UMass Boston Asian American Studies Program

the first national Association for Asian American Studies conference held on the East Coast was hosted by prof. Shirley Hune and Hunter College in 1989, supported by a national leadership group that included (L/R front and rear): lane hirabayashi, ray lou, margaret chin, marilyn alquizola, peter kiang, chung hoang chuong, john liu, gary okihiro, chalsa loo, greg mark, emu suzuki, lee c. lee, shirley hune, and steve sumida. photo: gail nomura.

rip gary okihiro with respect and appreciation.

rip bob suzuki, a true pioneer and visionary who changed the course of history for Asian American Studies and Asian American educational leadership during his 10 years at UMass Amherst and through his long career in California higher education.

In Tribute to Dr. “Bob” Suzuki – APAHE In Tribute to Dr. “Bob” Suzuki May 23, 2024 On May 1, 2024, we lost a great Asian American higher education leader, activist and agent of change. Dr. “Bob” Suzuki passed away surrounded by his wife Agnes Suzuki, their children and grandchildren. Bob was an early pioneer in fighting for civil...

Full color 24-pp profiles and AsAmSt news for 2023-2024 here:
https://www.umb.edu/media/umassboston/editor-uploads/asian-american-studies-program/asamst-grads24-(2).pdf

We bilingually applaud Singho Chan (陳陞豪) as our 24th student to successfully propose and execute a 10-course individual major in Asian American Studies at UMB. In addition, seven students from 2023-2024 have completed at least six courses and all AsAmSt program-of-study requirements: Louis Miguel Arriaza
Erazo, Thi Hoàng (Thi Minh Thi Hoang), Annie Huynh, Thi Huynh, Christine Le, Supriya Rai, and Nhi Vo. They are among 162 students who have graduated with AsAmSt concentrations since 2000. Additionally, we congratulate Cindy Bui in Gerontology and Mai H Vang in Higher Education for completing their doctoral degrees. Mai is the second student from a Hmoob (Hmong) refugee family— following Mai See Yang in Gerontology (2017)—to earn a UMass Boston PhD.

A 78-year-old Quincy man pleaded guilty to committing a hate crime after hitting a man twice with his car and yelling anti-Asian threats, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday. John Sullivan pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act. He was accused of shouting “go back to China” at a Vietnamese family — including three children under the age of 12 — and hitting a man from the family with his car outside a Quincy post office in December of 2022. A federal grand jury indicted Sullivan on the hate crime charge in February 2023. Sullivan initially pleaded not guilty to civil rights, assault, and reckless driving charges in Quincy District Court in 2022. He was released on conditions after the incident, including home confinement and no driving, The Boston Globe reported. According to court documents, the district court charges against Sullivan were dropped in March of 2023.

Quincy man pleads guilty to hate crime after hitting man with his car 78-year-old John Sullivan threatened to kill a Vietnamese family outside a Quincy post office and told them to "go back to China."

love, peace, and justice always in remembering may and all she offered in this life.... She was 99, two months shy of turning 100, when she died March 13 in her Newton home. As she watched racism ripple through generations during her nearly 100 years, Mrs. Takayanagi was determined to help prevent a repeat in the United States of the internment camps her family endured. “It actually happened,” she said in 1988. “It could happen again.” Into her 80s Mrs. Takayanagi volunteered with organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and she was a bookkeeper for the American Friends Service Committee. Both groups bucked public sentiment during the war to speak out against the internment camps. In a 2001 oral history posted on YouTube by Voice of Women, a Newton-based nuclear disarmament organization, Mrs. Takayanagi spoke about her need, “after my own life experience, to be involved in all these issues of justice and peace.” Along with serving on the board and as a past president of the New England Japanese American Citizens League, she and her husband, Tetsuo Takayanagi, an architect who died in 2018, were founding benefactors of the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “Although small in stature, May was a major force of activism and support for civil rights and progressive causes in the Asian American and broader civil rights communities in Massachusetts,” wrote Paul Watanabe, director of the institute, earlier this month in an email to let the community know Mrs. Takayanagi had died. She had been the treasurer of the Harry H. Dow Memorial Legal Assistance Fund, named for the first Asian-American admitted to practice law in Massachusetts, and volunteered with the Asian American Resource Workshop. The May Takayanagi Making Waves Award is named for her... With the passing of time, the Takayanagis were able to speak about their time in the camps. “After the war, people like myself didn’t want to discuss this experience,” Mr. Takayanagi told the Globe when the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 provided a formal US apology to those who were imprisoned in internment camps — a long-sought action that allowed many to finally break their silence about what they had gone through...

