Episode 11: March 16th marked the one-year anniversary of the Acworth-Atlanta shooting where eight people died, six of them being Asian American women. In this episode, we hear from Anthea Yur about the solidarity march she organized last year and Professor Jigna Desai on media portrayals of Asian American women and historical events that have led us here.
Guests include: Anthea Yur (Kokoro Project), Professor Jigna Desai (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities), Kay Moua, Phoua Chang, Jun Lin, and Siena Milbauer
Yoko Vue: Hello everyone, welcome back to New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. My name is Yoko Vue and I’m the storyteller intern for Asian American Organizing Project. I’m so excited to be the host for this podcast and to share stories from Asian Americans with you all. For this episode, we’re going to highlight the violence against Asian American women as it is so important to bring visibility to this group. We’ll hear from a local community organizer as well as a professor from the University of Minnesota.
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Yoko: It’s Women’s History Month and I’ve always celebrated this time of year by remembering leaders in our community like Grace Lee Boggs, an author and fierce activist; Choua Thao who was the first Hmong nurse recruited at the age of 13; or Patsy Mink, the first woman of color and first Asian Pacific Islander woman in the U.S. House of Representatives. However, this year our community is remembering those that have lost their lives in the Acworth-Atlanta shooting as well as the anti-Asian attacks across our nation.
The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum released a report on March 3rd on the experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islander women with discrimination, harassment, and violence. According to their report, “The racialized misogyny faced by AAPI women is not limited to hate incidents, but also includes experiences with different forms of harassment. AAPI women are continuously fetishized, exoticized, and objectified through hyper-sexualization… Nearly 3 in 4 (74%) AAPI women report experiencing racism and/or discrimination over the past twelve months…”
I spoke with Anthea Yur who is the founder of the Kokoro Project, a collective that started last year with a focus on community building and social justice. They’ve hosted the BLACK AND YELLOW: Asian Solidarity Rally, Dedicated to Daunte along with a climbing group to bring community members together.
Anthea: And the name actually stemmed from the first march that I hosted and that was the Asian solidarity march. It was more for the Asian women that were murdered in the Acworth and Atlanta shootings and there was a speaker there, her name is Alicia Gibson, and she’s this incredible local politician that was running for city council. I think she’s a quarter Japanese and her family– she had family ties to the Japanese internment camps and so when she was speaking with her grandmother, her grandmother, like taught her this concept of, of what kokoro meant, and kokoro is Japanese.
She said it didn’t necessarily mean heart. It didn’t necessarily mean spirit, it didn’t necessarily mean like these things that if you look it up and that’s like, what the Google translation is. But she said that it was the whole being, like the whole essence of it. And to me, it’s when you think about your pure self, all, all three of those things are ignited. And that’s again, like your heart, your spirit, and your soul.
Yoko: The solidarity march was on March 18th of 2021, two days after the shooting in Georgia. For Anthea, there were heavy emotions when she first heard of the shooting that moved her to organize this march.
Anthea: It was huge. And at the time there wasn’t– it was early in the morning and I just learned about it and just woke up and was looking through my phone. And I was like, my heart just sunk when I read that these Asian– Asian massage parlors were shot up. And then when I like looked even further into it, I saw the word Acworth and I just started grieving. I just broke down. I was really hysterical about it because it just felt so personal. You know, as an Asian woman that for some reason spent my time in Acworth Georgia, it was just felt so uncomfortable. And so directly insulting.
The thing that was super heartbreaking about the news media was the fact that it was almost as if they were like, hiding how large scale of xenophobia was with this because they were like oh it’s from– it was in Atlanta, Georgia but realistically started in Acworth Georgia and again, the Asian population was tucked away you never saw them and so it was clear to me that like these Asian women were directly hunted down because we don’t – like you just didn’t see us around, you know.
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Anthea: And I ended up calling my friend Tucson. And, you know, I told him how I was feeling. And I was like, someone needs – someone needs to host something and I know that we are probably the people that are going to have to do it. And I told him, I was like, I’m tired and fatigued, I’m angry. And I was like I don’t know what to do. But can you please help me? And he’s like, absolutely 100%. He’s like, of course. And it was really amazing. Because a lot of the time with like marches and things that I’ve organized, I’ve done a lot of the legwork. I’ve done the majority of it, you know, and invite people into the spaces and I love sharing that space and I love doing the work. And for the first time, you know, the organizations that I worked with, they just showed up.
