Author Kitty Tsui stands alongside a stack of anthologies containing her writing.
I remember being at Lowell High School, looking out the window, daydreaming, and I saw a line of mounted police,” says Kitty Tsui (B.A., ’75). “And I knew where they were going, because we all knew what was going on at San Francisco State.”
This glimpse of the 1968-69 student strikes at SF State, which brought the naton’s first college of ethnic studies to the University, was a catalyst for Tsui’s path as an activist, she says. “That vision is burned into my mind, and that was when I decided to go to San Francisco State. I made my decision based on the fact that I wanted to be part of this movement that was beginning.”
For Tsui, playing that part meant carving out an identity as a Chinese-American lesbian activist, a poet, a visual and performance artist and even a competitive bodybuilder. The granddaughter of a Chinese opera singer, Tsui enrolled in the University’s Chinese studies program but quickly switched to creative writing, drawn by the chance to learn from professors like novelist Kay Boyle and poet Stan Rice. She also remembers communications professor Sally Gearhart, the first open lesbian to obtain a tenure-track position at a major U.S. university, as “a great mentor to me.”
Born in Hong Kong and raised in England, Tsui credits her love of poetry to a “thorough English education” that led her to poems like Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils.” “That’s one of my favorites, even though it rhymes, and I hate rhyming poems!” she laughs. Tsui helped develop the first Third World Poetry series at SF State, which featured writers like Roberto Vargas, Ntozake Shange, Jancie Mirikitani and Pat Parker, among others.
Tsui’s own poetry has been featured in more than 35 anthologies, but her life’s portfolio is much more expansive. “I believe I began as a poet but then I just followed a path, and it took me to short stories, I started doing essays, I wrote one-act plays,” she says. She was one of the founding members of Unbound Feet, a 1970s Asian-American feminist literary and performance group, along with SF State alumna and poet Merle Woo. Tsui became a competitive bodybuilder in the 1980s, winning the bronze medal at the 1986 San Francisco Gay Games and a gold medal in the 1990 Vancouver Gay Games.
Among her other pursuits, Kitty Tsui was a medalist at Gay Games II and III in body building.
“But I believe my activism is also my writing and always has been,” Tsui says. She is working on several writing projects, most prominently a revised edition of her 1983 poetry and prose collection The Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire, to be reprinted next summer as the latest volume from Midsummer Night’s Press and Sinister Wisdom’s Sapphic Classics.
Tsui recently returned to San Francisco from her home in Long Beach to accept the 2016 Phoenix Award from the Asian Pacific Islander Queer Woman and Transgender Community. “Just feeling that community again is phenomenal, especially to see how things have changed in terms of accepting the transgender community,” she says.
Tsui also visited an exhibition at the GLBT Museum that contains two of her silkscreen posters featuring poems by Willyce Kim. The exhibition was co-curated by SF State Associate Dean Amy Sueyoshi, who gave Tsui and her parents a tour of the art on display.
“When she first gave me her card and I looked at it, I was overjoyed and overwhelmed,” Tsui says. “To see that now there is this Japanese woman who is associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, it was mindblowing! It was just wonderful. I knew we had at least come this far.”