San Francisco native May Chin Tong was referred to as “the voice of Chinatown” for her long-running role as the anchor of The Chinese Radio Hour.
With her husband Tommy Tong, she launched the pioneering broadcast in April 1939, the first Chinese-language radio program in North America. The show spanned forty years, ending in 1979.
May Chin Tong would use a pair of scissors and a pot of glue to cut stories from various newspapers and paste them onto sheets of paper, creating her scripts. She carefully curated news from China as well as local information, aiming to give the broadcast’s audience a sense of connection to their ancestral home as well as the Bay Area.
May Chin Tong died in 2010.