Yoko: Anthea created posters to be handed out at the march, it was her way of grieving at that time.
Anthea: So that was kind of my 24 hours was like, just grieving calling and talking to my family talking to my Asian roommate about it, talking, you know, with my friends that are checking in with me and, and then creating these posters and showing up. I know, there’s a lot of footage from that day and the first thing I did was I broke down. I just broke down and started crying. Because I was like, on the go, run, run, run, run, run, go go, you know, just survive that day.
And then I wasn’t expecting much. I think I was like keeping my expectations low, in case I was disappointed. Instead, I was overwhelmed with how many people showed up and standing up and like looking at everyone and seeing a bunch of like Asian women’s faces and our beautiful almond eyes and just seeing these women that look like me, you know, they’re and they’re so like, that are hurt, like I was, just I was looking at a mirror, you know? And like, it wasn’t just us it was everyone, you know, there’s Native folks, Latinx folks, Black folks, white folks, everyone was there and it just meant so much to see that.
Yoko: I asked Anthea what were some memorable moments that came up for her as we were recalling that day.
Anthea: One of them is with Mel Reeves, Mel Reeves is a Black elder of ours in the activist community. And he came out and like, I love him. He’s always meant well, and he’s included me with the mother’s March and helped organize for that. And he just showed up. He was like, you know, he’s like, “What do you need for me sister, I got you. I want to say some words.” I was like, absolutely. And just the things that he had to say it was just like, so powerful.
And when he – when he passed away this last year, not even six months ago, from COVID. I went back and rewatched these videos because he meant so much and he, educated us on the Japanese internment camps, the Chinese Exclusion Act, he really cared, you know, like this event didn’t activate him it already existed. And I can’t remember the other thing that he said, but he essentially said like, they’re gonna make you feel like you’re not a human being. And he’s like, they’re gonna make you feel like you’re not a human being, they’re gonna make you feel like your experience isn’t worth it. Just his chants were just so powerful.
Yoko: I looked for the video of Mel Reeves and found his speech that was posted by Move for Justice News. Watching back, it is just as powerful now as it was then hearing him in person. In the past few months, we’ve continued to see hate crimes, and for Anthea…
Anthea: I try not to focus on the continuation of these Asian hate crime headlines and the justice not being served because I feel like in this last year, it’s, it’s still absolutely an issue. We’re still seeing it, you know. There’s a lot of things that are hitting home. And, again I refuse to be discouraged because I’m not going to use those as my statistics to see whether or not things are changing. And at least with the Kokoro project I, you know, I took a step back for a while to, like, heal my own trauma and to come back this spring and, you know, get it reactivated, but the Kokoro girls they’ve really found each other. They just stuck together. And it’s so heartwarming to see that they’ve created this community, and they like, keep this BIPOC climbing, weekly climbing group active, and seeing that they’re all just getting literally physically stronger and happy. They’re you know, they’re building their own community. So I’m really stoked.
Yoko: For Anthea, she wants to see the multifaceted groups under this Asian umbrella term to come and celebrate together.
Anthea: With a Kokoro project, and the climbing club and things like that. And even the Thai festival that I work with at the Buddha – it’s called Wat Promwachirayan in St. Louis Park. All these people come together and they’re all different, you know, they’re Hmong, Korean, Vietnamese, they’re you know, there’s– it’s all over the map. And to me, that’s what it means to be Asian, that’s what it’s like to be an APIDA person in America. So like I said, I’ve seen that in my local environment, my localized environment in the Twin Cities and it brings me hope, because again there’s other organizations that are focused on policy changes and for me, it’s like, I can’t use that as my statistical mark to see whether or not things are changing.
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Yoko: Although the shooting in Georgia brought on an outcry from communities all over the nation, these hate crimes have happened before. So I spoke with Professor Jigna Desai about what historical events have created these circumstances and it dates back to the U.S. immigration laws.
Professor Jigna Desai: And some of the most– of the earliest immigration laws actually targeted Asian women. And so even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1885, which is talked about as the first law that specifies that people can’t come from certain countries and it’s a racial national exclusion, is the Page Law. And the Page Law says that we can’t have prostitutes and convicts and felons coming into this country and so Asian women from China and Japan and other quote-unquote oriental countries, we have to be careful because they’re prostitutes and trying to sneak in. So it actually comes before Chinese Exclusion.
Yoko: This law created barriers and made assumptions about this particular group.
