As the child of Chinese immigrants, Cindy Ng wanted to fit in. She wanted to, as Andrew Yang puts it, “out-American the Americans.”
“I had a very hard time relating to the culture of my schools. Although I spoke English, I was very culturally alienated,” says Ng, the Scott J.J. Hsu Director of the Asian American Activities Center at Stanford University, where she is now a bastion of community. “In response to wanting to fit in, I wanted to not be Asian.”
That would change though as Ng entered college at the University of California, Berkeley in the early ’70s. With the Vietnam War dragging on overseas, she came
across a photo of a Vietnamese woman carrying her infant. The woman had just been napalmed.
“I saw that photo, and I said, ‘She looks like me. Those are my people. Why is the U.S. doing this?’” recalls Ng. “I think that started my understanding of ‘What does it mean to be Asian? What does it mean to be Asian and American?’”
That’s how Ng, a passionate mathematics major who intended to go on to graduate school, became “sidetracked by activism.”
After graduating from Berkeley (where she founded the Asian Student Union), Ng began knocking on the back doors of restaurants and garment factories in San Francisco, asking for a job. It wasn’t the job itself that she was interested in, as much as the people she would be working with. A member of the Chinese Progressive Association, Ng was determined to help workers organize for better wages and working conditions. But, as Ng tells it, she quickly realized her coworkers had more to teach her.
