The Bookstore That Tells the Stories of Asian American Activism

From the history of Japanese internment to “Crazy Rich Asians,” all in a tiny corner of San Mateo

Florence Makita Hongo, founder and general manager of the Asian American Curriculum Project // Photo courtesy of Pia Ceres

The story begins on the bookshelves. Volumes of Chinese American author Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior sit next to iconic works by Korean American novelist Chang-Rae Lee, which are crammed alongside books by Indian author Arundhati Roy. The newer additions, marked by their glossy jackets, lie horizontally across the tops of shelved literature, like the uber-popular Little Fires Everywhere and Crazy Rich Asians. Across the store, a wide smattering of others include picture books in Khmer, Tongan historical publications and a cookbook devoted solely to Spam.

Within this humble store in San Mateo, called the Asian American Curriculum Project (AACP), are the many stories of Asian Americans and, often, the activism they’ve pursued.

On one particular Saturday, just around 10:00 a.m., volunteers—myself included—gathered near a long table toward the back of the store in an office area separated by desks stacked high with files and boxes. There are seven of us. Most are older with children around my age. I’m 23, the youngest. The table’s center of gravity is owner Florence Makita Hongo. At 91, she’s sharp-eyed; age spots crinkle and bloom at her temples.

The bookstore’s origins are entwined with Hongo’s own history, which encompasses imprisonment at a Japanese internment camp through the Asian American civil-rights movement, when, 40 years ago, she rallied schoolteachers with the goal of combating racism against Asian Americans, using books.

“Activist organizations rely on people’s memory,” Leonard Chan, the vice president of the AACP, tells me. He’s been a volunteer here for over 20 years, and when he says this, we both glance at Hongo.

Outside, the store is nondescript, folded unassumingly among the beige facades on 3rd Street, its to-the-point name announced by a sun-faded blue awning.

Photo courtesy of Pia Ceres

Its looks may be modest, but this shop has played a vital role in the Bay Area, where the roots of the Asian American civil-rights movement run deeply. In 1969, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Black Panther movement, a group of UC Berkeley students coined the term “Asian American” to mobilize under a collective political identity. In the 1970s, activists rallied against the eviction of elderly Filipino residents of the International Hotel in Manilatown and joined a multiracial coalition to advocate for the first Ethnic Studies department in the country, at San Francisco State University.

During this climate of change, Hongo, a mother of five living San Mateo, was hired to serve on the school district’s new multicultural advisory staff. She says that when she brought up teaching the history of Japanese internment during World War II, the teachers, who were mostly white, seemed not to know what she was talking about.

Photo courtesy of Pia Ceres

But internment was branded into her own memory. Hongo was born in 1928 to Japanese immigrant parents on her family’s farm in Cressey, California. After Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, calling for the interment of 120,000 Japanese Americans. She, then 13 years old, and her family were imprisoned at Camp Amache in Colorado.

Years later, she recounted her efforts to talk about internment in schools, in the bookstore newsletter: “When I first told the public the story about Japanese internment in America, the people did not believe me! They called me horrible names. They accused me of being a liar.”

So in 1969, she, along with 11 teachers and school administrators, started the Japanese American Curriculum Project, or JACP. Sponsored by the San Mateo City School District, they typed out K–12 syllabi and reading lists that highlighted parts of Japanese American history that were left out of textbooks. “Before [prejudiced] attitudes change, a foundation must be built first based on extensive research and documented historical data,” Hongo told the San Mateo County Times in 1969.

In the 1970s, the curriculum project expanded into a bookstore — first in Hongo’s garage, then to a store on 3rd Avenue, in San Mateo, where the JACP invited local Japanese American authors to sell and read their books. The JACP expanded to become the Asian American Curriculum Project in 1985, and its volunteers traveled to schools and libraries across the West Coast with boxes full of picture books, novels and histories.

That’s what makes the AACP so unique: it has always brought the books out of the brick-and-mortar store and into schools and community events, like the San Mateo Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Festival, which the AACP used to organize. “If we bring the bookstore to them, it becomes a really interesting part of a festival,” she said.