Host: Anya Steinberg (she/her/hers)
Episode 3: They Call It the “Sleeping Dragon”
This episode talks about the 2020 election, voter disenfranchisement in Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and the importance (or unimportance) of political representation.
Guests include: Cindy Yang (Forward Together), Nimisha Nagalia (Hennepin County Elections), Amy Zhou (Legislative assistant), and Chip Chang (PhD Candidate at the U of MN Twin Cities).
Anya Steinberg: Hi and welcome to New Narratives, dispatches from Minnesota that highlights the stories of Asian America. I’m your host Anya Steinberg. I’m the Storyteller Intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a nonpartisan, nonprofit based out of St. Paul, Minnesota and focuses on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
Welcome to 2020 everybody! The 2020 election is slowly creeping closer and closer on all of our calendars and it’s bound to be unprecedented in every way. Our oldest president in history is running for re-election, the Democratic primary has been characterized by historical racial diversity and the entire electoral process as we know it is going to be up-ended by COVID.
Today though, I don’t wanna talk about the scandal swirling around the White House or the postal service or the various verbal blunders of either candidate.
I want to take a deep dive into the political lives and history of Asian Americans.
We are going to be talking about who the Asian American electorate is, why Asian Americans have such low voter turnout, and if representation really matters for creating political change. Let’s dive right in.
[Music play]
Anya Steinberg: In the Democratic Primary coverage, the biggest question plugging the candidates was: how are you going to capture the loyalties of Black and Latinx voters? This led to a lot of cringy affirmation and intensive outreach campaigns to these enormously influential voting blocks.
However, it left me thinking: where are my Asian voters at? Who is asking what Asian voters want?
Nimisha Nagalia is a first generation Indian American that works for the Hennepin County Elections Office. I asked her if she thought there even was an Asian American electorate.
Nimisha Nagalia: I doubt it, you know, I just think that there is so much diaspora in our — within the term Asian American — that for a long time, I didn’t even really think of myself as an Asian American. I was like, oh, that’s like, not South Asian, you know? And then I think it’s probably the last five years that shifted for me, that I have been like oh no, I understand our solidarity though. I think that there are very few electorates that actually can boil down to a set of issues.
The Latinx electorate is a really great example of this, where like people do really try to say like this is what Latinx people care about but it’s like, that’s not true because you have like tons of conservative Latinx folks. You have tons of hyper liberal Latinx folks. You have people who like immigration is their first thing. And you have people who like that matters, but queer rights or Black Lives Matter are my first things. You know, I just think like, there is no way that we could do that with such a huge huge population.
Anya Steinberg: Asian Americans, as we’ve talked about before on this podcast are pretty difficult to define. Cindy Yang, a Hmong American woman who ran for state house seat in 2018 and who now works as a Political Data Strategist at Forward Together spoke to me about this.
Cindy Yang: Sometimes people call it a sleeping dragon and that’s also using the animal dragon because all Asian people resonate with dragon somehow. I don’t know why people say that. I don’t know. I would say that I think, I think the Asian population — they’re super different. You have like the long-term API community like the Chinese, Japanese Americans who have been here for generations, and you have the very new southeast Asian community that’s like very new here, like the Hmong folks.
Anya Steinberg: When you think about it, it’s pretty difficult to distill the needs and wishes of millions of people into a specific policy platform. Chip Chang, a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, brought up some other reasons why Asian voters might not get talked about.
Chip Chang: We do make a very small percentage of, you know, the US population. I think right now it’s at 6 percent and so I think it’s just a dismissal of like, you know, they’re in the single digit still so why even talk about them? I also think that comes from the model minority myth and this idea that Asian Americans are submissive, that we are passive, that we’re not outspoken, you know, that we rather just keep our heads down.
Anya Steinberg: Lots of people I talked to had big problems with the way stereotypes perpetuated by the model minority myth are weaponized against Asian Americans to say they are politically unengaged. Here is Cindy.
Cindy Yang: So to say that you know that Asian community is not politically engaged, it’s almost like an insult. It’s as if we’re not engaged in the news or what’s happening in our community or what’s happening around us. You know, like we do understand. I remember talking to our elders. They know that Trump is bad for immigration. He was trying to actually send Hmong folks back to Laos earlier this year. Like they know that’s happening. They just needed an avenue to act — you know? Like how to navigate this political system, how to vote, how to get involved.
