S2E1 - This Asian American Life | UPAAN x ASAM25

If I were to ask you, "What is Asian American Studies, how would you define it?" That's a good question. It's also a very big question. Very simply, Asian American Studies. Asian American Studies. Asian American Studies is. Asian American Studies is what exactly it sounds like. It's an academic discipline. A experience of Asian Americans in this country. It's one critical part of understanding American history. It's reclaiming a narrative that are still routinely ignored. Buried and unspoken. Asian American Studies is multidisciplinary. It's an interdisciplinary realm that combines sociology, anthropology, English literature, histories, folklore, and so many other things kind of tied into what it means to be human. This roots in the civil rights movement as a community-orientated area of study. It was not a discipline that was given as civil platter. But when it started, it was an effort that was created by the people, for the people, or people like our meaning Asian Americans. You know, and the legacy of yourself and your family and others from your community. Asian American Studies is the study of race in America. It's really important. It really interrogates power systems, but also disrupts power systems. Questions, the existing educational systems. What are you going to do to participate in transforming society to be more of a wall? A movement of fight for one's belonging. That is a just representation, but affirmation of our existence and our importance. The Asian American experience, the ethnic study sort of perspective. Without these perspectives, the story of the United States cannot really be told. For all people, not just for Asian people, but for everybody. I mean, that's a simple definition. In their own way, the course members made up of 20-some-odd students, scholars, and alumni of Asian American Studies. You just heard all correct, but these responses also just go to so the breadth of what the discipline can be for those who study it. At Penn, Asian American Studies, or Asim Faisort, is an interdisciplinary program offered in the College of Arts and Sciences, made up of classes cross-listed with other departments such as English, history, and sociology, often counting toward a general educational requirement for cultural diversity in the U.S. or cross-cultural analysis. If one is able to take six Asim classes, you may even graduate with an Asim minor. This year, 2021, the Asim program at Penn celebrates its 25th anniversary, a landmark milestone for any academic program. But when you dive into the history of Asian American Studies, both at Penn and at Lards, you'll soon realize that the significance of this accomplishment is more than endlessly meets the eye. Hello and welcome to the podcast of the University of Pennsylvania, Asian Alumni Network. On this podcast, we aim to document the oral history of the ever-changing multi-faceted Asim American Experience on Penn's campus across generations, as well as to share and highlight our alumni stories. Welcome to our five-part mini-series honoring the Asim American Studies program and its 25th anniversary. My name is Paul Boothista, class of 2014, and I'm your host. Over the course of this series, we'll hear about the challenges overcome, and the battles hard fought to establish and sustain Penn's Asim program through the words of those who live through those struggles. We'll also hear about the impact Asim has had on both students and alumni personally and professionally, and of course, a peak in the future of the program for the next 25 years. Before all that, we must first return back to that central question. What is Asian American Studies? Heck, what does it mean to be Asian American in the first place and what is there to study about them? This episode, borrowing from the format of the legendary podcast This American Life, three acts to illustrate the past, present, and potential future of Asian American Studies as a discipline. Act One, a third choice. When I think back to my high school days and my AP US history class, the only real mention of Asian Americans that I remember learning about were Japanese internment and the Chinese Exclusion Act. But in reality, Asia and Asian Americans are much more integral to the history and even the identity of the United States from before its inception than I learned in class. Don't take my word for it though. Here's where now the Asian American scholar, Dr. Gary Okihiro. My name is Gary Okihiro, and I'm a professor at Marinus at Columbia University and a visiting professor at Yale. The very foundation of the United States is wrapped up in this idea of Asia. Why did Christopher Columbus sail west? He was looking for Asia. The first English colony, Virginia colony in 1609, the colonists were ordered by the London Company that sent them to find a road to Asia when Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana. He instructed Lewis and Clark to find a route to Asia. Now, why were they all interested in finding Asia? It's because national greatness was derived from the trade with Asia. And that's why Asians are so central to the story of America. Because in the 1600s, Filipinos were brought over to Acapulco in Mexico. And from there, they went into Louisiana and helped into California. We also understand that South Asians were enslaved. And they were brought to the United States in the early 1800s before the US Civil War. And they were enslaved in the US South. South Asians then were part of the early history of Asian America. So you just don't think about California. You have to think about Louisiana. You have to think about the US South. You have to think about the Northeast where the trade with Asia brought various Asians into those part cities like in Massachusetts, like in New York City. Now, I'm not going to spend this episode going through the entire history of Asian Americans in the United States. That could be a podcast series all of its own. However, it is important to realize that up until about the 1960s, calling yourself Asian American was not a thing. If I had lived at that time, I might call myself Filipino American or even just Filipino dropping the American. The term "Asian American" to mean a cross ethnic grouping of Asians was first used in spring 1968 by the University of California Berkeley's Asian American political alliance, or APA. APA was an integral part of the Third World Liberation Front Strikes of 1968, TWLF for short. Starting at San Francisco State in November, and eventually spreading to Berkeley in January 1969, the TWLF strikes were the longest student strikes in history as students of color demanded the establishment of a Third World Studies College, as well as the hiring and recruitment of more minority faculty and students. To learn more about these strikes, I was fortunate enough to talk to two panelists who participated in them. First, Dr. Elaine Kim. My name is Elaine Kim, and I graduated from the College for Women in 1963 at Penn. I am currently retired from UC Berkeley's Asian American Studies program, where I worked for more than 40 years. Dr. Kim had grown up on