Shig! lecture at the San Francisco Main Public Library

 "No, I'm not a Chinese-American. I'm an American Eskimo." Hastily departed matron from Duluth: "How interesting!" Furious deadbeat, after having been turned out of City Lights Bookstore for bothering everybody by spare-changing, "Who that fat Chinaman think he is anyway?" 

This large, thick, imposing person of the small feet, the spiky black beard like a fence around his aloofness, he of the aplomb, this is Shigeyoshi Murao, known far and wide as "Shig". He is manager and part-owner, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the bookstore; he has been there from the beginning."

— from Common Soldiers by Janet Richards