Anya Steinberg: Labeling Asian American as politically disengaged erases the history that we do have in this country and abroad, Cindy pointed out there is evidence of long standing political traditions in the Hmong community.
Cindy Yang: Yeah, I can only speak to, like, my experience and you know, to being a woman. And seeing how politics can move internally in our community. From having a clan system, from having even elected positions of who represents each clan. So, I would say that historically, Hmong folks have been, you know, that they have that political sort of bone in them. You know sometimes, you can really date back whether a community has been politically engaged or have like some sort of the political movement. But oftentimes if you know, within the language, they have a word for it, then yeah, they have practiced in civic engagement at some point. We have Hmong words for elected seats, which you know which date back like generation to generation.
Anya Steinberg: For Cindy, the lack of Hmong visibility in US politics can be attributed to the history of Hmong Americans in this country.
Cindy Yang: But I actually heard this called back during the Hmong National Development Conference. A Hmong woman said, yes, it took 30 years because the first 30 years is about surviving here, assimilating for survival, figuring how to survive in this country and then now the next 30 years is about making this our home. And yeah, it’s taking this long because we’ve been struggling and surviving. A lot of Hmong folks have made it. You know, API folks have made it and how do we also fill the political sphere with representation. You know.
Anya Steinberg: Nimisha was quick to add that on the Asian continent, there’s no shortage of political mobilization. Once Asian immigrants arrive in the US though, it isn’t a guarantee that they’re going to feel like they are part of the political system here or that they are even able to participate.
Nimisha Nagalia: I think we have incredible history of like political engagement and of like rebellions. And like all kinds of incredible political movement that happen on the Asian continent. Right? Like I think that we are, we come from like political histories — a lot of us. But I think that because of that like model minority [myth] — you just gotta survive, like that’s somebody else’s problem — mentality that I think happens once people come here, there can be less engagement because people are like I just gotta take care of myself, my family, you know my community like I gotta hustle and make money. That’s what I have to do and that isn’t about somebody else, you know? That’s kind of the sense of like that’s not gonna do me any good to get myself tangled up.
Anya Steinberg: So Asian Americans are mischaracterized as apolitical because of the far reaching consequences of model minority myth. As a result, the trans continental political traditions and the rich history of Asian American activism are completely discounted. But here is where it gets complicated. While all of that political history is being erased, Asian Americans are also being met with barriers to political engagement in the present day.
According to NPR, around 51% of Asian Americans are categorized as non-voters, having only voted in 1 or none of the past 8 elections. And there is a reason for this low turn up. It’s because the system is built to disenfranchise us. Voter disenfranchisement affects a lot of people, basically everyone except affluent, male, white, able-bodied voters without felony face some sort of barrier to casting a ballot. Breaking down how it affects Asian Americans specifically involves pulling in a lot of pieces so bear with me. I’ll start simple.
One of the biggest ways that Asian Americans are disenfranchised is through a lack of translated materials. Amy Zhou is a legislative assistant to a Minnesota Senator and is also first generation Chinese American. She shared her personal experience with voter disenfranchisement with me.
Amy Zhou: I think that a lack of access is something that I saw firsthand with my parents. I think the biggest one being English being a second language. I think that growing up with a lot of Asian Americans — they have to translate things for their parents and things in that nature. I feel like ‘cause I was doing that already in so many aspects — things like voting, things like having a problem going to their elections office — that was something that there wasn’t any option. I never really saw that happen. They only ever started voting because me and my sister urged them to vote.
Anya Steinberg: Cindy and Nimisha gave me more examples of systemic issues that lead to voter disenfranchisement.
Nimisha Nagalia: One of the reasons the biggest part of our work at Hennepin County Elections has become working with folks who are homeless and highly mobile. We have a voting system based on residency. It wasn’t built with people who don’t have houses in mind. Right? Our folks who move around a lot, even renters, and we know that there is huge, huge disproportion overlap between renters, highly mobile communities, houses people, and people of color, immigrants, youth, people with low income.
Cindy Yang: Most folks who don’t turn out to vote are working. They don’t have the luxury of being able to vote before or after. I was trying to get out of work to vote and I was actually denied by my employer. I felt like I had no right when actually, that’s against the law. But when you’re in a position where your boss can bully you or fire you, then you wouldn’t take that chance. You know?