May Takayanagi, peace activist whose family was interned in World War II camps, dies - The Boston Globe “I just don’t want to see it happen to anyone else,” Mrs. Takayangi said of her family’s experience being imprisoned in a US internment camp during World War II.

With heartfelt respect and affection, we note the passing of esteemed Vietnamese educator/author/clinician/advocate, Ms. Trần Thi Kim-Lan on 2 November 2023 at age 83.

Throughout the 1990s, Cô (teacher) Lan inspired early generations of Vietnamese refugee/immigrant children, youth, and families in bilingual education classrooms of the Boston Public Schools, including many who later attended UMass Boston. Soon recognizing the critical care need for bilingual mental health services in the schools—beyond her own classrooms—Cô Lan took on the leadership role and responsibility of becoming credentialed and licensed as the only bilingual Vietnamese school psychologist in Boston and the region for many more years.

In addition, Kim-Lan authored one of the country’s very first, authentic Vietnamese American children’s books, Têt: The New Year, in 1992 through the pathbreaking Multicultural Celebrations series sponsored by the Boston Children’s Museum. We have often circulated our own multiple copies of this book from our AsAmSt library for students to recognize the important cultural and educational role of Asian American children’s books. Similarly, Kim-Lan’s incisive short story portrait, “Edna,” published in the landmark 1995-1996 Vietnamese American Studies anthology, Once Upon a Dream, co-edited by Andrew Lam and colleagues, has been included in the syllabus of AsAmSt 223 Asians in the US for the past 25+ years, and is still required reading in our current teaching this year in Fall 2023!! Indeed, decades before contemporary activist social media calling in and out, Trần Thi Kim-Lan modeled through her vivid creative writing portraiture, grounded in daily life experience on an MBTA bus, how and why Vietnamese-Black working-class women of color solidarity is actually embraced.

Cô Lan last visited our Asian American Studies classes at UMass Boston in October 2017 to share her culminating bilingual book, Traveling in a Dream.

Students’ reflections from that still-memorable day included:

• It’s rare for some of us to meet a Vietnamese elder with whom we can communicate . I found her presence very friendly and welcoming and her storytelling captivating.

• Kim Lan Tran has a very gravitational personality; she is everything I’d like to be when I’m older. She has so much wisdom, clarity, and insight, I felt very honored by her presence.

• I love Cô Lan presentation today. She is funny and lovely. I can see that she is very passion about her career and writing. I love how she tells her stories and about herself with the happiness in her eyes.

• Kim Lan Tran uses very vivid descriptions and that’s what makes the readers like us engage in her stories. Her actual story of how she survived the war and went to jail for a week and escaped like 8 times by boat is very impressive. She has been through so much and now she is a person who is able to follow her dreams of writing and she keeps touching people in their hearts with her awesome stories.

• Even when speaking about serious moments in her life, Ms. Kim Lan Tran sooner or later always mixed in some humor. Her personality/charisma is really infectious. A story/message that stuck with me was when Ms. Kim Lan Tran was discussing on how she got a scholarship to attend college in the U.S. She explained that the reason why she had people advocating for her scholarship was not because she was an excellent student but rather it was who she was as a person that got her that opportunity. With hard work and acting like yourself (being a good person in general) you will be able to achieve your goals as other people will take notice of your actions.

• “People hurt people. People learn from people. People need people.” She told us in her presentation and I totally agreed with that phrase. I have hurt people and I also have been hurt by people. Every person I met taught me something, even if they hurt me. Sometimes I’m hurt due to my disability, but because of them, I have learned to be patient and, also, I could realize that there is a person who support me no matter what. No one is alone. In my perspective, that’s one of the messages that she wants to tell children through her books.

• She does not forget how to reconnect and try to understand her students (she is the perfect embodiment of the proverb: when eating a fruit, think of a person who planted the tree).

