daring could I be?
I sat next to Belva for a while in the newsroom. Sometimes she smiled at me. Sometimes she shook her head. But I never realized till now, I should have listened to her more.
When I left KRON and ended up as host of “All Things Considered” at NPR, I would see her occasionally when I came back to San Francisco. Throughout all my journalistic configurations, I’d see her and remember how she was always there keeping the door open for me. She was watching out.
She didn’t just take the elevator up. She never forgot to send it back down. For people like us.
I don’t know what she’d think about me doing standup and comic monologues now.
I always liked the news because it was filled with straight men.
They needed some punching up.
But it’s not too far a leap to see a journalist do comedy. Have you seen the news lately? Or the country? Is it a joke?
It’s no coincidence that many people prefer to get their news from the likes of Stephen Colbert or John Oliver or Jimmy Kimmel.
When I heard about Belva’s passing, I paused. Then at Bindlestiff I told some jokes about Charlie Kirk.
After this week, that’s my First Amendment right. I think Belva would approve.
I don’t want to give short shrift to the 40th celebration of AAJA’s San Francisco chapter. It was great to see people like Wendy Tokuda, who was San Francisco’s evening news darling for the longest time. Evelyn Hsu, a reporter who has continued fighting for diversity at the Maynard Institute. And Randall Yip, the executive editor of this publication, who also sat next to me at KRON for a time.
And it was great to see young people feel hopeful and want to be journalists in 2025. They were actual people and not AI.
They helped break the nostalgia on Saturday.
There was plenty of that, even among my fellow founding chapter members.
We all knew to bow and reflect on the passing of Belva.
She opened the newsroom door for us all.
We will never forget that.
Registration is closed for Common Ground: Building Together conference and gala award banquet in San Francisco on January 24. A shoutout to our planning committee: Jane Chin, Frank Mah, Jeannie Young, Akemi Tamanaha, Nathan Soohoo, Mark Young, Dave Liu, and Yiming Fu.
We are published by the non-profit Asian American Media Inc and supported by our readers along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AARP, The Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Foundation, The Asian American Foundation & Koo and Patricia Yuen of the Yuen Foundation.
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