Anya Steinberg: Facing these barriers can sow feelings of distrust in the system. People feel intimidated and they also don’t feel like the system was not built for them. Nimisha described to me some of the research Hennepin County did in 2018 into voter disengagement. She said one of the main reasons why people don’t show up to the polls boils down to a lack of trust.
Nimisha Nagalia: We did a bunch of qualitative studies back in 2018 to 2019 with Hennepin County residents specifically to ask people like what are your biggest barriers to voting? Like, tell us, right?
Overall, the biggest thing people said was that they had a distrust in the system or the candidates or the government. And that came from a variety of reason. Some people were like we trust the election system, but we don’t trust candidates — they never do what they say they’re gonna do once they get elected. Or some people said, well I am from a refugee community, the government we had to deal with back home was so untrustworthy, there is no way we can now trust the United States government system or any government system. Some people said that they fundamentally just don’t trust the election system, they think it’s rigged, that it doesn’t work right. I think that’s by far one of the biggest things that happen is that we have a system that doesn’t work well for people, that hasn’t for a long time, and then that’s led to disengagement.
Anya Steinberg: But wait, there’s more. For everything that prevents people from turning up to the polls on Election Day, there’s actually months of work done leading up to the election that also disproportionately excludes a whole portion of the population. Cindy’s data strategist work has given her a lot of insight into how the election system continues to leave out communities of color. I asked her to break it down how it all works.
Cindy Yang: If you look at more of a microscale, people are making decisions about political targets, right, that are leaving [out], you know, nontraditional voters. People who look like us or look like our parents. People who weren’t taught to vote since they were a kid. When people were making these big decisions of who to talk to, who to send mailers out, they often leave out people who look like us because we don’t have a strong track record of voting.
Yeah, I would say it starts at the beginning you know. Typically, a campaign would work at previous years of when their seat was up for election. They will see which precincts turned out. What was the voter turnout like and so neighborhoods are pretty much like precincts. They [the precincts] differ, right? There is like, low income, predominantly BIPOC, you know, white rich area. And I also just want to say, that sometimes precincts consist of both – low-income. high-income sort of things.
Where they go is they probably go to the Secretary of State website. The seat numbers for each precincts, so they’ll look at that, they’ll compare it to the voter files, the voter file is what’s the secretary states you know has and they’ll administer it to a campaign to see. Or the state party will buy it, and the state party will tell campaigns that hey, if you’re running as a DFL, we can give it to you for free or at cost etc.
And so, what they would do is that they will try to match up the precinct with the voter data and the voter data will often say — depending where you live — what they often say is you know, older, white, etc. And so campaigns have to make a decision. Do I talk to people who regularly vote or do I talk to people who they would say like “unreliable” voters? So they had to make a choice.
And each campaign, of course, has six timeline elections days. So, what are they going to prioritize? They’re probably going to prioritize the great traditional voter who is “reliable” right? So, there is risk involved in choosing which one. And I bet campaigns translate the regular voters as the least risky one.
And so, you have two or three campaigns sort of dipping out of the same pool of these regular voters to see if they can prevent his tiny group of votes. I feel like that’s where it really sparks. What do you do? You shape your messaging, right? You shape how you talk, you shape how you look, you shape how your campaign looks.
What I see in my head as I’m talking about this is actually the local races, like city council, like county commissioner, like even our state house and state senate seats, they’ll just dip into the same pool and not spend any time or money. Because anything you do in a campaign is gonna cost money, even it’s just volunteers, it costs money. And so they’re gonna spend their resources into their regular voters. Then again, just repeating, you know, these tactics of leaving people out of the conversation, leaving people out of the process, and not engaging BIPOC voters essentially. And that’s saying, often folks who turn out to vote are those who grew up with those sort of values, you know?
But yeah, I think it starts from the very beginning of the planning process of just looking at the barebones of the data and then making decisions from there. Yeah.
Anya Steinberg: Nimisha said that while Minnesota is putting in work to make the electoral process more inclusive, there is still a lot to be done. She envisions a whole reframing of how we imagine voter outreach.
Nimisha Nagalia: The people be like, what? We reached out to the Hmong community, but it’s like, you talk to the two people who everybody talks to, whereas like for white Americans, like they’re never equivalent to each other. There is never like “oh, did we do enough outreach to white Americans?” kind of thing because we know that we’ve definitely done like 10 things that will definitely reach everybody. And then we gotta make sure we get that one thing that reaches this one community or whatever right? Of people of color. I think that that’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about in my role. You know.
