S2E3 - A Story About Ourselves | UPAAN x ASAM25

Hello and welcome to the podcast of the University of Pennsylvania, Asian Alumni Network. On this podcast, we aimed to document the oral history of the ever-changing, multi-faceted Asian American experience on Penn's campus across generations, as well as the share and highlight our alumni stories. Welcome to episode three of our five-part mini-series honoring the Asian American Studies program and the 25th anniversary. My name is Paulo Batista, class of 2014, and I'm your host. Thanks for tuning in. If you haven't yet, be sure to pause this episode and go back to listen to the first two episodes in this mini-series, episode one about the origins of Asian American Studies as a discipline, and episode two about how Penn's Asian American Studies program, or Asam first sort, came to be. Both of those should be in your feet already. In those episodes, we talked to a number of alumni who were involved in the formation of the Asam program, such as Cliff Persamerah, Dan and Akano, Sajji Philip, and Ben Eliseuak among others. Of course, by talking to the most engaged alumni from this time period, I've biased myself toward featuring alumni who are the most involved in the program. All of them got a minor, and many of them were involved in the Asam undergraduate advisory board or the UAB. That said, many students take Asam classes without getting the full minor. Perhaps they're drawn into it because it meets one of their general education requirements, or maybe because they have a free elective, and a friend of theirs recommended they take a course. Whatever the case, though, I wouldn't want you to think that you need to take all six classes for the Asam minor in order to benefit from what any individual class has to offer. While we are the Penn Asian alumni network, I think it's important to showcase how current students on campus today are benefiting from the seeds planted by all those alumni nearly 25 years ago that are now bearing fruit. Two students who illustrate this idea that you don't need to take every Asam course in order to benefit from the program's existence are pre-med students, Simran Chan and Anusri and Aja. So my name is Simran Chan. I am currently in my final semester at the University of Pennsylvania. I am a gender, sexuality and women's studies major, along with a biology major. Hi, my name is Anusri and Aja. I'm a senior at Penn and I'm majoring in neuroscience. In a lot of ways, these two have a lot of similarities in their backgrounds. Both grew up in predominantly white communities as Indian Americans, Ohio, and Connecticut. Both also had an idea of their Indian Americanness through their participation in cultural events, but they still felt some distance from that part of themselves. For Simran, she had this almost double life where she would engage with her Indian heritage while at home, but in front of her white peers, she would almost be ashamed of that same Indian background. I was, you know, the only Indian girl in my graduating high school class of 432 people. So I felt very isolated in my own identity as a brown woman. I had never even heard the term Asian-American prior to coming to Penn. I don't know, I would say that my experience with my identity as an Indian American woman was extremely tense. I think I spent a lot of my middle school with early high school years having this desire to be white, constantly feeling like I had to hide the Indian parts of myself. But simultaneously, you know, I was part of Indian communities within Connecticut. My parents, friends were all Indian. I had a lot of Indian family friends, but nobody within my particular community or somebody who I, people who I felt close to or feel felt like I could relate to. So I definitely shied away from that part of myself. You know, that's caused a lot of discord within myself because I grew up, you know, listening to Bollywood music, speaking Hindi, going to India every other year. What my home life was extremely in touch with that Indian identity. But upon leaving the home and being in my hometown, it was this taking on a white indivision of what I thought I should present as. You know, I associated American being American with whiteness. And so I always said that, no, I'm not, you know, I'm not brown, I'm actually like white on the inside. But in reality, what I had to understand was that I could be American and not be white and I can be proud of that Indian heritage and still come to terms with bringing together Indian and American culture and embracing that biculturalism. And it really took, you know, leaving that predominantly white space and coming to pen and engaging with those communities to finally come to terms with that and understand that. For a new story, while she didn't describe any desire to become white, she still felt a disconnect with her Indian heritage, particularly when it came to not being able to speak Hindi with her family. And my parents were friends with a lot of their Indian colleagues and would throw, like, the Wali parties and holy parties and things like that. But that was essentially my only interaction and kind of personal touch with Indian culture. It was kind of me going through the motions of celebrating these holidays and watching Bollywood movies with my family, which I greatly enjoyed growing up. But I always kind of felt a little bit disconnected to it. I didn't really feel like I truly understood the significance of what I was doing. The something that only added to that was the fact that I completely understand Hindi, but I can't speak Hindi. And so that just felt kind of like more of a, like, a rift between me and my culture because it was like I wanted to communicate so badly, but I just didn't have the ability to, even though I completely understood what my extended family were saying. But my parents never made me speak it back to them growing up. But I always wished that I had done more, like, cultural things, like, gone involved with dance and singing and things like that because I would go to our family friends as, like, daughters, R&G thrums, which is, like, this big dance ceremony. And it was this huge procession where they rented out an auditorium and, like, friends and family from all over came. And it was just a really beautiful display of culture. And I realized I never growing up really had anything like that. The closest thing I had was with my family, like, on our living room couch, like, watching music videos together. I absolutely love volume music. I have, like, a six-hour playlist of volume music. In high school, I never really thought of that as, like, a major component of my identity just because I felt like I couldn't really share that with anyone around me, either. So coming to Penn, both of them consciously decided to engage with that side of themselves that they felt they couldn't in high school. A new street, for example, took Hindi classes, which had an impact beyond just simply meeting her language requirement for graduation. Coming to college, I immediately noticed that there were so many opportunities to do things that I wouldn't get in high school, like, for example, in high school. You're very limited in the language