We do think of you, Cô Lan.

With shock and sadness, we offer heartfelt sympathy and care to the family of alumna, Cydney Dang (鄧詩簾), who unexpectedly suffered a brain aneurysm and passed on October 11th at age 49. Cydney graduated in 2001 with a major in sociology, and she completed many of our AsAmSt courses offered at that time. In addition, during the mid-2000s, we regularly took students as part of Chinatown field trips to see Cydney at South Cove Manor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center—the exemplar of culturally competent nursing home care for Asian immigrant elders— where she originally worked as Director of the Schlichte Learning Center. Cydney took over the leadership of the Learning Center in 2005 from her dear friend, AsAmSt alumna (1999), Lola Tom, who served as its founding director. Cydney later became head of Social Services at South Cove Manor throughout the period of its expansion in Quincy where she continued to sustain her long career of community contribution until this month.

Lola, herself, shared the tragic news of Cydney’s passing here: https://www.hamellydon.com/obituary/Cydney-Dang , and created a funding page to support college-going costs now facing Cydney’s three daughters here: https://gofund.me/3d4253b3

The following is an excerpt from one of Cydney’s course writings in AsAmSt 423 Boston’s Asian American Communities at UMass Boston in December 1999. Cydney’s grounding in and love for our communities is so clear from her course writings then until her final days. All this and more, we remember and honor.

“... I have learned a lot from this course... I think it is very important to learn about the community by going out to the community and studying instead of just sitting in the classroom and studying about statistics and reading about it. When you are in the community, you are able to see, hear, and feel the people in the community and able to see how they deal with their everyday life. I have gained a deeper understanding of the Asian community, which is something I cannot learn from reading a textbook...

I would like to see more people get involved in the community. I think there are more today than yesterday and there will be more tomorrow...

I see myself in relation to the Asian community all the time. I live in an Asian community and work in Asian communities therefore everything I do relates to Asian communities. I think that can be good because it allows me to learn more. When you spend more time on certain thing you will be more sensitive about the other things around you. There is something new everyday to learn about...

I am planning to stay in the Asian community for as long as I can. I think I want to be able to help the Asians who needed help. If we don't, who is going to do it? I think it is very important for us to know our weakness and our strength so that we can help each other in different ways.

I think this class is very important. Many students have learn a lot from this course. I am not the only one that think this way, I am sure many people who have taken this class feel the same way.”

(Cydney Dang) In Lieu of Flowers, organized by Lola Tom My dear sweet friend, Cydney Dang, 49, passed away quite unexpectedly on October 11, 2023 f… Lola Tom needs your support for (Cydney Dang) In Lieu of Flowers

[on sept 21] Teens harass Asian man and woman on Red Line, smash windows, threaten to rob passengers

A group of teenagers harassed a man and woman of Asian descent, threatened to rob passengers, and smashed windows on a Red Line train at Downtown Crossing on Thursday before getting off at Andrew station in South Boston, police said. MBTA Transit Police Superintendent Richard Sullivan said the disturbance involved about five teenagers and took place around 10:45 p.m. on an Ashmont-bound train. The woman who was reportedly harassed was 25; the man was believed to be between 55 and 60, Sullivan said.

“A witness stated that the juvenile subjects approached the victim and began making fun of her for being Asian,” Sullivan said. “They were taunting her based on her ethnicity. They were trying to mimic an Asian accent.... They also threatened to rob some people on the train.”Sullivan said the teenagers also harassed the man, who was riding in another part of the car, and made “derogatory statements about his ethnicity,” Sullivan said. The teenagers smashed windows on the car. Sullivan declined to provide descriptions of the suspects, who are believed to 15 to 17 years old, to allow detectives to identify and arrest them. “We take this extremely seriously and we’re going to dedicate all resources to the identification of all parties involved, and we will seek the appropriate charges,” he said. “Transit Police are committed to safeguarding the constitutional rights of everyone regardless of age, race, gender, or ethnicity. We will not tolerate incidents such as this.” Sullivan said he will consult with Suffolk District Attorney Kevin R. Hayden’s office to determine whether the teenagers will be prosecuted under the state’s hate crime laws. The woman stayed on the train and met with Transit Police at the JFK/UMass station in Dorchester, the next stop after Andrew on the Red Line. An officer gave the woman a ride home in a cruiser.

