Obit: Nellie Wong shook the status quo—So will her legacy

By Chriistopher Chow

The Takeaways

• Nellie Wong shattered the limits placed on Asian American women of her era, transforming herself from a Chinatown restaurant worker and corporate secretary into a defining poet of resistance.
• Her voice helped ignite the Asian American movement, blending feminism, socialism, and creative fire to challenge racism, patriarchy, and silence.
• Wong’s legacy endures as a blueprint for Asian Pacific Americans seeking to claim their stories, confront injustice, and create art that refuses to bow.

The Details

The name Nellie Wong is stirring the hearts and minds of Chinese/Asian Pacific Americans who knew her or know of her. The revolutionary poet, cultural fighter, feminist and political socialist whose artistic and activist career flowered during the rise of the Asian American movement and flourished after retirement from working in the corporate world, passed away on January 2, 2026, at the age of 91, in her San Francisco home. 

Nellie Wong leaves behind a life and a legacy that will be sung about and celebrated February 14 at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, just a couple of blocks away from where she born in the heart of Oakland Chinatown.

The singing has already begun.

In the fields of literature, Asian America, feminism, where does Nellie Wong stand?

“She stands at the pinnacle … because her voice is a very rare one. I mean, it’s
incomparable. I don’t know anyone in her age bracket that addressed as many things as
mentioned. Feminism, workers’ issues, imperialism.”
Genny Lim, Poet Laureate of San Francisco

“Nellie’s brave, beautiful spirit lives on in her poetry and this message, ‘There is no
better way to live than to fight for a better world.’ I am a fan forever.”
Fellow writer and activist Connie Young Yu

“Nellie was for me both a dear friend and a precious comrade. Thank you, Nellie for finding your voice and sharing your life experience and wisdom with us all. Nellie Wong presente!”

Stephen Durham, International Secretary, Freedom Socialist Party

“My deepest condolences for your loss. I have the honor of stewarding her papers. It is
a pleasure to be able to share her legacy with scholars, students, and general public.
The world is a better place thanks to her commitment to her community and to the
creative work she has made.
Nellie Wong, Presente!

Angel Diaz, Curator, California Ethnic & Multicultural Archives, UCSB

“While it was tough to wake up today, I did it knowing she wanted me up and at the protest of the U.S. bombing of Venezuela. Nellie was the first comrade of color to train me against asian bigotry, because it’s not just hate it is bigotry and it must be squelched. Nellie’s 91 years of life was a triumph against the capitalist class and system and for a socialist feminist revolution. May the cosmos embrace her and let me call upon her as an ancestor for a better world! NELLIE WONG, PRESENTE! 

Norma Gallegos

Nellie Wong is an honorable name that should be better known among Asian Pacific Americans today because she was a leading literary voice among us who fused art and politics to fight for social change and justice in the world.

Consider the context of her break-out.

Born at home September 12, 1934, in Oakland, California, Nellie was the fourth of seven children – two China-born parents, three China-born daughters, three American-born (Oakland) daughters, and one American-born (Oakland) son. Of them, she and her younger sister Flo Oy Wong and her brother William Gee Wong would become leading lights in the fields of art, journalism, and poetry (Flo, William and Nellie).*  

Her mother and father owned and operated the Great China Restaurant on Webster Street from 1943 to 1961, a period when Chinese Americans were trying to recover from the aftermath of the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), the Red Scare of McCarthyism during and after the Korean War, then the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the coming of racial integration in schools, busses and other public accommodations from the rise of the Black civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s. 

Typical of working-class children of self-employed immigrants, Nellie, along with her siblings, worked shifts at the restaurant.

“Her early life into her late twenties was rooted in the patriarchal culture in Chinatown and the white American mainstream,” her younger brother William noted in an obituary posted on CaringBridge.

Her resistance to and triumph over that bicultural patriarchalism would be realized over a span of more than 50 years until her last breath.

At Oakland High School, Nellie was a part-time secretary both during school and after graduation. Then she worked as an administrative staffer at Bethlehem Steel Corp.’s San Francisco office (1964-1982) before moving to the University of California San Francisco’s affirmative action office “in various administrative assistant and analyst positions” before retirement in 1998.

While working for the man, as it were, in the corporate and academic world as administrative and support staff, Nellie Wong’s “intelligence, creativity and compassion yearned to break free.”  She was a fighter who would arm herself with the tools, knowledge and vision to fulfill her dreams and aspirations.  And in her evolution, she made immense contributions.

