Title: Author talk with William Gee Wong about this new book: “Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America”
Join us for a special conversation between veteran journalists Bruce Koon and William Gee Wong as they discuss Wong’s new memoir,Son of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America. This deeply personal book explores Wong’s experiences growing up in Oakland’s Chinatown, his family’s immigrant journey, and his reflections on identity, belonging, and the Chinese American experience.
William Gee Wong is the son of a Chinese immigrant, a “paper son” who came to Oakland, California’s Chinatown during the Chinese Exclusion era. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, Wong became a pioneering journalist of Chinese/Asian descent with, among others, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote for Asian American publications. During the last phases of his mainstream career, he wrote a high-profile column that occasionally highlighted stories from growing Chinese American and Asian American communities. For about a year, he was a regional commentator on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS and appeared as a guest on local television and radio news shows. During the mid-1960s, Wong was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of the Philippines, after which he got his Master’s degree at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to his most recent book, Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America, he is author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches from Asian America and Images of America: Oakland’s Chinatown.
Bruce Koon is program coordinator forContra Costa Youth Journalismand mentors college and high school journalism students and mid-career journalists. He is a member ofPro News Coaches, a network of former Wall Street Journal editors and reporters assisting local news organizations, and a senior fellow for theUSC Center on Communication and Leadership Policy.
Previously, Koon was News Director at KQED for nearly 8 years and held various editor roles at Knight Ridder. He also worked as a reporter and business editor for several newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune. Koon was a founding board member and two-time president of the Online News Association and president of the San Francisco Chapter of the Asian American Journalism Association.
He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Californian in 1970, guest lectured at UC Berkeley in 2022, and taught at San Francisco State University in 2019. Koon has advised the Maynard Institute, Knight Digital Media Center, J-Lab, and the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.