UAAO Zine Ed. 4: The Liberation Archive

We preface this zine by acknowledging that the University of Michigan stands on stolen Anishinaabeg land, that is home to the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples who all had villages along the rivers of Southeast Michigan, and land belonging to the Fox and Peoria tribes. It is important that we remember that the founding of the UM was made possible through the signing of the Treaty of Fort Meigs in 1817, when the Anishinaabek ceded portions so that their children could be educated alongside the children of the European settler for the continuous cycle of 7 generations. To this day, this promise has been largely unfulfilled. Rather, the UM and its students have created a legacy of mockery, erasure, and violence against indigenous people and indigenous land that is still ongoing today.

The United Asian American Organizations is dedicated to being accomplices to decolonization efforts on campus led by indigenous students and organizations such as the Native American Student Association.

We are also dedicated to confronting our own biases and ignorance regarding indigenous sovereignty within our own identities and communities.

We also acknowledge that this zine is dedicated to the activists, advocacy, and organizing legacies of both Pacifika/Oceanic/Pacific Islander and Asian American students and uses the term AA+PI. However, the term “AA&PI” or reiterations of it generalize an incredibly diverse community. Notably, Pacifika communities have faced a distinct set of injustices and experiences apart from Asian Americans.

The Pacific Islander label itself describes a very large group of people that spans over many different ethnic groups as well as national identities. Furthermore, there are disservices done to PI students on UM’s campuses largely due to lack of representation from the past to the present, and it is the responsibility of the university and its students to take active measures to advocate for PI students and faculty. Until we can find a way to equitably serve Pacifika students, our usage of AA+PI is one that actively perpetuates harm. We hope that these statements will center indigeneity in the work that we do and set a standard for decolonization at all our events.

Introduction

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Why archives?

Why digitization?

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Did you know?

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Ethnic Studies

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Timeline

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Oral histories

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Irene Hwang pp. 11 Mel Wong pp. 16 Ally Langenkamp pp. 19 Malu Castro pp. 24 Manan Desai pp. 36 Surabhi Balachander pp. 52 Shiryn Anissa Binti Noor Affendi Contributors

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pp. 59

The United Asian American Organizations (UAAO) is a coalition organization of 20+ Asian American organizations, dedicated to acting as a resource for advocacy and social justice in the community.

UAAO was established in 1988 to work in unity with the Asian American community on campus.

We are a coalition group representing various Asian American organizations on campus. Our aim is to serve as the liaison and collaboration agent for diverse Asian American organizations at UM, promote awareness of Asian American issues, serve as a political voice for Asian American organizations on campus, and develop relationships with other POC groups on campus and Asian American organizations outside of UM.

The United Asian American Organization’s “Activism, Organizing, and Leadership within U-M Asian American + Pacific Islander Communities and Spaces’’ Digital Collection is a part of UAAO’s ongoing initiative to digitize historical materials regarding Asian American activism on the University of Michigan (U-M) Ann Arbor campus in collaboration with the U-M Library.

Through archive digitization, our goal is to recover, preserve, and teach the history of activism. Additionally, we want to recognize our campus’s lack of materials regarding Asian American and Pacific Islander history, and we hope to help fill that gap.

Our initiative consists of three phases and has spanned over the course of multiple years. Over the past year, UAAO is well into the project’s second phase, which involves the documentation of our materials and the digitization of our existing artifact inventory. We have digitized over 150 materials reaching as far back as the late 1970s. With the help of the U-M Library, UAAO’s digitization team has also been gathering metadata for the collection. Currently, our collection includes items such as educational pamphlets, promotional materials for numerous student organizations, newspaper clippings, student magazines, and video recordings.

As we continue working on this project, UAAO hopes to expand our collection by sending a call out for artifacts pertaining to Asian American and Pacific Islander histories at U-M Ann Arbor and creating an Asian American and Pacific Islander activist and leader alumni network. An oral histories project will also be integrated into the collection.

Overall, we want to make our digital collection accessible, using it to create digestible information about Asian American and Pacific Islander activism, organizing, and leadership on the U-M Ann Arbor campus. Although our collection isn’t complete yet, our zine draws on already scanned materials and transcripts from oral history interviews conducted by our zine team. We hope that this zine provides you with a general understanding of our archive digitization initiative and Asian American and Pacific Islander history and activism on campus!

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Chelsea Padilla The purpose of archives is to document and preserve the history and heritage of a group. They help us maintain our collective memory, providing us with an understanding of who we are as individuals, but also on a larger scale — we begin to recognize our place along the timeline of history. However, physical archives often come with barriers. In order to access a physical archive, a researcher might have to set up an appointment, then travel whatever distance to that physical archive. Depending on the materials a researcher might want to access, that distance might 3

be thousands of miles across the continent, or even across oceans.

Archive digitization helps take down these barriers.

With a digital archive, academic researchers and the average person can look at historical materials without having to physically travel.

Materials that might have been only accessible to few have the potential to attract international audiences. More importantly, digital archives increase the scope of who can learn from historical materials.

Vicky Wan The University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and Kalamazoo College offer ethnic studies programs and/or courses! UMich has several ethnic studies programs under the Department of American Culture and offers a Latina/o Studies major, an ethnic studies sub-major, and various ethnic studies minors. Wayne State offers majors in African American Studies as well as Latino/a Studies. Kalamazoo College offers majors in Critical Ethnic Studies, an interdisciplinary field that requires students to take various ethnic courses.

Zafirah Rahman Ethnic Studies at U-M For students interested in studying more on these topics, there is the Ethnic Studies sub-major under the American Culture major at LSA! This track offers the opportunity for students to create a blend of ethnic studies curriculum — ranging from not only APIA studies, but also Afro-American, Latina/o, Arab American, American Muslims, and Native American studies — courses in the context of American culture and society. Students can then delve deeper into their course of study through ethnic studies electives. For example, there is a course on South Asian Diasporas (AMCULT359) taught by Manan Desai.

APIA Minor If you want to deepen your studies even further, there’s the APIA Studies minor! This minor allows you to concentrate on APIA studies in particular with no prerequisites required. The minor is fulfilled by 4 elective courses that cover historical experience, cultural expression, or contemporary communities. Totaling to 12 credits, this minor is flexible and perfect for students with an interest for APIA courses.

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Rié Vander Schuur The concept of ethnic studies in universities emerged out of the civil rights movement during the 1960s and late 1970s, and it sought to combat the eurocentric perspectives of disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, and political science.

The first strike demanding the creation of an ethnic studies department took place in 1968 at San Francisco State University, led by a coalition of the Black Student Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the Asian American Political Alliance, the Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, and the Native American Students Union called the Third World Liberation Front. At the time, this was America’s longest student strike and would eventually result in the recreation of a School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

A second strike demanding the creation of a school of ethnic studies took place the following year at the University of California - Berkeley. Involved in the efforts to dissipate the strike included several police departments and California’s national guard, ordered onto the campus by then California governor, Ronald Reagan.

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Irene Hwang

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Interview by Nellie Shih

NS: One question the zine team has been asked and I’d like to pass along to you is: are there any identities you assume that you would like to share with our readers?

IH: I definitely feel Chinese American and I think I’m really interested in service, so architecture service and academic service. I guess one of my other identities is scholar in service - that’s 11

something I really pride myself on. Another identity that’s really important to me is to be a good spouse to my wife.

I would also add to that I’m a really curious person, and I think that curiosity just gets me interested in people, in a way where I feel connected and I want to know more, and connecting that with the scholar and service. I think it really blends those two where I can be curious about an

intellectual concept, or I could be curious about a practical problem. Both of those things are really engaging for me.

NS: What do you do at Taubman?

IH: In our architecture program I have a dual role that’s administrative - so when they say administrative in the academic sense they mean how are you helping to understand how the school runs, but also how it evolves over time - and then I have a faculty appointment which is where I teach. I can talk about my philosophy; I first came to Taubman as a fellow in 2010 and I got to be here for two years teaching and doing really interesting research about how architectural ideas connected with the rest of the world. Since then, I went back to the private sector and then I came back in 2018. The role of Assistant Chair allowed me to kind of

really see how I could help the school and the staff, faculty, and students. My philosophy when I first came here was to be like spackle spackle smooths out the cracks and covers the gaps and covers all the holes and kind of makes all the bumpy stuff look a little bit better, fix it up a little. There were all these kinds of gaps in the system and that’s just because a system that grows like a community that’s growing and changing with different people all the time and different ambitions - you’re going to have gaps, and so I think, for me, what I do every day, what I really try to do is figure out how to find those gaps and then fill them or work with people to fill them or figure out ways that those gaps might become something more, more beneficial to the school and the community.

I also have three streams 12

of research. The first one is really about public opinion and I’m really interested in how architecture and public opinion kind of mutually shape each other and whether architecture has presence in the public psyche - does the general person care about architecture?

One of the ways I studied that is by looking at HGTV; I look to HGTV as a really important way of talking about the built environment and educating people on the built environment, but the things that they’re educating are not necessarily the best.

