Dr. Franklin Odo’s Impact On My Educational Journey

I never met Dr. Franklin Odo in person but his impact on my journey as an educator was immense.

In the summer of 2010 I arrived at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to serve as a graduate student research intern. Aside from conducting research at the National Archives for my dissertation, my duties at APAC included participating in several public-facing projects advancing Asian American history and culture under their new executive director, Dr. Konrad Ng. I loved my brief stay working with awesome folks at APAC--it was my first time being exposed to a vision of Asian American Studies as something valuable outside the ivory tower classroom; in a way, returning it to its activist community roots. It really inspired me to *do* Asian American Studies in a way that truly matters, and shaped every subsequent class I taught and project I oversaw. None of that would've been possible without Franklin, who served as APAC's founding director until his retirement in 2010, right before I arrived. Even though APAC didn't nearly have the same status or resources as the Smithsonian's other identity-based museums, Franklin stewarded APAC for 13 years, curating innovative exhibits on multiple Asian American communities and histories.

So, it was truly an honor when I was invited by historian Dr. Beth Lew-Williams to join Franklin and other Asian American historians on the roundtable, "How Should We Teach Asian American History?” at last year's virtual Association for Asian American Studies conference. I nervously presented on my oral history project, Memories of Militarism and War: Asian American Voices From the DMV which I oversaw as a faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, one of many institutions where Franklin taught and helped build Asian American Studies. Franklin was enthusiastically supportive of my work and the work of the other roundtable participants. I had no idea he was battling cancer at the time. But he was clearly still passionate about Asian American storytelling as a way of sharing our struggles and triumphs with ourselves and the rest of the country.

Speaking of storytelling, click here to listen to a great oral history interview with Franklin from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

Rest in peace and power, Franklin, and thank you for all that you've done for me and so many others.

My Story Our Future: South Asian American Voices of Connecticut

One of Maum’s core offerings is Narrative, Arts, and Cultural Change. Our offering is based on Founding Director Dr. Terry K Park’s more than twenty-five years of training, expertise, and experience as a Shakespearean-trained actor, off-Broadway performance artist, community-engaged oral historian, peer reviewed-published Performance Studies scholar, and volunteer Executive Director of a national, award-winning magazine on Asian American arts, culture, and politics. In short, social change storytelling has pulsated through Dr. Park’s work as an actor, activist, and educator, and it now flows through Maum’s heart.

That’s why, as one of three activists-in-residence at UConn’s Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (AAASI), Dr. Park is thrilled to be the lead facilitator of a groundbreaking storytelling project—My Story Our Future: South Asian American Youth Voices of Connecticut. In partnership with the India Cultural Center in Greenwich, CT, the Greenwich Historical Society, and designed by AAASI’s director Dr. Jason Chang, My Story Our Future invites over twenty South Asian American middle school and high school students to explore their identities as South Asian American youth in the Nutmeg State. Through a series of virtual and in-person workshops comprised of presentations, assigned readings and videos, social-emotional learning (SEL) activities, family migration maps, discussions, guest talks, and lessons on community-engaged oral history best ethics and practices, the youth participants will conduct several oral history interviews of their South Asian family members about their histories, their challenges, and their triumphs. Through these interviews and the workshop materials, the participants will gain a deeper, more critical understanding of how their individual lives have been shaped by a larger constellation of families, ancestors, social histories, and contemporary forces. In short, they’ll be guided by the Ethnic Studies ethos of “K(no)w History, K(no)w Self.” These “stories of us” will inform the participant’s “story of I,'" which will be presented to the public on December 18th at the Greenwich Historical Society.

The youth participants will also have the opportunity to participate in a GHS-led curatorial workshop. They’ll learn how to install an exhibit of their own stories, which will be showcased at GHS.

Just as importantly, MSOF’s participant stories and family-based oral history interviews will help contribute to Connecticut’s mandated K-12 Asian American/Pacific Islander curriculum. The curriculum's goal is to teach the histories and contributions of AAPIs to the economic, cultural, social, and political development of Connecticut and the U.S. Stories of the lived experiences of all AA/PIs, including South Asians, will help Connecticut’s public school students have a richer, more intimate understanding of what it means to be Asian American and Pacific Islander. MSOF will play an important role in this significant project to make Connecticut a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive state for all.