Professor Jigna Desai: You know, if you think about it, the first exclusions in this country by race are against Asian women. And the assumption is that they’re deviant and dangerous and a moral sexual threat to this country and to the white wholesomeness of this country. And so from the very beginning you know, Asians are framed as a threat and dangerous in all kinds of ways, whether it’s through disease, but it’s also moral, sexual, and that has I think been an important way of shaping everything that comes after and since then, and there was so much scrutiny of being– trying to figure out who’s respectable and who’s deviant, who’s a good Asian woman and who is a deviant Asian woman and the good Asian woman is going to be the merchant wife and she’s going to be domestic.
And on top of that exclusion history, of course, we have the wars that the U.S. has been involved in both explicitly, implicitly, covertly in Southeast Asia and in Korea, you know, in Asia overall. And that war and imperialism also has shaped how the U.S. sees Asian women often as sex workers, often as docile and kind of available as part of war. As part of either war brides or as part of the sex work that happens around militarization and tourist economies. And so there’s a way in which even hypersexualization, but also anti-Asian misogyny comes from those relationships as well.
Yoko: The refugee experience is very much a part of the Asian American experience and often these folks are viewed as taking people’s jobs, resources, and money away from others.
Professor Jigna Desai: While Asian labor is so in demand and exploited of seeing Asian women and Asian Americans as being indebted and somehow leeching off of and stealing from– whether it’s stealing jobs or taking welfare or something like that, getting something they’re not entitled to. And that idea of labor and whose labor is valued and what labor is valued in Asian-American women’s labor, which is often service labor. Whether it’s take caregiving, caretaking spa nails but also food and nursing, right. Like there’s all kinds of ways in which Asian American women are associated with care and docility and submissiveness, but at the same time, their labor is in demand. And in this larger context of refugee populations, being in communities, being indebted, and leeching. Right and so that doubleness is always there as well. So there’s all of that at play, I think in how histories have shaped how anti-Asian violence and especially anti-Asian violence against women plays out now.
Yoko: A common experience of being Asian in the United States is being seen as the perpetual foreigner. Never truly belonging, even if they are born here.
Professor Jigna Desai: And so many people have talked about that in Asian American studies and in our Asian communities. It’s like, no matter how long we’re here, no matter what the histories are we’re in this xenophobic way seen as not the belong and we’re on settler-colonial land. And so I would say we don’t belong. And no matter what we do, “Where are you from?” And, you know, St Paul or the Midwest is never the answer that is accepted. And that is just part of that exclusion, I think that is really still in full force even after almost a hundred– over 150 years.
Yoko: In addition to this, there is a long history of what Professor Jigna Desai says is economic and disease scapegoating.
Professor Jigna Desai: And those have a long history. Those are a part of the yellow peril narrative that we started with where even Chinatowns were seen as being spaces of disease and germ contagion early on and Chinatowns were associated with filth, sexual depravity, but also with disease and that same idea of Chinese being dangerous to the health of the nation is one that I think has been, you know, re-kind of vamped now, especially when Trump was president. And we had in the beginning of COVID, the anti-Asian violence really hit its stride then. And we’re looking at part of the– we’re looking back on the year of violence, but someone is writing, you know, like the same week as we’re marking the anniversary one year anniversary of the deaths of the women in Atlanta. It’s also the same week of the My Lai massacre.
And so like there’s ways of which longer histories or war and imperialism, but I would say. You know, it’s been two years since COVID. And so the Atlanta killings, I think come in that trajectory of the increase in anti-Asian violence that started right– well that increased when Trump became president because of his scapegoating of China in general, but definitely with COVID and that we’re all feeling that. That combination of economic precarity in the U.S. which is what happened when Vincent Chin was killed and COVID has made it acceptable and so that anti-Asian racism is often targeted against women and elders.
Yoko: I asked her why elders and women were often the target.
Professor Jigna Desai: I think they’re seen as incredibly vulnerable and also assumed to be docile. And you think that idea that there won’t be resistance, that they’re the easiest ones to pick off is part of it. That there’s no consequence, they’re also maybe seen as most disposable. And they think about the Atlanta killings of women. And I was just reading a vanity fair experience, but like that the idea that women are always there to surface and to serve and to care and to not be real people And I think there’s a way in which that dehumanization that comes from that place of you’re here to serve me, but I don’t even see you as human is so common.