And this first stream is understanding that and public opinion and how those two things get formed.

Another stream of research is more about leadership and architecture as the profession changes, how do our structures change, how do we go from more autocratic individual genius based systems into 13

things that are more collaborative, more grassroots, more leadership at all levels as opposed to leadership from the top down, how do we rethink our professional structures.

And the third stream is about architecture and society. It’s more of a historical research that looks at how we can think of architecture - and what I mean by architecture is buildings that have an architectural origin, so not just a vernacular building or building done for commercial purposes, but a building with actual architectural roots and origins - looking at examples of those buildings and conducting a really close reading of those buildings to understand them not as historical artifacts or aesthetic artifacts or objects, but to understand these architectures as actual historical events.

NS: What came first for you, was it the architecture or was it the service?

And then how did one thing lead to the other?

IH: I think it was service because I don’t have an architectural undergrad education, my degree was in international relations. I was always really interested in political science, economics, history, and languages.

Growing up in a bilingual culture I’ve always been really interested in the idea of having access to multiple cultures. From the beginning, I wanted to study law because I really wanted to understand how to change these systems we had or how my individual single person could plug into something bigger than me, plug into a purpose or some kind of objective bigger than me. I worked for a law firm and I’m kind of not good at it. I just realized that I was a very visual person and I think that also had to do

with being able to connect my own things that I was comfortable with that I would be able to thrive in.

I went to dinner with some of my college friends. A really good friend of mine was getting married to a doctor and he was talking about going into gynecology, and I was really young and I was like, why do guys want to go into gynecology? And what’s really interesting is [what] he said to me, and this totally stuck with me and helped me change my own career trajectory and connects with service. He said that it may be kind of glamorous at first, this idea of cardiothoracic surgery or oncology, but for him, being an OBGYN meant that he was there at the beginning of life right in these joyful moments, with people.

Obviously there are complications but everyone is so happy. When it comes to law, I was interested in 14

litigation, so I was really interested in the untangling of these kinds of complex questions and situations that people had gotten themselves into. I only had these kinds of cliches and very simplified understandings of architecture but I just was really excited to be there.

It was really helpful because coming from an immigrant family, there’s a lot of pressure to have a career that has immediate financial security and architecture felt like a luxury for someone who was 23. I knew I was a visual person but I never did it because it just didn’t seem responsible, like my parents immigrated and worked so hard and it just didn’t seem like something I should be doing.

NS: Do you still continue to feel like it’s luxurious?

IH: I really focus on what I’m contributing and I really know that it’s a life15

long, career-long thing. I feel like I have the capacity where I can choose architecture as a profession and part of that actually had to do with my mom.

My mom passed away when I was 19 and I just look at the sacrifices she made as a role model to me coming from a totally foreign country and then speaking basic English and then learning English and then completing her bachelor’s degree while raising a kid and having a full time job. I think she died young, it really fueled me to live the second half of her life, not in such a direct way, but she did all these things and she isn’t here to kind of enjoy the second half of that. I don’t have that regret because I realized how much it takes to contribute to the built environment, I realize how important it is, and I tried to connect that and realize that having fulfillment in life or your contribution isn’t just how much

money you can make.

I also realized the values of my parents, they obviously want me to go into a profession that makes money because they want me to be secure and that’s a kind of direct thing in Chinese culture, but I think they’re also really proud that I’m able to make an impact with the next generation and do research that can help change society, or at least aims to affect society. I think I pretty much know that your parent would want you to be engaged and satisfied on a day to day basis. That is priceless in a lot of ways.

NS: I’ve been to a lot of alumni networking sessions where a lot of the advice is you’re not going to end up where you expect. Speaking to that, how has your process been with teaching yourself to be comfortable with new situations?

IH: I mean it’s totally like sometimes you just want

to give up or you just feel bad, but I think it’s really meaningful to me to understand that time is the only thing you can’t get back. It’s important to also hear how you are benefitting people.

Interview by Elizabeth Hwang

Mel is from Rochester Hills, MI and a sophomore in LSA intending to major in Women and Gender Studies. *Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

How was your childhood in New York?

I was born in New York.

When I lived in (Flushing,) New York, I lived in 16

a small studio apartment with my parents and my older sibling. My grandma lived upstairs and my aunt and uncle lived downstairs. We moved to New Jersey when I was two because my mom wanted a good school district. We lived in East Brunswick.

I was a very happy, happy child. My Chinese name means ‘always happy.’ I went to preschool a year early and every single day, my mom had to pick me up early because I was so sad and missed my mom.

When did you move to Michigan, and how did life change for you when you moved?

I moved to Rochester when I was eight. When we first moved here, my dad was still working at his job at Coach and Chanel in New York. I was so attached to my mom, but I still loved my dad a lot. When I was 17

younger, I’d wake up before he went to work, and I would wait so I could say bye to him. He was always coming and going because he would take flights to New York and not spend a lot of time in Michigan. Sometimes, he’d have to go to China for business trips.

What’s the story with your parents?

My dad is from Hong Kong, but he lived in Venezuela for a little bit, so he speaks Spanish [too]. My mom was really poor and lived in a village in Taishan (Guangdong, China). They immigrated around the same time (late teens) to New York.

They were high school sweethearts.”

I have a step-grandma, and it’s my mom’s aunt.

She was really mean to my mom when they were kids and never did anything for her. My mom had to steal pads from the store because she couldn’t afford them and

no one would give them to her. When my mom was a kid, she was sexually assaulted, and I think that’s why I have really strong triggers [to sexual assault]. *Note: I thought what Mel said demonstrates the inheritance of trauma between generations; the trauma that a parent endured indirectly affected her perspective and behavior. It’s a painful ‘inheritance’ and one that many other children of immigrants deal with to some extent. I did not add further explicit detail for presumable reasons.

How was your relationship with your dad and mom growing up?

My dad started getting angry when his dad passed away. [My dad] had a lot of regrets about their relationship. His dad was fully abusive – physically and emotionally. [My dad] emotionally abused us for the majority of high

school and into my freshman year of college. He doesn’t believe in therapy or being traumatized, but I think he’s [finally] getting it now. You can be a good person and still traumatize other people; a good person can still traumatize you.

Not that my parents didn’t love me, but I don’t think they loved me in ways that I could comprehend. They were loving parents especially when we were kids, but as we got older, I needed more words of affirmation or physical touch, and that’s something that they didn’t know how to do.

How did you interact with your identity as a queer Asian American throughout your life?

In second grade, it was Chinese New Years, and my mom wanted me to wear a traditional dress to school, and I didn’t. I didn’t want to be different, and I was really inse18

cure. She also wanted to put my hair in a bun, and I was sobbing all the way to school. I’ve thought about that [moment] and cried about that before.

Just imagine being my mom.

I was homophobic as a kid. Glee truly changed the trajectory of my life.

They were so cute, I couldn’t hate them. Kurt and Blaine! Come on. I was closeted from pretty much all of high school…

How is your relationship with your sister?

We just work really similarly; we think really similarly. I’m also very protective over her because I feel like she’s my baby.

I’d die for her. She’s important to me, and she gets me, and I get her.

Last semester was really hard for me because before I left for college, we were attached at the hip.

I would sleep in her room every single day, and I still do when I go [back] home. I have so much 19

love for her that anything she feels is something I’m feeling and vice-versa.

I have attachment issues where I have strong attachments, but it’s gotten better. I think it’s because I found more of my people here in Ann Arbor that it makes things better.

Interview by Elizabeth Hwang

Ally is a biracial Asian American woman born in Hong Kong and resided in New Zealand for most of her entire life. She is a sophomore in the College of LSA.

What is your family like?

My dad is American, and he met my mom in Taiwan. The two of them traveled Asia [together], and I was born in Hong Kong but as a U.S. cit-

izen because my dad is a U.S. citizen. I lived in Hong Kong for eight years, and we moved to New Zealand [afterwards].

How has the experience of your brother differ from your experience with your racial identity?

[My] older brother, he came to the U.S. for college as well. He’s three years older. I’m shocked by the different experiences we’ve had. He went to MIT, and almost one of his friends is an international student.

In [my brother’s] high school, every year level, they would test them and rank them. He was always in the top class, and everyone in his class was Asian, so he was always surrounded

by Asian or international kids.We’ve had very different experiences.

[When we were younger], he had three more years in Chinese school, so I

definitely think that made quite a fundamental difference [between us]– language wise.

How was growing up with biracial parents?

It was definitely something almost bizarre to have been raised in Hong Kong, where I feel like I never really thought about race and ethnicity. I was mixed and a lot of the other kids were as well. I feel like Hong Kong is quite a spot for international kids. For kindergarten, I went to a Chinese school, so when I was a kid I was pretty fluent in Chinese and English. Then, I went to an international school in first grade– we spoke English and Mandarin there.

But then, once we moved to New Zealand, it was a bit of a confusing circumstance. In New Zealand, the city I lived in had a pretty big Asian population. I didn’t really understand my identity, and I remember when I 20

first got there, my teacher was Taiwanese like my mom, and I joined the Chinese dance group that did traditional, cultural types of dancing. I remember as I aged, it became something I was embarrassed about.

