By the time poet and organizer Fay Chiang became the director of Basement Workshop in 1975, the organization had grown from a small team of researchers working out of an unassuming Chinatown basement into something uniquely ambitious and unprecedented—something between a community center, art collective, and magazine publisher, built from the ground up by young Asian American activists and creatives to respond to the needs of a neighborhood and a community that had long been isolated from the rest of New York City and its social services. Originating as a continuation of Danny Yung’s 1969 Chinatown Study, the first-ever research study on the Lower Manhattan neighborhood in the city’s history, Basement was an expression of the zeitgeist at a pivotal moment in Asian American history, rooted in the ideals of the civil rights movement and ethnic studies riots of the preceding decade.

As New York City’s first Asian American political/arts organization, Basement’s identity as an artistic/literary project is impossible to disentangle from its identity as a political project, and vice versa. While the term “Asian American” has become somewhat diluted and defanged by neoliberal corporate agendas in more recent decades, Basement Workshop was founded during the time when the label was at its most salient, when it would have been understood not as a marker of any inherent cultural or ethnic affinity, but as an intentionally constructed political coalition formed in resistance to structural inequalities and oppression. Bringing together artists and organizers across disciplines around a shared vision for the Chinatown community, Basement laid the groundwork for present-day neighborhood institutions such as the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the Asian American Arts Centre, all of which began as projects at Basement.

Chiang, like so many other students in those heady early years, was drawn into Basement’s orbit in the early 1970s. The daughter of Cantonese immigrants, Chiang grew up traveling between Chinatown and her family’s laundry in Jackson Heights, Queens before matriculating to Hunter College to study fine arts. Following a trip to Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1971, Chiang returned to New York with a renewed sense of commitment to organizing at home, struck by the profound disconnect she had felt during her time abroad: “Once I was in Asia,” she writes, “I knew I had to go back to America and do some work there, because I was an American.”

That quote is one of many that linger with me after spending some time with Chiang’s papers at NYU’s Special Collections, sifting through box after box of notes, poem drafts, interviews, emails, ephemera. Though our journeys began some fifty-odd years apart, I can’t help but see my own experiences and anxieties as a fledgling poet, educator, and community organizer reflected in her words: What does it mean to organize in a settler-colonial nation that has come to stand for so much suffering, especially now that fascism, racism, and xenophobia seem to be increasingly prevalent around the world? What is the relationship between my creative practice and the responsibility I feel towards the people and places I call home?

Like Chiang, I was an undergraduate student when I first became involved with arts organizing in Chinatown, starting in another basement studio just a handful of blocks away from Basement’s original location on Elizabeth St. Located at 26 Mott St, the W.O.W. Project is a community nonprofit operated out of Wing On Wo & Co., the oldest continually-run family storefront in Chinatown—coincidentally, directly across the street from the elementary school both my father and I attended as children.

I became a public programs intern at W.O.W. in 2019, three years after fifth-generation storeowner Mei Lum started W.O.W. as a response to the rise in artwashing and gentrification in the neighborhood. Attracted by the suitably grungy, exotic atmosphere and relatively cheaper rent (compared to nearby SoHo and Tribeca), art galleries had started popping up around Chinatown while long-term residents were priced out of their homes, losing access to necessary language services and long-established support networks. W.O.W. set out to mobilize artists from the community to participate in anti-gentrification actions, using the available space in the family-owned building to host a variety of programs that brought together community members across generations.

Compared to the work I had previously done with my college’s Asian American activist organization, W.O.W.’s place-based approach to organizing was a revelation. As a third-generation Chinatown local, I was often left dissatisfied by some of the ideologies that I observed gaining popularity within the Asian American far-left, the vaguely neo-Third Worldist yearning for a lost radical past or an idealized motherland that could rescue us (spiritually, ideologically, geographically) from the bleak future promised by our present American political landscape. My reservations were as personal as they were philosophical, if I’m being fully honest; even if I had wanted a motherland to romanticize, I didn’t know what that would even look like for me. My maternal grandfather immigrated as a young child in the 1930s, a paper son brought along by a couple who needed two boys to match the paperwork they had purchased off another family; my father’s side immigrated later from British Hong Kong, now a so-called Special Administrative Region suspended in political limbo ever since the territory was “returned” to mainland China in 1997.

For better or for worse, Chinatown was and still is the place where I feel the most coherent, the most myself. As Chiang herself puts it in one interview, “Even though we are Chinese, and we are aware of what’s happening in China, they are such different countries—you have to have different strategies.” When Chiang writes about traveling around the world only to discover her desire to return, I think of myself at nineteen, working out of W.O.W.’s basement and encountering my own neighborhood as if for the first time. I think of Mei, choosing to return from working abroad in Thailand to take over her family’s store, and W.O.W.’s commitment to nurturing the roots laid down by generations of Chinese Americans in this city.