“She represented the new American-born Chinese,” said San Francisco Poet Laureate Genny Lim, a fellow artist-activist who teamed with Nellie and others to form Unbound Feet, one of the first Asian American women writers collectives, and The Last Hoisan Poets, a group of Chinese American women paying homage to their ancestral language and roots.

“And she had the vision, the drive to overcome all the obstacles of that generation, the real patriarchal values that were carried over from China into Chinatown, being raised, you know, in a working class immigrant environment, working in a restaurant. But she had the curiosity, the intelligence, and the imagination to somehow put it together and carve her own identity – which is kind of the prototype of the, you know, the new Asian American, you know, feminist, socialist. She’s a member of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. And once she was able to break free from her secretarial chains where she had to take dictation and shorthand…she didn’t allow that to oppress her or keep her down.”

In the 1970s, when she was in her late twenties and early thirties, she enrolled at Oakland Adult Evening School and San Francisco State University, taking classes in ethnic and feminist studies and creative writing.

“She made herself study things that Asian American women didn’t study,” continued Lim.  “She didn’t go into business. She didn’t go into teacher credential program, which is what most of my friends went into, teaching. That was their means of liberation, becoming a teacher. But she went beyond all that to something that was not really valued in our community, you know, creative writing, poetry. And then also the socialist Marxist politics [ she joined the Freedom Socialist Party and its affiliated Radical Women organization], very unpopular in our community. Somehow, she defied all that, and she went against the grain.”

Among Asian American writers, Nellie Wong came from the modern generation that created a consciousness of itself as a revolutionary movement for a unique, distinct, cultural, social, and political sense and sensibility that helped drive the intrusion of Asian Pacific Americans into the U.S. mainstream.

The Asian American Movement – for political, social, cultural change and justice – sprang forth on all fronts in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Asian American Studies were established at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley following the Third World Strikes for ethnic studies at SF State (1968) and Berkeley (1969) through academic and political activism. The Strikes linked students, faculty and ethnic community members in solidarity.

The battle for the International Hotel began at this time (1968) to save the elderly Filipino and Chinese tenants from eviction by real estate speculators and preserve low-income housing in San Francisco’s Manilatown-Chinatown area.

Asian Americans were entering civil service in major municipalities, state and federal government levels and a few were running for elective offices, such as county supervisors, city council members, school boards.  Advocacy organizations such as Chinese for Affirmative Action were taking the lead in opening up employment in the construction trades and manufacturing industries, police and fire departments, and news media, such as on-air news reporters and print journalists.

Nellie was part of the wave of writers who demanded inclusion of them in mainstream published works, challenging and breaking through conventional stereotypes of Americans of Asian Pacific ancestry.  Writers/poets/playwrights like Frank Chin, Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Inada, Jeff Chan, Shawn Wong, Mitsuye Yamada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Jessica Hagedorn, Yoshiko Uchida – all of whom did not achieve publication of their books before 1970.

The first collections of Asian American literature were published after 1970:  Asian American Authors, Hsu, Houghton-Mifflin,1970; Aiiieeeee!, Chin, Chan, Inada and Shawn Wong, Howard University Press, 1972; Yardbird Reader Three: Asian American Special Edition, Chin and Wong, Yardbird Publishing Cooperative, 1975.

Ignored by mainstream press Nellie Wong blazed her own trail. She published and flourished with independent outlets (Kelsey Press, Red Letter Press, etc.) and platforms created collaboratively with other artists (HoongHoong, nelliewong.dds.net).  

In fact, her first published poem had a political edge to it, appearing in a public safety conclave.  “We Can Always” was printed in Poetry From Violence, an anthology for the 1975 San Francisco Conference on Violence Against Women.

Nellie’s first book of poetry, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, came out in 1977, a time when Asian American writers were coming out in droves, many unnoticed and unsung by White mainstream exponents of American culture (academia, book publishers and news media).  

Her book was published two years after the first national Asian American Writers Conference at the Oakland Museum and San Francisco’s Chinese Culture Center.  That near-weeklong event in March 1975 brought together more than 200 published, unpublished and aspiring writers, students, and academicians from across the country for four days of presentations, workshops, panel discussions and open readings to quench the thirst for Asian Pacific American literary expression.