Teens harass Asian man and woman on Red Line, smash windows, threaten to rob passengers, police say - The Boston Globe Transit Police Superintendent Richard Sullivan said the incident, reported to involve about five juveniles who boarded at Downtown Crossing, took place Thursday night on an Ashmont-bound train.

scan QR code for link to 36-pp full color profiles of graduating AsAmSt students plus Program news for 2022-2023

Full color 36-pp profiles and AsAmSt news for 2022-2023 here:https://www.umb.edu/editor_uploads/images/asamst/graduations/asamst_grads23_rs.pdf

This year boasts our largest-ever number of AsAmSt graduating students. Arlene Vu is the 23rd student to successfully design, propose, and finish a 10-course individual major in Asian American Studies at UMB. She accompanies 15 students in 2022-2023 who have completed at least six courses and all AsAmSt program-of-study requirements. They include: Tenzin Dechen (བསྟན་འཛིན བདེ་ཆེན), Lily Sirin Horburapa (ศิรินทร์ หอบูรพา), Kamalpreet Kaur, Tommy Hoàng Lâm, Stephanie Alyza Gapongli Mastinggal, Jenny Ngeth, Anthony Nguyễn, Jenni Nguyễn, Nyah Pérez, Husnain Shah, Lee-Daniel (LD) Tran, Richard Tran, Ada Tsang, Helen Võ, Dennis Weng (翁鴻彬), and Ping Zhou (周萍). They account for nearly 10% of the 155 students in total who have graduated with AsAmSt concentrations since 2000. Additionally, two AsAmSt alumnae, Maryanne E.M. Chow and Yan Hua Liang (梁燕华), earned master’s degrees in two of the College of Education & Human Development’s graduate programs.

Faculty and students remembered Sayed Faisal, the 20-year-old University of Massachusetts Boston student killed by Cambridge police in January, during a daylong teach-in and memorial service at UMass Boston Friday. UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco also announced last week the establishment of an endowed scholarship in Faisal’s name to “ensure that his legacy lives on at UMass Boston.” ... Faisal was fatally shot Jan. 4 during a confrontation with police while appearing to suffer from a mental health crisis, sparking outrage and demands for accountability across Cambridge and Boston. His death also deeply disturbed members of the UMass Boston community, faculty and students told the Globe. Cambridge police and city officials have refused to release the name of the officer who shot Faisal, saying the officer has a right to privacy during an ongoing investigation... The new endowed scholarship is an “appropriate step for the university to take,” said Elora Chowdhury, a UMass Boston professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies who helped organize the day of remembrance and called on the university to create the fund. “This scholarship is part of a solidarity statement with the community and with the family,” Chowdhury said. “In that sense, it reflects the various kinds of public advocacy and activism that have been happening in the wake of this tragedy.” Chowdhury was also one of the organizers of Friday’s teach-in, a nonstop day of workshops and panels running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and focusing on subjects ranging from racism, policing, and alternative responses to community belonging to the immigrant experience in Boston. Faisal’s shooting “really touched the nerve on our campus because we serve a student body that is largely immigrant,” Chowdhury said. “We thought we needed a broader discussion about these issues of structural racism, appropriate responses to mental health emergencies, various kinds of community advocacy that are being organized around the city, and accountability from the leaders of our community, our university.”

UMass Boston honors student killed by Cambridge police with new scholarship, day of remembrance - The Boston Globe Faculty and students remembered Sayed Faisal, the 20-year-old University of Massachusetts Boston student killed by Cambridge police in January, during a daylong teach-in and memorial service Friday. The school also established an endowed scholarship in Faisal’s name.

