At 60, the Chinese Culture Center Enters a ‘New Era of Courage’

Tatwina Lee peered down from the balcony of Club Fugazi, a historic theater in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. As the crowd began to pour in, Lee’s phone buzzed with texts from friends arriving at the party.

“This is very new for us,” Lee said, as she gestured towards the lively scene below, where drag queens, city leaders, Asian American artists and longtime Chinatown organizers were gathered. The Oct. 17 gala marked the 60th anniversary of the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco (CCC), one of the nation’s oldest Asian American arts organizations and a longtime anchor of the Chinatown neighborhood.

“For these celebrations, usually [we host] a Chinese banquet in one of the few remaining [banquet hall] restaurants,” said Lee, a CCC board co-chair who has served in multiple leadership roles at the organization, including as president during the early 1990s. “But we wanted to mark this special time differently.”

The choice of a nontraditional venue reflected the evolution of CCC, an organization that has grown over the decades to meet the shifting needs of the local Chinese community. In the 1960s and ’70s, the center’s exhibitions and educational programs introduced Chinese and Chinese American art to wider audiences. Some 60 years later, it has become a critical launchpad for some of the most boundary-pushing contemporary artists working today.

Despite funding cuts and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, leaders regard this time as a “new era of courage,” as CCC prepares to open its first street-level permanent home on Chinatown’s storied Grant Avenue early next year. With a growing network of collaborators, the organization has positioned itself as one of Chinatown’s most vital engines of reinvention.

In many ways, the story of CCC mirrors that of modern Chinatown: born against the odds and sustained by ingenuity and deep community care. Over the past six decades, the organization has faced economic pressures, political rifts and waves of cultural change. But CCC has emerged each time with a renewed sense of purpose and activism.

The DNA of persistence

CCC formed in 1965, when Chinese American community leaders made an ambitious bid for cultural visibility in San Francisco — the same year that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted restrictive immigration quotas, and just one year after the Civil Rights Act was passed. The mid-1960s brought a pivotal shift for Asian Americans, as both an influx of new immigrants and a growing generation of Chinese Americans brought new community concerns and demands. It was also the height of the Civil Rights era, when Black-led movements against segregation inspired parallel efforts for equity across communities of color, including Chinese and Chinese Americans.

In a historical account of CCC’s founding, the late Chinese historian Him Mark Lai described the period as a defining time for both San Francisco Chinatown and the organization’s founders.

“The increased ethnic consciousness and concern for the community became part of this development that spurred many young activists with the desire to play roles in shaping Chinatown’s destiny,” Lai wrote.

For generations, Chinatown’s leadership had been dominated by family and district organizations, notably the powerful Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which played a key role in protecting early 19th-century immigrants. That longstanding power structure was challenged by a new generation of progressive community leaders, including Jun Ke Choy, or J.K. Choy, a Hawaii-born Chinese American who had established and managed a branch of the San Francisco Savings and Loans Association in Chinatown.

Choy leveraged his stature in the community to drive political action in Chinatown. In 1963, he formed the San Francisco Greater Chinatown Community Service Association Organization (SFGCCSA), which united local leaders and pooled resources to launch community projects. Its most ambitious effort was a response to an existential threat: rapid real estate development encroaching on the neighborhood.

“Urban renewal” had already displaced a number of low-income immigrant and working class residents in San Francisco’s Western Addition, Fillmore, Japantown and South of Market neighborhoods. In an effort to preserve community space, SFGCCSA proposed the creation of a Chinese cultural facility on city-owned land at Kearny and Washington Streets, the former site of the Hall of Justice, across from Portsmouth Square.

San Francisco city leaders were initially lukewarm to the idea, but Choy was indefatigable.

“He was the only person from the Chinese American community and Chinatown [who] had the gumption to go down to City Hall and to City Planning and voice his concerns. He was a no-nonsense guy,” said Helen Hui, Choy’s niece, a former immigration attorney and a longtime Chinatown advocate.

Eventually, Choy and his associates at SFGCCSA succeeded in lobbying the Board of Supervisors to turn the property over to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. The organization negotiated a landmark compromise: the developer of a planned 27-story Hilton hotel on the site would also build a 20,000-square-foot facility dedicated to Chinese community cultural activities. A milestone in local cultural preservation efforts, the agreement remains the reason why CCC has been housed on the third floor of the hotel since its founding.

“[Choy] would take off early from work and go downtown and testify before the planning department so that he could wrangle a piece of the old Hall of Justice,” Hui said, reflecting on her uncle’s relentless efforts to plant CCC’s early roots. “He always spoke out against what he thought was unfair to Chinatown.”

Jenny Leung, CCC’s current executive director, says the DNA of persistence and political savvy that drove Choy and other advocates — who incorporated as the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco in 1965 — still resonates today.