How was your experience attending high school in New Zealand?

Once I was in high school, I felt like that’s when the pressure to fit in really started. For one, going into high school, everybody feels like that, but definitely, being white passing, I feel like, had a role in that. My school was somewhat diverse– [around] 40% of my school was Asian. I didn’t know anyone else who was mixed, and I feel like because I was white presenting, I kind of got adopted by the white kids. There was a noticeable separation [between students of different races]. We had a divide that really didn’t need to 21

be there.

It almost felt like being an undercover agent.

Being biracial meant that I witnessed so much racism that happens behind closed doors. I was assumed to be ‘with the white kids,’ so they thought they could say racist things around me.

How is race discussed and acknowledged in New Zealand culture?

New Zealand is often praised for being super progressive and multicultural, but I would say that’s definitely not quite the case. I lived in the biggest city in New Zealand, and we had a

decently diverse population, but drive anywhere else outside the city and it was very white. Even in the city, people were still racist but they were just more subtle with it.

It’s more about exclusion from certain circles– it’s more subtle things.

New Zealand has a colonial history just like the U.S. The indigenous people were there, and the British people came in. The indigenous people there face a lot of issues that Black people face [in America]: unequal incarceration rates, police brutality, and income inequality…

We had a big shooting in a mosque in 2019, and one of the first things that our prime ministers said was, ‘this is not us.’

And a bunch of people of color, especially people from the Muslim community, were coming forward and saying, ‘Actually, this is us. We’ve been pushed into the streets, but this is what our country is

like.’

How did you interact with your Asian identity living in New Zealand?

In my second or third year in high school, one of my white friends was in a modern chinese dance group. I haven’t seen a white person being interested in Asian culture like this before; people are always obsessed with [euro-centric ideas]. I auditioned and that group was almost entirely made up of Asian kids [with a handful of white kids], but that was one of the first spaces where I felt like I started to reconnect with my Asian heritage. It was really good for [sharing] experiences, like being a New Zealand Asian and having immigrant parents and all those things that are part of the Asian diaspora.”

How were your experiences in regards to understanding your biracial identity?

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I never quite know if I can call myself a person of color. I did a woman of color, feminist film class last semester, and we learned more about the origins of the phrase ‘woman of color.’ It’s more of a political identity than something that’s necessarily race-based.

I’ve often been told by other POC, ‘Of course you are — you are part of our community,’ but it’s sometimes hard. I guess that’s what white supremacy does – it tries to draw you in and tries to expand the circle of whiteness more and more to further marginalize other groups.

As a person with mixed backgrounds, how do you feel about ‘being American’?

This has been a lifelong struggle. Being primarily a U.S. citizen, how can I not call myself an American? I always considered myself somewhat American– I visited here, my 23

dad was from here, and I thought I felt like I understood American culture a lot more than the average New Zealander would.

When I moved here, [I thought], I’m not American. There’s so many minor cultural differences that shocked me the way I didn’t think they [would].

My whole life I thought I understood what America was like. When I was in New Zealand, I always felt too Americanized to be a true New Zealander, and then I came here and all anyone sees me as a Newzealander– that’s like my identity here now. It comes up with every person I meet. That’s never been a part of my identity until being here, so that’s really bizarre to me.

What are your favorite (and least favorite) parts of being in America?

[In New Zealand], our seasons aren’t significant, and our seasons are reversed. There is

something sweet about the American enthusiasm. New Zealanders are a lot more reserved.

You don’t see the same level of earnestness. I feel like Americans are very earnest and enthusiastic. I kind of like that. I also have grown to like the snow… America just does ‘holiday cheer’ particularly nicely. It’s nice that every state is like a different country here– there’s such a big variety of things and people. Everything you can ever imagine is here, and that is the best and the worst about [America].

There’s such great, funny, creative amazing people here, but also the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen. The dichotomy – the duality of the U.S. [Also], I genuinely am obsessed with REI and Trader Joe’s and Taco Bell. Drive-thrus for everything – that is not in New Zealand. A pharmacy drive-thru, a Starbucks drive-thru?

That is crazy to me, and obviously, capitalism is terrible, but the U.S. does such fun things with it. In New Zealand, we’re so far away from everything that we don’t get the silly ‘pumpkin flavored Cheerios’ in fall.

Interview by Mira SC with transcription by Phoebe Yi

By way of introduction, what do you study at the University of Michigan [and] where did you do your undergraduate degree?

I am doing my PhD in Resource Policy and Behavior, which is a PhD program in the School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). I got my bachelors in psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. From there, I went to a PhD program at MSU, Michigan State, 24

in community psychology. Did about three years there, before being brought over here with my advisor.

What got you interested in this change from psychology to what you study now?

I found that, broadly, psychology was really bad at talking about things that weren’t humans or animal models for human behavior. I am interested in land, and how people relate to land and how land relates to people.

But also I found myself being more and more disinterested in performing being a scientist, which I think a lot of psychology is trying to [do].

And I don’t like people.

That is probably the most honest thing, is that I am generally misanthropic.

So kind of being forced to study people, and understanding humans as the most basic unit, even in psychology; it was just kind of a dead end for 25

me, with my values and where I wanted to go.

In undergrad, what kind of communities were you a part of?

I was not part of any communities. I returned to undergrad when I was 23 or 24 after leaving home at 18. The closest thing to a community was a research group I was a part of. But even there, I wouldn’t say I was a community member. I had close friends and a close mentor, but it wasn’t a community in any regards.

Were you able to find a community later in your college career?

I don’t think I ever found a community, or what ‘community means.’ It also isn’t something I am looking for. I never really understood what people meant when they said they ‘found a community,’ especially in these kinds of college settings.

Like, I found people I can

talk to and commiserate with and engage with, but I think community is a bigger word than that.

Do you have any identities you want to share [with our readers]?

First and foremost, I am a settler. Here in the traditional and contemporary lands of the Three Fires Confederacy, so I accept that. But outside of contemporarily being a settler of these lands, my mother is native Hawaiian from the islands of Oahu and Moloka’i. Most of her family history is on Moloka’i, but she lived in Oahu and spent most of her time there. And then, there’s some German ancestry there. And my dad is Puerto Rican, from the village of San ​​ Germán, which is on the western side of the island. I am a father [and a] teacher.

And yeah, that’s kind of where I am at on those things.

Would you consider

yourself an activist or an organizer?

I worked professionally as an organizer for a few years before going to undergrad. Basically, I left home to do justice work. Part of what I was doing with my life was a lot of organizing, and kind of with that, a heavy amount of activism as well. I was a labor organizer. And then left that, went to school and kind of fell back right into that.

With that [experience], I did a lot of community organizing around school closures and police brutality in Baltimore.

When I was at Michigan State, I fell back into union organizing a lot. I was like ‘I’m here, I have to have a responsibility in the physical places I am in and the physical people I am around, so I need to be fighting on the front lines.’ And it wasn’t great, it was really hard and traumatic for me. I think overall I had a beneficial effect on the situ26

ation, and I think it went positively, but overall, super terrible experience.

I left union organizing because it didn’t have a vision for a non-college educated, indigenous person from an island who has been all over the world, who didn’t see injustices as just class warfare. It wasn’t that reductive. I was like, ‘Oh, I care about other things.’

So I left and realized what I was really going back to was fighting for my family — fighting for Puerto Rico and Hawaii as an extension of those things. Right now all of my work, or a lot of my time, is going towards doing frontline work in Hawaii, working with communities, organizations, individuals who are in Moloka’i, in Maui that are trying to push indigenous human rights, land back and all that stuff.

But I also do a lot of work in the continent with my professional work.

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How did your experiences then influence you further down the line?

I don’t really think that there are other experiences available for people nowadays, where they kind of get put, for lack of a better word, on the front lines of organizing like that; where you don’t already have those deep relationships.

Like when we think of, like, water protectors or land defenders, a lot of the community members or family members that do that, most likely have strong relationships and strong ties to each other that show up and do that work. But for me, I was an 18-year-old kid who got hired at a hotel and I had to develop quickly strong relationships. And that had to fight a very powerful multinational corporation. So ever since then… [sic] one I appreciate that I have been through some pretty terrible shit, that was re-

ally hard, and I would not recommend it to anyone, but I survived it so that’s good. And I think that survival helps me survive shit now, and then I think the biggest thing is understanding the value of relationships and deep relationships. But then also understanding the value of tension and aggression… understanding the value of conflict and direct action organizing and stuff like that. Having the confidence to be disruptive is something I live in right now, and I try to embody, and is central to all the work I do.

Can you give more specific examples of disruptiveness in the work you do right now?