So, what if when we did our general outreach strategy like, we changed who we pictured and we stopped picturing a 55-year-old white man who is what everybody pictures when you say the word general public. What if our understanding of the general public was like a Hmong elder? How would we change our strategy and like and be able to cater then like to for the general public, be able to say instead of doing English first off, we’re doing Hmong first off, we’re thinking about how our folks are getting information and what would be trustworthy.
And then other people then, can adapt — the way we ask everybody else to adapt to this understanding of this 55-year-old white man. Right? Like what would happen if we did that? And like we decided to change that understanding more? I haven’t gone very far. But we will see.
Anya Steinberg: So broadly, what does this all mean for Asian Americans?
Nimisha Nagalia: Seeing I think like as whole, community as a whole diaspora, there is so many different needs and like a lot of those aren’t seen for a whole bunch different reasons. Whether it’s like a language barrier, [which] I think is a huge, huge reason still. I mean like I work for this government organization and it’s like pulling teeth to get information out in different languages. It’s like not intuitive at all you know? And that’s like the bare minimum, you know? That’s the bare minimum and that’s not even being done yet. And so the people who are administering the system for you can’t talk to you and can’t hear you. Like literally can’t listen to you. But of course, you are not, your needs are gonna be met.
Anya Steinberg: I wanted to know more about Minnesota politics specifically, so I asked Amy to describe what she thinks Minnesota politics are like.
Amy Zhou: I mean, Minneapolis, St. Paul is an incredibly exclusive place. I feel like it’s a very, it’s a place that reeks of white, cis, maleness. I’ve seen that firsthand working here in politics. In general, Minnesota politics, while it does preach its own breed of progressivism and liberalism, I think that liberalism is really centered around white narratives and just very traditional, you know, white male, a nuclear family. This doesn’t really look updated and also doesn’t really represent what Minnesota is now. People have stereotypes of what Minnesotans are, you know? This white lumberjack that you know, has a cabin and all these things, and that’s just not the case anymore and Minnesota politics really has yet to transform with the population.
Anya Steinberg: Amy sees a real danger in the lack of representation at this level of government. She told me about her experiences as a Capital Pathways Intern.
Amy Zhou: It’s a program that was formed to get youth of color into Minnesota state government. And so when I was there as intern for Minnesota housing. I was by far in many meetings regarding homelessness, regarding affordable housing, I was absolutely the only person of color in the room. And I was someone who hasn’t really experienced housing instability. What are we saying when we have huge homeless encampment in Powderhorn Park that just got bulldozed over? What are we saying when Minnesota has the largest inequality between white and Black homeownership?
I think these are all facts that our policymakers know about, but it’s not something like they know about. It’s not the first thing on their mind, I guess. And I mean, that’s painting with a broad brush, I think there are some really great policymakers right now, but I also think that, I mean, that’s a huge problem when white people, making decisions that absolutely disproportionately impact communities of color, particularly Black communities.
Anya Steinberg: Her experience got me thinking about the repercussions of having the same type of person filling up the gilded halls of government everywhere. It seems like lately representation and diversity have become the buzzwords that every political candidate wants to hit on and rightfully so. The national intention to focus on ensuring that candidates for political office actually represent American is unprecedented and has been a longtime coming.
However, I had some questions about how far representation actually goes. Is representation enough? Or do constituents need more than just racial diversity from their candidates. There have been some very polarizing Asian Americans in national politics this election cycle. I wanted to hear what people thought of them. Yeah, that’s right. We gonna talk about Andrew Yang. I asked Chips if she thought that Andrew Yang represent Asian American well.
Chip Chang: No. And that’s largely because the few, like Andrew Yang supporters I met were Asian American men who very much have these like, who still have so much internalized racism, and some sexism and homophobia. I think he really reinforces this idea of Asian Americans being east Asian American or being east Asian. And that was something to me where I was like no like you know; the category of Asian American is dynamic and it’s changing and it’s very complex and multiethnic.
Anya Steinberg: Chip mostly had a problem with the way Andrew Yang portrayed himself. She spoke to me about the Washington Post article Yang wrote in responses to the rise in anti-Asian racism during the pandemic. In the article, Yang calls upon Asian Americans to show their Americanness by stepping up and pitching in during the pandemic so that people will see that “Asian Americans weren’t the virus; they are part of the cure.” Here’s Chip’s thoughts.