the East Coast, and by her own admission, they didn't really have a strong association with her Korean American identity growing up. To tell you the honest truth, I was completely white-washed, because I had actually hardly ever known any American-born Asians. Compared to Penn's population today being over 20% Asian, Elaine's Penn experience was a little bit different. I recall only four Asian American women from freshman to senior when I was an undergraduate. The four of us, the first one was a Korean American woman who quit after the beginning of the first semester, and the other two were two students from Hong Kong. Eventually, after graduating from Penn, Elaine got her master's in literature from Columbia before heading to the West Coast for her PhD in 1968, where things weren't much better for Asian Americans in academia at the time. For example, when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, the sociology text listed minorities under a category called social deviants. Now, given her background, when the third world strikes started at Berkeley in the winter of 1969, she didn't really have any idea what it was all about. I was the first year English literature graduate student from the IRIS. I went in and I was going to class, crossing the bigot line, and I was coming out of class one day in the spring semester towards the end of the strike. I heard somebody say, "Hey, are you Chinese or Japanese?" Which always made me so angry so I turned around and turned out that was a Filipino guy. An undergrad, I said, "Oh, no, I'm not. I'm Korean." And then he said, "Well, I'm Filipino, and which way are you going to class?" I said, "Well, I don't know." And they just said, "Well, instead of going to class, why didn't you come to college?" this up a meeting and then I you know that was the first time anybody ever approached me because I was Asian American usually was like no so I was up very you know like welcome and then I went to the meeting and then that that's how I started getting involved. I lived in Korea after I finished my MA and I think I really understood US imperialism in Asia and I had also lived as an Asian American before brown versus the Board of Education. So I really knew that about the domestic racism but I didn't really put those two things together until I met these kids from California who had put them together and was like a psychological life saving experience for me. Even though I was a grad student they were all undergraduates. The other panel I talked to about the strikes was one of those undergraduates. See When Law. My name is Xiwen Law and I graduated in law school in 1984. I'm currently an attorney in private practice focused on real estate litigation. At this time Xiwen was a freshman at Berkeley only 18 years old. For him the idea of the Asian American identity came about when looking at the broader anti-war movement of the time. Turn came about because the members who came together had met each other in different parts of the anti-war activities and decided that there needed to be a new type of approach towards addressing both the war and also issues in our communities. Up to that time there were kind of two choices. You could totally assimilate and leave your Asian identity behind or you would totally reject the American white paradigm and say I'm not going to participate in this society because I think it's racist. So the Asian American identity was was a third choice based on our history in the United States as well as the things that were happening in the war. The ironies of Asians being drafted to fight in the war in Vietnam. And so we felt that we had to have a different educational system that the education system that existed did not address any of these issues and our history was totally absent and therefore it created this disorder of invisibility. Asians did not need to be accommodated in public policy. At that time the idea of Asian American studies was to try to address the problem of how education was geared towards steering the students away from their families' communities and backgrounds. It wanted their education to enable them to serve those communities that they came from. That was radically different from what education was envisioned to be by those who control the university. Now while this podcast is certainly focused on the perspective of Asian American studies it feels repeating that these protests were a multiracial coalescent effort. In fact many of the Asian Americans at Berkeley weren't taking part in the protests. But when it started it was an effort to work with other people of color in the US who had been segregated until the time of the Third World Strike. So that was native people, Chicano people, African Americans and Asian Americans. So only a tiny minority of Asian American students were in the strike and that was not because people were stupid. Undergraduate students were mostly for much more working class backgrounds than now. So there were tons of people whose parents were janitors or sewing factory workers. They had made a lot of sacrifices in some cases for their kids to be there and it was kind of unheard of to do strike. Some students had a tremendous amount of sympathy or interest but they wouldn't do it and some people had no idea and stayed away as far as possible. In any case both Elaine and Siwen did take part in the strike. Well it was like having a full-time job even though we were on strike. We didn't just sit home. We actually had assignments every day. You would report to the liberation front headquarters and get your assignments and go out and speak to classes, speak to faculty, speak to different groups about the strike and why these other students to join the strike. I did walk the picket lines around Saturday. There were some usually white undergraduates who tried to run through, push their way through or do violent things to the students in the picket lines. So I remember those. Blocking the main pathway through campus, Berkeley's equivalent of Locust Walk certainly caught the attention of administration who didn't really take the civil disobedience all that well. Also a quick warning, the next section includes descriptions of police brutality. What I remember is that you know every day at noon we would block say the gate. Say the gate was the main passageway for people going through campus. My job was the steer people as it direct them to the smaller bridges so that they would not have to confront the the strikers who were blocking and marching in front of the gates. At some point police would start to shoot tear gas at us at the gate and I remember that the administration through many different police departments at us every few days it was a different police department. So it's just every police department within a ten to fifteen mile radius. Eventually the university shut down then Governor Ronald Reagan sent a national guard in place of the police. Eventually they just ran out of police departments to do this. They came in full right here in coveralls helmets and everything with the three batons. Our members were beaten. But mostly they were beaten in the basement