On Leong

The aging Chinese men sit at five defense tables in the enormous courtroom, looking like retired businessmen. White-haired Wilson Moy, 74, the unofficial mayor of Chinatown, keeps adjusting his glasses and tugging his cardigan sweater tighter around him. Henry H. Fong, 69, is natty in a crisp white shirt and dark suit. As they listen, Sheu Mon Moy describes being dragged into Chinatown's city hall and beaten severely by members of a street gang called the Ghost Shadows.

The aging Chinese men sit at five defense tables in the enormous courtroom, looking like retired businessmen. White-haired Wilson Moy, 74, the unofficial mayor of Chinatown, keeps adjusting his glasses and tugging his cardigan sweater tighter around him. Henry H. Fong, 69, is natty in a crisp white shirt and dark suit. As they listen, Sheu Mon Moy describes being dragged into Chinatown's city hall and beaten severely by members of a street gang called the Ghost Shadows.

Music and poetry readings by Kamau Daaood, Manuel Luna, Russell Leong and Canta Luz will highlight the eight-day Nommo International Word Smith Festival starting Monday at the California Coffee House, 4455 Overland Ave., in Culver City. Daaood will be joined on opening night by Reuben Guevara, Chung Mi Kim, Doug Knot, Sequoia Mecier, OJenke and Eric Priestly in "Elements of Ivory and Dusk" at 8:30 p.m.

In 1949, Eugene Kinn Choy built his family a home in Silver Lake. Deftly set in a narrow hillside lot, it was praised as a model of modernism, photographed by Julius Shulman and its merits noted in national architecture magazines. And yet the house might not have been built at all, if not for Choy's ingenuity and resolve. When racial covenants had threatened to keep him out of the area, he went door to door, seeking neighbors' permission before he moved in. "Even after he got an OK to purchase the land, no mainstream bank would offer financing," says Steven Y. Wong, the curator at the Chinese American Museum.

The small, polished lobby of the old Subway Terminal Building in downtown Los Angeles suggests neoclassical splendor: columns, marble, a copy of Rodin's "The Thinker," potted palms. Directly adjacent to the lobby is a massive room--actually, a ruin--with additional classical columns. But these have been stripped of their adornments, about one-third of the way down each column, so that the bare interior of the column is left exposed.