There is also the possibility that some of the stories and oral histories will get archived at South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA). SAADA is a community-based culture change organization ensuring that South Asian Americans are included in the American story: past, present, and future.

MSOF started on August 28th with a kick-off event led by Dr. Chang and Dr. Park facilitated the following virtual meeting. In addition to facilitating all virtual meetings, Dr. Park will also travel to Greenwich to facilitate the in-person workshop on October 16th. For those in the Greenwich, CT area, we hope you’ll join Maum, its MSOF partners, and the youth participants and their families at the celebratory presentation on December 16th.

For those interested in receiving assistance for their own high-impact, community-engaged storytelling projects and other narrative change services, we invite you to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with Maum Consulting.

Introducing Maum’s New Program Manager: Marjorie Justine Antonio

Hey, my name is Marjorie (she/they/siya), and I’m the Program Manager for Maum! I am a 1.5-generation queer Filipino American interdisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and community arts organizer based in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

I recently graduated from the University of Maryland (UMD) with my dual B.A. in History and American Studies, and am pursuing a gap year (or years!). I have decided to pursue my dream to serve my community through the arts and cultural education, in particularly, the Asian American and Filipino American spaces in the DMV (DC-Maryland-Virginia).

As a Filipino immigrant, I am the product of the Philippines’ labor-export policy as my parents found professional employment in the US in the early 2000s. From my childhood until I got to college, I was conditioned to feel ashamed of my Filipino nationality and identity (ew, colonial mentality) despite living in a Filipino ethnic enclave in Baltimore, MD.

My first introduction to Asian American studies was Dr. Terry Park’s Asian American History course. It inspired me to pursue Ethnic Studies as my life’s passion and commitment and spurred my involvement in student organizations, academic research and thesis work, and culturally-competent community arts organizing. Learning about Ethnic Studies strengthened my racial-ethnic identity, enabled me to reconnect with my ethnicity and homeland, as well as ask critical questions about the presence, visuality, and stratification of Asian Americans and other Southeast Asians in the United States. My interest in Ethnic Studies coincided with my engagement with the Filipino American progressive activist space in the DMV, and such involvements spurred my honors thesis on Filipino American transnational arts activism, where I conducted oral history interviews, archival research, and visual culture analysis. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with Dr. Park to make Ethnic Studies more accessible for the public and learners of all ages.

To sum up my time at UMD, I had an equal commitment to Asian American studies / Ethnic Studies and the arts. I was the founding director of “FCArts” - a Filipino American-interest creative arts organization at UMD, The Clarice’s NextNOW Fest 2020 student curator, Student Entertainment Events’ Performing Arts Director, and the previous editor-in-chief of Stylus: A Journal of Literature and Art. I incubated my interest in politics of representation, contemporary art, and cultural interpretation through the curation of two exhibitions at the Stamp Gallery, Not Your Model Minority (2020) and alternate universe: visualizing queer futurisms (2022). I have had a fruitful run at UMD, and have been grateful for the opportunity to strengthen the arts ecosystem on campus.

Currently, I am pursuing my passion in the arts as I figure out my next steps professionally and academically. I am the newest and first poetry editor of Mahalaya SF, a Filipinx community newspaper based in the Bay Area, CA, and a teaching artist at Art Works Now, a non-profit based in Hyattsville, MD. During my free time, I am working on my craft as a visual artist and creative writer, reconnecting to my classical music background, and warming up my old field hockey stick. I am reading Safia Elhillo’s Girls That Never Die (2022) and Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family (2022), and getting through my poetry haul from AWP 2022. I love making matcha lattes with oat milk, going to concerts, wandering around museums and galleries, learning new recipes from TikTok, and spending time with my loved ones, doggies and humans alike.

I am excited to serve as Maum’s first Program Manager, and ready to optimize all of our workflows!

Maum Joins UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute’s Activist-in-Residency Program

Maum is excited to announce that they have joined the Activist-in-Residence program at UConn's Asian and Asian American Studies Institute for the upcoming 2022-23 academic year.

“Housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,” as stated on their website, AAASI “is a multidisciplinary research and teaching program. Distinguished by its global, diasporic, national, regional, and transnational orientations, the Institute brings two traditionally distinct fields of inquiry together in dynamic conversation: Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. Comprised of the humanities, social sciences, and the arts, the Institute’s research output and course offerings engage Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas not as static, monolithic sites rather as sets of shifting historical, geographic, and geopolitical zone of interaction, struggle, and cooperation.”

Under the directorship of Dr. Jason Oliver Chang, AAASI is engaged in innovative, public-facing work, including working with allies through the Connecticut chapter of Make Us Visible to implement first-in-the-nation legislation that requires the inclusion of Asian American and Pacific Islander history with funding for localized curriculum development. The passage of the historic bill, as described on Make Us Visible’s website, was a result of a “bipartisan coalition of parents, students, teachers, and policymakers…Their bill had 99 co-sponsors with legislative support from both the Progressive and Conservative Caucuses, and everyone in between…After passing the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, the bill was signed into law on May 24. The Governor, alongside the bill, also signed a proclamation recognizing May as AAPI Heritage Month. These successes build on MUV CT's legislation [the previous] year including AAPI history in a K-8 model curriculum with 360k in funding. Their team is looking forward to working with the State Department of Education on the development and implementation of these two new laws.”

To that end, Maum is honored to join current AiR's Jennifer Heikkila Diaz and Mike Keo to contribute to community dialogs, youth-driven family oral history workshops, K-8 teacher preparation in Asian American literature, and the Institute's Advanced Pedagogy Curriculum Lab.

Scroll down Maum’s landing page to activate a pop-up window that will allow you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter. And add us to your socials for updates on our work with AAASI.

On Embracing Our Inner Magical Air Guitar Unicorn

As a young Asian American man growing up in Utah, I learned to be ashamed--of myself, of my body, of my family. I learned to view any Asian or AsianAmerican boy or man, on screen or around me, as lack--lacking in strength, lacking in virility, lacking in desirability. I learned to understand such lack against the measuring stick of whiteness, as embodied by James Bond, Indiana Jones, He-Man, and mimed in the blonde Mormon boys who were perfectly cast as my heroes. They called me Data. They called me Long Duk Dong. They called me Bruce Lee. I was devastated to learn what the character Song Liling declares in David Henry Hwang's award-winning play, M Butterfly: "...I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man."

Thus, I learned to hate other Asian men. I coveted what they failed to achieve. I learned to yearn for a masculinity that could never be my own--without questioning its toxicity.

Gradually, thanks to friendships with gender fluid, queer, and other CIS and non-CIS men of diverse backgrounds, as well as courses and books from Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Asian American Studies, I began to unlearn, and thus, heal. And I began to learn that another form of manhood was possible--in fact, it was always there, right in front of me. In Data's selfless courage. In Long Duk Dong's love of a bigger, loud woman. In Bruce Lee's refusal to treat women as hypersexualized objects to conquer. In my immigrant Korean father's tenderness.

These are the lessons I imparted to my students in over fifteen years of teaching Asian American Studies. This is what I tried to embody in my Magical Air Guitar Unicorn character that I performed when I won Mr. Hyphen 2011, Hyphen Magazine’s annual community fundraiser/beauty pageant. This is what informed my decision, when I volunteered to be Hyphen's executive director, to make Mr. Hyphen more inclusive of masculine-of-center, genderqueer, and transmen applicants, which not only resulted in more applications and the biggest audience in the event's history, but more importantly, its alternative vision of what it means--could mean, should mean, does mean--to be an Asian American man. These were the themes discussed in an online gathering of Asian American men from Ohio that I co-facilitated last year with Dr. Max Tokarsky under the auspices of OPAWL - Building AAPI Feminist Leadership in Ohio. And this is what I hope to offer in a future course on Asian American masculinities--to share what I've unlearned and learned, to hold space for our journeys, and to transform the spaces we inhabit. And I'll do so using JEDHI (#justice, #equity, #diversity, #healing, #inclusion) principles—that same principles that guide Maum.

Introducing Maum’s New Social Media Associate: Callie Wen

Hi there! I’m Callie (she/her/hers), and I’ll be working on social media for Maum! I’m a second-generation Chinese American and a rising senior at the University of Maryland.