I mean the Atlanta murders are one aspect of it, but they’re part of a full spectrum of dehumanization of Asian-American women and especially people in the service industries and spa and body care. And I think part of it is that people don’t expect Asian American women to respond or to be angry and so it’s even more targeting. And so like, if there is a response, if there’s any resistance– like the woman who is walking home in Yonkers, I think 67-year-old woman, she was yelled at and called a racial slur and she ignored it and almost like that incites more anger. And so it’s anything that isn’t servile is seen as somehow resistant– inspires more anger, and I think more vitriol.
Yoko: I shared with Professor Jigna Desai how I was taught not to cause trouble, to put my head down and that resonated with her.
Professor Jigna Desai: Like, I am told not to rock the boat. I think in all kinds of ways whether you’re immigrant or refugee, like don’t draw attention to yourself, right? Like just go under the radar and whether it’s because your family went through internment or whether it’s because you’re a refugee, you don’t want to draw attention or– just follow the rules, get what you can out of it and then just stay out of the spotlight. Right? Like, don’t draw attention because that can be dangerous. For all kinds of reasons. And so don’t protest, don’t get angry, just get what you can and keep a low profile. And also, you know, as an Asian American daughter, take care of everybody. And so, right. Like don’t get angry. Um, and I think we spent a lot of time, even cultivating anger and, you know, feminist anger was really liberating when I figured it out.
“Like I’m pissed all the time. Everything is so fucked up.” And so I’m like, “Oh my God, thank goodness for rage and anger,” because being a good daughter, not just culturally, but keep a low profile, don’t get us, you know, don’t draw attention for all kinds of reasons. Don’t get in trouble at school. Don’t do any of that was also about that racial gender– you know, being not docile, but again not being the target, Like if you get to do it to not get around– to get around, not being bullied and you get around it and not to draw attention in ways that will mark you in gendered ways that hyper-sexualized right.
Like, I don’t want people to look at me cause then I have to deal with whatever catcalling or whatever else that’s going to come harassment. And so just it’s a learn– I feel like it was a learned strategy, but it backfires because in terms of our gendering where the job is to take care of others and all of that, then not only are we last, but resistance in harassment, it’s harder to stand up to that. And if you haven’t, you know– you don’t all of a sudden call somebody. You’ve had to, like, that’s not going to be your fight or flight response.
Yoko: Media influences how we view others so I asked Professor Jigna Desai what types of media portrayal there have been of Asian women.
Professor Jigna Desai: There’s always the kind of self-sacrificing vision of Asian-American women, whether you’re thinking of classic opera like you know Madam Butterfly where the woman has the baby but gives it up to the man, the white man so he can take the baby back as the savior and she’s willing to die for their love. Or the idea that even, for example, where militarization happens in and places in Vietnam or in the Philippines or where there has been a lot of presence of the military, and there is sometimes sex work where I’m thinking of Miss Saigon. Again that same kind of narrative of white savior coming in and the sacrifice-ability of Asian women. But always there for consumption, but hyper-sexualized at the same time, I think that kind of white desire is underplaying so much of that and it is a metaphor, I think both of you know for– in terms of imperialism. A representation of conquering of taking land and having access to women’s bodies. And so militarization you know, of course, is part of U.S. dominance and power over in places that, especially in Asia, and that have either been colonized like the Philippines or have that actively been involved in terms of war, like Korea.
Yoko: Historically, there have been very few representations of the variety of Asian ethnic groups. Often portrayed as the villain, someone exotic, or someone to be saved.
Professor Jigna Desai: Like I remember one of the first times that I got to see South Asians on the screen was Indiana Jones and the temple of dooms and they’re linking Monkeybrains and I go to school and people are like, do we need monkey brains? Look, I’m a vegetarian. Like, this is some orientalist fantasy. And it’s like, you know, when people get told dog eaters and it’s just like this exotic, you know the location of people, but I think those representations you know, for Asian American women, often come as these lotus blossoms as these China dolls as these sex worker prostitutes, or as, you know, the old stereotypes would be like dragon lady, but these conniving evil women.
But I think that those representations, they still play out that way. Right? Like that there are, there’s the Asian American girlfriend and she’s always with some white guy and– or she’s nerdy, but I mean, it’s like what will be called the Lotus blossom. And she has never queer she’s, you know, she’s never a rock climber or has any kind of life, but she’s never an organizer. So those are the representations we don’t get. We get the standard kinds of narratives and tropes. And we get racist ones where people are asked to fake accents.