Of course, W.O.W.’s community has always extended past the limits of Manhattan’s Chinatown as a matter of necessity as well as conscious coalition-building. The older I get, the more I notice the dwindling numbers of neighborhood kids growing up as I did; most of the families my parents grew up with have since moved away to Brooklyn or Queens or farther, and I truly couldn’t tell you the last time I met someone my age or younger with family ties to pre-1965 Immigration Act Chinatown. Cultural organizing has never been sustained by biological relationships or narratives of authenticity alone, but instead grows out of a shared understanding that our lives today are shaped by the labor, care, and creativity of those who inhabited this place before us, and the desire to preserve and build on that legacy for those who come after.

My work at the W.O.W. Project could not have happened without the foundation left behind by Basement Workshop. Basement serves as an inspiration and model for the kind of organization W.O.W. strives to be, and while at W.O.W. I made a point of collaborating with and learning from Basement alumni like visual artist Tomie Arai, whose support has bolstered W.O.W. from the start. During my time as leader/coordinator for W.O.W.’s youth arts and activism program, Resist Recycle Regenerate (RRR), we always began the year-long curriculum by grounding the cohort of high school and college students in neighborhood history, from the 1875 Page Act used to disproportionately prohibit Chinese women from immigrating to the United States, to the 1982 garment workers’ strike, to Basement Workshop and Bridge magazine. Basement in particular serves as a crucial reference point for students, many of whom come from a background specializing in either fine arts or community organizing but rarely both. For these students—all Asian American young women and queer/trans youth, ages fifteen through twenty—the work of people like Chiang is concrete, tangible proof that socially engaged art is not only possible, but woven into the very fabric of this neighborhood and its institutions.

Drafts of Chiang’s poem “Chinatown,” a truncated version of which was published in her 1979 collection In the City of Contradictions from the now-defunct Sunbury Press, reveal a painstakingly detailed yet intimate vision of the community she cared for. These earlier versions are especially ambitious in their scope, blending an ethnographic attention to history with her own childhood memories, almost as if afraid to leave anything behind.

There’s an ease, a certain unfussiness in her writing that develops into something more urgent and condensed in the published version. Like so many contemporaneous women of color poets in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chiang’s poetics are infused with the particular self-consciousness that comes from writing about an experience that had previously been entirely missing from American literature.

Chiang credits the community of artists and cultural workers at Basement Workshop for encouraging her to write poetry in the first place after noticing her interest in using the written word in her visual art pieces. As Basement expanded its network of Asian American artists and writers through programming and Bridge: the Magazine of Asians in America, Chiang formed a writing circle with poets Jason Hwang, Richard Oyama, Helen Wong, and Teru Kanagawa, meeting twice a week to read and share writing with one another. While Bridge was not exclusively an arts and culture magazine, covering everything from news and politics to academic research to photography, it was nevertheless one of very few publications at the time that centered otherwise unknown Asian American poets and writers who lacked the connections and institutional support to break into the mainstream—or even the overwhelmingly white avant-garde, for that matter.

Existing scholarship surrounding the emergence of Asian American literature as a movement during the 1970s has largely focused on the West Coast as the primary hub of Asian American culture, a natural consequence of the size of the Asian American population in the region and the hard-won establishment of Asian American studies departments at universities. The relative invisibility of the East Coast as a site of Asian American political and cultural organizing can be traced all the way back to Chiang’s own experiences working for Basement in those early days. In one instance, Chiang recounts visiting a prominent New York organization with Richard Oyama in search of funding. Upon hearing their idea for an Asian American poetry reading, the organization’s representative replied, “What are you talking about? There aren’t any Asian American writers in New York; they’re in California.”

Against all odds, Basement Workshop and Bridge magazine carved out a place within Asian American art and organizing over the course of the decade, though this came at some cost to members of its leadership. By 1976, Basement was already under significant financial pressure, supported by a surprisingly small staff even as the organization looked towards new projects. In a memo dated March 18, 1976, Fay Chiang laid out upcoming tasks for each staff member at Basement, assigning the vast majority to herself. With a level of dedication that characterized all of Chiang’s organizing work, the memo lays out a packed schedule for her, from grant meetings to personally traveling up to the Bronx to look at printing equipment for a press that would never come to fruition.

Out of all the documents I encountered in the archives, I was most deeply affected by what I can only describe as loose journal entries: typewritten pages with minimal punctuation and formatting in which Chiang goes into detail about the compounded stress, fatigue, and grief she experienced during Basement’s later years.