so that they wouldn't be televised. A television or captured in the new. The administration did everything they tried to undermine our efforts to negotiate a resolution and we had leadership meet with the university administration and on one of the occasions when negotiations were scheduled the police were sent to arrest our leadership. We heard shortly thereafter that the chancellor developed a heart attack and was in the hospital the university regents then Kate Den and they decided to negotiate by then it was like March. Now while the strikers did get a department of ethnic studies not everyone was happy. It was a total disappointment because what people wanted was a third world of college. They wanted they didn't want a department of ethnic studies. They wanted a college of third world studies and in the end a compromise was achieved which a lot of people didn't agree with and wanted to hold out because we knew that the goal of self-determination would not be accomplished unless we had a college. But we pushed that anyway yes and then a group of people came in to affect the Asian-American studies curriculum the opa people some of them joined the league for revolutionary struggle some of them joined workers viewpoint you know because they really wanted to continue the revolutionary struggle some of those people went and really dedicated themselves to serving Chinatown for example and who is left at the university are the more academic types. Disappointment aside though those who remained got to work that summer preparing for the fall semester. You expect the summer basically researching materials and trying to identify you know what kind of books were relevant to you know what we wanted to teach it was fly by you see the advanced kind of thing to you know have courses in place at the end of the strike. I mean we had one course that started in people that was a bent basic introductory course and then after that then you know the following fall in September you know we started having full-time regular courses. So the funded a program we didn't know anything we do nothing about programs we knew nothing about how to hire anybody we didn't know anything they didn't tell us either so we got the money the positions little by little we figured it out and I think the university thought oh they'll just atrophy on the vine we'll just throw this money and they'll mess it up we'll be able to say oh look they messed it up. See when we'd go on to graduate from Berkeley and eventually make its way over to Penn Law where he played an important role in helping Penn develop its own Asian American Studies program which will hear more about next episode. As for Elaine Kim despite her insistent that she was just a hangar on Dr. Kim would go on to have a long and storied career at Berkeley becoming the first Asian American woman to receive tenure at the university. While at Berkeley she would help the Asian American Studies program in the Department of Ethnic Studies grow into the Asian American and Asian diaspora studies program and establish a PhD program that would help spread the discipline of Asian American Studies across the country to other universities. And we churned out a ton of excellent PhD people who were positioned all over the country as if they were missionaries so we can say that as a field it probably began to really set down roots when the PhD program was designed. Fun fact Penn's as-and-professors in English David Eng and Josephine Park both graduated from Berkeley with PhDs in Comparative Literature. We'll hear more from various penetrated scholars in Asian American Studies about what the field can teach us in art too. That's after the break. Act 2, a lens of understanding. So we've talked about the past of Asian American studies as a whole. It's origins in the 1960s and the protests defied for its formation. Talking to Dr. Ocahiro and Dr. Kim, they definitely acknowledge that the field has evolved since then. The demographics of Asian American communities, the class background, the ethnicities who are relevant have completely changed. So what does the field of Asian American studies entail today? If you remember from the beginning of the episode in that course of responses to the question of what is Asian American studies, one recurring theme was that it is a interdisciplinary field of study. It's more than just history. It's also literature, sociology, political science, anthropology, cinema studies, and so much more. Later on in this series we'll talk to students and alumni about what they took away from Penn's Asm program. However, to talk about the scholarly work being done, who better to turn to than the faculty and lecturers that teach Penn's Asm classes? Next up we have Dr. Wupa Palai. My name is Wupa Palai, I am the senior lecturer in the Asian American studies program. I am trained as a cultural anthropologist and I specialize on the intersection of race, religion, and migration. Well, I think it's important to recognize the importance that religion has in everyone's life. In the United States, religion is instrumental in defining the norm. We are a nation that was supposedly built on religious freedom, but in actuality everything is defined by white Christian supremacy and so anything that is a non-Christian religion has to adapt to the format of what Christianity is and so we see this in immigrant religions adopting Christian congregational forms to get recognized as a religious organization and being recognized as a religious organization on a city, state, and national level enables you certain privileges and needs access to resources being able to get funding if you are going to offer programming such as ESL classes, food, pantry for your community, is all based on a certain definition of religion that non-Christian religions need to adapt to in order to be recognized. So I teach intro to Asian American studies, Asian American religion, Asian American gender and sexuality, and the Asian group. Let's dig a little bit more into that intro to Asian American studies class. Not only does it offer an overview of the field in general, it's an excellent way for college students to develop and practice the skills necessary for critical thinking and research. So we start off first with exploring who is Asian American, who is Pacific Islander because most people who enter the classroom probably would identify as Asian American or Pacific Islander because they filled out a census form or government form and that was the box that resonated with who they are. But they are unaware of the political history behind formation of that category Asian American from trying to define who is Asian American, we move into the actual protest at San Kansas State College. From there, we do like a quick introduction to a variety of different topics and methodologies so that students get exposure to the diversity of issues that you can explore through an Asian American lens. On the different methods of tools you have access to, you get to learn how to read primary documents. Think about how you can analyze social media. You get an introduction to various different topics from the