selection you can take. And I realized there was a language requirement at Penn. And I was, like, I said to myself, I was like, hey, you can literally take any language you want to, like, you're not just limited to, like, these three. Spanish, French, or whatever. And I had an opportunity to test out of Spanish and just get rid of the language requirement entirely. But I was like, no, let me take this time for myself and do something I would actually be passionate about and something that could probably serve me in the future. And that's why I decided to take Hindi. And immediately after taking the Hindi class, it was just so amazing to walk into a classroom and have a teacher who spoke with, like, a perfect accent and, like, perfect intonation and spoke Hindi, which is a language I was so used to hearing at home, but never expected to hear in a classroom setting. And what was even better was that there were, like, 30-something kids in the class, which I honestly never expected. Meanwhile, someone chose to get involved with the extracurricular South Asian community at Penn, trying out for one of the many dance teams. So I did come to Penn with this intention of, I want to better understand what it means to be me and what it means to be in Native American, although I don't think I would have articulated it as clearly at the time. But I came to Penn and I immediately realized how robust this and how tight knit the South Asian American community here is. You know, we have the South Asian society, we have so many constituent groups that are all specific places for South Asian Americans to come together. And that was also my first time hearing the term South Asian American that, you know, Bung with Asian Americans, Pakistani Americans, Sri Lanka Americans were grouped into this larger umbrella with Indian Americans. And so I started to, you know, become involved in those communities and I tried out for the South Asian Fusion dance team, Penn Masi. I actually didn't make it my first year, so I didn't really have a very tight knit group. My freshman fall, but I tried out again my freshman spring and I did join the team. And that was my first time having this really tight knit group of predominantly Indian American, you know, people my age who are all, who were all so proud of their identity that they, you know, danced, sang, played Indian music constantly and had this beautiful fusion with American music and culture. Of course, while the extracurricular Asian identity organizations and performing arts groups on campus do certainly offer an outlet for cultural exploration, they're not for everyone. A new series perspective on this. I did feel that Penn was kind of this weird in between. I felt like at home I was kind of too Indian, I guess, because I had a lot of white classmates, than at Penn, I felt like. I wasn't Indian enough because there are so many dance groups on campus and people who had been dancing since they were like probably three. There were so many Indian singing groups on campus but I never grew up like singing like these types of things and I did attempt to try out for an Indian dance group but obviously I didn't have the training so I remember walking into that first day of auditions and then just walking out because of how intimidated I was and I noticed like with like SAS the kind of South Asian community on campus they were very close with one another, very integrated with one another and my first experience with like kind of feeling more so in touch with that group was with South Asians in the US with Dr. Khan and that was like kind of the start of me becoming more interested with my Asian American background. So how did Anushui get into Dr. Khan's South Asians in the US asm course? Well even if she didn't mean to take an asm course it goes back to her desire to get more in touch with her Indian side by taking the Hindi language course. Kind of like accidentally my Hindi teacher recommended I apply for the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, so I ended up applying and I got it and part of the requirements for that fellowship is to not only take like the language like in my case Hindi but to also take in areas like area studies courses and in this case it was asm and I was my first experience with an asm course which was South Asians in the US with Dr. Fariha Khan. As we know from the past couple of episodes Dr. Khan's courses are cross listed both with the area studies department courses of South Asia Studies as well as with the Asian American Studies ethnic studies based program. And while asm courses didn't necessarily push Anushui to get more inductively involved with the South Asian community on campus it still helped her strengthen not only her relationship with her own Indian American identity but also her relationship with her parents as well. A community where every two state Thursday I'd walk in and Dr. Khan would have like these discussion prompts like where we would just have a discussion on the papers we'd be surprised for I got more involved noticing everybody's answers and seeing how much I actually had in common with so many people at Penn particularly in this class was truly enlightening and I think one of the things that made me feel more comfortable with my Asian American background was this one assignment that Dr. Khan had us do where we had to tell an immigrant story and we could do anybody we wanted and so I picked my dad. I think when you grow up your parents don't really let on to how much they struggled because they just want what's best for you they just want you to have the best and I mean even when I was older they never really let on about it was only until I explicitly started asking these questions remember I had like teared up because just hearing about everything he'd had to undergo like for example my dad told me that in the process of applying to residency in the United States while he was still in India the lawyer kept taking like money from him and doing these things over and over again but would never file for his green card so it came time for my dad to start residency and he just never got a green card so he had to delay everything reapply all over again and it was very very tiring very frustrating he told me he once had to walk through like a mile of snow in Chicago with like a broken arm like in a sling took it to an interview to me I was just growing up with them I never felt like they gave me less my mom told me that she really regrets a lot of things in which that she had spent more time with me growing up and that she had given me more growing up but I never felt that I never felt like my parents were lacklustin anyway I always felt they were always there for me and they provided so much for me and I guess even though I may not have gotten more involved with things on campus I was not that I ever took it for granted to begin with but I just became so grateful and just so much more in touch with my background and so much more appreciative and that that's like something that I feel like was just so impactful and very valuable going back to Simran she was having similar revelations that she wasn't alone in her experiences growing up through conversation