Chiang remained the director of Basement Workshop until its closing in 1986. Her tenure was only interrupted once in 1978, when she returned from a health-related leave of absence to discover that the acting directors refused to restore her to her position. Either unwilling or unable to manage the organization’s debt, those same directors asked her to return shortly after in the spring of 1979. Faced with pervasive sexism and petty squabbles within the organization in addition to family tragedies and health scares, Chiang nevertheless continued to champion spaces where marginalized voices in the arts could flourish, going on to work for the Chinatown Planning Council’s Project Reach and Poets and Writers, where she led “Growing the Literature for a Democracy,” described as an initiative to “support the development of a literature embodying the experiences of the people of this nation.”

Yet it seems that Chiang and Basement Workshop have become mere historical footnotes, remembered only by students of Asian American studies and an aging generation of Chinatown activists. It is heart-wrenching enough to read pages of Chiang’s reflections on the day-to-day costs of a life in arts organizing—it is utterly devastating to realize just how much of Basement’s literary legacy has already slipped through the cracks. Many poets once published by Bridge magazine have since faded into obscurity, their work only accessible through archival research.

While there have been more robust scholarship and documentation around Basement Workshop’s impact on Chinatown’s social services and visual arts scene, it seems that the intersectional and interdisciplinary nature of the organization has rendered its literary contributions largely illegible within a framework that siloes off the literary from the political, in which the history of poetry can be easily isolated from its greater context. Even within the NYU Special Collections, Chiang’s papers cannot be found in a listing of the Fales Library of English and American Literature, her work having been exclusively historicized as part of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. Such approaches only further marginalize writers of color for whom publishing was itself a political statement, who did not have the luxury of deciding whether to take a stance because their creative practice was, in fact, inseparable from the organizing efforts that provided the support and resources that made the craft possible.

After hearing about my visit to the Fay Chiang Papers, a friend of mine at the W.O.W. Project asked how the experience made me feel about the work that we do. “Mostly sad and anxious,” I told her. Yuki had been the one who first introduced me to W.O.W. in college, the person in the organization I’ve known and worked alongside longer than anyone else, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have had her support since we were both starting out as interns.

We sat on the swings in an empty neighborhood playground, across the street from the summer school I used to volunteer at during high school, and exchanged stories: Yuki had met Chiang’s sister Jeanie at a W.O.W. event years ago, where they happened to touch on some of the same details I encountered in my research—the loss of their father and brother, her long battle with breast cancer, her exhaustion and burnout and willpower in spite of it all. As young organizers and artists who have long looked up to her work as an essential part of Basement, it is sobering to consider how someone as accomplished and hardworking as Chiang may have nevertheless felt underappreciated or powerless during her time at the organization.

Following the gutting of the NEA, which has eliminated federal arts funding for any projects that aren’t decidedly fascist, arts organizations such as the W.O.W. Project now find themselves under considerable financial pressure just to stay afloat. In such a climate, I feel the pull of despondency, the looming fear that a neighborhood and a community so precious to me could be swallowed up by some greater force of history while my back is turned.

Still, the work continues. This year marks the ten-year anniversary of Resist Recycle Regenerate and the W.O.W. Project as a whole, no small feat for a grassroots arts organization of its kind. At the most recent RRR final showcase, an annual celebration that marks the end of the program, I reconnected with alumni across the past few years of RRR, all of whom I either worked alongside or mentored as a member of the leadership team. Seeing former fellows I once interviewed and brought into the program doing the same for the next cohort of young artists and activists, I know that there’s nothing I would take back. More than any form of institutional recognition or support, witnessing the growth of this community each year is what ultimately sustains me and makes the work truly worthwhile. Fay Chiang certainly understood this as well as anyone, writing the following in her Artist’s Statement for her residency at the A/P/A Institute at NYU:

While Basement Workshop’s legacy is woven into the fabric of Chinatown’s present network of cultural organizations, Chiang’s own legacy as a poet and organizer can be felt in the relationships she fostered both within Basement and with other local organizations such as the Bowery Poetry Club and the Asian American Arts Centre, to name a few.

In the meantime, there is a necessary conversation to be had about which stories are allowed to exist within the history of literature in New York City, not to mention the history of American literature at large. Basement Workshop is only one case of how a vast range of artistic disciplines and areas of expertise once coalesced around a shared cause and community, and in doing so, produced a great deal of historically significant art and literature that has gone untaught and unexamined outside of the organization’s direct cultural descendants at places like the W.O.W. Project. The existence of Asian American literature as a field of study is no excuse for its absence in less specialized institutions and archives, and such an absence does a huge disservice to the reality of cultural production, considering that poetry and literature have always existed within, around, and in response to social movements. We have always had poet-organizers working at the intersection of the arts and politics; it is merely a question of having the language and willingness to see them in their entirety.