Sampan

About Sampan

A sampan is a flat-bottomed wooden boat, used across East and Southeast Asia for fishing, transportation — even habitation. It is also the name of Boston's most enduring Asian American newspaper. Sampan, founded in October 1972 by volunteers of the Asian American Civic Association (then the Chinese American Civic Association), is New England's only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper: a free, nonprofit, biweekly chronicle of Boston's Chinatown and the Greater Boston Asian American community, published continuously for more than half a century from its headquarters at 87 Tyler Street in the heart of Chinatown. Its slogan says it plainly: "the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England."

1972: volunteers launch a newspaper

Sampan was founded in October 1972 by volunteers of the Chinese American Civic Association — the organization now known as the Asian American Civic Association (AACA). The name was a metaphor: just as the little boat carries goods across the water, the newspaper would carry news of the Chinese community, in both Chinese and English, around the city of Boston — providing a means to acquire information about the community to non-English speakers as well as non-Chinese speakers. It was a product of the Asian American movement era, when young activists across the country were building the institutions their communities had never had: service agencies, legal clinics, and newspapers. In Boston, that newspaper was Sampan — and it has never stopped.

The AACA connection

Sampan is owned and published by the Asian American Civic Association, the Boston-based nonprofit that has served the region's Asian American and immigrant communities for decades. Published biweekly by the AACA and distributed free of charge throughout New England — even delivered as far away as Hawaii — Sampan operates as a nonprofit publication, making its revenue almost entirely from advertising. The arrangement has given the paper institutional stability rare among ethnic weeklies: backed by a service organization rather than dependent on a single proprietor, Sampan has weathered the advertising collapses and ownership crises that killed so many community papers. Its offices at 87 Tyler Street, on the fifth floor in Chinatown, sit at the physical center of the community it covers.

New England's only bilingual Chinese-English paper

Sampan's defining distinction is its bilingualism. It is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England — and, by its own account, "Boston's oldest bilingual Chinese-English newspaper since 1972." Every issue bridges two readerships: Chinese-speaking immigrants who need news in their own language, and English-speaking readers — including the broader Asian American community, policymakers, and allies — who need to understand what is happening in Chinatown. That dual mission shapes everything the paper does: the same story must serve a restaurant worker reading in Chinese and a city councilor reading in English. Few American newspapers attempt this balancing act; Sampan has done it for over fifty years.

What Sampan covers

Sampan primarily reports on the news of Chinatown and Asian Americans of Greater Boston — and it is, in the AACA's words, "the only comprehensive chronicle of local issues and events impacting Asian American and immigrant communities" and "the only printed voice in both Chinese and English." Devoted to education and advocacy, it covers topics usually overlooked by the mainstream press: key immigration legislation, civil rights, housing, education and employment — issues crucial to the well-being of immigrants, low-income families and individuals not proficient in English. Its sections span Boston news, metro coverage, arts, business, education, food and opinion. Where the dailies parachute into Chinatown for a story, Sampan lives there — covering the school committee votes, the development battles, the small-business struggles and the cultural celebrations that make up the neighborhood's daily life.

Advocacy journalism

Sampan has never pretended to be neutral about its community's survival. Its coverage of immigration enforcement — including the case of Lan Le, a Massachusetts resident of more than 40 years who faced deportation to a country she barely knew after fleeing Vietnam by boat as a child — exemplifies the paper's advocacy: telling the stories of immigrants caught in the enforcement system with the depth and humanity the mainstream press rarely musters. Its opinion pages carry essays on memory and history, like remembrances of the 1,500 Chinese sojourners interred at Mount Hope Cemetery in Mattapan — New England's oldest Chinese burial ground, holding the remains of Boston's earliest Chinese immigrants from the Exclusion Act era. Sampan is at once a newspaper and an archive, documenting a community the official histories forgot.

Editorial leadership

The paper's editor, Ling-Mei Wong, has become one of the recognized chroniclers of Boston's Chinatown — profiled by Boston magazine as "The Storyteller" among "Chinatown's New Power-Players," the editor of "the only bilingual Chinese and English newspaper in the city" who "shines a light on issues important to the community that often get overlooked by larger local media outlets." Earlier editors included Adam Smith and Anita Chang. The paper runs lean — historical accounts put its staff at just three people — but its impact far exceeds its headcount. Now online as well as in print, the Sampan website offers content around the clock, extending the biweekly paper's reach beyond the racks.

Free, nonprofit, independent

Sampan's business model is as distinctive as its editorial mission. It is free — distributed without charge throughout metro Boston — and nonprofit, published by the AACA rather than owned by a proprietor or chain. Revenue comes almost entirely from advertising: local businesses, community organizations and service providers who want to reach the paper's bilingual readership. That model has trade-offs — advertising downturns hit hard — but it has also kept Sampan independent and community-accountable for five decades. No hedge fund owns it; no chain dictates its coverage. It answers to Chinatown.

Chinatown's changing battles

Sampan's five decades of coverage trace the changing battles of Boston's Chinatown: urban-renewal displacement in the 1970s, when highway and development projects threatened the neighborhood's existence; the garment-industry decline that reshaped its economy; gentrification and luxury development pressing in from all sides in recent decades; and the community's organized resistance — the Chinese Progressive Association, the campaigns to preserve affordable housing, the fight for the neighborhood's survival as a living community rather than a tourist attraction. Through each era, Sampan documented both the threat and the response, in two languages, giving the neighborhood the record it needed to fight back.

Fifty years of the little boat

More than fifty years after a group of volunteers launched it in October 1972, Sampan is still afloat — still bilingual, still free, still nonprofit, still the only comprehensive chronicle of Greater Boston's Asian American communities in print. It has outlasted rival publications, survived the digital disruption that sank so many weeklies, and kept faith with the metaphor of its name: the little boat, carrying the community's news across the water, in two languages, to everyone who needs it.

The achievement is worth pausing on. Ethnic newspapers founded in the activist 1970s have mostly vanished; Sampan endures. Nonprofit journalism is now fashionable; Sampan has been nonprofit since 1972. Bilingual publishing is now recognized as essential; Sampan has been bilingual for five decades. The little boat was ahead of its time — and it is still sailing. Its official website is sampan.org.