Nine years later, Nellie Wong’s book drew this revelatory review from University of Wisconsin English professor Amy Ling who wrote in the MELUS Journal (of multi-ethnic literature):

“For a Chinamerican thirsty for contact with others like herself (Amy Ling was born in 1939, five years after Nellie) “Wong’s Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park is a crystal spring. From the opening pantoum, “’Grandmother’s Song,” its formal quatrain bound like grandmother’s feet, to the last nostalgic notes of the dream “Picnic,” Wong gives voice to the experiences and emotions of a daughter, a woman, a Chinese in America, a sentient human being. Her poems are full of fresh, rich images from Chinese culture: “pomeIo-golden days,” “my jade donut embellished with gold,” “coloring eggs for an unborn grandson,” “peking duck and thousand-layer buns,” “’bound feet struggle to loosen free.” But for the most part, her language is unpretentious and direct: it has a quietness resonant with deep emotion, a tone occasionally biting but more often ironic, wry, poignant, and loving.”

An example of Nellie Wong’s power, imagination and love appears in her 1986 book, Death of a Long Steam Lady.

“Mama, Come Back”

By Nellie Wong

Mama, come back.

Why did you leave

now that I am learning you?

The landlady next door

how she apologizes

for my rough brown skin

to her tenant from Hong Kong

as if I were her daughter,

as if she were you.

How do I say I miss you

your scolding

your presence

your roast loin of pork

more succulent, more tender

than any hotel chef’s?

The fur coat you wanted 

making you look like a polar bear

and the mink-trimmed coat

I once surprised you

on Christmas morning.

Mama, how you said “importment”

for important,

your gold tooth flashing

an insecurity you dared not bare,

wanting recognition

simply as eating noodles

and riding in a motor car

to the supermarket

the movie theater

adorned in your gold and jade

as if all your jewelry

confirmed your identity

a Chinese woman in America.

How you said “you better”

always your last words

glazed through your dark eyes

following me fast as you could

one November evening in New York City

how I thought “Hello, Dolly!”

showed you an America 

you never saw.

How your fear of being alone

kept me dutiful in body

resentful in mind.

How my fear of being single

kept me

from moving out.

How I begged your forgiveness

after that one big fight

how I wasn’t wrong

but needed you to love me

as warmly as you hugged strangers.

From Death of a Long Steam Lady by Nellie Wong, published by West End Press. Copyright © 1986 by Nellie Wong. Reprinted by permission. 

It may not have gone viral but lines from her poem are easily retrieved on the internet with key words “Mother’s Day.”

Another perspective comes from the centenarian poet Mitsuye Yamada, in her essay “The Emergence of Asian Pacific American Women Poets,” from the book Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003):

“Until 1970 no book of poetry by an Asian Pacific American woman was published.  By 1979, twelve books have been published” partly an “outgrowth of Black American movement and Women’s Movement.”

Ten years later, 1980, the two artist-activists appeared as themselves in Mitsuye & Nellie: Asian American Poets, a national public television documentary directed by Allie Light and Irving Saraf, filmed by Emiko Omori and music by the late Betty Wong.  Major scenes were filmed with Nellie Wong at the Angel Island Immigration Station, and Mitsuye Yamada at the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho, historical locations of oppression and incarceration. It was a demonstration of how far Asian American women writers had come.

Genny Lim recalls the impact of Nellie’s first book on herself and how it led the two of them to the primordial women’s writers groups, Unbound Feet (1979-1981) and The Last Hoisan Poets:

“I was so impressed when I first read– when she first put out Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park. And I thought, wow, you know, like she had all these snippets of that era of Chinatown, Oakland Chinatown. And, you know, I think these are going to be very valuable literature because we don’t have very much about our early Chinatown, you know, first generation culture, working in the restaurant, serving the customers, the types of food, and using, not being afraid to use that peasant spell dialect, you know, Hoisan-wa. That’s why I formed the Last Hoisan Poets with her and Flo, because I’ve always been very embarrassed about having to speak, you know, out loud, because, you know, right away it showed, you know, like, oh, you’re, you know, working class.

And so we started embracing our cultural language and food and values. and using– not being afraid to use Hoisan-wa in our poems. And Nellie even wrote a couple completely in Hoisan-wa. A brave Nellie. So she really represented the forward-looking Asian American woman of today. She was the prototype of the woman warrior.”

In 1979, Nellie Wong, Genny Lim, Nancy Hom, Canyon Sam, Kitty Tsui, and Merle Woo, began performing their work as Unbound Feet, one of the first Asian American women writers group ever formed.

“It was really amazing how it caught fire. People really loved what we were doing and what we were addressing. Six of us wrote– we performed our own work, and so integrated monologues. Canyon wrote mostly monologues, and she was into theater. And then Merle did a lot of essays. She did some poetry, but she was kind of a political essayist as well. And then Nancy and I and Nellie – we wrote our own poems. And we performed them. And we had a lot of positive responses.”

Though the group disbanded after about three years, the Unbound Feet attitude has found new life and new fans on social media nearly 50 years later.

