When Assunta Ng decided to start a Chinese-language newspaper in Seattle, many of her potential readers and advertisers were skeptical.

Because Ng was an outsider, having grown up in Hong Kong. Because she was a woman with young children at home. Because she insisted she had no political agenda on issues like relations between China and Taiwan.

“The only way I could think to prove myself,” recalled Ng, who subsequently also launched an English-language newspaper with pan-Asian content, “was to come out every week on time.”

So, that’s what she did. Week after week. For 41 years.

On Thursday, Ng’s Seattle Chinese Post and Northwest Asian Weekly will appear in print for the last time. The Seattle Chinese Post will shut down completely, while the Northwest Asian Weekly will continue online.

Through the decades, the papers have chronicled life, death and politics in the region’s Asian communities, with punchy columns by the publisher holding the whole city to account. It’s been quite a run.

“People thought I was the least likely person to be able to tackle a newspaper,” said Ng, a bespectacled, restless straight-talker who asks as many questions as she answers. “They all underestimated me.”

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Ng, who started the Seattle Chinese Post in 1982 and the Northwest Asian Weekly in 1983, is making the changes because the print business isn’t sustainable and because she wants to spend more energy caring for a family member, she said.

She thinks the Northwest Asian Weekly can still thrive on the web, which she hopes to update with new stories on a daily basis, but the decision to close the Seattle Chinese Post wasn’t easy, she said, mentioning older immigrants who rely on the paper to learn about local, national and international news. She phoned some of them personally to let them know.

“They’ve been reading this newspaper for so long” and either can’t read English news or aren’t comfortable reading online, said Harry Chan, owner of Seattle’s historic Tai Tung restaurant, who prefers print himself.

By the end of a call with one longtime reader, Linda Tsang, Ng was in tears.

“I was just so shocked,” Tsang said later. “It’s like I’m losing a friend.”

Before the pandemic, the subscription-based Seattle Chinese Post’s circulation was about 3,300 and the free Northwest Asian Weekly’s was about 9,500, Ng said. Their websites attract 150,000 to 200,000 monthly views, she said. Ng might have stopped printing earlier but wanted to allow some staffers to line up new jobs (others are retiring) and to provide information about COVID-19. Now, she’s ready.

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“I’m not sad at all,” Ng said, during an interview at her office on Maynard Avenue South in the Chinatown International District (CID), where a wall is lined with reproductions of historic front pages. “I’ve done my share.”

Early days

The newspapers would have never been born had Ng, when she was 18, not surprised her parents by announcing she wanted to leave Hong Kong for college in the U.S. Her ambition and independence didn’t jibe with their traditional expectations for a Chinese daughter, she said, but they eventually agreed to support her at the University of Washington for a year. Then Ng was on her own, which meant working in restaurants to supplement her scholarship income.

Post-graduation, in the 1970s, she taught at Mercer Junior High on Beacon Hill, where she saw newcomers struggling to adapt and realized she could help.

“I created a newsletter for immigrant parents. I started a potluck,” said Ng, whose principal was surprised when so many of those parents showed up, because they hadn’t visited the school before.

She started the Seattle Chinese Post with the same basic aim: To empower immigrants and Asian Americans. In 1982, Seattle already had the International Examiner, a nonprofit, bi-monthly paper dedicated to Asian American communities and published in English since 1974. But the city had no Chinese-language outlet at the time, leaving local readers to make do with a publication printed 800 miles away, in San Francisco.

The project was challenging. This was before computers were widely available, so Ng’s staffers had to typeset the Chinese characters manually, using a bulky machine imported from Taiwan. Her children were 3 and 1½.

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“Patty Murray said she was the mom in tennis shoes,” said Ng, now in her 70s, referring to the longtime U.S. senator. “I was the mom in tennis shoes, too.”

Once the Seattle Chinese Post was humming, U.S.-born acquaintances persuaded Ng to take another leap. They were hungry for community news but couldn’t read “a damn thing” in Chinese, said Ng, who remembers receiving encouragement from Gary Locke long before he became governor.