“Tied Together by a Thousand Threads” was installed in July 2017 by the nonprofit Asian Community Development Corporation. The 8- by 16-foot painting on plywood hangs on the brick wall of a vacant building at 15-25 Harrison Ave. in Phillips Square, an area in the northern part of Chinatown. Community members raised over $4,000 to restore and reinstall the mural, which was lightly vandalized in the first few years after its unveiling and then noticeably defaced during the pandemic... ACDC staff and the artist, Shaina Lu, had been discussing restoration efforts for the last two years. When it came time to uninstall the mural, Lu found that residents were eager to help. She posted a short comic on Instagram recapping how friends and passerby chipped in last minute to provide tools for taking the mural down. “Strangers in the street would come by and help us un-drill,” Lu said. The vandalism began as soon as a year after the initial installation in the form of scribbles and tags on the mural and the sign next to it, as well as one instance of advertisements pasted on the mural. Over the course of the defacement, residents and staff reported the vandalism to the City of Boston through its 311 app, which addresses non-emergency issues. “Everybody felt this collective ownership and care for the mural,” ACDC’s director of community programs and design, Jeena Chang, said... The mural was initially organized by students in ACDC’s Asian Voices of Organized Youth for Community Empowerment program, or A-VOYCE, in collaboration with Chinatown resident Yvonne Ng. Ng, who is an annual fund and donor relations officer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, responded to A-VOYCE’s call for public art project ideas, and they worked together to design a mural that depicts Chinatown’s history, much of it filtered through Ng’s childhood memories of the neighborhood. The mural’s title is translated from a Chinese idiom, “千絲萬縷,” and encapsulates Chinatown’s past, present, and future, said Lu. On the left side of the mural, Consuelo, Ng’s mother, and Ng’s 3-year-old son, Enrique, blow bubbles together. Thin, sinuous white lines extend from their bubble wands across the painting, and eight bubbles of varying sizes depict different scenes and symbols, set against a blue backdrop. The mural is a record of how much has changed in Chinatown, Ng said. Some bubbles depict Chinatown’s people and culture, including images of a garment worker and protesters, dim sum, and the now-closed See Sun Market that existed in the building the mural is on, according to ACDC. One bubble depicts an eye symbol that was the sign of an establishment known as Naked i Cabaret, which Ng remembers from Chinatown’s proximity to the city’s red-light district, the Combat Zone. “I didn’t want to romanticize the history. I really wanted [it] to be grounded in truth,” Ng said. One bubble on the left shows an elevated Orange Line train, from before the line went underground in the late 1980s. Another in the top right is a rendering of a 1903 raid in the neighborhood where police arrested and deported several laundrymen. Chang said that with the painful parts of history, “there also is power and resistance.” “It’s not about Chinatown as a poor or in-need neighborhood, but Chinatown where the residents and the businesses are empowered and exercise their power in fighting for their neighborhood,” Chang said. The decision to install the mural was itself an example of fighting back. In 2017, residents protested proposals for three hotels in Chinatown, and ACDC placed the mural on one of the buildings that was meant to be developed into a hotel. The mural was thought to be a temporary measure of resistance, purposefully painted on wooden squares instead of on the brick wall so that ACDC could remove it if the proposal moved forward, Chang said. The mural was one of ACDC’s “placekeeping” initiatives — efforts to improve Chinatown’s public spaces — and fit into the nonprofit’s method of “using arts and culture to extend the cultural footprint of the neighborhood in hopes of actually extending the physical footprint,” Chang said. ACDC calls this strategy ANCHOR (Activation, Needs, Community, Housing and Open spaces, and Residents) in which art projects can serve as physical markers of the neighborhood and delineate the community spaces as belonging to Chinatown given the increasing displacement of residents. “[The mural] was the start of us pushing back and trying to reclaim this northern edge and almost create a cultural gateway,” Chang said. Nearly six years later, the Harrison Avenue property is still empty and the mural remains. While there is always a possibility that the restored version of the mural will also be vandalized, ACDC is considering preventative actions like public communication about the mural’s significance as well as working with city officials to create mitigation tactics. Ng said that when she found out people had rallied behind the restoration, allowing ACDC to meet its fundraising goal, it was “heartwarming” to see that people connected with the mural. “Even though it comes from my experience, I hope that it’s a mural that really celebrates a shared experience,” Ng said.

Community members restore mural in Chinatown - The Boston Globe “Tied Together by a Thousand Threads” was first installed in July 2017 by the nonprofit Asian Community Development Corporation. The mural was lightly vandalized in the first few years after its unveiling and then noticeably defaced during the pandemic.