Yoko: In the past few years we’ve seen more movies and television shows that center on Asian American experiences, like “To All The Boys I’ve Loved” or “Turning Red”.
Professor Jigna Desai: Thank goodness for Mindy Kaling, but even some of the other kinds of YA narratives besides Never Have I Ever– I’m blanking on the names, I should have done my homework better, but we see Asian American lesbians. We see you know– And we have our wonderful new Disney film. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. And so here’s a situation where we have mother-daughter narratives, like those are the things we are allowed, like Joy Luck Club, woman warrior. We are allowed our mother-daughter narratives, and this is one, but already as you probably know, it was getting slammed on social media, by white dudes who can’t identify, it’s not universal, like sit down boohoo.
Yoko: Although representation is a part of the solution and we have taken some steps forward to increase this, a both/and approach is necessary to create a world where we feel seen, safe, and heard.
Professor Jigna Desai: Representation isn’t enough. It’s both/and. We need that and we need to deal with you know, the fact that folks are getting deported, that doesn’t change– having a Disney film isn’t going to change deportations. So we need a both/and approach and we still have all of these ways in which so little of that is recognized. And I think that is it’s not a one strategy thing for Asian Americans. We have many needs and people elsewhere get to have complex needs and complex representation and complex narratives and complex movements and multitude. And we should too. We also get to have social movements and cultural representation and deal with immigration policies and deportation policies and all those, we get to us all of that. Like we’re talking south Asians and Filipinos, you know, Chinese American, Japanese, American, and Korean. Like we’ve got already so much multitude and I’m not even talking about Pacific Islander where we also have to do with different parts of settler colonialism. Like we have so much plentitude and complexity in our communities.
Yoko: This approach includes data like Stop AAPI Hate, where people can report hate crimes. This initiative is important because it brings visibility to the issue and they are documenting what’s happening in our communities.
Professor Jigna Desai: And there’s something about counting and quantitative data that you think makes things visible. And I’m an abolitionist feminist, so I’m not going to be one that is like, we need more hate crime legislation and we need to incarcerate. I think there are important aspects of judicial responses, judicial legal responses. For me, abolition is the pathway to real liberation and real justice. And so prosecuting people for anti-Asian violence as hate crimes is not for me the pathway that I would choose, because I think participating in the white supremacist structures that further anti-Black violence, anti-Asian violence. So I am not a proponent of increased police surveillance for our communities. I don’t think those are the pathways. I think it is what we’re doing, which is what we talked about was like making more solidarities with Black Lives Matter, working towards abolition.
Yoko: This approach should be intersectional with other social justice work.
Professor Jigna Desai: I think things have changed because people know the histories and people feel like we’re not safer with more police, but we do demand action to address anti-Asian violence and we demand that we take responsibility and other communities also take responsibility for this and stand up for it. And so that to me, I think is one of the things that I hold on to– is that there is an abolitionist bases to some of what came out of the response and a desire to, again, like to make visible anti-Asian violence in quantitative ways, I’ll be it. Which is not the only thing, but to link it to these larger histories, to be able to link it to other forms of white supremacy and violence and settler colonialism, and to be able to frame it through an abolitionist frame. And I feel like that’s a lot going on right there. I don’t think we had that before. I don’t think we would have been able to do that 10 years ago or 20 years ago, so effectively. And so I’m not an optimist, but I always carry on. And I can see things that were possible that weren’t possible before and that does give me hope because it is a shared vision. It’s a collective vision that we’re building together and the more people are doing it and I’m here for the youth who are so already there and have come to that far earlier and I’m just so here because they are doing amazing jobs.
Yoko: The youth is an important part of these movements and building a world that we want to see together.
Professor Jigna Desai: This is where I think organizing youth is so important because I think they have the critiques. I think they understand and have analyses that didn’t have access to. I think they can name things now. And can name anti-Asian things all the way and have grown up in movements– moments where like Black Lives Matter is there and know that we’re in solidarity and know we have to be there. And also can name these complex movements and name the complex dynamics of what do you do when the person who beat up the 67-year-old woman was a Black man. And how do we be abolitionists in a sense we don’t like– I don’t want to call police on people, right? But where does that leave our politics, our communities, our options, and what relationships and solidarities do we have to build in order to always have these conversations. And I was so touched and impressed by the show of solidarity and standing up last year by Black communities after the Atlanta killings. And so it is part of the fabric we’re building. And I’ve seen, you know, a lot of work done by Asian American around solidarities with Black Lives Matter and I felt like I got to see a little bit of that in the other direction last year, which was really beautiful and important and touching as we think about this kind of world we’re living in where it gets erased, the solidarities get erased when we see the violence.
