Pathways on Alex Park ʼ24, Diana Kim ʼ25 research first women of Asian descent to attend College

At the very front of Earl Gregg Swem Library, a display of historical images tells the story of the rst Asian American women who attended the College of William and Mary.

Created by Diana Kim ’25 and Alex Park ’24, the Charting Diverse Pathways exhibit aims to promote visibility for the Asian Paci c Islander and Middle Eastern community at the College. e exhibit tracks the lives of the rst three Asian American women to attend the College: Hatsuye Yamasaki Kajiwara ’37, Margaret Lee Masters ’45 and Beatrice Fujiwara Sakai ’53. Kim and Park follow the research started in the 202122 academic year during the College’s Asian Centennial. e Asian Centennial celebrated the 100th anniversary of the rst student of Asian ancestry to attend the College, P.K. Chen, Class of 1923. Park noted the signi cance of its celebration to her as an Asian American student.

“As an Asian American person on campus, it felt like a very big deal because it was the rst time that any of these communities that I’ve been in, especially in predominantly white spaces, we got to see ourselves represented and people like us honored in that way,” Park said.

Sumie Yotsukura ’22 and Brian Zhao ’23 led the research focused on P.K. Chen, and Director of the College’s Asian Paci c Islander American department Professor Deenesh Sohoni supervised their work. For Sohoni, the Asian Centennial boosted visibility that helped create the College’s Asian Paci c Islander and Middle Eastern Research Project, under which Kim and Park’s project falls.

“One of the big things that both [Professor Francis Tanglao-Aguas] and I wanted to do was not just some big celebratory events, but also to create something that’s more sustainable,” Sohoni said. “And so right now we have this kind of nebulous entity, the APM Research Project, where it’s the sustainable part of the centennial. e centennial was one year, but we want to create opportunities for students to conduct research about Asian-American experiences. And that’s what Diane and Alex did over the summer.”

Using funding from the Charles Center and the Braitmayer Foundation fellowship, Park and Kim began their research. ey started in Swem Special Collections, looking at historical views of Asian Americans with archivist Jennie Davy. eir goal was to understand the social and racial environment and attitudes at the College during Yamasaki Kajiwara, Lee Masters and Fujiwara Sakai’s respective decades. “[ ese women] each had di erent experiences at William and Mary,” Park said. “Something of note is how far spaced apart they are. ere’s almost a decade in between the entrance of each woman….contrary to when we talked about the rst…women to be accepted to changes happening within the community. And it really takes looking at a larger time period and all three of those women to start to understand why that would happen.”

From there, Park and Kim conducted oral history interviews. Reaching out to Lee Masters’ family and Fujiwara Sakai’s family, they were able to speak to Katherine Masters, Lee Masters’ daughter, and get an account from Fujiwara Sakai herself.

“Getting that history and hearing Beatrice’s life and story through her words, not the words of government records and all of that stu , was so cool, because it’s little things,” Park said. “She talks about how much she loves Virginia ham. It’s little things like that that ended up not making it into the exhibit just because of space and everything, but as the researcher and having spent so much of my time looking into their lives is cool.”

For Kim and Park, their work was highly collaborative.

“We’re always geeking out in some way of the new information that we learned about our people,” Kim said. “When we had a moment of like, ‘oh my goodness, we found something,’ it’d be like we share it on email, we texted to each other, like ‘I found something’…. It’s always collaborative. It’s almost like you’re private investigating partners, trying to gure out a person’s life.”

Inadditiontotheirteamcollaboration,ParkandKimalso worked with external agencies to expand their audience. Working with groups such as the 1882 Foundation and School of Education Professor Dr. Esther Kim, the team plans to convert their research into educational materials. The K-12 Asian American Studies Education Initiative will provide educators with more resources about Asian American history and representation.

William and Mary, there wasn’t a huge change. You didn’t see a ood of Asian students coming in. You didn’t see any notable

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