with her musty teammates which would lead her to taking her first as a course that similarly helped her understand her parents a little bit better a lot of the people who were on the team were very aware of you know their own Asian American identity and a lot of them were involved with either Asian American studies at Penn or the Pan Asian American community house or patch at Penn and a lot of them said take a sast class or take an assam class this is a great assam class you should take it so I had a lot of encouragement from other members of musty to get involved in patch and assam specifically but also just in our own time casually we would have conversations of yeah this was what it was like for me growing up this is what it was like for me growing up this is you know my specific experience being Punjabi experience American this is my specific experience being Telugu American and like what that looks like so we definitely had a lot of conversations just on our walk to practice that's ultimately what did bring me to assam was that encouragement from my team members. So as I mentioned I'm a gender sexuality women studies major so I was actually looking just for a GSWS class and I noticed that assam 215 which is Asian American gender in sexuality was cross listed under both so that was the first course I took with Dr. Palai that was my sophomore spring and that was hands down my favorite class at Penn the course that honestly I think I will remember the most from my time here and I think that had the most impact on me in terms of coming to terms with my Asian American identity understanding what gender means what sexuality means as an individual who's Asian American there was just a multitude of things that came out of that course first and foremost it was just incredible to be reading academic articles published in prestigious journals that were talking about phenomena that I lived lived experiences of mine were the focus of academic studies so that was just mind boggling to me so for example there were all sorts of psychological or ethnographical studies that were specifically on South Asian women and their dating lives and what that looked like so what was their experience with their parents like what was their experience navigating a culture that looks down upon dating but while also being in a society American society that considers dating a normative part of adolescence so what that rebellion looked like what navigating that looked like what that repression felt like and as I was reading these interviews and these you know analyses and the conclusions that these researchers were drawing I was learning about myself I was seeing myself reflected in the interview ease and saying oh my gosh I did the same thing or oh my gosh I never thought of that or oh my goodness my parents had the same exact thing to me and then here's how these researchers were analyzing that under the scope of Asian American studies and what they took away from that with the understanding of certain immigration patterns or cultural norms that migrated here that ultimately led them to conclusions to say that South Asian American women experienced these set of norms surrounding dating due to their parents because of this and it was just beautiful it was beautiful to see that I wasn't alone and that my experiences were grounded in very real immigration patterns cultural norms that were shifted and that my experiences were something that were of value and that it wasn't just me going through this I also felt like I learned a lot about my parents perspective as for a generation immigrants and the specific gender and cultural norms that they brought with them from India and what that then meant for how they parented us and why I felt that they were strict or why I felt that they had these hesitations and it really allowed me to be so much more empathetic to them. And since taking that course I've just had so much more conscientiousness for my parents positions and a lot more love and respect for them for understanding where they came from and the struggles that they probably faced in parenting me as individuals who were born and raised in India with certain beliefs and values in a society whose beliefs and values just didn't align with theirs. Simran actually completed a senior's honest thesis that brought together these different elements of herself, her gender sexuality and woman studies major, her STEM background as a premed and her identity as an Indian American woman. With gender studies I wanted to write an honest thesis and I was really interested in looking at how sex education works within South Asian communities so I wanted to know more about that family conversation, the sex talk so to speak within brown families. And so what that meant was looking at, you know, those experiences and those interactions through surveys and interviews and conducting basically an ethnography of South Asians at Penn to understand one how does culture and how does Asian American identity and how does specifically South Asian American identity impact the ability for first-generation Asian-born immigrants to have a conversation with their second-generation American-born children about sex, about sexual health, about puberty, and how does that then impact those second-generation South Asian Americans today in their sexual, mental, and physical well-being. So really just bringing together kind of like my three, you know, overlapping identities as a STEM major, as a gender studies major, and as that somebody who's an Asian American, and bringing that all together to really understand what does that dynamic look like, and how does it then impact this demographic. And what I got from that was a very clear trend across the board that South Asian Americans do not receive a sex talk from their parents. Some of them, you know, receive some level of sexual education from their school, but, you know, most of that is relatively lackluster as reported by my survey respondents. And that really results in tensions between parent and child in regards to what that sexual expression for that child means, because they're not able to go out of the house and date or engage in sexual relationships and feel comfortable in doing so. And if they do, they have to do it in rebellion or in secret, or navigate it on their own. A lot of them didn't feel comfortable asking their parents questions or having those open dialogues. So a lot of my interviewees gave me stories about how because of their relationship or lack of communication with their parents, they had to end a relationship with a significant other because they didn't feel comfortable, you know, either pursuing a sexual relationship, or even having a romantic relationship period because their parents didn't approve. Or, you know, I had other interviewees who weren't able to get gynecologic care because they weren't able to have that conversation with their parent. I had other other interviewees still who were, you know, on certain medications that required them to be on birth control, but because of their family members, they weren't able to. And that led to a lot of mental anxiety in terms of anxieties surrounding unwanted pregnancies