Yoko: Something Professor Jigna Desai shared with me was very comforting and speaks to the way we should be taking care of one another.
Professor Jigna Desai: One of my favorite scenes moments was like one day we’re on a zoom call and an Asian-American, I think, grandparent came in and brought fruit to one of the students. So it’s like, that was an act of love. That was love language. Right. There’s cut fruit. But just show love and come for each other in these ways with moments of delight that you’re willing to share and show up and do that for yourself and for others. Because what we do know is that we have taken care of ourselves and each other, and those histories of mutual aid and those histories of being there for each other cause nobody else was is what we do have as part of our past. Not just all the violence and exclusion and the war, but taking care of each other and what is now mutual aid and mutual support, but has been care labor and has been community care and showing up. But also taking breaks because sometimes you can’t do it all the time and sometimes communities are hard and it’s exhausting and you can’t do it 100%, especially because that’s what we’re asked to do in the world all the time. So find some delight, do nothing. Those are also radical acts of anti-capitalism. I think they’re radical acts of feminism.
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Yoko: The song you just listened to is “Same” by Alisha* Thao who performed at the Coalition of Asian American Leaders’ event on remembering the Acworth-Atlanta shooting. To wrap up this episode, I wanted to know; “How do you celebrate being an Asian American woman?”
Kay Moua: One way in which I celebrate is really learning and re-learning how to just show up and be unapologetic about what I have to say, especially during times where I might feel like my voice is small or shaking, but just really owning up to that.
Siena Milbauer: As a mixed-race Asian American woman, I can very literally draw the origin of my identity back to a singular person and that’s my mom. My mom just so happens to be my favorite person in the entire world. So I feel like even when, you know, being an Asian American woman can feel scary or feel like an identity that’s unwelcome, it’s really hard for me to lose sight of the joy of that identity too because it comes from my mom and I love my mom. I feel like ultimately relationships are what bring joy into our lives and so the relationships that have made me an Asian American woman and the relationships that I’ve been able to forge with other Asian American women bring me a lot of joy.
Anthea: I celebrate being an Asian American woman in so many different ways, it’s very fun. I’ve been really enjoying this process for myself. One of them is, for me, being proud of being Asian is being proud of my family. You know again, like walking out of your house, and you’re in this super white environment, with a lot of, again, racism that we didn’t even recognize at the time, I’m coming back home and like having my meals, and having my mom and having my language and, and our values as an Asian family, that was really special to me. And that’s what it means for me to be Asian, is to be a Yur, of Yur family member, to the daughter of two immigrants that worked hard to be a part of this culture.
Phoua Chang: I celebrate being an Asian American woman by wearing my cultural clothing and accessories. I think it’s such a special moment for me whenever I do wear it, especially if it is to a place that I don’t typically wear it to. And I know people will look, but I like to think of it as if they’re looking that means it’s really piquing their interest and so it just makes me feel even more confident to show it off. I mean it is a beautiful craft that was made to show our culture and our history so I feel empowered whenever I do wear my cultural clothing.
Jun Lin: I’m celebrating being an Asian American woman by supporting and uplifting other Asian American women within my community. Together I feel that our connections help us grow.
Professor Jigna Desai: Hanging out with other Asian American women, right. Like I think just amazing people, right? Like, and for me being with women of color, being with Asian American queer folks, I appreciate our humor. I appreciate our ability to laugh at each other, to make– to be able– to laugh through it all and that is what keeps me going because if I’m not laughing at it, I’d be crying all the time these days. We’re smart, we’re sassy, but we’re also sad and we’re tired. And I think we get to be all those things, but I do want to laugh while I do. And I have to say, I’m just always so impressed by the depth of Asian-American women in particular.
Yoko: Thank you to all the guests who were a part of this story: Anthea Yur, Professor Jigna Desai, Kay Moua, Siena Milbauer, Jun Lin, and Phoua Chang. This episode is written, edited, and produced by your host Yoko Vue, Storyteller Intern at Asian American Organizing Project. More information about AAOP can be found at our website aaopmn.org. Thank you for listening and see you next time!
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*Uncertain about the spelling of this name