Stewart Kwoh, lawyer fighting for Asian American rights, on what drives him
The founder of the Los Angeles-based civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, talks about his Hollywood actress mother Beulah Quo and the Vincent Chin murder case
MADE IN CHINA My parents were both Christian. My father was from Shanghai and his family owned a printing company, called Commercial Press, that printed Bibles. He went to the seminary at Princeton University for his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD in education from Columbia University. He met my mom at a graduate Chinese Christian association. Her family was originally from a village in Guangzhou and she was born in Stockton, California. She went to the University of California, Berkeley and then to the University of Chicago. My parents went to China to help rebuild the country and taught at Ginling University (in Nanjing) – that’s where I was born, in 1948.
IMMIGRATION NATION When I was two months old they moved back to the US and we lived in northern California for two years and then in Los Angeles, where I’ve lived ever since. Los Angeles is a diverse city and our neighbours were Mexican American, African American, Middle Eastern, white and Asian. The 1965 immigration law that was fully implemented in 1968 ended years of exclusion and allowed Chinese to come to the US. I observed a lot more Asians coming in from the 1970s – every decade there was a doubling of the Asian-American population.
HOLLYWOOD MOTHER My mother was a professor but she became a Hollywood actress. Her stage name was Beulah Quo. A family friend who was an actor made the introductions and she got a job on Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) – she played the aunt of Jennifer Jones – and that led to more than 100 films.