Meet the women who lead the fight for Chinatown’s existence in Philly

In her neighborhood, she’s known as the grandmother of Chinatown — a leader in activism who has been fighting for her community for six decades. It’s a fight that has always been about survival.

”We realized that this is a fight for existence,” said Cecilia Yep, who has been leading the charge against development projects in Chinatown since the 1960s, earning her the moniker.

Existence of the neighborhood, existence of the culture, and in Xu Lin’s case, existence of the people and their safety.

When Lin immigrated to the United States as a teenager, he was often told to just lie low and keep his head down. If you don’t bother others, he was told, they won’t bother you. He quickly realized this wasn’t true — becoming subject to extreme racism, bullying, and violence at South Philadelphia High School.

But it was the women of Chinatown, he recalls, who fought to protect him and other Asian students when they faced discrimination and violence at school. The women didn’t lie low and keep their heads down — they fought back.

“It’s this group of Asian women who care about our community, who spent a lot of time to build our community. They create space for us,” said Lin, who is today raising his own family in Chinatown. “Throughout their whole life, they are told to be submissive because they’re women, because they’re Asian. But they say no. ... It’s this group of Asian American women who changed a lot of things, who changed me. I feel like I’m carrying their spirit in many of the fights.”

The Chinatown community is tight-knit with a strong culture of organizing, perseverance through difficulties, and rich culture. Here are some of the women who have made Chinatown what it is today:

Homes were being torn down all around Cecilia Yep’s house at Ninth and Race Streets, until hers was the last one on the block. Still, she refused to leave — and to this day, many in the community refer to her persistence as akin to the Alamo.

It was the 1960s and ‘70s, and the city was using eminent domain to destroy blocks of houses and evict dozens of families to make way for the Center City Commuter Connection. Yep, a recently widowed 32-year-old with three children, refused to leave her home.

So she gave the mayor at the time an option: I’ll leave voluntarily if you build more housing in Chinatown.

He proposed a $60,000 comprehensive plan in Chinatown, and three housing developments were eventually built: one for residents who owned and lost their properties, one for senior citizens, and one for Section 8 holders.

That was Yep’s first of many fights for existence. Over the decades, Yep was on the front lines fighting against the Vine Street Expressway, Convention Center, a federal prison, two casinos, a baseball stadium, and more.

Yep, who grew up in the neighborhood, was also one of the first community organizers in Chinatown — and the first woman to become an organizer.

“The fact of the matter was that I broke tradition,” she said. “When I spoke out … I was breaking the rules because women didn’t speak out. Women didn’t even attend meetings [in] those days. But there was no pushback — I kind of became the voice of the community.”

Mary Yee wasn’t born an activist — she bloomed into one after a lifetime of experiences that planted the seeds for a justice-centered existence.

Yee grew up in a Chinese working-class immigrant family in Rutland, Vt. — a small city in the state’s southeast with very few people of color in the ‘50s.

“I grew up as a person that stuck out everywhere,” Yee said. “I was seen on one hand a little exotic, and the other hand as a foreigner, an alien.”

When she was 8, Yee’s family moved to Boston’s Chinatown — going from an all-white community to a virtually all-Chinese one. And it was during her time in Boston that she saw the systems in play against communities of color, from attending a segregated elementary school to watching the Chinatown neighborhood evaporate when a large highway project took down half of the neighborhood’s housing.

“We stayed for a couple of years, but the community became really desolate,” Yee said. “Half the housing was gone, your friends were gone, and the construction is just a mess.”

The erasure of her childhood neighborhood echoed in her mind years later, when the Vine Street Expressway was proposed — threatening to destroy Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

By that point, Yee had become a full-on activist. While she had experienced racism and systemic discrimination growing up, it wasn’t until college that she found an outlet and supportive environment to put more context to her life experiences.

Across the country, the civil rights movement was spreading rapidly, and antiwar activism was rampant. Yee was wrapping up her undergraduate degree at Princeton University when she founded Yellow Seeds, a community and political organization filled with radical young people who were serving Chinatown — the first of its kind in the neighborhood.

“[Students and professors] were saying, This war is really depriving our communities, and we’re going back to work in our communities,” Yee said. “That was something that inspired Asian American young people to go back to their communities and serve the people.”

When Debbie Wei was growing up, she didn’t know her family history.

She didn’t know that her parents were once undocumented. She didn’t know that her father’s father and siblings in China had all died of leprosy. She didn’t know that her mother always made Wei and her sister get milk from the corner store because the workers there would laugh at her mom’s accent. She didn’t know what the Mid-Autumn Festival was, or that her parents would come home, glum, with mooncakes in a pink cardboard box on that day, because they were sad they had no community to celebrate with.

It wasn’t until Wei — who grew up in what was then predominantly white Upper Darby — went to college in the 1970s, surrounded by many other Asian American students, that she realized her family wasn’t so different from others. She and other students created an Asian American studies study group, bringing in speakers and learning more about Asian and Asian American history.

“These were seminal experiences for me,” Wei said.

Wei went on to become a central activist in the Chinatown community, founding Asian Americans United and fighting against development projects and anti-Asian racism and violence over the years. But the main focus of her work was always building community — to fight for something, not just against it.

When Wei first went to Hong Kong and saw what a momentous occasion the Mid-Autumn Festival was, she knew she wanted to re-create that for her community back home. So she started reaching out to community members and getting support from the city to put on their own festival in Philadelphia.

“Creating a festival is as much fighting for something as doing a demonstration,” Wei said. “A fight for culture and history and language to matter.”

When Ellen Somekawa was 16, her parents dragged her to the annual Sukiyaki fund-raising dinner for the Japanese American Citizens League in Minnesota. As she passed a table, someone handed her a leaflet that said something along the lines of “Don’t ever let this happen again.”

Somekawa flipped through the leaflet, learning for the first time about the roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent — two-thirds of whom were American citizens — who had been swept up by the U.S. government during World War II and incarcerated in American concentration camps.

Then she found out her parents were among them.

“It was the experience of having your world turned upside down,” Somekawa recalled.

When she went to her civics teacher asking why they were never taught about this critical piece of history, her teacher rebutted, asking why Somekawa’s parents never told her about it.

“The reason that our parents didn’t tell us about it was that they were ashamed and afraid, so they were completely silenced,” Somekawa said.

Somekawa’s journey to activism wasn’t linear — there were moments of craving to learn more about the histories and systemic oppressions, and moments of wanting a break from it all. But ultimately, Somekawa threw herself into activism full force — especially after she moved to Philadelphia, where she witnessed and experienced injustices and violence against Asian and Southeast Asian communities.

For Somekawa, her years organizing with Asian Americans United were formative, and she believes their balance of fighting against and fighting for is exactly what people should strive for in activism.

“I feel that we arrived at a really important model, which is intergenerational in nature, and is both how to build fierce resistance to oppression, and at the same time building community,” she said. “And seeing those two things as really inseparable and integral to each other.”