Muslim plan to Japanese internment to how the family is altered and the final weeks are spent in thinking about politics. We are going to learn about a lot of different topics around this specific issue, but we need to think about why did you learn it and what are you going to do with the knowledge? So let's say you are a freshman who took Dr. Palais class and entered the Asian American studies and wanted to see if a minor was for you. Well, one of the minor requirements is the Intro to Asian American Literature class taught by Dr. Josephine Park. My name is Joe Park, I'm a professor of English in Asian American studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Well, my dissertation was on fascination with the Orient in the early 1900s in American poetry. As I was writing my dissertation, I became more and more interested in how Asian American poets were responding to that. So I teach Intro to Asian American Lit. So the first published literature by Asian Americans is by Suison Farh and her father was British, her mother was from China, he became a reporter and reported on conditions in Chinatown and became a really important advocate for the Chinese community. And what's interesting about her is that she could pass as white and she made a conservative decision to be Asian American. And that's one of the reasons why she's kind of the origins of Asian American literature. The one thing that I bring out in my classes is that Asian America is a racial identity that people have chosen to become. I start with Suison Farh, which is my way of looking at Chinese exclusion, which is what she really examined through Chinatown experience. And then I look at Japanese internment, Japanese American literature, and some of the Japanese American writing is kind of our key documentation for that experience. And I kind of move through the 20th century to look at different groups of Asians in the U.S. And how, in fact, we were lumped together to become something called Asian America, even that we have very different histories. Now, in that description of what into the Asian American Studies class, half the time it felt like I was hearing about an Asian American history class. There's a good reason for that. So English, you know, is the study of literary expression in English or kind of cultural expression. In order to study Asian American literature, you need this framework. Otherwise, it's nonsensical. I do kind of a close reading of the way verbs are used in the passage. You know, that's fine. And I actually do force my students to do that. We can't understand what we're reading when we read Suison Farh when she's writing about Chinatown. If we don't understand the Constitution of Chinatown in that period, if we don't understand why it was, why are there largely men in that community? We might think that she's writing a kind of fanciful fiction, except we know a history of what was called bachelor societies. And so in the way now, we can't understand this literary expression without understanding this historical and political framing. On the other hand, I would say we could not understand the history without these literary expressions. We could not understand the demography without these expressions. In many cases, because the numbers were not deemed significant, and because Asians were not deemed important enough to be recorded, the literary and the individual expression is incredibly crucial in order to understand. Of course, the experience, but the history, the culture, the sociological makeup, I am especially grateful when I have students who have expertise in African American studies and Latinx studies in my courses because students who have backgrounds in those fields can speak very knowledgeably about how exclusion has operated, how racial formation works, and so our conversations become much, much richer. And any kind of expertise for my students, I put my students on the spot. It's wonderful. The more kind of range of expertise we have, actually the better. One lecturer at Penn who brings in those multiple expertise that Dr. Park likes is Rob Busser who alternates semesters teaching Asian American cinema and Asian American activism. My name is Rob Busser and I've been teaching in the ASM program since 2017 as a part-time lecturer. I teach courses on Asian American cinema and Asian American activism. I also serve as the board chair for the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival and the president of the Japanese American Citizens League Philadelphia chapter. Film and cinema is sort of unique as an art form in that you as the director or the cinematographer can make an audience see the world from your perspective by using the camera lens and allowing them to see the world through your eyes. So in the same way that I grew up understanding parts of the Japanese culture through the films that my great-grandmother introduced me to, as I began watching and programming Asian American cinema, I also began to familiarize myself with the different cultural perspectives. It's within specific cultural and ethnic movements and in all honesty I feel like cinema is probably one of the best ways to initiate that kind of inquiry about what it is to have empathy with other communities and I think, you know, so much of Asian American studies from the Pan-Asian American approach is about being in solidarity with one another and working for collective liberation but it's also important to kind of view it as a tool of empathy building. is that in early Hollywood Asian-Americans were absent completely from the screen, which certainly was a rarity. But actually in the silent era, the United States had its first male sex symbol who was Sechu Hayakawa, the Japanese Eastse immigrant actor, who at his prime in the late 1910s was as popular, if not more so than Charlie Chaplin. But then, you know, the movement itself begins and it grows out of that same time period that we're talking about in the late 1960s. From that time period, we see UCLA's School of Ethnic Communications, which was actually created to incorporate more of the African-American community into filmmaking. They showed allyship to the Asian-American community and opened up a significant number of slots in a class that at the time was meant for all African-Americans. And that allowed a number of Asian-American film students to join the program, who ultimately graduated and created visual communications. They operate the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. There are Asian-American film festivals and just about every major city in the United States now. We are lucky here in Philadelphia to have the largest Asian-American film festival on the East Coast. Philadelphia Asian-American Film Festival was started in 2008 by a team of Asian-American film makers and community organizers. Seeing that Philly has a large and growing Asian-American community but didn't have as many places to celebrate the creatives in our community. It's about creating a sense of pride and also a sense of ownership. I started teaching the Asian American cinema course here because of my role with PATH. Having the unique ability