Chip Chang: I would say that after he wrote that article in the Washington Post about how, about responding to anti-Asian racism with COVID. That to me, I was like I have no respect for this person. That really was just so, I was reading that and I was like I was just gonna vomit in my month. It was just disgusting.
Anya Steinberg: Chip mostly took issue with this part of Yang’s opinion piece that drew on Asian American history during World War Two. Yang held up Japanese American soldiers during World War Two as an example for how Asian Americans can rise above discrimination and show their Americanness. The soldiers he’s referring to were part of the 442 battalion, an almost exclusively Japanese American battalion that was formed during the time when Japanese American were not only pretty much excluded from military service, but they were also being racially profiled, rounded up and incarcerated in camps across American. Chip thought Yang did a disservice to these soldiers by using them to further his argument that Asian Americans should strive to be more American.
Chip Chang: To me, that was very evident that he had very little knowledge of Asian American history. And kinda these people who built the pathway before him. And instead, he kinda just like you know, he dismissed it and used it to be very inappropriate, you know? He used them as an inappropriate example, that’s what I felt like.
Anya Steinberg: Other people share a similar visceral reactiosn to Andrew Yang and the way he represented Asian American. Amy elaborated for me.
Amy Zhou: Andrew Yang, like not my ideal candidate I think it’s cool he ran, I think it’s awesome he got that far. I admire his place in the race. I don’t love how he played up this whole like, math rocks, like the only thing Donald Trump is afraid of is an Asian guy who likes math. I don’t love that at all. That’s certainly not my Asian American hero. That’s probably just like an attack he used to make people more comfortable with him and I can respect that.
And I respect, in general, his place in the race, but no way do I like — even though Andrew Yang is Chinese and in a lot of ways, like is my community — there’s no way in I was like, oh yeah. I just feel seen with Andrew Yang. I think he represented this part of Asian American who doesn’t really want to be part of Asian America. I feel like he represented those like Asians who tried to align with whiteness.
Anya Steinberg: Nimisha thought that as much as Yang tried to distance himself from his Asian-ness or make fun of it, his identity ultimately dictated the way he was treated on the national stage.
Nimisha Nagalia: But I also think that like very soon that started happening, where people just didn’t take him seriously. That’s how I felt. I was like, okay, yeah, like we’re allowed on the stage early, but we’re not really like given the space to be taken seriously to be like oh maybe this person could actually win. I almost feel like he wasn’t even considered to be a contender ever against President Trump. To me, that felt like it was about anti-Asian stereotypes, right? There is a weakness basically to like an Asian man against a white man.
Anya Steinberg: It’s important that we recognize the significance of somebody like Andrew Yang. He definitely made history for the Democratic Party standing on the debate stage. But to me the historical significance of the moment was tainted by the way he embodies racist conceptions of Asian Americans. It shouldn’t be asking too much to want more from our role models when our role models are just a reflection and validation of the racist stereotypes we face in the world everyday.
So let’s turn our attention to the other historic candidate who will actually be on the ballot this fall — Kamala Harris. Harris was nominated to the Democratic ticket as Vice President. If elected, she’d become the first female, Black, and Asian American Vice President, which is one mouthful of title to hold. Nimisha sees the significance of this nomination reflected in her close circles.
Nimisha Nagalia: I think more of watching like my aunties and my mom’s friends excited about them [Biden-Harris] and like I am excited for them. I think I’m in like a place for I’m kind of analyzing her policy and stuff and being like, but does that serve Asian Americans? But I also like really understand, like for them — it’s been a long time, a lot of them only became citizens in the last decade.
I know my mom when I was little like just dealt with so much intense, overt racism. For her and for her friends, I get that being like how, like this person, this is an Asian woman on the stage. Like she could be in the White House. [It] feels like this huge, huge moment. I think it is. I think it’s like both.
I’m like for that representation itself does matter. I see it right I see what it does to people. And I know that you know when I was growing up, nobody would have thought of going into politics. And like, the fact that she is there, and she is going into it, means that here’s gonna be more Indian kids who are like hey, maybe I have something to say too, maybe I have something to advocate for. Maybe I could do that one day. And that does really matter.