that, you know, one of my interviewees said, "I think I literally had so much hair loss every month when I took a pregnancy test." So there really were some very serious implications for South Asian Americans because of this lack of sexual communication with their parents. This thesis received recognition from the Carol Smith Rosenberg thesis award in women's studies, as well as the Holden Furber undergraduate writing award for South Asia Studies. As pre-meds, it's definitely been no small feat for them to take these asthma courses in what I'm serious a very busy pre-med course load over the past few years. And yet, similar in an industry, both found asthma courses to be pivotal to their time at Penn, and they encourage everyone to find time while on campus to take at least one asthma course. So there is like a bit of hesitancy to taking this random course that doesn't count for anything, but I think once people hear from enough others that, "No, this is a really incredible course, you're going to learn so much," then people are more excited to get involved. Once people have taken them, they love them, and they tell everybody about them, but it's about taking that first one. And Anusri's advice to other students? And I would say like, you don't necessarily have to go in with the goal of, "Oh, I have to minor in this or I can't do it at all." Well, I think I would recommend just take at least one class, because one class, I took only two, but those two were so impactful by themselves. And I think even just having one opportunity in your entire time at Penn to kind of take something that isn't along a traditional like history class that you've taken in high school is just really valuable, even if it ends up not being your thing at least you gave it a shot. And I think no matter what the outcome is, it will serve you in some way. Even though I may not have gotten super involved in like on campus activities and things like that, I think personally, I just had a lot of growth like writing those papers. And I ended up sharing my paper with my family that I wrote about my dad. And my parents, I remember them writing back to me like, "We're so proud of you." Like previously, my parents like, I mean, they like, they told me they're proud of me, but I always like messing about things like, "Oh, I got this grant for my research or I did this." Like something kind of like a reward type thing. But to hear them say, "Oh, we're so proud of you for doing something like an assignment in school, having that privilege of being able to write about them and learn more about them." It was really incredible in and of itself. So don't put too much pressure on your depth of involvement, but as long, like if you give it a shot or try it out, then you'll never be left wondering like, "Oh, what if I had done this? What if I'd done that?" Like as long as you give it a shot, then you won't have any regrets. After the break, we'll talk to Warnalum who took that advice and took one or two Aslan courses while she was a senior and who is now back on campus this time as a PhD student. That's in a minute. Now, if you've listened to the last episode about the origins of the Aslan American Studies program at Penn, you'll know that your graduate students played a critical role in getting the program and the broader Aslan American community off the ground. Individuals like Alonso Makawa, Yen Ling Sec, and Yun Mi Cheng among others. Despite that, Penn's Aslan program still is currently focused on the undergraduate level, though not for lack of interest among graduate students. To get a current PhD student's perspective, I spoke to Joyce Kim. "My name is Joyce Kim. I was an undergrad at Penn from 2011 to 2015, so I majored in political science, and I also minored in urban studies and Korean studies. And now, I'm back as a first-year PhD student at Penn's Graduate School of Education." Before coming to Penn in 2011 for her undergrad, Joyce, like many other students featured in this episode, may have had some recognition of her Aslan American identity and how it affected her, but she didn't have the exact words for it at the time. I grew up primarily in the Dallas area in Texas, and it was primarily white. So I think I did have a sense of feeling like I was an other. I do remember thinking as I was growing up, man, life would be so much easier if I had blonde hair and blue eyes. So I think there was a sense and awareness of my Asian American identity, also my Korean American identity. That said, I think coming to Penn and Philly, I was exposed to much more ethnic and racial diversity, and I think I also came to understand the historic context of Asian American identity in ways that I haven't been able to before growing up in Texas. For example, I do remember thinking very saliently while growing up, wow, how is it that there is no one that looks like me in these history textbooks? Also, too, I remember thinking, oh, what I do see about Asian American history or people who look like me is about Japanese internment, and there's only two pages devoted to that. Like a nursery and Simran, Joyce didn't minor in Asian American studies, and only took a couple. Though in hindsight, she thinks if she had known about the program sooner, she probably would have become a minor. I say this to people all the time. I say, oh, I wish our tech Asian American studies classes earlier. I would have considered being an Asian American studies minor. It wasn't until senior fall I took into to Asian American literature with David Eng, and to this day, it remains one of the most formative classes I take. I still think about and reflect on the lectures and the discussions that I had in that class, and so that was my first class, and then that was followed by the other Asian American studies course I took senior spring, which was Asian American communities with Dr. Faria Khan. With Dr. Khan's class, it was an academically based community service class, but what I was really neat is that we got to work with a community organization. I worked with the Philadelphia Folklore Project. I got introduced to the Tibetan American community in Philadelphia, and I got to know about the Tibetan diaspora, which is really not a community I would have interacted with otherwise. I think in Dr. Eng's class, first of all, it was an opportunity to be enmeshed in literature with people who I relate to on an ethnic level. So I guess in some of my Korean studies classes, I was able to do that, but to me, if anything, the Asian American studies class, particularly with Dr. Eng, felt a lot more relatable to me, because it's very different to be a Korean versus a Korean American. Now, before she took her asm classes in senior year, it's not as though Joyce wasn't involved in the exploration of diversity issues at Penn. Earlier on, in her time at Penn, she actually served as chair of the United Minorities Council, or UMC. So this was the umbrella organization of students who identified as minorities as students of color that preceded many of what we know now as the affinity groups on campus and the cultural houses too, whether it is Patch, Makulakasa Latina, and it was born out of a history of student advocacy, I think, it's about