‘Healing our inner child’: Students Selling Stickers

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 friends 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.”

Xiang, whose family is from Wuhan, China, was aware of COVID-19 from 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 from 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 from the “Stop Asian Hate” sticker pack continue to benefit 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 Pacific 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 specifically 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-profit 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.”

The Students Selling Stickers website features numerous readings, infographics, films and documentaries that spread information about injustice. Aside from donating and going to protests, Xiang says history education is a critical path to eliminating one’s own biases, discovering the truth and learning to respect others. She vividly remembers reading a book about the Syrian civil war when she was in the eighth grade — a profound moment that drove her to educate herself on other parts of the world.

“I wanted to throw up,” Xiang said. “I couldn’t believe that that was a real world, and I think that was like a glass ball shattering, because I realized how sheltered I had been. I knew about issues in America, issues in China, but kind of the whole world opened up to me.”

She sees Students Selling Stickers not as the definitive form of activism but a way for these students to respond to horrible verbal and physical attacks against minority communities. To Xiang, activism means inherently appreciating everyone around the world and standing up for them.

“I feel like the word ‘activism’ is so funny now because so many people are just like ‘I’m an activist,’’ and then they post a TikTok dance of them and the caption is ‘don’t hate Black people,’” Xiang said. “But activism, I don’t think it’s something that you have to consciously do. It’s trying to reconcile your identity with the forces pushing against you, telling you that you shouldn’t be there or that you’re different, or that you’re weird, or that you’re not loved … It’s literally just telling yourself, ‘I’m beautiful and I’m meant to be here.’”

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, political inactivity and anti-Blackness in the Asian community sparked intergenerational conversations, Xiang said. To promote these conversations between family members with different English proficiencies, Students Selling Stickers lists language resources on their website. She said that having resources for people who don’t speak English helps share those ideas across language barriers.

“Our parents, and especially our grandparents, have certain views that they’re very set in their ways about, certain ideas or viewpoints that were presented to them that they believe in, even if they’re not true,” Xiang said.

While she acknowledges that contributing money can be difficult for many who simply don’t have the funds, she believes these stickers help incentivize generosity for people who have the financial ability.

“[Money] is an evil thing, but it’s such a huge factor,” Xiang said. “Incentivizing that donation and being like, ‘If you literally donate three dollars, you can get a free freaking sticker.’ You get like a fun little message that you resonate with and that maybe represents your identity and makes you feel better.”