Celebrating Lunar New Year with Maxine Hong Kingston and Special Guests

We welcome back renowned Bay Area author Maxine Hong Kingston, along with new guests Kathy Leong, Russell Jeung, Donald Young, and Nicole Wong, to commemorate Lunar New Year and the Year of the Fire Horse. The panelists will share the traditional, contemporary, and uniquely personal rituals that make up their New Year celebrations, explore the myths and qualities associated with the Horse, and offer predictions for the year.

Co-sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America and The Ruby.

About the Panelists

Maxine Hong Kingston is the author of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and The Fifth Book of Peace, among other works. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald award. She was given the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. She worked for many years as a senior lecturer in creative writing at UC Berkeley. Kingston lives in Oakland, California.

Kathy Chin Leong is an award-winning journalist who has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sunset Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is the author of San Francisco’s Chinatown, with Dick Evans. As a second-generation ABC (American-born Chinese), she grew up in San Francisco’s Sunset District and spent nearly every weekend in Chinatown visiting her grandmother and helping her mother shop for groceries.

Russell M. Jeung is Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAIP Hate. He is a leading sociologist of race, immigration, and religion. Over the last 25 years his groundbreaking research on Asian American communities has shaped the fields of Asian American Studies and Sociology of Religion. He is author of Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans (Oxford University Press, 2019); Moving Movers: Student Activism and the Emergence of Asian American Studies (UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2019); At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors (Zondervan, 2016); Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (with Carolyn Chen; New York University Press, 2012): and Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (Rutgers University Press, 2004). Jeung is considered an expert in community-based, participatory research and is extensively involved with his students in conducting research with Asian American communities. In addition, with Valerie Sie, he co-produced the documentary, The Oak Park Story (2010), about a landmark housing lawsuit involving Cambodian and Latino tenants. In March 2020, Professor Jeung co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that was awarded the 2021 Webby Award for "Social Movement of the Year." He was named as one of the TIME 100 Most Influential Persons in 2021.

Donald Young enters the role of CAAM’s Executive Director, after serving the organization for 30 years, most recently as the Director of Programs. As a longtime documentary production executive and advocate for independent storytelling, Young has played a key role in building CAAM’s stature as a national producer of documentaries and independent feature films. His credits include executive producing the 2022 Peabody Awards Nominee Rising Against Asian Hate, and the 2020 landmark PBS series Asian Americans. Other credits include the critically-acclaimed independent feature Coming Home Again by Wayne Wang. Young is a member of the Documentary Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Nicole Wong is the author of Mahjon: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora, and the creator of The Mahjong Project. She has over a decade of experience working with companies and community organizations that tell stories about the Asian American experience, such as Hyphen magazine and the Center for Asian American Media. The Mahjong Project is her effort to preserve a small piece of her family history and bring more people into the joy of playing the game while also encouraging others to contemplate unique family traditions in their own lives. The Mahjong Project hosts pop-up mahjong nights around San Francisco and Oakland and collects stories and anecdotes about mahjong at www.themahjongproject.com (Instagram: @themahjongproject). Nicole's work has been featured in Vogue, The Washington Post, NPR's Code Switch, CNN, KQED, and more. She is also a founding member of The Ruby, an arts & letters-focused collective and gathering space in San Francisco for women-identifying and nonbinary creatives.