Wong is a Chinese American poet, feminist, and socialist who has organized and participated in activist groups working to create better conditions for women, workers, and minorities.
"[1] While a student at San Francisco State University, Wong was involved with the campus Women Writers Union, which organized around issues of race, sex, and class.
In the late 1970s, alongside Chinese American women writers Nancy Hom, Genny Lim, Canyon Sam, Kitty Tsui and Merle Woo, Wong co-founded and organized the feminist literary and performance group Unbound Feet.
Woo, a lesbian Korean-Chinese American feminist, had filed a complaint against their former employer alleging wrongful termination based on discrimination.
From 1983 to 1985 Wong taught poetry writing at Mills College in Oakland and playwriting at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco.
In 2019, Wong, Genny Lim and Flo Oy Wong began performing together as The Last Hoisan Poets, conducting special poetry readings in English and Hoisan-wa (also known as Taishanese, a Yue Chinese dialect native to Taishan, Guangdong) to pay homage to their mother language which is at risk of fading from collective memory.
To mark her 90th birthday, poet and activist Nellie Wong's fifth collection of poetry, Nothing Like Freedom, published by HoongHoongLookLook Press, bridges the decades of her remarkable career, with work that spans the 1970s to the present (2024).
[14] Wong writes directly from her working life; she states "A lot of my poems come from the workplace; that's where I've experienced a great deal of sexism and racism."
"Can't Tell," one of the poems Wong recites in the film, highlights the author's attempt to understand why her Japanese neighbors were being sent to internment camps when she and her family, as Chinese Americans, were considered patriotic citizens.