I think there are a few ways. I try not to put myself in situations where I am trying to disrupt my immediate working situation. I’m working with some family and some colleagues in Hawai’i on a land back initiative to

buy about 56,000 acres and to put into a community trust. So that is disruption in the context of looking for movements and efforts and actions that are disruptive to the systems of oppression that directly affect the poor. I figured out that I need to go towards and work with people that are interested in those kinds of actions on a large scale, or at a scale for a community’s needs. On the more interpersonal side, I joke a lot with my advisor, but even though I am getting my degree on resource, policy, and behavior and I teach a class on environmental justice and sustainability, when students ask what the work is for — environmental justice or indigenous environmental justice — I’m like, it’s racism. Like your job, 90% of the time, is walking into a room and either having no one who agrees with you, one person who agrees with 28

you, or people who are actively trying to promote values that are detrimental to the people that you belong to. And your job is to survive that. So, in that context, being disruptive [asks] how you train a student in environmental justice to know when to say to a supervisor or a client they are consulting, basically what you are doing is racist. It’s not just about saying that, it’s also being able to survive the emotions of calling out a person or an organization and the retaliation and moving through that retaliation. So that is sort of the more interpersonal component that I bring to my work now.

Would you say that you are more interested in that interpersonal work?

Yeah yeah, definitely, that’s all I do. I don’t study things, I don’t know things, I just relate to people and I talk to them. And I try to have 29

good relationships with them. Or if I need to have bad relationships with them, or I need to facilitate a tense relationship with someone, I try to do that. Like even in the context where I am working in Hawaii, where I am trying to do this big land purchase, it all boils down to the dynamics of the room. And that is the case in every decision [that’s] ever been made.

So I really do believe in mastering myself, and trying to share to others how to be the person in the room you want to be.

And not in a manipulative or inauthentic way, but actually in a very authentic way that’s based in justice and restorative justice in particular, based in anti-oppression work. I’m a man of color, but I am also incredibly fair skinned, and I have a weird racial history. And when I walk into a room there are a lot of racial beliefs that land on my body, and people can

be like, ‘Oh that person is cool because he says radical shit.’ But that can easily be flipped and people can be like, ‘That person is aggressive,’ ‘That person is disrespectful.’ And like that’s what I spend my time thinking about how to master that dynamic and how to share that with my students. Like when I walk into a room, who am I, what am I doing, what does it mean when I want to push for justice.

How has that [mindset] unfolded specifically at the University of Michigan and through your experience at the University?

I have only been here for a year. So I don’t have much of an oral history.

But, not great, I don’t want to get into it. I don’t want to speak poorly of any person in particular in the faculty. Outside my relationship with my advisor and some students I have been able

to meet and my teaching experience, any kind of discussions I have had around justice or pushing for justice have gone sour or poorly. And that’s not surprising, and it shouldn’t be surprising.

This is not a safe space.

Fundamentally, [the University of Michigan] is not a safe space, and that is something to be understood. I really hoped it would be different, and it wasn’t. And I really didn’t have anything to base my belief on or my hope on, other than, for once, I would be teaching what I really wanted to teach and researching what I wanted to research.

So, I was really naively equating that hope and that freedom with other spaces, and that has not actually been the case.

What are the other spaces, in comparison to the University of Michigan, that you consider safe?

I don’t consider most 30

spaces safe. I mean, I consider some indigenous spaces that I have been involved in safe [and] some individual relationships safe. I don’t necessarily know if ‘safe’ is what we should be aspiring to when it comes to your work, especially in justice. Because oftentimes if you want to do justice work, the spaces you want to be in are probably not safe.

And probably aren’t safe for systemic reasons and may never be safe, in your lifetime at least.

There are places that I care about so much that I don’t care if they are safe or not. I don’t care about this place, [the University], to survive its lack of safety. There are very few places I would consider safe. And it’s not to oversell my lack of safety here; I know I am relatively safe and dependent on privileges as a cis male presenting person. But when it comes to my political and spiritual values 31

of safety, there are very few safe spaces.

And what are the values you associate with safe spaces? You mentioned that’s not necessarily what we are aspiring for, but when we do need those safe spaces, what are the values that you see?

I mean, in the current context that we are in, the best we can hope for is that your home is safe.

Or a domicile that you are in or the immediate relationships you have [are safe], and whatever kind of social, psychological, material kind of configuration of home is. And what that means is values like trust, reciprocity and loyalty, selflessness, collectiveness, collective wellbeing.

Those are the values that I would espouse in there.

Obviously, with a heavy dose of anti-oppression and anti-colonialism.

How did you get in-

volved with your work in Hawaii?

Family. I shouldn’t say that, because I knew of the organization that is spearheading this before.

But I got put into contact with the executive director, through my advisor, and we found out we were related to each other. We are actually very close to the same cousin. I always wanted to go back to Moloka’i, my mom is going to retire there, I always wanted to take care of her, I want to be married there, I want to raise my kid there. So there is no question [of] where I was going, so I just made my research in that space. So to answer your question to how I did that, I didn’t give myself a choice in getting involved in that work.

You cited family as something that is very important in the work you do — can you talk about that more?

I am very close to my family. I wouldn’t say we look very close on the [surface], but we are incredibly loyal. It’s always been us against the world, even though sometimes it’s us against us. My parents are both the first ones of their immediate family to leave the island. They met each other when they were 18 and 21. They had a shotgun wedding, because my brother was [born] out of wedlock. Even though things were tense, they shared ethics and values of ‘you don’t go back on your responsibilities and promises, even though you break things over time or lie.’ There is this expectation and reliability that is the only thing left when you die. More so than anything else. That is what I was raised in.

I had a really good relationship with my mom growing up, I probably wouldn’t be here without the love and support she gave me. I got into justice 32

work because I was so pissed at the world. I was pissed at the world because of how my family life was going and kind of what I saw going on out there. My dad was in the army; he was enlisted. And that sucked. I saw everything sucking around me, and I grew up seeing my dad go to the Gulf and Eastern Europe. 9/11 [and] Afghanistan — I saw all that shit happening, I grew up seeing that effect on war fighters and their families. And I was seeing all this shit happening back home with my islands.

We’d go home, and we didn’t live in the greatest parts of the islands. And I was just angry, and it was only figured out later that this anger was that the people I cared about were hurt by this thing.

And I didn’t want anything to hurt my family.

So it has just kind of been more fleshed out in my older age.

33

How have your identities influenced your experience in higher education?

I know enough about psychometrics and population statistics and the census to know how this shit is just laughable. What I mean by laughable is this idea of representation, diversity. PI’s make up less than a percent of a percent of all PhD’s in this country. That is not necessarily the case for Puerto Rico, but being someone who grew up in the military, traveling all over, has these connections and trying to apply this to how I see the world, is extremely isolating. I know how hard it was for me to get here, but I don’t see this stuff changing for anyone anytime soon. So it’s just, like, laughable. I guess to put it this way, I teach at a school where most people want to go on vacation to where I am from. And that’s weird.

saw something special Do you have advice to in me, and she was like, share with a younger ‘I am going to work with PI/Oceanic student — you despite your own rewhat would you tell sistance and go through them? this process and teach I have so many things I you all the tricks.’ If I can say. It’s tough. If you didn’t do that, I would be are already here, make in so much student debt. them pay for it. Whenever I worked off to pay for I meet an indigenous stu- school, besides having dent, a student of color, some funds saved for me and they are doing well in by my parents. I worked an undergrad or masters through undergrad and program, and I hear they [have] only been paid to are paying for this shit, go to school afterwards.

I’m like, fuck that. That And I think that should be is so bad. But we are so what it is like for everyrare, that the fetish pays. one, but particularly for And it kills me that there students of color and are so many ways that indigenous students. But indigenous students can this place fucking sucks, do this work and not pay. it’s dangerous, it’s vioThat really kills me that lent, it will chew you up, people are spending so it will make you second much money because guess yourself, [and] it they don’t have the train- will change you. But it is ing or support. I had this also a place of immense woman who was a godprivilege and power. Like send who only worked this is the best I have with international stuever had. So, I want more dents or students of color people to come here, and at the University of Mary- I want more people to land Baltimore County. I come into these spaces worked with her, and she for free. Because if they 34

don’t and have to pay to be here, I can’t imagine having debt and having to deal with the shit I deal with.

What support systems do you see lacking in the University of Michigan and higher education? And is the biggest system of support free education?

Yeah, free education or incredibly reduced, and subsidized education has clearly been seen in other countries as a social good. The issue I see is that students can go to college if they use the right things and do the right things, but that system is predicated on you also performing and confining yourself in a way no one else has to: getting straight A’s, applying to a hundred different scholarships, fellowships, or certain internships, being able to write incredibly well so that your personal statement [stands out].

35

I would love it if we can just give free rides to the poorest performing students — no expectations.

So it’s a free thing, right.

So students apply and by signing up they can go.

They are going to have these expectations or criteria — investing in the communities so that more students can reach those criteria. If you expect these students to operate above and beyond their white peers, maybe you should be funding these particular communities in a way that allows them to be achieving these things.

There is a lot where the University can be achieving these things in their direct vicinity. But it’s a business, and I don’t expect it to do good. I don’t expect it to go against its profit interests.

In an ideal world, do you wish the University wasn’t a business?

Well, in an ideal world, I would wish I was on a beach, drunk all the time.