to be the United Minorities Council's 40-something anniversary, but it started because students from six different cultural organizations ranging from Black Student Me to Puerto Rican Student Association to the Korean students on campus, they organized a sit-in in a college hall demanding that the administration response to the unique needs of students at color on campus, and then that's how the Greenfield Intercultural Center was initially founded, so I think that also was a very formative experience for me understanding what it means to be a student of color and also understanding the advocacy that students at color were part of in order to make spaces that I was heavily involved with on campus possible, and so I think for me that definitely translated to the types of projects I was really interested in advocating for within the undergraduates assembly. If that story of how the UMC and the Greenfield Intercultural Center came to be sounds familiar, it may be because that sort of advocacy and cross-cultural core listen building over 40 years ago is very similar to the same sorts of advocacy that started in the sixties for the formation of ethnic studies in California, as well as the student activism for asthma that we heard about last episode at Penn. In any case, as Joyce noted, she ended up serving on the undergraduate assembly all four years of her time at Penn and actually was elected as the first Asian American woman president of the UA in her senior year, and while she only took her asthma courses after she got elected, she also knows the importance of representation to inspire those who come afterwards to strive higher. And I'd also be remiss not to mention that my freshman year, the vice president, Faye Chang, was also an Asian American woman. Seeing Faye in this role too also made me think, oh, you know, maybe it is possible. I recall a conversation I had as a freshman, my very good friend Josh, he ended up serving as vice president alongside me. I remember freshman year and we were talking, oh, where do you see yourself going in the UA? And at that point, I really didn't even fathom this idea that I could be president. I remember, I recall Josh saying, oh, maybe I can be speaker and I remember being like, oh, I want to be like Faye, I want to be vice president. So I think having those role models and seeing yourself or someone that looks like you in these positions really matters because I think it signals to you whether it be subconsciously or consciously. Oh, I can, I can be in this role too. The advocacy that made Asam happen, I know quite a huge role in my being able to even have the confidence to even pursue that role. After graduating from Penn with her bachelor's, Joyce had a very eclectic experience before coming back to Penn. Her first stop after Philly, South Korea, for her full-byte research. My immigration story is connected to a larger one where my grandparents on my dad's side immigrated from North Korea to South Korea in 1950. I've had a long-standing interest in North Korean defectors and North Korean human rights. It's kind of cool to think that I wrote my Penn admissions essay on North Korean human rights and then I wrote my senior thesis on how education affects how South Korean see fellow North Koreans and then I got the cool chance to go and study how North Korean defectors civically engage and adapt once they come over to South Korea. So that's what I was working on in South Korea. If you remember Joyce did minor in Korean area studies in addition to her political science major. We've alluded this season to the differences between ethnic studies and area studies and why say Asian area studies are different than Asian American studies based on ethnic studies. Joyce has further elaborated on this illustrated by her full-byte experience. Within the process of immigration, I guess with the formation of diaspora, your context changes your identity and I think too you have to remember that many Asian Americans they've been in the US for a number of generations. Not a total parallel of course but it's like almost comparing Africans to African Americans right. There is a different history. There's a different legacy. Sure they are some shared components to it but it's not the same and so I would say to someone who is the daughter of immigrants and who is someone who was born and raised in the US. My experience is very different from people who grew up in Korea and that's something I experienced too. That's something that caught me off guard and that I flew it in the language at Korean was my first language into the extent where I attended English as a second language until I was six. I wasn't fluent in English until then. I had expected that adjusting to South Korea would be not too difficult because I knew the culture, I knew the language and I found the different nuances to be different. Like I remember thinking oh I don't know if I can center myself a particularly loud and opinionated person especially in relation to the friends I have but in South Korea I felt very loud. I felt opinionated especially in terms of the social norms of that I observed in South Korea where it does tend to be more patriarchal, more formal, hierarchy matters, more so and in different ways than it does in the US. So I think now beginning all those things put into stark relief the differences that I embodied as an Asian-American, as a Korean-American versus someone who was perhaps sort of born and raised in South Korea. After her full bright completed, Joyce spent time in a number of cities. She worked at an educational non-profit in San Francisco, she got the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to study at Cambridge in the United Kingdom and yet her master's in international education specifically looking at how South Korea universities internationalize their offerings and then she came back to the States to work at Boston as a researcher for Harvard Business School on a number of projects. And then all said and done she had a couple of options as to where she could potentially pursue her PhD. I was very fortunate to be awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to go back to Cambridge to do my PhD. That said I was also fortunate to get an offer from Penn and to do my PhD here too and I mean in many ways it was a tough decision in many many ways but I think for me, COVID really highlighted the importance of being close to family. At this junction in my life I'm in my late 20s and I spent the past six years sort of going all around the world and COVID highlighted for me the importance of family because my dad is immunocompromised so unfortunately I wasn't able to see a single family member in person for over a year and a half and I thought to myself Joyce like you know in your late 20s or early 30s like do you really want to be in a different country and also two things worked out well and that my youngest sister is a current sophomore at Penn and then just last month my parents moved to Northern New Jersey which is about 30 minutes away from Penn so you know if that's not a sign I don't know what is I had to ask what's it like being back on Penn's campus as a graduate student after getting your