.Asia Pacific Cultural Quagmire

Struggle over the Oakland Asian Cultural Center sheds light on the generational conflicts within Asian Oakland

The boldly colored prints and paintings hung carefully on the walls. It had been many months since any art was displayed at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, and a crowd turned out for the January 17 opening. True to the notion that one attends art openings not to see but to be seen, no one stood in the hallway to gaze at the artwork. Instead, everyone gathered in the auditorium to chat and nibble on dim sum.

The exhibition of Taiwanese printmaker Liao Shiou-Ping’s work marked the unofficial reopening of the Oakland Asian Cultural Center after a passionate tug-of-war between the center’s staff and more entrenched Chinatown interests forced its closing last summer. It was an abrupt end for the institution that once had served as the city’s single-most-visible expression of Chinese political power.

The city, which had provided free rent and funds to the center, took over in August, passing the responsibility for day-to-day operations first to its Community and Economic Development Agency, then to the Oakland Museum. At the opening, Councilmembers Henry Chang and Danny Wan shared their thoughts about the center’s future with the audience, which included museum head Dennis Power and members of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. Visibly absent were the former center employees who had worked hardest to turn the center into a real arts mecca.

The cultural center grew out of the vision of the late Rev. Frank Mar, pastor of the Oakland Chinese Presbyterian Church from 1964 to 1984, who worried that young Asian Americans were losing touch with their backgrounds. In the 1960s, Oakland rebuilt its downtown, taking chunks out of Chinatown for the Nimitz Freeway, BART, and Laney College. Mar and other Chinatown activists lobbied the city to include a cultural center, library, and affordable housing in its redevelopment. Stricken with cancer, he died before his dream came true.

The Oakland Asian Cultural Center opened in the Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 9th Street and Webster in 1996. With an auditorium covering more than 2,500 square feet, six conference rooms, and an industrial kitchen, the center earned bragging rights to having the nicest space of any Asian culture center in the country.

But the center has been plagued by financial woes and weak leadership ever since it opened its glass doors. In five years, it went through seven directors. Money disappeared. The board of directors held meetings devoid of parliamentary procedure that more closely resembled family powwows, said onetime board member Sonny Le. It didn’t fund-raise sufficiently and responded to problems by zealously firing its staff.

“It’s a beautiful space, so it tends to attract people with status seeking board membership who don’t know anything about nonprofits,” said Francis Wong, who resigned as director last May.

The center also came under fire repeatedly for a lack of diversity. Though its name proclaims the center a place for all Asian Americans, it was mostly Chinese Americans who fought for the center during redevelopment and mostly Chinese Americans who used the space at first. During the first years of its life, the center resembled a conference hall for Chinatown businesses and political fund-raisers more than a place of arts and culture.

While some community groups couldn’t afford the fees for booking rooms, certain businesspeople enjoyed free use of the facilities from close pals at the center. Community nonprofits and art groups representing various ethnic backgrounds complained mightily to the city, and in 1999 the center entered into an agreement with the city to receive $60,000 a year in community access funds that nonprofit groups could apply for and use toward renting space at the center.

Operations appeared to take a turn for the better in August 2000, when a new management team came on board. Wong, a respected jazz musician who has headed arts organizations, and Jolie Bales, a former Wall Street lawyer, took the helm of the struggling group and succeeding in raising the center’s profile. They hired a dedicated staff to program events and worked with other arts organizations. Soon, the center offered not only traditional fare such as Cantonese opera and brush-painting classes, but world-class jazz concerts, hip-hop shows, and spoken-word performances. The center also became home to a citywide program for some 200 high-school students.

But the center neglected to raise its profile in one crucial place: Oakland’s Chinatown. Neither Wong nor Bales hailed from Oakland, and though the pair shared leadership responsibility, Bales was perceived as running the show, which raised the question of why a white woman led an Asian culture center. A generation rift formed: As the center became better-known in arts circles, it grew increasingly disconnected from the older activists who had pushed for its creation. Chinatown leaders say the center didn’t include them in its plans or market directly to the Chinese-American community. Staff members say older folks didn’t show interest in the programming and thought of “culture” as something from the past, not something to create anew in the present. The flashpoint came in March when the center announced its new name, Asia Pacific Cultural Center-Oakland, to reflect its inclusion of Pacific Islanders.

“It was like whatever they did, they kept it from this community,” said Jennie Ong, executive director of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, which sits just down the hall from the center. “That’s not the right thing to do because it was this community that fought for the cultural center in the beginning, and I don’t know if they knew the history involved, or whether they cared.”