But I don’t know, that’s a tough question. In an ideal world, I don’t believe that the University is necessary or important.

I’m just here and it’s here right now.

Interview by Mira SC with transcription by Phoebe Yi

Prof. Desai is the head of the Asian/Pacific-Islander American Studies Program in the American Culture Department at U-M. He is the author of The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature & Transnational Refraction (2020), published by Temple University Press as part of the Asian American History and Culture Series, and served on the Board of Directors for the South Asian American Digital Archive

Something we are asking all of our contributors is if they have any identities that they want to share with the readers — in the most expensive terms.

I identify as South Asian American. I guess that is the most salient self identification in terms of my ethnic and racial background, but also a cis-het guy. I would [also] say professor, educator, writer. I think writing is really, really important to me.

Can you tell me about yourself, and where you grew up?

I was born in California, [around] the San Jose area, but I grew up in Michigan. My parents moved here when I was seven, [and] I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, north of Troy. I came to the University of Michigan as an undergraduate in 1998, and then I graduated in 2002. Had a couple of years off, but then I started grad school 36

at Michigan in English, then I taught at Syracuse after I finished my PhD, and came back. So I’ve been at Michigan for what, like, 35 years?

What drew you to Michigan for undergrad?

For my family, going out of state wasn’t really an option. It was between Michigan State, Michigan, and Wayne State.

When I was growing up, there wasn’t much imagination [as] to where to go to college. It was because in-state tuition was so much cheaper, you know? So that was basically it. I didn’t even know what was outside of Michigan; I didn’t even know what a small liberal arts college was. It was just like, go to an in-state school, whichever is the best.

If you had [exposure to that small liberal arts colleges], do you think you would have chosen that path? How do 37

you see yourself having changed from your years in undergrad?

It’s been so long since I left my parents house.

But it was kind of a strict house. There was a lot of pressure to be a doctor, you know? That’s why it was like, go to one of these schools, but the real goal was med school. And I think that was more my dad’s goal than my own goal. I think that if I had known about a small liberal arts college, I definitely would have been interested. But there were a lot of things that I didn’t see possible at the time, [with] my family situation and everything.

I went to Michigan and started pre-med, but there was a creative writing class I took, and it literally changed my life. I was in bands, I always liked creative outlets since I was really young. But a lot of that was — it wasn’t like it was discouraged — but

there was a lot of fear of not doing a practical job.

There was a lot of my parent’s first generation immigrant fear around being able to sustain yourself; there is this kind of survival mentality. I think if I had known about a small liberal arts college, I would have been interested. But when I think back to, however long ago — 25 years ago —I think it was beyond my imagination.

I think college was just a way, a kind of four year path, to a job as an engineer or a doctor. But that was a really limited imagination. And so in terms of the other dreams I had as a teenager, which at the time would have been to be a rock star, that was like a pipe dream. Those were just fantasies; those just felt like the kind of things I was thinking about as a young person. There didn’t seem like a path to actually living a creative life. I couldn’t figure out

how to get there, the only thing I saw in front of me was a road to medicine or something really practical.

And has that understanding changed? And when did you see that begin to change for yourself?

I think this creative writing class was really important. It was taught by this GSI, his name is Eric Lee Braden, don’t know where he is anymore. But in retrospect, I think I see now that I took it more seriously than everybody in that class. I was just so into it. That [class] seemed to open up this possibility of the arts as a world that you can kind of live in. I didn’t grow up knowing anyone that was remotely in the arts.

It was just something that people did. My dad would always play music and stuff like that, but more as a hobby. It was seeing people that were pursuing it [art/the 38

creatives] in these real ways, in different ways: as a professor in literature or a creative writer in an MFA program. That was really really impactful. That was my sophomore year in college that I took that class and this world opened up. Even until this day, I can go back to that. You know your memory is such that there is this certain type of feeling you can tap into… I still feel that when I think back to that class — [it] stirred up something that was really important.

PhD process, you pick a topic that is very resonant with you. There’s this thing that happens — when you talk to other professors, they probably will say this to you. There is so much of you in your dissertation project, whether you realize it or not. Right, like as a PhD, you are writing something that oftentimes seems like it is a couple degrees away from who you are.

My book was about the 1920s and these Indian American intellectuals who are sharing their ideas of anticolonialism.

Like, what does that How have your interhave anything to do with ests evolved throughout somebody born in the your academic career 80s? But you know, it in relation to how you was about this sort of think about creative transnational exchange writing and what you and ways of seeing the teach now? world through different I think it keeps evolving. lenses. And these lenses I did my PhD in English. had something to do with It was very, very interest- myself. I guess this is ing. In grad school I just how this interest in literagot interested in literary ture manifested in my 20s studies, a lot of history [and] in my PhD. I think too, and then with the getting hired at the Amer39

ican Culture department was really interesting, because it was the first time I was not in English [as a discipline]. I was teaching in the English department, and then I came to American Culture - Ethnic Studies, [which] was much more interdependent and interdisciplinary.

I think the place where a lot of my thinking evolved was in classes, and it just keeps shifting. I think the classroom space was really important, obviously learning a lot, [but also] being challenged in these new ways. I think the classroom space is really central.

Does that have to do with the student-professor relationship?

You can’t be lazy as a teacher. The world just keeps shifting, and young people arrive with new ideas, and they’re a reflection of a world that is new and forward-looking.

I kind of feel my age — like it’s been ten years

since my first year as a professor, almost twenty years since I started as a grad student. The beginning of grad school was when I first taught— the the world’s very different from between 2004, 2011 and 2022. And so I think students continue to push certain conversations in directions that are different from when I first learned ideas around x, y,or z. I can be more concrete about this…

When I taught Asian American literature for the first time, I think it was around 2011, to teaching it now — the literature was in a completely different place than it was ten years ago. Like this book didn’t exist, [along with] the sophisticated conversations about gender, race, anti-blackness. Within the South Asian American community, there’s a way more sophisticated conversation around caste that didn’t exist; that wasn’t developed in 40

the diaspora. So like the classroom space consistently evolves; from my perspective it becomes more sophisticated. You’ll see it too. Ten years of conversation is going to be so different. Your formative experiences will be a moment of time that you can’t return to. You either keep up with it, or you get left in the dust.

It’s really interesting [to think of] classrooms as this intersect between professors, that are a little more static, and students, coming in and out. How do you see student organizations’ role in the relationship between racial justice and departments like American Culture and Ethnic Studies?

What’s the role between student activism and departments, faculty and staff… I think it’s really central. If there wasn’t student activism, there wouldn’t be ethnic studies programs. I think that 41

is kind of fundamental.

It’s because of student activism that these kinds of spaces within the University developed in the first place. Otherwise, I think the University would look very different. From my perspective, there would be more of these traditional disciplinary spaces. Like it wasn’t a bunch of students that banded together to start the English department.

You know what I mean?

Like it’s just a different dynamic. There were a lot of times when these spaces were just created as a result of that kind of advocacy. So that’s the kind of relationship.

What does it mean for programs like ethnic studies to be centered around students organizing?

Hmm I don’t know, what do you think?

I am interested in that kind of back and forth in the classroom [that

happens with American Culture and Ethnic Studies]. It’s a program that I see as much more expansive than anything else in academia.

It’s so open to evolving in a way that anthropology is still working out.

American culture is so rooted in the present.

Yeah it is, even for folks whose research is in the past, you’re obviously going to be shaped by your present concerns.

It makes it really dynamic, maybe difficult too. There’s something about being able to teach in these departments, maybe be a student in these departments too — there has to be this kind of, you can’t dig your heels in and say ‘this is what it is.’ You have to be open to the idea that it is evolving; you have to relinquish some of that — I don’t want to say power [because] I don’t think it’s quite that. But you have to share the space, give the students some

agency in shaping the curriculum, but also, you know, accept your role in helming it.

Do you think that is the intention of larger academia?

I think it can be. I think there is something to be said about the kind of the training, the time, the rigor and all of those things that somebody that got the PhD and now a professor has been through. There is a tension between hierarchy between the teacher and the student. It’s totally vertical, right? There are different forms of pedagogy that try to form a more horizontal relationship, but there is always going to be a tension between that. I think certain subject matters kind of lend themselves to these different orientations, too. And I think that’s for teacher and student both, I don’t know how much I need a horizontal relationship to 42

the prof that is teaching me calculus. Cool, but it doesn’t really matter.

You know when you are talking about issues that are so difficult and present, ones of which really tapping into the subjective experience of people it is much more productive to create a different sort of space.

And the thing I remember so much in college, is that I took this class that was related to the prison creative art project, and we read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and the teacher wasn’t doing anything on the chalkboard. I was so confused by it, I was used to, ‘that’s the authority — here are the students, I listen to what he says.’ And the way I found success as a young student like in high school, because I kind of struggled with it. It was like, memorize everything on that board and I will succeed, right?