Anya Steinberg: Amy also felt like Kamala Harris was a more relatable figure than Andrew Yang. She saw herself in Harris more than she did than Yang’s version of Asian American. However, what Harris represents to her does not come without conflict.
Amy Zhou: I think the way that she talks about her family and absolutely the meaning that she has as Black woman, as Asian American woman, as mixed woman. I think that’s so impactful obviously. I think she spoke really earnestly about her experience. I still remember the debate where she was like, when you point out the segregation of the buses, she was like, I was that little kid that rode that bus. I felt she spoke very earnestly on her experience as being Black, as being a child of immigrants, as being South Asian. I felt she spoke on that, more vocally than Andrew Yang did.
So, in that way, yeah I absolutely do feel the same. I also think that Kamala is a cop. I think that if we are looking at just her actions. I think she has really betrayed the community that she is planning to serve. I think that putting Black and Brown kids in jail for being late to class, I think that’s not something like super — like, there is just so much for Kamala that it’s so hypocritical to the things that, to the values that she’s toting. But I mean that being said, I think she is an amazing speaker. I think she is incredibly intelligent
If anything, if we’re going off the American legacy, I don’t think she is like the worst pick ever, I don’t know. I’m long past idolizing politicians and putting them on pedestals, but I do think that Kamala Harris, what she represents in terms of representation is powerful. And I think that’s, I feel more seen by her, I would say, than Andrew Yang but also, Andrew Yang doesn’t have the record Kamala Harris has, so.
Anya Steinberg: So, how much does representation actually matter? is representation what communities of color should be striving for? Cindy thinks that our politics have to go deeper than that.
Cindy Yang: Like, to be totally honest, I’m wrestling with [this].. Like to me, representation to me absolutely still matters, but it’s representation, and this, and that, and is it: we do share my values? Ideologically, are we aligned? It’s how do you make decisions? You know, do you work with the community? Because representation only isn’t enough.
I’m kind of, like, tired of just getting people who share our values into office. I actually want more people who share our values and who are willing to work with our community to come out with a solution. I think that as much as like representation is beautiful and great, we also need people in there who are willing to fight for us, who are willing to make an unpopular decision.
I think back to people who get into office and they’re getting presented a list of facts about how much the city is going to lose money, or the state is going to lose money and then deciding what to cut, where to make the cut. And where do they predominately make the cut? It’s the cut that hurt us the most. It’s the cut that hurt people the most.
And so, like I am tired of seeing that. If we got the person who has our value into office but when they are hit with a list of facts, of course they’re gonna make the decision that’s gonna save the city money or the district money, you know. And we need people grounded in their values and we need people who are grounded in the community. What would they look to see someone testified about a bill who was completely grounded in the community and in the issue?
Anya Steinberg: We have a long way to go before everybody’s voice is not only heard but honored by our government. It’s true that the US has historically excluded lots of people from the political process, but it is also true that this is changing day by day. Our system will work a whole lot better for everybody if everyone has a voice. Lately, it seems like those who are sitting around the table are so consumed by battles over conflicting viewpoints that they forget the importance of making sure that people are even invited to the table in the first place. Nimisha had a way better way of putting this. So, I will just let her say it instead.
Nimisha Nagalia: It’s really about making sure people have that moment that we are talking about earlier, that it’s like if you care about something, it is your responsibility to do something about it. Right? Or like you can do something about it maybe. Pushing people to like that moment and activation and it’s not about defining what they believe. Yeah, that’s not to say that it doesn’t matter what you care about.
Anya Steinberg: Right!
Nimisha Nagalia: Like obviously it does, but I think that if the goal is like overall power then we have to start from an accessible place, where people are set up or when people are ready to take action. What are they willing to do about it? A lot of people talk about voting as like the most basic form of democracy and I don’t really think it is. I think consensus-based conversations are a much more fundamental part of democracy. I think like taking care of your neighbors, protesting. I think those things often happen before and often should and like if you are doing that and you’re not voting, I never gonna shame you for not showing up.
Anya Steinberg: That’s a wrap for this episode of New Narratives. Special thanks for those featured in today’s story: Nimisha Nagalia, Cindy Yang, Amy Zhou, and Chip Chang. Music featured in this is Alone by Small Million. This episode is written, edited, and produced by your host Anya Steinberg, Storyteller Intern at Asian American Organizing Project. More info about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org.