“Today, we feel like we have to reclaim or protect what we have, but they were really the pioneers,” Leung said. “They were creating a creative and cultural movement at the time, inspired by what the Civil Rights Movement was doing, and [insisting] that our community deserves a place to tell our stories.”

‘It was inherently so radical’

When CCC was founded, formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China did not yet exist, so the organization aimed to bridge a cultural knowledge gap, educating Americans about Chinese art, history and traditions. From the 1970s through the 1990s, as U.S.-China relations thawed, CCC linked cultural exchange with community visibility, showcasing artists like Wu Guanzhong and Weyman Lew.

By the late 1990s, CCC entered a period of artistic reinvention. During her tenure as executive director from 1997 to 2000, Manni Liu steered the organization beyond its early focus on preserving Chinese history and tradition, and toward contemporary art and identity.

“What I wanted people to experience is a contemporary sensibility, that the Chinese are also creating art that reflects the present times too. It’s important to know our past history, but also most modern ideas and struggles and issues,” Liu said. “‘Am I Chinese? Am I a Chinese American? Am I just American? Who am I in this society?’ A lot of those themes were starting to develop.”

Hoi Leung, CCC’s current deputy director and curator, says the center is less encumbered by those questions now. Over the years, the organization has grown more assertive and less apologetic about taking up space. “It wasn’t until contemporary art really flourished in the organization where [we could be] so confident about our position in the world, in the community, in the city,” she said. “It was inherently so radical.”

Executive Director Jenny Leung agrees the organization has hit its stride in the last 15 years. In conjunction with the Chinatown Community Development Center, CCC created an artist residency program that has helped activate Ross Alley, a historic alleyway in the neighborhood. A registry launched with the San Francisco Arts Commission helps connect artists to public art opportunities in Chinatown. And CCC co-hosts several large community engagement events annually, including the Hungry Ghost Festival and Chinatown Pride, underscoring its allyship with other communities.

The center also broadened its mission to become more inclusive of other communities, intentionally debunking the perception that Chinatown is insular. CCC’s leaders say that groundwork allowed the organization to respond with clarity and strength during the pandemic, amid anti-Asian sentiment, increased attacks and a national racial reckoning.

“We weren’t reactive; we were more than ready,” Hoi Leung said.

In recent years, CCC has also helped propel the careers of local artists, including Christine Wong Yap, a visual artist and social practitioner whose 2023 project How I Keep Looking Up brought together 16 working-class Chinese and Latinx immigrant women to create flags carried during the Chinese New Year Parade. Yap described CCC as fundamentally “artist-centered.”

Yap said CCC has pushed her to grow by providing resources, including linguistic and cultural competency, that would be hard to find elsewhere. She also appreciates the intentionality of CCC’s leadership, especially as the Trump administration threatens the wellbeing of immigrant communities.

“The fact that there’s queer women in leadership — I feel like that really shows in the arc of who they are right now,” Yap said. “Everything that’s happened in the past 10 months [with the start of the second Trump administration] has been so crazy and destabilizing … I hope that they can be the rock that a lot of people can rely upon to weather the storm over the next three years.”

Jenny Leung believes the organization can play that role, in large part because of CCC’s ethos of collaboration.

“In the past, there’s always a fight for resources, but I really feel like we’re moving into a more collaborative period where we’re thinking about the bigger picture,” she said. “It’s about this holistic vision: How do we make sure that our communities feel whole and have humanity and are taken care of?”

To that end, CCC is one of six organizations that make up the Chinatown Media & Arts Collaborative, a multidisciplinary coalition  — including the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, Chinese Historic Society of America, Center for Asian American Media, Chinatown Community Development Center, and Chinese for Affirmative Action — that aims to model solidarity and shared purpose in Chinatown.

Jenny Leung believes the new ground floor space for CCC on Grant Avenue will be a game-changer for the organization: It’s central in the neighborhood, not tucked away on the third floor of a hotel. Not only will it make the CCC more visible, the organization’s presence can help deepen the cultural significance of that street beyond mere “tourist destination.”

“I think people have a lot of preconceived notions when they come to Chinatown … [Now] we have an opportunity to reclaim it,” Leung said. “[The community] wants to be able to see young people and new energy and artists, and see something that they can feel proud of.”

As CCC continues to shape Chinatown, it’s easy to wonder what Choy, the determined CCC founder and gutsy uncle of Helen Hui, might think of the organization’s evolution.

“It took someone like J.K. Choy to go down to City Hall and yell at them,” Hui said with a laugh. “It’s a hard tradition to live up to. … But it’s been 60 years of joy and fun … I think Uncle J.K. would have approved.”

The Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco continues its 60th anniversary festival with a week of activities Oct. 25–Nov. 1 at the New CCC Gallery (667 Grant Ave., San Francisco). For tickets and more information visit www.cccsf.us/60-af.