diploma as an undergrad I love love love being back at Penn I think sometimes it's when you go away from a place where you realize how special a place is I think my appreciation for this institution has grown even more because of course no place is perfect and Penn has its share of areas that can certainly improve on but that said in contrast to other institutions that I've now been part of I think there's just very some very unique and special aspects about Penn such as its connection to Philly of course once again we can always say there's much more that Penn can do and you know I don't disagree with that but I think there are concerted efforts by many people students staff and faculty alive who are deeply invested in Philly community and are deeply invested in wanting to make their community better and I think I love that I think that's exactly what higher education should be doing and the kind it's the kind of thing that higher it should be cultivating in any case I was also curious about what Joyce's PhD research would focus on and how to incorporate everything she had been involved with up to this point going back to her time as an undergrad something that I've identified as well is that a lot of the changes whether it's the birth of ethnic studies at the birth of Asian American studies but it's a direct result of student advocacy it's I think with that my research agenda has really become interested in okay if it's students really pushing for this where's the focus on the students we focus on the institutions and how they can or cannot serve students and of course that's all very important work but I want to understand where the students of their story because they're the ones writing history and so I really want to understand the students role in advocating for these changes and how that relates to institutional change over time and what are its implications so seeing students as active agents and changing their outcomes is something that I'm very interested in of course this relates to Asian American studies too because they're all it's Asian Americans who have you know for the, who have demanded that it's important that their histories be heard and learned as well. Joyce's research definitely seems to be at the very least adjacent, if not directly overlapping with, the story of the formation of Asian American studies, both at Penn and at large. And while there aren't any graduate-level Asim courses, as I mentioned, again, it's not as if there are no opportunities to continue exploring Asian American studies at that level. In a way that's conscious of the multicultural origins of Asim, similar to how the UMC was formed. And even amongst graduate students, too, I mean, I just recently that there are two individuals in sociology who are organizing on graduate Asian American studies reading group that I'll be joining. And so it's there, it's alive, and it's moving and growing. I see myself getting deeper into sociology. And so I would love to see, it would be great to, if there was like, a sociology of Asian America. And I can't help wonder if perhaps this reading group itself can maybe lay the groundwork for that, especially if there will be a joint sociology of Asian American studies. So that, I would love that. I would take this class. It's like, one of the classes I'm taking this semester is a diverse and higher education from a post-colonial Latin excellence. I won't be frank. I do remember. I think I was the only person that I knew of that I was Asian American who like, stopped in La Casa Latina, stopped in Demacoo, and then stopped in the patch, too. And there are reasons why they are affinity groups. They are nuances related to a certain group of students. That's it though. I do think find there to be some self-secretation. And I think that's something that we talk about. I remember in a poly, too, that's something we talked about as well. And I would love to see activism that happens, realizing that in many ways an Asian American issue is not just an Asian American issue. Speaking of those Asian American issues that aren't just for Asian Americans, Joyce believes that Asian American studies and education, while they won't go all over the way to solving the issues, certainly play a crucial role in that important, coalesce building necessary to fight racism. I think it's incredibly important. I think even the most recent events, which are very unfortunate of people who are Asian American who are getting targeted unjustly because of their identities, this all goes to show that we are very far, very, very far, from being in a world where what you look like makes your target of violence, and that's just scraping the surface. And I think it's through education and learning that we should, the baseline should be that we should all respect one another, regardless of our skin color, regardless of what we look like. And I really feel that education is potentially powerful for us that can combat this kind of racism, this kind of stigmatism, this kind of violence. And so I think it is immensely important, in terms of coalesce building too, I really think that in many ways, our oppression, we face is very interconnected, it does everyone to deserve us for people to be wrongly targeted this way. And so I think having education to help us understand that is also very important. And I think it transcends racial and ethnic boundaries. Next up, we'll talk to another alum. This time, a more recent grad from this past year, about the time at Penn's Asam program and why Penn's program was the very reason they transferred the Penn in the first place. That's after the break. So for this episode, we've talked about students who maybe took one or two Asam courses and how it influenced their perspective about themselves, be their relationship with their family and Indian American identity, or their desire to pursue higher education related to coalesce building among minorities. That said, it's still important to also show the students who did get an Asam minor. So I wanted to feature a recent student who explored both these internal explorations as well as finding a potential academic career forward through talking to Aaron O'Malley. So my name is Aaron O'Malley, I graduated in May of 2021, and I majored in comparative literature and gender sexuality in women's studies. And I also minored in Asian American studies and creative writing. Now you wouldn't expect O'Malley to be the last name of somebody who's Asian American, but there's a good reason for that. And it plays in the Aaron story of awakening to their Asian American identity. Growing up, I obviously knew that I was Asian, but I didn't necessarily call myself Asian American. My whole family is white, I was adopted, they definitely tried in different ways to teach me specifically about Chinese culture in the ways that they could. My mom and I, we attempted to take Mandarin lessons. Both of us were pretty bad about doing that. I think that was something that was both really difficult for both of us. Family was a part of an organization called Families with Children from China. So the sort of sense that I had of specifically Chinese culture was one that was sort of created by adoptees