And to create this new 43

space where it wasn’t really clear, about how this works, it was really confusing as a student, but a huge learning experience. I remember the teacher at the time was Buzz Alexander. Our assignment was to write in a journal, and he would respond to that journal, like, every week or something like that. I still have it. First of all, I don’t know how he put so much feedback and stuff like that. And the other piece of that is for that class, we would go into, like, a juvenile detention center and work with people who were a little younger than us who were in those circumstances and try to think about how to create this space where [there is] a clear hierarchy. Like, we are University of Michigan college students going into this space, but like how can you still create a space of education? And it was challenging, it was really challenging. There’s

something about there’s really different models, nobody does it the same even in our program, yeah it’s challenging you know.

because that’s what they did. And probably still do that. But we wrote letters to the then governor of Texas, George Bush, to express our anger that there was this woman It seems that you have that was being slated a lot of memories from for execution. Amnesty when you were an is still very anti-death undergraduate at the penalty. I remember I University of Michigan, got a letter back from which is amazing. As George Bush, I am sure an undergraduate, what it’s some form letter that communities or organi- their staff wrote. It was zations were you a part like, ‘thanks for the letter.’ of? And like how did And I remember that was the different spheres of the kind of space I was your life intersect if they seeking out. And I wasn’t did? part of it, I remember I felt pretty isolated in my going to a couple meetundergraduate experiings. I had a hard time ence. I don’t think I was finding a space. I remempart of UAAO; I don’t ber going to the Indian think I was a part of any Students Association, I undergraduate student wasn’t really the kind of associations. I remember young person that was when I was in my first interested in that kind of year, this was the late cultural performance, I 90s, I remember joining didn’t want to do that. So Amnesty International be- I had a hard time looking cause I heard of it growfor those spaces. For me, ing up from bands that it was really the creative I liked. And there was a writing community. And letter writing campaign, that was probably be44

cause I just go to a lot of readings. I guess I was finding spaces less from student organizations, I was also a really, really shy person too, so I was trying to find spaces that were exciting and interesting. For me, it was seeing bands play or readings and stuff like that. So really creative performing spaces were really exciting to me.

You mentioned that you were kind of seeking spaces more like Amnesty International, could you go more into that?

I think I was, like many college students, trying to figure out what politics and political orientation [was] outside high school. It was the late 90’s, early 2000s — I was there from ’98 to 2002, so there was a lot of, like, trying to understand how the world worked and better understand where my political orientation was. Because Amnesty 45

was something I heard while growing up, and to see it in a college space, I was interested. I think it was also the time of the Seattle WTO protests, which I didn’t understand. There was a real kind of reaction to globalization coming from the left, but you know that’s a different word now. And there were these really dramatic, violent clashes with the police in Seattle in 2000. I didn’t really have a context for it, but I was curious on what that was. I think I was just trying to figure it out. Like having this sort of political inclination and like seeing the death penalty too, right? These sort of disparate political causes that were in places where I was just starting to understand how power operated, how it was working in the United States, how it was sort of like working globally too. There was another moment, my senior year, which was like 2001. So

in the beginning there was the September 11th attacks and so that was also a moment of — I wouldn’t say clarity — but a moment of political education. That moment I was in the PCAP class, so we were thinking of mass incarceration, kind of [taking a] critical look on America’s domestic and foreign policy. It was all kind of a mess of things, but I was also trying to figure out what I think of these things.

You mentioned your undergraduate years throughout the 90s and a little about 9/11. How did you see yourself change from undergraduate to graduate to masters, but also in relation to a changing historical moment?

I graduated in 2002, and I started grad school in 2004. Between that time, the war had started. So, I still think about it as this incredibly dark period, you know. I remember

going to anti-war protests, and there were massive protests against the US invasion in Iraq.

Like it comes back here, those memories and it kind of crystallizes those feelings kind of. Like with the War in Ukraine, you see Russia invade Ukraine and you know we saw the US invasion of Iraq, a sovereign state. And like that was a moment of having a better sense of what I believe politically, but also a feeling of futility.

Because everything else that came with the War on Terror, surveillance, and it continues to be very dark. Everything, I remember this onslaught of more than a moment, but a certain kind of beginning of an era or epoch. It’s weird to look back on that, like that was me turning twenty, and these things are happening historically, and it’s remembering how it felt like, but you also don’t know how it’s 46

going to unfold. So like the 2000 election where Bush was elected, that was very disheartening. 2001, 9/11, War on Terror. And then in 2004 there was this, that was disheartening, it felt like this groundswell of activism of different stripes and feelings and sentiments to vote Bush out.

And that didn’t happen.

I thought that was very disheartening. That’s what I remember, and I always continue with this, with your generation. Because probably the first president you remember is Obama, right?

Vaguely Bush. But, I was born after 9/11. I have no understanding of life without the internet. We just don’t really have a moment to compare it to.

I feel so fortunate to remember a world before it. I don’t know — I really admire young people who make it through.

Like it feels really difficult 47

to grow up now.

How do you define activism, advocacy, and organizing, and how do you see yourself in relation to those?

I think there’s like different scales of it, you know? Like there is student activism where they are trying to affect change on campus and how the university looks like. And then there are other forms of work, like organizing and activism outside the campus, which work at the scale of different communities and have different techniques and different strategies. Whether it’s electoral politics or working around bills, whether it’s labor. Like in grad school, I was part of GEO, that was an important piece of political education.

Because on one hand, I was part of the graduate student union, but what I remember seeing as part of the culture of GEO was that people were also in-

volved with forms of political organizing outside of negotiating contracts on campus. I remember this very vividly. I think I became more active in GEO because GEO was one of the groups that [was] available to me to organize against what was known as Prop 2.

Prop 2 was the bill that banned affirmative action in the state of Michigan, so GEO was very much in support of affirmative action. Anything to support students of color on campus, that was where GEO politics were. Again, Prop 2 passed, which is what ended affirmative action in Michigan. That was really disheartening.

But like, I think that was my entry point to organizing in a lot of ways. Being part of this union, this kind of concerted effort, pushing against a bill that we thought was really harmful. But then there’s all kinds of different forms of activism, and, like, I have never been a

part of a political party.

I have been supportive of certain kinds of campaigns for candidates, for me, I have never really been connected like that.

Anyway, the question about advocacy, activism, I don’t know. This is what I would say if I ought to be honest, I don’t really see myself as an activist and that’s not out of, like, I don’t see myself as an activist because I don’t think I put in that kind of work. It’s out of reverence for the people who actually put in that work. That I don’t want to conflate the role of someone who is an educator, like a professor who talks about these issues, and creates spaces in the classroom that can interrogate them. I don’t want to conflate that with activism, which I see as multipronged but also really, really difficult.

So it’s out of reverence for activists. I don’t put in that kind of work, but I think it’s central and 48

important, and I’d like to be part of protests when I can. But joining a protest doesn’t make you an activist either — you are supporting people who have organized these efforts. I can see myself in that role, I can see how those debates, that effort for justice can inform the classroom. But I don’t see them as the same thing. I think other people are in different places with that. I would say that one time in grad school, this professor spoke who was really revered and stuff. At the time, he said, ‘I see my classroom as my activism now,’ and I remember thinking, ‘What? What are you talking about?

Like that’s it?’. I think that’s where it’s coming from personally, I just don’t at the time, because I was young, I was like ‘that’s all you do?’

This prof is like, ‘I feel so busy teaching.’ All this administrative stuff, it’s not that I don’t have time 49

for it, I feel like this is the job. This is the work with perhaps larger themes of social justice. What does social justice look like? I don’t know. It just feels different, you know?

The theme of this zine is ‘The Liberation Archive’: how do you define liberation in relation to Asian American, Pacific Islander/Oceanic communities and what does liberation mean to you and meant to you?

It’s really hard to answer that without diving toward the platitude that sounds right — like sound bites. But I feel, sometimes, they’re really valuable. ‘You’re not free until everyone is free,’ is really valuable, especially [for] somebody who has evolved a lot to think of the positions of power and privilege that I’ve been a beneficiary of and the way that it lands on people. What’s important for me in any consider-

ation of liberation would be to think about how we are part of a larger set of forces that disempower people and recognizing the ways that you can be complicit in that, or you can challenge it.

That is how I can begin to look at liberation. But that horizon is so hard to imagine.

What does liberation mean to AAPI communities and the South Asian American community?

I think what’s really important is to think about the internal dynamics of power and privilege within [the AA and PI communities] and how you can really meaningfully deconstruct the [AAPI] community. I grew up Hindu, and I grew up in a community that later I understood was upper caste, and I can see how Hindu nationalism or upper caste identity, which might not have been legible to me as a young

person, is a structure that oppresses minorities within the South Asian community. And without tending to that and having honest conversations about that we’re not going to go anywhere.

That’s what I feel. I’m having those difficult conversations and thinking about what it means to upend and dismantle those structures, which sometimes seem impossible.

That’s fascinating. Do you see liberation for the Asian American community as in some ways internal? Is that a stepping stone?

I think so. I feel like the more resonant one, [with] so many more conversations surrounding [it], is when Asian American individuals start to recognize themselves as complicit in the system of white supremacy that suppresses Black, indigenous, Latinx. Recognizing that is very important.

