Senior Profile | Jiajia Zhang
Teaching, Telling, Painting Asian American History While Jiajia Zhang is on her way to becoming an Asian American studies scholar, her life has encompassed so much more: art, activism, and even social media management for a Belarusian rock band. —Leo Kamin ’25 From the liberal-arts focus to the open curriculum and the Loeb Center for Career Exploration, Amherst College markets itself as a place for young people who do not yet know what they want to do with their lives. But Jiajia Zhang ’22, an American studies and studio art major, has known that she wanted to be an Asian American studies scholar since she was in seventh grade. Her story, one of fierce and consistent intellectual vision, is a reminder that there is not one kind of Amherst student, and not one kind of Amherst experience. Zhang was born in Aba Tibetan Prefecture, in Sichuan Province in Western China. She moved to Wuhan when she was two months old, before relocating to Denton, Texas, when she was four-and-a-half years old. In Denton, located in a “working-class part of North Texas,” Zhang was the only child of Chinese ancestry in her public elementary school. For as long as she can remember, Zhang loved listening to and telling stories. They were “a way to experience solidarity and unpack my contemporary experiences and connect them to the events of the past,” Zhang explained. Naturally, she was interested in the humanities from a young age, but she was typecast by her peers as a “math kid.” When she would speak up in humanities classes, her classmates would make fun of her — she
had a stutter. The only Asian person she saw in middle school was an exchange teacher; anytime the teacher tried to speak about anything besides math, Zhang’s peers would snicker. From this early experience, Zhang began to think that a person like her did not belong in the humanities. “It was those kinds of memories that made me feel like it was impossible for me to become a historian,” she said. But as Zhang grew older, things changed. In seventh grade, one teacher changed her life. She was assigned to read the book “Journey to Topaz” by Yoshiko Uchida, which tells the story of a young Japanese girl sent to an internment camp during World War II. Though Zhang is not Japanese, the book resonated deeply with her. “I remember reading that book and realizing for the first time [that] I had a right to complain and stand up for myself because this entire time, I had felt that everyone else had roots in this country [except for me].” She had learned about Black history and Latino history, but never about Asian American history. As she began to study Asian American history on her own, Zhang realized that “we’d been coming in waves for centuries, that we had been protesting and standing up for rights for as long as we’d been here.” She retains a close relationship with the teacher who assigned the book to this
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day. As Zhang, then still in middle school, began to learn about the stories of the generations of Asian Americans who had come before her, she also desired to share them with others. She had had a passion for teaching from a young age. In second grade, she began teaching Chinese lessons to children at her local library, the same library where a volunteer from the local community had taught her to speak English. As her interests combined, a new dream emerged — to teach Asian American history. From that point, Zhang set out to learn as much as she could about that history. Because there were few books catering specifically to children, she dove straight into the academic literature, discovering the discipline of Asian American studies. One of the early books she read was “The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience,” a 620-page survey of Asian American history written by John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer Franklin S. Odo, who Zhang described as “one of the founding fathers of Asian American studies” and who has been teaching at Amherst since 2015. Though there were a number of reasons why Zhang ultimately chose Amherst, the prospect of studying with Odo was a major one. Odo remembers his first interaction with Zhang, while she was still a high-school
Photo courtesy of Jiajia Zhang ’22
Zhang poses with “The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience,“ by Amherst’s Franklin Odo, a book that ignited her interest in Asian American studies. senior making her college decision. “She introduced herself and said, ‘I want to be an Asian American studies professor,’” he said. “That about floored me. How many high school kids know what they want to be in the first place? And how many kids want to be an Asian American studies professor?” It was the beginning of a four-year working relationship between the two. Zhang said that she worked with Odo, either in classes he taught or in special topics courses, during each of her eight semesters at Amherst. While at Amherst, Zhang not only studied Asian American history, but advocated for it. She served as president of Amherst’s Asian and Pacific American Action Committee, leading protests and facilitating dialogue with the administration in hopes of establishing an Asian American studies department at Amherst and organizing the “Stop Asian Hate” protest in March of last
year. The campaign is already showing results in the form of the hiring of three new Asian American studies professors, but the administration has not yet committed to establishing a department. Odo celebrated Zhang’s activism and her academic prowess; he said that, from the beginning, he could tell that Zhang was “unusually intellectually mature.” But his favorite part of the relationship has been that he “keeps learning things about her.” Such is the experience of getting to know Zhang. Though her intellectual life has long been anchored by a love for Asian American history, she seems to have an almost infinite array of interests and talents. She was a competitive figure skater growing up. She is an exceptionally talented artist; she recently sold one of her works to the college’s Mead Art Museum. She sang in Amherst’s Choral Society. When she was in middle