Fifteen-year-old Ngan Huynh, a sophomore at the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science, has yet to meet a teacher this school year who can correctly pronounce her common Vietnamese name. “It causes a disconnection between us,” Huynh said about her strained relationships with her teachers, “which can also affect my studies, because I can see that they don’t care enough to learn about my background.” Huynh’s experience is common among Asian American students in Boston Public Schools, who, according to a recent analysis of school climate survey data, are more likely to report feeling isolated and undervalued compared with their white, Black, and Latino peers. The study, commissioned by members of the Massachusetts Asian American Educators Association, reinforced what many Asian American students, teachers, and community leaders have long suspected: Although they perform better, on average, on standardized tests and are more likely to graduate high school on time, many Asian American students feel overlooked and invisible. “The dominant narrative out there in Boston Public Schools, as well as many other places, is that Asian students are doing fine,” said former BPS teacher Go Sasaki, who spearheaded the study, along with Rosann Tung, a retired education researcher. “Based on our experiences and anecdotes, we know that is not the case.”... Asian American students, for example, reported feeling the least physically safe at school, compared with students of other races and ethnicities, and they felt the most stress about their grades and schoolwork. Although Asian American students reported feeling the most engaged in their classes, they were the most likely to feel their school curriculum wasn’t relevant to their background or culture. The analysis also showed they were the least likely to feel they belonged at school, or that teachers and staff were interested in their well-being. The findings were unveiled in a public event Saturday afternoon at VietAID’s community center in Fields Corner, in which Asian American students at BPS were invited to share their experiences. They described being stereotyped and exoticized by teachers and peers as model students and feeling, as the researchers put it, like “perpetual foreigners.” The students said they rarely learned about Asian American history in school and had almost no Asian American teachers. ... “Based on my experience in the classroom and my work advocating in BPS, I feel like in many cases, Asian students are kind of ignored and invisibilized,” Sasaki said. “Asians are an afterthought.” Tung noted the study’s findings echo the body of academic research on the “model minority myth” and its impact on Asian Americans’ mental health. Studies show Asian American students who feel pressured to conform to the myth that all Asians Americans are naturally high achieving often suffer from anxiety and low self-esteem, especially if they struggle academically. As a result, they may fear asking for help while their teachers wrongly assume they don’t need any. “We don’t just need more Asian teachers,” Tung said. “We need all educators to understand and care about the Asian experience.”

‘Asians are an afterthought’: Asian American students at BPS report feeling less safe, more undervalued - The Boston Globe “The dominant narrative out there in Boston Public Schools, as well as many other places, is that Asian students are doing fine,” said former BPS teacher Go Sasaki. “Based on our experiences and anecdotes, we know that is not the case.”

Throughout history, cultures have passed stories from generation to generation as a way to educate, advocate, honor, and remember the past. For some Asian Americans, challenges like emigrating from war torn countries and facing discrimination in the United States make it increasingly difficult to find the platform to preserve rich stories and narratives. Now, the University of Massachusetts Boston is working to sustain Asian American storytelling for decades with a new $6 million anonymous gift for the school’s Asian American Studies Department... Tang is renowned in her field for her storytelling work with students. In her classes, which include Asian American Media Literacy and and Digital Storytelling Praxis, Tang explores the identities of her students through digital storytelling, encouraging them to use both English and their native languages to express ideas. “Our students … are local, and they have a lot of powerful stories to share,” Tang said. “But sometimes they don’t know that their stories matter.” ... Suárez-Orozco called Tang’s storytelling methodology “extraordinarily significant and influential,” while Eddinger said the endowment puts Asian American Studies “on the map.” “[This investment] establishes the fact that Asian American Studies is not a subfield of anything. It is a field of study with rigor, with methodology, with a rich history,” Eddinger said. According to Tang, the endowment will sustain the professorship and storytelling courses for nearly 20 years. “We can now ensure that the voices, stories, and contexts of our Asian American students, families, and communities and those of other refugee immigrant communities of color in Metro Boston will be valued, preserved, and mobilized to benefit everyone,” Tang said.

UMass Boston receives $6 million gift for Asian American Studies, launches endowed professorship - The Boston Globe Inaugural distinguished professor Shirley Tang said she will use her platform to uplift Asian American students’ narratives through storytelling.