to give students access to the inner workings of a major film festival and we're able to give all of the students in our class free access to all of the programs in a given festival year. One of the main assignments is actually a reflection journal where students are invited to reflect on the experiences that they've had after attending the different events and film screenings during the festival. By the way highly recommend checking out at Philadelphia Asian-American Film Festival which fun fact one of the founding members was actually a pendulum. When I was at Penn a number of screenings were held near Penn's campus in the International House. Another community organization more closely affiliated with Penn is PATH. The Penn Asian-American community house located at 36th and Locust led by director Peter Vando. My name is Peter Vando or Peter Vando in Vietnamese. I serve as the director for the Pan-Asian-American Community House otherwise known as PATH at Penn. PATH is the Asian-American Resource Center on campus and I also serve as a lecturer for the Asian-American Studies program at Penn and Premajor Advisor for the College of Arts and Sciences. Now we'll talk about PATH's history a little bit more next episode but in short PATH is an arm of the University life and soon-to-fair department aiming to be a hub for academic, personal and professional growth of the Asian and Asian-American communities on Penn's campus through advising, leadership development, advocacy and programming. What we've been focusing on within PATH is really making sure that we follow through with our mission around community building and also developing individuals to be their best. Not only are we a welcoming space for undergraduate and graduate professional students but we also celebrate the diversity within our community. We use a verb celebrate purposely to express that we are a center that welcomes Asians and non-Asians because anybody can celebrate and partner with us. We also use the words Asian-American communities plural to acknowledge the diversity of Asian-Asian-Americans and to point out that Asian-Americans are not a monolith. So this includes first-hand low-income women, LGBTQ+, international, those of different religious backgrounds, those from lower caste, mixed race, immigrant status, undocumented disabilities, our communities have been evolving in the last about nine to ten years since I've been a director as patch. When remember that we started off with 70 or 80 unit organizations that identify as Asian-American but that has grown to 100 plus. Historically when PATH was founded back in 2000, Peter's role as director was actually a joint role also serving as Asm's associate director. The positions have since been separated but Asm and PATH are still closely linked, both in Misson as well as with Peter teaching some courses in the program such as a course on Asian-American pop culture, which is both exactly what it sounds like and also so much more. Public culture is quite interesting I think that most people consider it as love. One of the clearest ways that I can provide how important public culture is with Beats' compare countries. So if you look at the United States and its influence around the world, American public culture is everywhere whether it's food or media, then we zoom in to sort of Asia for example. If you think about the countries that where their public culture influences not only their country but other countries, then you can think of originally Japan and then now South Korea. That influence really makes a difference. There's all of this conversation about China take you over as a country of influence. My argument is yes the China is doing well with this economy and what have you but I think that until China's popular culture is able to influence at the same level if not better than the United States popular culture, then we can say China has taken over. So that's how powerful popular culture is. Going back to my course, should we do analyze the negative descriptions and the stereotyping that occurs towards Asian-Asian-Americans but we also talk about a different kind of public culture and that's how do we develop a public culture from a grassroots level and so what are those promising practices and ultimately those promising practices really come down to community building and leadership by our budding activists. They're developing their own narrative and so I think that that's also equally important and that's what we talk about in the public culture class. So you've taken your Asim courses, got involved in paths and graduated with an Asim minor. What next? Does Asian-American studies stay limited to what he learned at Penn? Talking to Asim alumni Dr. Cliff Bersamira, the answer is no. Asim scholarship and research is extremely crucial to dealing with today's issues both inside and outside the classroom. So my name is Cliff Bersamira. You know, while I was at Penn, I was a psychology major and Asian-American studies in history minor and I graduated in 2003 from the college. Currently I'm an assistant professor of social work at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Thompson School of Social Work and Public Health. After graduating from Penn, Cliff had a number of roles before eventually going to the University of Chicago for his masters in social work policy and practice. What's involved working with the Community Mental Health Center focused on serving the Asian-American community. There are a couple things that I would say that I learned there. One being sort of the complexity of what it means to run a nonprofit agency that serves a diverse population of folks. You know, making sure that you have therapists on a staff, for example, that speak the various languages so that mental health services are accessible. And then to understanding how the constructs of mental health and mental illness, how we often talk about diagnosing these and treating them in the Western context, fall short sometimes. Not everybody talks about mental health in the same way that we talk about mental health in the West. Somebody might come to the clinic and talk about physical manifestations. Like I have a lot of stress in my shoulders. From there, he spends some time in DC, forgetting his PhD in social welfare from Chicago and then landing at Hawaii, where his research focuses on Asian-Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian behavioral health disparities. I have a strong focus on Filipino community and then also interest in other Asian-American Pacific Islander Native Hawaiian communities because there's a lot of knowledge gaps that still exist. These populations continue to be understudied. The disparity is in the understanding. The other thing that I'll mention then is the underutilization of certain services. And we know this with many of the different groups that we I just mentioned there. There's a distrust in the system, you know, and that has a lot to do with the legacy of colonialism, the language-related barriers, lacking lack of understanding of the mental health system and how to navigate stigma about what treatment is and and also