My Poems for the 2026 Newsletter

By Leonard Chan

Back in January of 2004, we started featuring poetry in our January newsletters (check our newsletter archive to see the other editions). I was usually able to find actual published poets to feature in these newsletters. Along with these professionals, sometimes I was successful in persuading our staff and volunteers to contribute haiku, tanka, and other forms of poetry.

Ever since then, I’ve made it a point that my first writing for the year would be a haiku or poem. I did this even in the years when the AACP newsletter was in hiatus (February 2011 through April 2020).

During the last two years, I was thinking that I would retire featuring AACP’s staff poetry for display. I couldn’t convince anyone to join me in this endeavor. However, with all the craziness of the world these days, I was feeling like I needed an outlet for my thoughts.

Since we didn’t have a second article for this month, I decided that I would take this opportunity to once again indulge my ego into believing that I could actually write some poems that you may want to read.

Please, if you’d rather not read my amateurish attempts at poetry, don’t read any further.

What’s Playing at Tanforan?

The irony of the question.

Today, all that’s mostly left is a theater.

How much longer?

Will future toilers on the site know its past?

First Ohlone villagers called this home,

Leaving behind mounds of shells and even remains.

Once it was a haven for addicted gamblers and

An arena for gladiator horses.

Then a prison for innocent families,

Incarcerated for looking like the enemy.

To pass their time, under trying conditions

They too asked what was playing for movie night.

As a business park,

Will workers be streaming their shows

To pass their free time during days of servitude?

Right now it’s a refuge for a few hours

From a wet and cold January day.

Who knows what may come?

But let us not forget what was there.

First They Came For the Undesired Immigrants

I pass day laborers near where I work

I think of the Genthe photos of Old San Francisco Chinatown.

My grandfather and relatives were like them.

They are me.

Both, average people that work hard,

Waiting on streets for someone to hire them.

We were the first ones to be barred from entry.

They created immigration laws to keep my kind out.

News reports of daily round ups of these immigrants.

When will they come for the nice guy who helped me park my car?

Now there are directives to bar citizenship to babies

That have parents seen as “illegally” here.

Will this be done retroactively?

What about all of those kids of “Paper Son”?

Will whole lineages of Chinese families

Have their citizenship questioned?

Was this how the Japanese Americans felt

As they were rounded up into incarceration camps?

What will be the next shoe to drop?

When will this nightmare end?

When will they come for us?

When will they come for you?

There “was” a time

When strangers were welcome here

Music would play,

They tell me the days were sweet and clear

(First draft of this poem was written in 2025)

With thanks to Martin Niemöller (First They Came), Neil Sedaka (The Immigrant), and Miné Okubo (and JANM, Movie Night At the Grandstand)