The older generation in Chinatown revolted. Fliers appeared in Chinese urging people to “take back” the center and falsely stating that the membership was not Chinese, but mostly Pacific Islanders and “confidants of this white lady.”
The flier’s author, Richard Mak, president of the Oakland Consolidated Chinese Associations, an umbrella group for twelve family associations, said he did not intend anything racist and got his information from the Chamber of Commerce. Ong denies that her organization was the source. In either case, the center, realizing its huge blunder, offered to put the name change to a vote of its membership. Mak’s association bought more than 100 memberships in preparation for an April 17 meeting. By that time, Bales had received death threats, a rapidly dwindling board of directors had elected a new president, and someone had called Councilman Danny Wan to mediate.

Wan’s presence was eyed with suspicion by the center’s staff because he received campaign contributions from Mak and other Chinatown leaders. (“I’m a politician; I take money from anyone,” he quipped to a reporter.) At a meeting involving Wan, center leadership, and the Chinatown community, it became clear that the controversy had nothing to do with the arts. Some complained that the word “Oakland” should come first in the name. Some argued that “Asian” already included Pacific Islanders. A minority expressed intolerance – “Are we going to let blacks and Latinos in too?” one asked – but mostly people were upset because respect had not been given where respect was due. In Chinatown, it doesn’t matter if names of organizations change, so long as the right people are consulted and forewarned.

The center agreed to change its name back, but by then it was suffering from an internal meltdown. Board members resigned left and right, as did Wong. New President Marsha Golangco, a feng shui expert who lives in Alamo, said she discovered, quite suddenly, that the organization had no money, which Bales and Wong vigorously dispute. Golangco walked into the center with treasurer Rita Yalung on July 18 and fired Bales. She then fired the rest of the staff in an unusual way: via a board resolution faxed from the phone of a man whom Golangco declared to be a board member, but whom the staff had never met before.
“What can you do?” Golangco asked tearfully during an interview in which she denied that the fax was an actual termination. However, paychecks to employees promptly bounced. “There’s just no money to pay the employees,” she said.
Golangco dissolved the organization, and the city terminated its agreement with the nonprofit, sent in its Community and Economic Development Agency, set up a task force, and ordered an audit. Teenagers from the youth program, afraid of losing their home, interrupted city council meetings with their protests, wearing signs declaring their ethnicities – Cambodian, Mien, Korean, Chinese – and questioned the city’s commitment to diversity. In November, the auditor’s report was made public and painted Bales in a bad light, saying she had overpaid herself. Chinese-language newspapers jumped all over the story. Bales, who declined to be interviewed for this story, filed a lawsuit against the board of directors and City Auditor Roland Smith.

In its latest show, the San Francisco-based Asian-American comedy troupe 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors poked fun at the name-change fiasco, suggesting that the center be called “Chinese Chinese Chinese.”

At the center’s recent reopening, a weary-looking Alan Yee took to the podium and introduced the center’s transition team. Yee, an attorney and original founder of the center, was appointed to the task force and charged with putting together a team to create a brand-new nonprofit with a fresh board of directors. Selecting the transition team was no easy process; community groups feared that they would once again be left out and plied Yee to keep diversity in mind. But Yee initially faced a tougher challenge – no one wanted to associate with a facility that had so many problems.

In the end, the transition team was diverse – perhaps too diverse, some worry. The members come from such different parts of the Asian-American community that they share only one thing: a background in nonprofits. They are Ong; Yui Hay Lee, an architect and original center founder; Corinne Jan, director of the social-services organization Family Bridges; Lillian Galedo, director of Filipinos for Affirmative Action; and Robert Uhrle, a Pacific-Islander activist.

Given the task of putting together a new organization at the breakneck pace of four to six months, they have had only a handful of meetings. Galedo said it has gone surprising well so far, especially considering how varied the group is. “But we haven’t gotten to the really nitty-gritty stuff yet.”

Recently, the transition team invited the former staff to talk about the programs they had run at the center. It was the first time in the process that anyone had asked staff members what they were trying to achieve.

For those who had worked at the center daily, a lingering anger and unanswered questions keep them emotionally tied to the space. Will the youth program be able to stay at the center? When political fund-raising season rolls around again, will Chinatown old-timers expect to use the space for free, and if so, what will the city do?

Former Artistic Director Penina Ava Taesali said she felt relieved the transition team included members who share her views. But she expressed anxiety about the cultural center’s future. “The question is, will the city honor its commitment to diversity?” she asked. “We need to have diversity because Chinatown is not just Chinese anymore.”

In the meantime, the center’s potential remains unrealized. At the mid-January opening, Dee Dee Castro, the editor of Dance Magazine and a first-time visitor to the center, happily sampled a plate of dumplings and gave the center an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “It is such a nice space,” Castro said. “If more groups knew about it, it would be booked all the time.”

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