The next year, Ng obliged by starting an English version of the Seattle Chinese Post, which quickly became a pan-Asian newspaper. Japanese American readers later urged Ng to select a new title, she said. That led to the Northwest Asian Weekly name.

The English paper was less than a month old when a thunderbolt struck: Thirteen people were killed in a shooting at a CID gambling venue.

“Boom! The Wah Mee Massacre happened,” said Ng, who was roused from bed when the news hit. “I was so overwhelmed, but we had to do the story.”

The ensuing decades yielded other big stories, such as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations that the Chinese government quashed with deadly violence in 1989, the arson blaze in a CID warehouse that killed four Seattle firefighters in 1995 and, last year, protests that halted a plan by King County leaders to site a homeless “mega-shelter” bordering the CID after years of racism, exploitation and neglect in the neighborhood,” as Ng wrote.

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Speaking out

The smaller stories have mattered, too, celebrating community leaders, showcasing local events and educating voters ahead of elections — explaining “how the system works,” said Tony Au, a politically active business owner who took U.S. history with Ng in 1977. Even the classifieds have played a part, Ng noted, giving immigrants a trusted way to find work.

Ng’s award-winning papers evolved as the county’s Asian population soared, from under 60,000 people in 1980 to over 500,000 in 2020, and as many Chinese speakers settled beyond the CID. Their page counts grew, then contracted. They added websites. The annual price of the Seattle Chinese Post climbed from $10 to $30. Readers knew the papers would be printed, all the same.

One of those readers, Belinda Louie, has regularly picked up copies to distribute at a cultural center and a nursing home in Tacoma, Louie said.

Last week’s edition of Seattle Chinese Post was packed with an array of news stories, some translated from outlets such as The Seattle Times and The Associated Press, plus community briefs, economic advice and soap opera updates. The penultimate print edition of the Northwest Asian Weekly included coverage of a Sound Transit workshop, with the agency weighing community concerns about where to build a new light rail station, along with photos of local Asian American politicians being sworn into office.

“So many of us just expect to pick up a copy when we go into a Chinese restaurant for dim sum or a Japanese restaurant for udon or an Asian supermarket,” Locke said last week. “We’re really going to miss that.”

Locke isn’t the only politician who’s paid attention to Ng’s papers. “Big shots” like Gov. Jay Inslee have made campaign stops at her office, she said. Mayor Bruce Harrell touted a Northwest Asian Weekly endorsement in 2021.

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Along the way, Ng has leveraged her skills as a publisher to reach beyond the newspaper business. She started Women of Color Empowered, a networking group with an annual luncheon to recognize local standouts, and she created a nonprofit to sponsor scholarships and a summer camp for teenagers.

“Assunta is a community leader who happens to run a newspaper,” said Stacy Nguyen, a former editor of the Northwest Asian Weekly, mentioning how that paper has built cross-cultural solidarity. “She has to cover everybody.”

The region’s Asian communities are super diverse, yet the Northwest Asian Weekly has made space for “shared information, shared passion and shared advocacy,” agreed reader Maria Batayola, who was born in the Philippines.

The papers owe much to Ng’s husband, George Liu, who traded a computer engineering career to become their manager, solving problems in the office behind the scenes, bringing meals to staffers and snapping photos, said Nguyen, who described the couple as ever-present on the streets of the CID, where Ng and Liu live.

The decline of print media is a widespread phenomenon, with two U.S. newspapers closing every week in recent years, according to a Northwestern University report. The Seattle Chinese Post is hardly alone in shutting down.

But the Northwest Asian Weekly will keep churning out stories for online readers, so the project that Ng began will endure. She hopes younger news hounds will take over soon, because the truth that motivated her in 1982 remains relevant. Ng said she would use her last print column to urge people of color to run for City Council seats in 2023.

“If you don’t speak up, you lose your power,” she said. “You’ve got to get a seat at the table.”