maybe even cultural barriers saying that you shouldn't seek treatment unless you're really, really weak as opposed to being a preventative or health promotion kind of thing. You know, the recent events with the anti-Asian violence and racism helped us to think about, well, from a public policy perspective, if you're going to go into the route of government or public policy, if you're trying to address these issues, you have to understand that context as well, right, of why this is going on. How do we address it from a policy perspective? Let's just say that you're somebody who's interested in working with older people. If you're trying to understand how to address the needs of elders in your community who happened to be Asian, you really need to understand that context as well, right, of what's going on there. Right when the pandemic happened, I was seeing all these headlines related to Filipino nurses. With some students, we actually unpacked what that looked like in the news because nobody was doing research yet, just yet, right, on COVID, but media was talking about it and so it's really trying to understand what news articles were saying about the pandemic. helps us to understand the impact that the pandemic was having on Filipino nurses and other frontline workers. We evolved that and also then think about, well, what do we do with this information? How do we make sure that labor practices are improved so that there's their safety of these workers is, you know, so put in mind. And how do we frame this so that community organizers and advocacy groups could address the needs of these communities? And then the other study that we're about to start is understanding how Asians and Asian American social workers and how what are their perceptions on all of this anti-Asian hate that's going on? And then also thinking about how does this shape how you do social work? Talking to these scholars, it occurred to me that Asian American studies acts a lot like a lens. In some scenarios, it lets you zoom in real closely, like a microscope or telescope, on a very specific element of the American experience that had been long overlooked, such as Rob's course on Asian American cinema or Cliff's research on mental health disparities among Filipino Americans. Other times, the interdisciplinary nature of the field acts like a wide-angle lens, letting you understand the broader picture of American society by studying the specific, such as studying Asian American literature to learn about migration history and policy. In all cases, though, it's a tool that scholars use not only to better understand the world around them, but to enact change, similar to how a lens lets you focus light to generate heat. Think of Rupus class, equipping her students with critical thinking skills or penis class on pop culture reframing how we understand community activism. From Honolulu to Philadelphia and everywhere in between, from psychology to literature to anthropology to cinema studies and so much more, Asian American studies really has grown so much in the last 50 years. And it will still continue to grow. In our final act, we'll look at some of the challenges and possible futures at the field faces. That's coming up. Act Three on the Frontlines. So we've heard about the origins of Asian American studies and we have a picture of where it stands today. As Dr. Bersamira mentioned in his research, though, Asian American studies will continue to have implications for a long time to come, especially in light of the pandemic-related anti-Asian racism and violence that the communities have faced in 2021. According to Dr. Park, fighting racism begins in the classroom. One thing that people who are not Asian, even people who are Asian American, in the absence of this history, they actually often can't see that something is racist. You know, and one of the difficulties challenges and even a crisis of being Asian American in this country is to have your experience discounted and to be told, oh, you're imagining things. If you learn this history, you will see actually where these attitudes are coming from and you'll be able to identify injustice. And I also just want to underscore, you know, our classrooms are kind of the front lines of combating racism in America. There's movement in the streets that I encourage our students to be a part of that, and I am a part of that. But our classrooms are the front lines. We're not removed from that. You know, what we're learning is critical to that and to the development of anti-racist discourse. This growing significance of Asian American studies in developing a more just nation leads to an interesting dynamic for the field moving into the future. As we heard from C1 law and Elaine Clim, Asian American and ethnic studies arose out of a desire for students of Asian heritage to see themselves reflected in the curriculum in a framework separate from the dominant euro-centric perspective at the time. However, what is the role of non-Asian Americans and specifically those of European descent in the Asim classroom? In August 2020, assembly bill 1460 in California was approved requiring ethnic studies courses be offered on all California State University campuses. And further, by the 2024-2025 academic year, all undergraduates in the Cal State System, regardless of heritage, be required to take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate, which includes, of course, Asian American studies. One panel done directly affected by this new law is Dana Nakano, who teaches in the Cal State System. So my name is Dana Nakano. I graduated from Penn in 2004. I also minored in Asian American studies while at Penn. I am now an associate professor of sociology at California State University Stanislaus. Now, we'll hear from Dr. Nakano more in the next episode about his time at Penn with our own Asian American studies program. But he had some interesting thoughts into the question of how non-Asians would impact the courses that he pizzas. Now, if every single student on a college campus has to take those classes, the demographics of those classes are going to change drastically. And the question is, is that does that change the pedagogy? Does that change the curriculum? Does it change how we talk about things? Is it change the readings that we're assigning? And I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question because part of me thinks that no, it shouldn't. That what we're talking about should be relevant to everyone. And it might be more meaningful to Asian American students and Asian American studies classroom where they might relate to it in a way that a white student or a Latinx student might relate to it. But nonetheless, they're still narratives and histories and experiences that are not covered elsewhere. And so, to talk about it in more scholarly terms is just as foreign to the Asian American student as it is to any other student. It's something that I've been thinking and trying to work through a lot as I've been thinking about who I may be teaching this to in the future that may not look like the students that I've been teaching it to in the past. And maybe