and adoptee families who maybe didn't actually know that much about quote unquote authentic Chinese culture. As I got older, I don't think I always had the language to articulate my feelings around my experiences regarding race and ethnicity. And I actually lived in Germany my senior year of high school when I was living in the US. So like my whole life before going to Germany, I had had this sense that I was being treated in a way that wasn't like other people. But I felt like in a lot of ways I couldn't confirm that. But then when I went to Germany, I was a foreigner for the first time in my life. And I was treated like a foreigner. And that made sense. I became used to knowing what it was like to be a foreigner. But then when I came back to the US, actually I think in the week that I came back, I went to two graduation parties. And I remember two different people saying something to me like, "Oh, wow, you speak English so well." I sort of had this experience in Germany of people telling me that, "Oh, you speak German so well. Oh, like where are you from?" I really had that sense confirm that like, "Oh, I am being treated like someone who is not American or doesn't belong here." And so that was sort of what got me started thinking about wanting to know more about Asian American studies. With that transnational experience in mind, Aaron entered college, not a pen, but at the University of Rochester, in thisly planning on studying literary translation between German and English, before finding out that's not really what they wanted to do. However, a class that they took there sold one potential option. And I took this really great class when I was at the University of Rochester called Chinese in the Americas, so not just in the United States, but looking at Chinese migration and diaspora in South America and Central America as well and also Canada. And that was a class that was like one of my favorite classes that I've taken in college. I was just pretty deeply immersed in doing a lot of outside reading on Asian American studies. And I found myself wondering, well, what would it be like if I was doing this in a classroom of people who were also really engaged in seeking out this knowledge? And that wasn't super possible at the University of Rochester. One of the things that drew me to pen was that pen is actually the only university in Pennsylvania with an Asian American studies program. There's other iterations of Asian American studies, like some schools have like joint model of offering classes between or among different campuses. But pen's program to me sort of felt like one that had a lot, had a long history and that was something that I was looking for. A history, of course, of struggle, but one that like I could sort of look to and point to like a kind of tradition of student involvement and faculty involvement. I feel that's pretty special to be honest. The fact that pens as a minor, not even a major, was a big enough draw for Aaron to transfer. I don't think it can be understood how important it is to continue to support pens as a program if things like that will happen. I had to ask, once they transferred to pen, how soon did Aaron know that it was the right move for them to make? I think as early as like my first semester at Penn, when I started being in community with other Asian American students, I think it started to set in. I can't think of like another group of people that like involves both like faculty and students that like I felt more in community with at Penn than like the people Asian American studies. I really don't think I would be the kind of student, the kind of writer and aspiring scholar that I am without their guidance. I think I also remember being at the Asim branch, so there's something that the Asim undergraduate advisory board does every spring where Dr. Khan invites us to her house. All the Asim UAB students, as well as faculty members who are involved with the Asim program and we have brunch at her house, I just remember feeling like that felt so much like a family and I hadn't really had an Asian American family before. Obviously, as an Asim minor, Aaron took a number of Asian American studies classes, so I had to ask which ones did I didn't do memory? classes. The first class Asian American Studies class that I took at Penn was intro to Asian American Studies with Dr. Pillai and it was just such an exciting class because it was the first time that it had been authored. Dr. Pillai was also new to Penn and she was just like such an amazing resource. Always offered me like supplemental readings when there was something that I was like really interested in. Another really great class was Dr. Park's intro to Asian American Literature class. I think I so so admire the way Dr. Park teaches and the way that she is able to from a pedagogical standpoint like engage a really large class in a way that feels so discussion-oriented but then from like a different point I think like all the texts that she chose that semester were like amazing. Like I read a number of books that changed my life or changed the way I saw my life which maybe means the same thing. This course work really highlights the interdisciplinary nature of Asian American studies which Aaron believes is an important academic reason for the program to continue on. Beyond the pure social good of having these sort of classes for Asian American students to explore their own self-identity. Asian American studies is viewed in the sense of being like a kind of social good as in oh students should have this to learn more about themselves which they should. That is that to me is like a legitimate reason to have Asian American studies but it always seems like a second thought to actually consider oh this is a field of study that students are bringing into other things that they're majoring in is something that is is an academic field and is a field that has a history and that is continuing to grow and it has an enormous kind of gravity and importance in this moment and in the future as well. Aaron's academic work led them to write not one but two senior thesis within their majors both to the lens of Asian Americanness. I made the interesting decision to write two thesis when in comparative literature one in gender sexuality in women's studies my thesis in comparative literature was looking at the depiction of Chinese migrants in early science fiction comics of the 19th and 20th centuries and specifically thinking about the term alien in relation to that. Something that really struck me about the research that I did for that project was how co-constitutive both like the legal aspect and the sort of literary or cultural aspect how those are really so essential to the development of each other like the legal language of the way the word alien works and how we talk about immigration. Unfortunately still in this country has really shaped a lot of the sort of science fiction lore and tropes of Asian as a foreigner and then vice versa thinking about the Asian migrant as a literal alien has given sort of an image to what we think of as like an alien an alien migrant and then my gender studies thesis was looking at the experience of transgender Asian adoptees