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I think that’s a step towards liberation. That’s a familiar conversation, and I think what’s so powerful about it is you kind of grew up internalizing ideas of the model minority without recognizing that they’re the truth or just a stereotype — without recognizing the interconnections. It’s more than just an unfortunate interpretation.

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Interview by Ally Choi Interview with Surabhi Balachander, instructor of English 230 / American Culture 301 / Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies 301: Introduction to the Short Story and Novel: Constructing Asian American Stories

Q: Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up?

Are you or your parents immigrants? How has your upbringing shaped your identity?

I was born in the Bay Area, but moved to Indiana when I was five, in 2001. Right after we moved to Indiana, 9/11 happened, which is maybe the biggest thing that shaped my understanding of race. At an early age, it felt really distinct to me that race and culture were different. My parents are immigrants from India; my dad came in 1985, and my mom came in 1982. They’re both very into balance– learning various things from everyone we encounter in the US, but also from our traditional culture. I grew up in a really strange place to be growing up– in the shadow of 9/11, where it was extremely white. Lots of racism at school. My understanding and my early identity were really, really shaped by racism, and I didn’t quite fully unpack that until I got to college.

Q: What made you decide to study English with a Creative Writing emphasis and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity?

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I always saw the world through words and texts and thought about how people express themselves as indications of big ideas, bigger concepts. That’s just how my brain approaches big problems, and still is.

I will work with other disciplines, but read them like a literary scholar. I was also really interested in creative writing. So I wanted to do English from an early age, but I didn’t even know that ethnic studies was a field until I came to college. As a freshman, I met a lot of people who were majoring in ethnic studies, and realized that that was something I wanted to do. Those were the questions that I was interested in – interrogating race and ethnicity in the US – so that’s why I added that major too.

Q: After studying at Stanford in California, was there a cultural shift when you came back to the Midwest?

I grew up in the Midwest, so it felt like coming home.

There’s things about Ann Arbor that are really similar to where I grew up, although it’s a slightly different population (politically), in a good way. It felt good coming back, as being consistently Asian American in the Midwest is how I’ve always been. I’d been in California for five years and built up a lot of great relationships and community. It’s been harder to build new networks in Michigan because of the pandemic, but I’ve been able to tap into things that I was involved with back in California. For the last seven years, I’ve been working with an organization called API Equality Northern California, which is for queer and trans Asian and Pacific Islanders. Because of the pandemic, I was able to put together a whole website project and launch the closing of an oral history project that we’ve been doing for many years. I wouldn’t have been able to take part of that pre-pandemic if I 53

hadn’t been in the Bay area.

Q: Are there specific values that guide you in your work with APIENC? Working with APIENC has been one of the great joys and big things of my life. I started working with them as a part of a class when I was a sophomore in college, followed by a summer internship, and have volunteered with them ever since. I’ve learned a lot that has reshaped how I think about the world. For one, we prioritize thinking of our communities as abundant, rather than operating from a place of scarcity.

A lot of organizing and activism operates from this place of ‘it’s never enough,’ or ‘we’re never enough.’

Instead, we stress that our community has what we need, and that we are there for each other, which makes us more willing to ask for help, more willing to believe in what we’re actually doing. That’s the most radical thought I’ve gotten from it.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the class Constructing Asian American Stories? Are you hoping to teach this class or a similar one next year?

I really felt called to teach in Asian American studies.

My own experience taking classes in Asian American studies has been scattershot, because even at a school with as much money as Stanford, ethnic studies is still underfunded. It depended on which faculty members were willing to give their time– it wasn’t a part of their official job. So I wanted to provide something that I didn’t have when I was an undergrad– an Asian American lit course. When I took an intro to narrative course as an undergrad, we only read white people, basically. The only non-white creator we interacted with was director Kurosawa, when 54

we watched Rashomon. We read a lot of things like Robinson Crusoe and Emma, so I was like, why can’t we do an intro to fiction class with all the Asian American novels and short stories? I thought about all of these different kinds of genres, formal conventions, authors, and issues that we’re working through in the class. It would be a really great way to explore both Asian American studies and teaching fiction, and work with more students of color and Asian American students at Michigan. I will be on fellowship and not teaching next year, but I would love to teach it again sometime in my life.

Q: Did the pandemic and anti-Asian violence also spur you to teach this class, or relate to anything you’ve been involved in with APIENC recently?

I would have taught this anyway. Anti-Asian violence is on my mind, because I’m an Asian American person alive right now. Especially the discourse around current violence– it’s a larger and longer pattern of both anti-Asian racism and pitting black and Asian communities against each other, which has been a very upsetting part of it. We’re seeing some of that stuff reflected in our texts, and I’m not making it a number one concern of the course. I also think students seem constantly overwhelmed, and I didn’t want the course to get too heavy all the time. But things like Yamamoto’s Wilshire Bus and some aspects of No-no Boy speak to some of what’s going on in the world right now. It’s in the back of my mind, but I don’t want to make it the number one thing we talk about in class.

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Q: What Asian American or other texts have impacted you most? Which authors in general have influenced you?

The Joy Luck Club is a landmark in my reading career, which I read in high school on my own, and then again in senior year. Our teacher would awkwardly gesture at the Asians, who were all friends and sat together, and it became this kind of anthropological project; it was a mess.

My dissertation is about rurality as an identity and how that interacts with racial identity in the environment. I work generally from a comparative ethnic studies perspective, where Asian American studies is one part of and I’m really interested in how people relate to place. On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous has some really interesting rural, urban aspects.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ocean Vuong for almost ten years. Other books we’ve read in this class like Hisaye Yamamoto’s stories are something I’m working on in my dissertation. The book that set me on the current research path that I’ve been on for seven years – kind of wild – is Jean Toomer’s Cane, which I taught last year in my class. I also taught Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of which covers race, place, and sexuality. Finally, a lot of writers, who are either my mentors, friends, or peers, have been really influential. My undergrad mentor who passed away in 2020, Eavan Boland, was just iconic as a teacher, so generous with everything she did. But even more than her poems, her presence shapes everything I do. Another mentor who has a new book coming out next month is Solmaz Sharif, who really reimagines what poetry can do. It’s fun to get to that level in life where my peers are writing some of my favorite books. Anthony So is someone who I’d gone to school with, and 56

he’s passed away too, but it’s wild to remember him making an awkward transition from stand-up comedy to creative nonfiction; now he’s written one of my favorite books of short stories. The most recent book I read that I absolutely loved was Return Flight by my friend Jennifer Huang who got their MFA here.

Q: Have you written or published anything?

A lot of my undergrad training is in writing poetry; I’ve published some scattered poems. My most recent one was all the way back in 2019, but it was in The Margins, which is the Asian American writers workshop publication, and it’s about my hometown in Indiana. Other than that, I’ve been preparing things for publication mostly. My friend and colleague and I wrote a short piece about the GEO strike last year that some people said some wild and pretty racist things about, honestly. So that was an experience (laughs). I’ve been working on editing a special issue of the journal Western American literature, for which I’m writing an introduction.

Q: Do you have a favorite piece that you’ve written– anything that you feel especially proud of, or close to?

That last poem, called Writing Home, was the heart of my thesis, which was on agriculture and race, and it was a mix of critical essays and poems about my own experience growing up in Indiana. It meant a lot to me, personally, to write it. I learned about myself, and it meant a lot to have it out in the world in a publication that I really admire.

See more of Surabhi’s poetry and prose at https://poesiesurabhi. github.io/pages/publications.html

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Q: Do you have any advice for budding Asian American writers or creators?

Everyone wants to write towards their personal experience; that’s really common advice. Some uncommon advice: don’t feel like you have to give into the master narratives of Asian American experience to be successful, which is starting to become more of a discourse among Asian American writers. People will make fun of the “diaspora poem” or there are tropes of “you need to return to your motherland and discover yourself.” If those are the things that are really animating you, that’s great. But even if they don’t, you probably have a lot to say. That fits in with my research area of thinking about Asian Americans in rural areas, where people would think that they’re out of place. When I went to college, most Asian Americans were from majority or plurality Asian places, like California. I would talk about weird and racist things that had happened to me when I was growing up, and they’d be like that sounds like it was from the 80’s! There was this sense of being out of time and not a part of today’s Asian American experience. And embrace cross-racial solidarity. With everything that’s been going on in the world, we need to prioritize that in our personal relationships and in our work. We want to speak to Asian American audiences, but not to ignore other people of color. We want to be able to build bridges, think across differences, and work together for lateral racial solidarity.

Interview by Elizabeth Hwang

Shiryn, who is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (the capital), came to America with a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan. They are an LSA Sophomore majoring in Sociology with a minor in Energy Science & Policy

Q: How is your life different in Malaysia compared to here (in the U.S.)?

A: I’d say my life in Malaysia is really different here, just because of the person that I am. I never felt so visibly Muslim and visibly Asian. But otherwise, not much has changed in terms of friends because there is such a big asian community here and I really rely on them a lot.

Q: What was your family like growing up?

A: I’m the oldest daughter of three kids, and [my mom] always made sure that I made a good example.