that changes like I don't know the jokes that I tell in class or maybe that changes right like something along those lines because the other thing that I'm always conscious of both as instructor when I'm lecturing is who the audience is right and how does the audience interpret what it is that I'm saying. I have my intention of what I want them to understand from the lecture or from something that I'm writing. But that's not as a necessity. I don't have control over how they interpret it. And so I become very careful about what I say and how I say it. At Penn, as Asian American courses grow more and more popular, Dr. Palai runs into the same tension of designing a course where some Asian students can have self-discovery while not everyone taking the class will be Asian themselves. Cracking a classroom or an Asian or a student can have the safe space to learn their history. It's very different from crafting a space for a non-Asian student to learn that history. Ultimately, the classroom needs to be designed for both. I still haven't figured out how to negotiate that. I mean if people have ideas please let me know. There is a need that every student appreciates our comfortity and the structures that are present. It's an unfortunate tension that's in present in any classroom that engages grace in the United States. How do you make sure that you create a space that doesn't victimize your students in color, but also create a space for white students to learn that history in a productive manner that doesn't accuse them of. I always student in my class is not responsible for the indenture ratio of Asian and Chinese individuals, but it's part of our collective history. This obviously isn't a question I have an easy answer to right now, but it's one Asian American studies educators will need to grapple with in the near future as more and more laws get passed like those in California. For example, earlier this year, Illinois passed a law stating that Asian American history must be taught at the K-12 level starting in 2022, and similar laws are being proposed in Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin. In addition, representative grace man of New York has introduced similar legislation at the federal level. That all being said, in some regards, I'm thankful Penn even has an Asian American studies program to begin with. Among the Ivy League, Penn is one of only two universities we can actually have a full minor in Asian American studies. The other is Cornell, whose program was actually started in 1987. Dr. Gary Okahiro, who we heard from earlier, actually served as Director of Cornell's program for a while. He also served as Columbia founding Director of their own Asian American studies program Endo Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, which up until 2010 had a standalone Asian American studies major and minor, but is now rolled into that major for ethnicity and race studies. Similarly, at Yale, where Dr. Okahiro is now a visiting professor, the ethnicity race in my racing program offers courses in Asian American studies, but no minor. This also applies to Brown University, which has no Asian American studies major or minor, but they do offer focuses within their ethnic studies and American studies courses as well as an independent concentration. At Princeton, the program for American studies began offering a certificate in Asian American studies rather than a minor starting in 2018. And at Harvard, while there are only individual classes and no majors or minors in Asian American studies right now, that very well may soon change. In the past couple of months, a number of Asian and Asian American Harvard alumni recently donated $45 million in order to end up professorships specifically targeted in Asian American studies. Finally, at Dartmouth, in order to get a picture of where their ambitions for Asian American studies is at, I turned to two members of Dartmouth's Asian Alumni Association. My name is Sarah Gupta. I graduated from Dartmouth in 2019. I co-chair of Dartmouth's Asian Pacific American Alumni Association. It's a mouthful, but DAPA. My name is Mourna Ha. I graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. I'm also a board member of DAPA, the subcommittee chair in Asian American studies. Yeah, so we have a few classes that are offered every year. There is an Asian-American studies post-ctoral fellow who is housed in a consortium of studies in race migrations sexuality which is comparable to other sorts of ethnic study centers that other universities have. I think that for the last 30 years students alumni and faculty have been really pushing to ensure that Asian-American studies becomes something formal. Dartmouth has had real challenges in retaining very talented faculty members. The pattern seems to be that we bring in these very talented people. They do great work on campus, get ray reviews from students and then come sort time for tenure. They're denied for tenure and then starts the cycle again. A few years ago the Asian-American Studies post-ctoral fellowship was established also kind of coinciding with some other schools like Duke and Princeton launching their Asian-American studies programs. So a lot of schools that were falling behind are starting to now launch their own Asian-American studies programs and that's really encouraging and we really feel like now is the time for action. DAPA and members of DAPA, we recognize that our struggle is not alone. We've been partnering with Asian-American alumni associations across the country who have found a solidarity in doing this work and we're working together to push forward ways that we can strengthen our advocacy efforts locally. Then Sara and I started engaging with a different alumni associations. We weren't sure sort of like would people be responsive with people share and for the most part it's been really energizing to meet people across the country who are invested in this issue just as we are. People recognize that even when campuses have Asian-American studies formalizing certain way there is a continuous issue of being under-resourced. This collaboration between alumni groups including UPEN resulted in a statement of solidarity among Asian-Aliminary organizations praising schools who already had Asian-American studies programs calling on those who didn't to begin developing them and urging all schools to continue to grow and support Asian-American studies as a whole. Depending on when you hear this episode the statement may not be fully released yet but here's a snippet of what that statement says. Over the past year agents in the United States have endured an epidemic of racially motivated hate incidents. This wave of violence is only the most recent chapter in a much longer story of interpersonal and structural racism. We, the undersigned Asian-American alumni associations of universities across the country believe that one of the most powerful ways to break this cycle is through education. Now is the time for our alma mater's to build vibrant Asian-American studies programs that recognize and respond to the needs of Asian-American students, faculty, and alumni. I