Dear Friends,

Thank you for all the support and interest for the work this past year! It's been truly productive and inspiring as I have had a chance to work on new projects by Jon Jang (Portrait of Sun Yat-sen at the 2nd Annual Cbinatown Music Festival), Lenora Lee (Reflections in SF and NY), Karl Evangelista (Taglish), and Melody Takata (Fox and Jewel). High points for my own work this year were performances of Diaspora Tale #2: 1969 at San Francisco State University with the Francis Wong Unit, A.K. Black, Lenora Lee and Olivia Ting and a new version of Shanghai Stories with Yangqin Zhao at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the world renowned Chicago Jazz Festival. It was great to travel this year to share the work in Chicago (as mentioned and in the 16th Annual Chicago Asian American Festival with Tatsu Aoki's Shamisen Jazz Project and Jeff Chan's Art Quartet), in New York (with the support of Meet The Composer in Lenora's presentations at NYU and the Museum of Chinese in America) and in Southern California (at UC Riverside and UCLA with Lenora).

I have also had the good fortune to be a part of some great work in the community at the Chinese Historical Society of America, Chinese Culture Center, National Japanese American Historical Society, Au Co Vietnamese Cultural Center, and Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center.

And I would be remiss in not mentioning the challenges facing the nationally recognized Cultural Equity Grant program in San Francisco under the cloud of a recent audit by the Controller's Office, please read here to learn more and get involved!

Take care and stay tuned for next year!

In Sound In Unity

Francis