She didn’t get the opportunity to do what I can do now. [When she was younger], she got a scholarship to study in the U.K, but because of societal standards [and her mother’s disapproval], she put it aside and put her family first. She made sure that I had a choice in what I wanted to do.

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Q: How does access to education abroad look like in Malaysia?

A: Typically, city kids [who live in the capital] learn English and a lot of things are accessible in English, whereas, outside of Kuala Lumpur, it’s all Bahasa Melayu, which is our national language. There’s this really interesting stigma if you come together with people from different states, and they hear you speak English, they’re always a bit apprehensive to talk to you. Before I came [to the States], I went to a pre-university program, just to prepare myself and the other scholars before we flew to America. That was when I met friends from all different states in Malaysia.

Activities and classes are mostly concentrated in the city. [Partly], you get those merit scholarships because of your socioeconomic status. You can’t be too poor to get a scholarship because you need to be able to afford things [like un-imbursed supplies].

Q: How did your experiences and perceptions change when you began attending university in America?

A: Every waking day, I learn something new. I learned in a sociology class (SOC 495) about *social breaches and *social rupture and the professor asked if anyone [in class] went through social rupture, and I raised my hand and I said, ‘every single day is a social breach for me’ [because] I’m not from here.

It’s daunting. *social rupture: social breach over a long period of time *social breach: a circumstance or set of circumstances that is contrary to social norms and makes one rethink the predictability of their own social standing

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Q: How is your experience facilitating conversation as a teacher’s assistant?

I’m a TA for ALA 122, Race and Ethnicity. I’m facilitating conversation and dialogue. When I walk around, I feel like there’s an ‘ask me anything’ [sign] pasted behind my back, but in the class, I feel like I’m open to accepting questions that [students] have. I feel that classes like these are really important.

[In this type of learning space], students of color kind of have to be the teachers, more than they can learn. We talked about how it’s a privilege for white people to take from these experiences and learn from them because they don’t have to go through them [first-handedly]. They need to be able to recognize that just being in that space and listening to [others] is a privilege that not many people get.

Q: How do you interact with the idea of an ‘American identity’?

The first time I came here I remember thinking I would love to be a white, blonde, blue-eyed girl for one day, and I want to see how they live. It’s like two different realities. I feel grounded enough in my identity now where I feel comfortable where I am and how I go about society and what I choose to do.

Q: How do you interact with the Malaysian community here?

I [used to] idealize America [as a place] where you can be an independent individual. Back in Malaysia, I think I depended on people who looked like me, talked like me, and thought the same things as me.

I wanted to be in a space where I’d be able to think for myself, and I came here and I realized that I can do those things, but also, I need to be around Malay61

sians. I can’t lose that part of myself. They make me feel really at home.

Q: What is your favorite part about living in the States?

My favorite part so far is seeing snow fall and waking up to snow. I feel like connecting with someone over the weather is so American. In Malaysia, it’s so hot, what do you say, ‘it’s hot’? That’s it - conversation ends. [Here], you can strike such interesting conversations with people just based on [the snow]. I think that’s really nice – it’s just these little things. But part of me feels like I’m here as a temporary figure, and I will leave, so it doesn’t make sense for me to make such permanent connections in certain situations. I have yet to find my actual footing here, but I feel like by the time I do, I’ll have to leave.

Q: What is your least favorite part about living in the States?

Fighting with Americans is so comedic. [In one situation, an acquaintance] treated me so rudely [based on her identity], and since then, I’ve been more cautious of people that I interact with. I interact with people in a very direct and monotone way. It’s just one of the joys of working here in America.

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Identity is a complex matter. With the loosest of definitions in mind, we asked UAAO’s Zine Team what identities they wanted to share with our readers. We also asked them the following question — What drew you to UAAO’s Zine Team and more specifically this edition: The Liberation Archive?

Ally Choi is a first-year studying Creative Writing and Literature from San Francisco, CA “I identify as an Asian American writer and creative! I wanted to get more involved in UAAO and have always wanted to contribute to a zine; this is my first one!”

Audrey Elberger is a third-year studying Communication; Law, Justice, & Social Change from Rotorua, New Zealand “i am a transfer student, this is my first year here! at my previous school, i took a course on the history of asian american women with dr yun, who helped foster the asian american studies department @ uconn and was the first professor to teach an asian american studies course there. in her class, i was able to interview one of the students who suffered a hate crime at the school which led to her spearheading organizing efforts at the university for asian american students, such as the creation of the aa history department. it was so amazing to learn about the history of people with the same ethnicity as me, and their organizing efforts nationally and locally. coming to this school, i knew that i wanted to continue being involved in local organizing efforts which attracted me to uaao. being familiar w aa history @ uconn, i was interested in learning about and educating others on aa history @ umich! it was also exciting to be able to learn how to design spreads because design interests me and with my major, i dont have much opportunity to design.”

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Aloe DeGuia is a third-year majoring in Public Health with a minor in Linguistics from Oakland TWP, MI. “I was drawn to this edition because of its intersectional approach to liberation! Additionally, I was really excited to work on the visual and design aspect. I identify as a trans, queer, filipina creator and educator. I’m also a skater, climber, gecko and plant mother :)” Liz Hwang is a second-year majoring in History with a minor in Entrepreneurship from Glenview, IL “It linked well with my history major, and I’ve been wanting to participate in UAAO’s committees for a while!”

Jeffrey Jin is a first-year studying Sociology from Houston, Texas “i identify as a queer asian american organizer and creative. contributing to a printed zine has always been on my bucket list, and i don’t think there’s a better way to check that box than with uaao! i went into it knowing that working with not only other asian american creatives, but friends and loved ones, would be a rewarding experience.”

Yoon Kim is a third-year majoring in Public Policy with minors in Spanish and CASC from Chicago, IL “I really love the title of our zine this edition because it really illustrates liberation as a historical effort! I think it’s really important to learn from those who have come before us, not only through documenting their organizing work on campus but also through hearing about their oral histories and lived experiences. Ultimately, I hope we can continue to grow this archive as an organizational tool that informs our current and future work.”

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Chelsea Padilla is a third-year double majoring in Political Science and Creative Writing from Grand Rapids, Mi “[I identity as a] Filipino-American organizer and writer!”

Zafirah Rahman is a second-year studying Organizational Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures from Queens, NY “Honestly, I was just excited to be part of a team with other creative and thoughtful people in seeing the Liberation Archive come to life.”

Nellie Shih is a third-year studying Architecture from Cincinnati, OH “I am a Taiwanese-American art/creative work maker and appreciator always striving to do more of the making part (: I’ve missed out on a lot of A/PIA Studies courses and wanted to learn about AA + PI history with some of my fellow creatives!”

Mira Simonton-Chao double majoring in American Culture (Ethnic Studies) and Arts & Ideas in the Humanities from Ann Arbor, Mi “i identify as a queer, mixed asian american organizer and creative.”

Victoria Minka is a fourth-year majoring Public Health with minors in Afro-American & African Studies and A/ PIA Studies from Kalamazoo, Mi. Gray Snyder is a third-year majoring in Art & Design with a minor in Creative Writing from Ann Arbor, Mi “I’m interested in using zines as a means of building community and placing information back into the hands of the people. I was also excited to collage with uaao’s digitization materials. I identify as a queer, Asian American creative and collaborator. :p

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Rié Vander Schuur is a second-year majoring Women and Gender Studies from Holland, Mi. Vicky Wan is a first-year majoring in Economics from Dearborn, MI “I wanted to be a part of an edition that empowered APIA voices at Umich.”

Lola Yang is a third-year majoring in Asian Studies with a minor in Translation Studies.

Phoebe Yi is a second-year majoring in Political Science and Data Science from Ann Arbor, Mi. “When we look at the AAPI community, we are reduced to a monolith. I was drawn to the Liberation Archive because it gave us as a community a chance to show how we are all different in our own ways, and we all our own have stories.”

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Marie Ting, whose materials and love for this community made this project possible.

Former UAAO President, Anna Dang Current UAAO President, Gina Liu Those at the U-M Library, with a special thanks to Anne Cong-Huyen and Helen Look A/PIA Studies Program, with a special thanks to Prof. Manan Desai along with many others.

Our Design Team — Aloe DeGuia, Audrey Elberger, Jeffrey Jin, and Gray Snyder.

Our Content Team — Ally Choi, Liz Hwang, Victoria Minka, Zafirah Rahman, Nellie Shih, Rié Vander Schuur, Vicky Wan, and Phoebe Yi. Our editors, Chelsea Padilla and Mira Simonton-Chao UAAO 2021-2022 Executive Board & Organizing Fellows — Aarushi Ganguly, Zoe Hu, Mahnoor Imran, Jeffrey Jin, Yoon Kim, Meera Kumar, Angel Li, Liana Lau, Victoria Minka, Karen Nguyen, Kaitlyn Onela, Chelsea Padilla, Zafirah Rahman, Nellie Shih, Mira Simonton-Chao, Gray Snyder, and Natalie Suh.