asked Sarah Morna as alumni of these frankly privileged institutions. What did they hope this statement and push for formalized Asian-American studies accomplices? These institutions really need to reckon with their histories and you know a lot of them will say that they aren't investing in diversity, equity, and inclusion and we love to hear that but we would also like to see that action happen. By us trying to change these very old hollowed halls I think in some ways we're really trying to change the very foundation of our country overall. Dartmouth has founded in the late 1700s. It was founded as a way to quote-unquote educate Native Americans. It's very founding was rooted in this idea that we don't need to include all of voices to make up this country and so by demanding Asian-American studies we're seeking to undo that. If we're going to change the very foundation of this country while doing so in the classroom is important it's just as important to remember the original intent of the development of the field. Namely to go back to our own communities to fight for the important issues of the day. Peter Vando, Cliff Bersmirra, and Elaine came on this sentiment and how we can strive for that ideal. I think that that's something that we need to sustain. The idea that it was a collective of students and community members that helped develop these spaces for learning but also to develop that narrative. How do we think about ethnic studies and Asian-American studies in particular in a way that decolonizes the approaches to understanding the Asian community, the Asian diaspora, just to make sure that it isn't just an academic exercise continuing to expand on how do we make this relevance through civic and community engagement. How do we make the Asian-American community and Asian-American studies sort of relevance with civic engagement, community, student activism? My advice is play to your strengths. Always play to your strengths. So your strengths are not the ones we had back then but you have other ones like you have a critical mass. Can you make it interesting and important to look at important issues? It may seem boring to talk about labor or something but it's really important. If they're doing that and worrying about these deportations and worrying about labor exploitation and worrying about violence against Asian-Americans or Black Lives Matter coalitions then they should just keep doing that. I don't want to see things move so slowly. I would like things to move along now that you have this critical mass. One other possibility is to try to realize the original Third World Liberation Front strikers demands full colleges in the field of Third World Studies, not ethnic studies. Dr. Ocahiro on that distinction and how Asian-American studies fits in that goal of liberation. Why is our subject matter defined by a racial category invented and imposed upon us by Europeans? How are we liberating ourselves when we use the very designation the taxonomy to define us as a people? Now to me Third World Studies examines human society, the human condition as a whole. And Third World Studies was begun in 1800 by W.B. Du Bois who said the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. He meant color line in terms of imperialism and colonialism. What will solve the problem Du Bois and others said is Third World people arising against those colonial imperial masters. Third World Studies is not about ourselves, cultural nationalism, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinx peoples, American Indians. No, it is about the human condition broadly and how we can liberate ourselves from oppression and exploitation. We are a global people and our cause our project is a global one of the human condition. All these different fields of ethnic studies are not ends in themselves you see. There are means towards an end. So it wasn't like a total bankrupt idea and is still relevant and important today because a lot of Asian-Americans don't even know their own history and their place within this United States, right? So like we need to understand ourselves and then we can begin to understand the bigger picture beyond ourselves which is to me like Third World Liberation. Whether it be Third World Studies or Ethnic Studies or Asian-American Studies the vote to get here has not been an easy one by any means and the vote for it certainly won't be a walk in the park but if there's anything to take away from the story of Asian- American Studies of the struggle of the fight of what it can be for everyone and of what the future might hold I think these words of Dr. Elaine Kim from all those decades ago that became a motto for the Third World Liberation for that Berkeley can be a North Star of Swords. If you want something that doesn't exist you have to create it. Many thanks to all the individuals I interviewed for this episode. Dr. Gary Okahiro Dr. Elaine Kim, Siwen Law, Dr. Rupa Pillai, Dr. Josephine Park, Rob Busser, Peter Van Doe, Dr. Cliff Bursamira, Dr. Dana Nakano, Sarah Gupta, and Morna Ha. In the so-notes you'll find ways you can get involved with both the Pan-Asian-American Community House and the Philadelphia Asian-American Film Festival going on in the next couple of weeks and depending on when you're listening you can also find a link to the statement Dapa and other Asian alumni associations put together that Sarah and Morna were talking about. Now this episode you've heard about the past, present, and future of Asian-American studies as a field overall. Next episode will dive specifically into the story of hence Asian-American Studies program how I got founded from student activism. Perhaps not quite as extreme as studying down the campus and facing the National Guard like at Berkeley but a powerful story in its own right. That episode is already in your feed so you can go and listen to that right now. A quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are of those appearing alone and not to affect those of any other organizations including University of Pennsylvania. Music in the show is provided by Oxay Sangosekar, aka Fortissimo, and Ram Vilarika, aka Askal. Both of whom are Penn undergraduate class of 2016. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions and Kevin McLeod. Editing and production is provided by Windsor Boy Media, episode art by Sophie Hurt. Special thanks to the Penn Asian-American Community House, the Asam undergraduate advisory board, alumni relations, Annable Estrada, and Dr. Freercon for their support. For questions and inquiries you can email us at [email protected]. That's [email protected]. or reach out on Facebook or Instagram. Links to those as well as where you can find our so-on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play in the so-nodes. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, keep it funky. I always considered a foreigner and somebody that couldn't have a date or something with somebody who wasn't Asian, but then there weren't any Asians. So, really well-meaning students brought this poor guy from Thailand to the dorm. He introduced us to each other. The guy ran away screaming, you know, but.