and sort of what the frameworks of pre and post transition both in regards gender and being adopted what that what those might mean and then for my gender studies project maybe there wasn't so much of a direct sort of like aha moment but I think it was a really important project for me to learn about it was one that in doing this in doing that research it helped me learn more about myself and I think that's equally as valuable. Now that's not to say this interdisciplinary work is separate from the importance of self-discovery of one's Asian American identity through this coursework as Aaron said it really helped them come to term with their Asian American identity especially with how it intersects with their adoptee and their queer identities. I really lean deeply into the term Asian American I don't necessarily identify too much with being Chinese or Chinese American especially thinking about Asian American as a term that was created out of political solidarity among Asian ethnic peoples it's a way that I want to relate my own life to the people of the communities that I'm a part of. Penn was really the first place where I started being friends with a lot of different Asian people like I never had a dumpling until my sophomore year of college like I had hot pot for the first time. So a lot of experiences just with the Asim program but with trying different kinds of foods and learning more from my friends about what it means for them to be Asian Asian American have also helped me contour parts of my own experience and I would also say too that I became friends with a lot of queer Asian Americans in college and I think that has really shaped my community as well and the people that I was able to be with has been like so fruitful for me in understanding myself and understanding them as well. It's also worth noting that Aaron was co-chair of the Asim UAB last semester when recent events surrounding the university's level of support for the program forced Aaron and co-chair Claire Wynn to take a leadership role in standing up for the program. While we don't have time this episode to get into all of that right now we'll save those stories for the final episode of this series. In the meantime though having recently graduated Aaron is off to graduate school to further those studies in Asian American studies specifically poetry. So I'm actually an interdisciplinary enrichment fellow in the at Creative Writing MFA program at Arizona State University. I'm spending the next three years of my life focusing on writing poetry. I also am really lucky to be able to take classes throughout the university. Right now I'm actually working on a project for an American Studies class that I'm taking that's interested in the relationship between how we talk about yellow fever and the way we talk about COVID-19 and the ways our language of pathology is working there. But I think in the future I'm really interested in teaching I think studies and gender studies whether at the high school level or at the college level. More importantly though pens Asim program has helped Aaron to be able to go back to their family better equipped to talk about their identity just as their family tried to help them all of those years ago. You know it can be really hard to begin having conversations with people who maybe you have complicated dynamics with but I think in a lot of ways like my my mom has been really supportive of me wanting to do so much work in Asian American studies and she definitely sees what it has meant to me. Now Aaron was part of Penn Spoken World Group, the Excellent Apothec. And I think it would only be a appropriate to end this episode on a piece of theirs about their Asian American identity that they wrote about two years ago. Take it away Aaron. So I can read this poem that's called Every Story About Myself. This was actually a piece that was published this past spring and so there's always like a huge lag between when something is published and when it's written. I think like I wanted to write a piece that felt very true to my experience of being Asian American right. So when I grew up I was like a huge horse girl so I wanted to sort of write about that being like a part of my Asian American childhood or my life. Yeah and then I was like thinking a little bit about like language and playing around with that and this is the poem that came out of that. Every story about myself begins with my mother. In a photograph she places one hand on my shoulder another on the small of my back keeping me still on the horse's saddle. I can't be older than three which means I'm too young for memory but who needs memory when you have a mother. I don't always remember that I have a mother in another country that in her language the words for mother and horse sound the same. Years after the picture we quit Chinese class during the second week because we keep forgetting that the word ma can name the way every birth begins with an animal. I say we and mean me and my mother. The horse I call my mother and the mother I mispronounce into a horse I don't remember writing but this is a story that begins with my mother and I know this is a story about myself. Special thanks to everyone who I interviewed for this episode. A new Shrenaja, Simran Chand, Joyce Kim and Aaron O'Malley. For any current students out there if you're listening to this episode as it drops you're in luck. Of course registration for the next semester of course is in spring 2022 are now open. If anything this episode sounded of interest to you or caught your fancy be sure to sign up for an asm course today. I have it on good authority that they fill up really fast so you want to act quickly. If you have any questions about next semester's offerings you can always reach out to the asm undergraduate advisory board whom I'll link to in the zone. Now while everyone in this episode is either a current student or a very recent graduate who can talk about this student experience facing their mind technically Joyce and Aaron are alumni and this is the Penn asian alumni network podcast after all so next episode we'll talk to alum about not only how asm influenced their own stuff identity as Asian Americans, but also how it's been impactful and even crucial to shaping their careers. That's next week. A quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed on the show are those appearing on this podcast alone and do not reflect those of any other organizations, including the University of Pennsylvania. Music in the show is provided by Oxay Sandersekar, aka Fortissimo, and Juan Villarica, aka Ascal. Both of them pen undergraduate class of 2016. A digital music from Blue Dot Sessions. So art by Sophie Hurd, editing and production provided by Ninja Boy Media. Special thanks to the Pan Asian American Community House, the Asim undergraduate advisory board, alumni relations, Annable Astrada, and Dr. Fourier Khan for their support. For questions or inquiries, you can email us at [email protected] or reach out on Facebook or Instagram. Links to those, as well as we can find or so on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play are in the so-nodes. Thanks again for listening. Till next time, keep it funky.