FROM:
Roshni Raj | CULTURE EDITOR
TO: The pandemic, anti-Asian hate, self-education and activism SUBJECT: Re: ‘Healing our inner child’: Students Selling Stickers
Reflecting on years of injustice and stereotypes, this CAS junior channels her energy into selling stickers.
STAFF PHOTO BY RYAN WALKER
Hearing the words “COVID-19” or “March 2020” makes most of us feel a blend of uncertainty, terror and outrage. The pandemic took family members and f riends away from us and deepened socioeconomic disparities in the United States. For CAS junior Grace Xiang, along with her high school friends Taylor Harris, Kylie Ning and Heidi Tandiono, these feelings of powerlessness and a desire to stay occupied during the lockdown led them to artistic expression. After spending hours researching and planning over FaceTime calls, Students Selling Stickers was born. “Back then, we didn’t really know what we could do to really contribute or make any sort of impact, like we weren’t leaders,” said Xiang, the collective’s head of management and graphic design. “But something that we did know was that you can sell little stickers.” Students Selling Stickers is a student-run nonprofit organization that, at the time of writing, has sold 1,715 stickers and donated $1,900 to various organizations. The group donates the profits from special sticker designs to specific organizations: A “Thank You” take-out bag sticker supports Send Chinatown Love merchants, and a “Higher Ground” sticker partnered with Didómi supports Water is Life to increase water accessibility in African countries. All profits from other stickers — such as “Trans Rights = Human Rights” and “Defund the Police” — are split between the 12 organizations Students Selling Stickers currently donates to. “Stickers are like, what, two dollars?” Xiang said. “You can print meaningful messages or images on them that make people happy, that people can resonate with, that people can carry around with them and kind of show messages and who they are. It kind of gave us a sense of self again to be able to feel like we were doing something meaningful.”
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Xiang, whose family is from Wuhan, China, was aware of COVID-19 f rom the moment it began. “It was really, really annoying being in the U.S. and having people not take it seriously and then also blame people f rom Wuhan for the virus, when in reality they were probably the ones suffering the most and feeling the most fear,” Xiang said. “I wanted to sell stickers to raise awareness about anti-Asian hate. But then with the coming of the summer, I thought that this could be an important thing for all minorities to be able to have some sort of output.” Xiang and her friends attended Little Rock Central High School, a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. A city with a history of segregation and brutality, Little Rock forced Xiang and her friends to become very aware of their race and how they differed from the majority population. Xiang recalled feeling unwelcome in her own city when Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tried passing a bill to ban Chinese students from studying STEM subjects in the United States and repeatedly used the racist phrases “Wuhan virus” and “China virus” when talking about COVID-19. After the Atlanta spa shooting last year that killed eight people, six of them Asian women, Xiang called Harris to help her channel her emotions into a sticker. The donations f rom the “Stop Asian Hate” sticker pack continue to benef it Send Chinatown Love, which supports struggling businesses in New York City’s Chinatown, and AAPI Women Lead, which aims to increase the visibility of Asian American and Pacif ic Islander women in American society. “I had a full panic attack. [The Atlanta shooting] felt gross, disturbing, so alien and unsettling,” Xiang said. “That’s why actually some of the stickers that we created were things that I specif ically requested them to make. The words in the background, they say things like ‘We are not your fetish. We are not docile. We are not a virus. We are not your scapegoat’ just over and over again, because I needed to reclaim something.” As Students Selling Stickers brought in more sales, Xiang and the cofounders — who are all full-time college students on a premedical track — recruited volunteers to help them with their responsibilities. Xiang says the group, which also includes high school students and university graduates — works tirelessly to continue the non-prof it by helping with artistry and management. “I’m sure everybody who grew up as a minority in America has [thought] about some person or some incident where you felt powerless and weak and you wanted to cry,” Xiang said. “And so I think that was really fuel. It was like healing our inner child and also hopefully the inner child of many people.”