Since it was her first trip to China, Nellie was able to steer a detour to her ancestral village in Taishan (Toisan County, Guangdong Province) where she was warmly welcomed and “connecting with distant clan cousins” as her brother has written.

Nellie’s many honors include lines of her poems inscribed at two places in the San Francisco transit system, a building in her name at her alma mater, Oakland High, and a 2022 Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Oakland. PEN is a century-old international umbrella of thousands of writers, journalists, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, and agents, who believe that people everywhere have the freedom write, to think, to speak, and to access the ideas, thoughts, and words of others.

For Nellie, middle-age was not a personal crisis. Based on her commitment to building a better world she branched out into teaching poetry writing at Mills College, Oakland, and women’s studies at the University of Minnesota.  She enjoyed the responsibility of preparing new generations of artists and activists.

All the while she continued writing. 

Over the course of five decades, Nellie wrote and published five books, each almost representing a distinctive decades of creativity.  Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (1977), The Death of Long Steam Lady (1984), Stolen Moments (1997), Breakfast Lunch Dinner (2012), and Nothing Like Freedom (2024 on her 90th birthday).

Nellie never retired from writing or speaking out about hope, love and doing the right thing.

At the tender age of 68, she enunciated what some might call a philosophy or mission statement or others might trumpet a call to arms:

“Deep in my heart and through my life experiences, there is no better way to live than to fight for a better world. That sounds trite, but it isn’t. I love the idea of making change for the disenchanted, the dispossessed, not in a ‘do good’ manner for the sake of being altruistic, but for the possibilities that we humans with our spirit and fortitude can fight for. Writing poems details those challenges.”

For about the next quarter century following those words from her Revolutionary Love (Expose) essay, Nellie Wong stayed the course, true to her word.

In December, 2023 Nellie and The Last Hoisan Poets did a program with the Del Sol Quartet to evoke and pay homage to the immigrant experience at the Angel Island Immigration Station detention barracks.  Their performance not only brought alive the depth of history there but also augmented community-based efforts of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation to bring more visitors to and build more public support for a National Historic Landmark so important and relevant to the ongoing national debate about the future of immigration and our country’s role in the world.

They closed the program reading their signature poem Haw Meong Suey – Good Life’s Water.

Two months before her passing, Nellie recorded a reading of her poem “Do It Every Morning” from her book Nothing Like Freedom (HoongHoongLookLook Press, 2025), on the occasion of “Fall of Freedom,” a nation-wide call to the arts community to unite in defiance of authoritarian voices and forces sweeping the land.
Nellie’s reading was recorded November 21, 2025.  

This is her poem.

DO IT EVERY MORNING

By Nellie Wong

whether sky’s gray
the sunlight squeezing through slats of blinds

Let it nibble your fingers

Taste, salt, wander
in shadow yeah tell me where they are in faded yellow 

of gingko leaf resting in a bowl of stones

Forget clutter, rnuscle spasms invading
your legs the light fantastic leaping across ceilings

Ant that got away arrogant as spider spinning web
orchid to leaf 

Do it, pull out that binder

The dust won’t bite but invites fingers in search
of something delectable to be read, taped
torn pages file folders holding Goat Year
in Chinese calligraphy,
titles of poems rejected

Still the words peak and rumble, refuse burial

Fan of goose feathers carried across the Pacific
to America your mother’s warmth her eyes shining
with questions at a strange new land whose streets
she’d heard were paved with gold

And you do it each morning
or noon brewing tea picking up mail
soliciting year-end funds
letting words and images float through universe, 

cicadas taking flight in search of poetry.

Nellie is survived by sister Flo Oy Wong, brother William Gee Wong, brother-in-law Edward K. Wong, and three generations of nieces and nephews totaling 39.

A celebration of life memorial will be held on Saturday, February 14, 2026, from 1-4 p.m, at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Pacific Renaissance Plaza, 388 9th Street, Suite 290, Oakland CA 94607, which is two blocks from where she was born.

In lieu of flowers and other objects, contributions may be made in Nellie’s honor to the Freedom Socialist Party San Francisco, socialism.com/san-francisco.

On Tuesday, January 27, 2026, from 7-9pm, there will be a Nellie Wong Memorial Reading at Bird & Beckett Books & Records, 653 Chenery St., San Francisco, CA 94131.  Limited seating. Call 415-586-3733 for reservations.

* The story of how Nellie’s incredible family came to be is described in some detail in her brother’s recent book Sons of Chinatown.

(Correction: An earlier version incorrectly described details of Nellie Wong’s family tree. We also incorrectly referred to her book Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park. The corrections have been made.)