Growing up, I didn’t realize how important my Asian American identity is to me until I took one of Dr. Park’s classes during my freshman year. As my first introduction to Asian American studies, this class (through Dr. Park’s insightful guidance) truly transformed my worldview and my perception of myself. Diving into this field of study helped me ground my own lived experiences in the context of larger histories and structures. I know I’m beyond lucky to have the opportunity to take Asian American Studies classes at my university (though I wish I had access to this curriculum even earlier in my education!) My own journey has planted the belief that all Asian Americans deserve access to knowledge about their community and history. I’m excited to see Maum bridge that gap and bring a deeper understanding of anti-racism, Asian American liberation, and transformative change to the broader APIDA community.

A little bit more about me! I’ve got my sights set on law school, and I’m currently studying for the LSAT. I’ve come to realize that while the legal system has powerful potential for change, it is often inaccessible to marginalized populations– through language barriers, financial burdens, and even policies that make finding legal representation difficult. I hope to provide culturally competent legal services to Asian American families, or to pursue impact litigation to create a more just future for my community and other BIPOC communities.

On campus, I’m involved in the Taiwanese American Student Association, where I do a lot of event-planning and community-building, and the Asian American Student Union, where I engage in student organizing and facilitate community education workshops. I also intern at my school’s Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy (MICA), as well as at the Domestic Violence Resource Project (DVRP), a D.C. non-profit that serves Asian American survivors of domestic abuse and gender-based violence.

In my personal life, I’ve been really into weightlifting for the past year. It’s taught me about creating balance in my life, and helped me develop quite a bit of confidence– being the only woman in a weight room full of grunting men was pretty intimidating at first! I enjoy reading too, though I haven’t had much time for that recently. My reading list as of late consists of Severance by Ling Ma, The Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri, and Human Acts by Han Kang. I also love longboarding around my neighborhood, taking myself on study dates to cute coffee shops and bookstores, going to concerts, and exploring new cities!

Excited to stretch my creative muscles with Maum’s social media and help it flourish!

On My Mom, Fermenting Community, and (Un)settling Asian American History

Photographer: My Dad, Elson Park

As we near the close of #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth, I'd like to share the above photo of my Mom.

According to her, the photo was taken around 1975, several years before I was born. She's sitting on the tiled floor of our family's backyard in Irvine, California. Her smile radiates as warmly as the Orange County sun that shines down on the jars of doenjang, or fermented soybean paste, hugging the ground. At the time, my Mom said there weren't any Korean stores nearby--Garden Grove, home to the oldest Koreatown in OC, was still emerging as post-1965 Asian immigrants like my Mom were just starting to establish a presence. So she made her own doenjang from soybeans mailed to her from Korea. She also gave extra jars to other Koreans in the area.

Doenjang, as some know, is the life-force of Korean cuisine. It's also incredibly labor intensive. As described by the Korean internet celebrity chef Maangchi, doenjang is made by grinding soybeans into a thick paste and forming it into blocks that are dried & fermented for months before being soaked in brine for a few more months. The solids then become doenjang.

In some of my workshops for Maum Consulting, LLC, I like to open with this photo as a way to show--and complicate--the place and process of Asian American history. On one hand, this photo shows how immigrant Asian women like my Mom labored to sustain Korean American families and communities. It's the kind of labor that often doesn't get included in what counts as "History" with a capital "H," and yet, we wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be here, teaching Asian American history, without this invisibilized gendered labor. And she did it through fermentation--a process of creating life from death. It's bacterial alchemy, manipulating matter so that it can live in a different form, and thus, allow us to live--with delicious joy. It says so much about our resilience, our resourcefulness, and our abundance in a country that only wanted us for our cheap labor & militarized gratitude. In a way, my Mom's doenjang *is* Asian American history, if we understand it as a narrative of "new life," the name given to the operation that, in the same year of this photo, brought thousands of Vietnamese refugees to several US military bases, many of whom would eventually resettle in Orange County.¹

And yet, can we call the ground that my Mom and jars sit on, and that nourished so many of us, as ours? How can we claim our rightful place on a land that's stolen? So, I also show this photo to acknowledge that my family settled on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Acjachemen & Tongva peoples.² How does this complicate the narrative of Asian American history as "new life"? How is our own presence a process of fermentation--of Asian American life from Native American death? How can white supremacy itself be broken down so that Asian Americans, Native Americans, and others might live--in a different form altogether? What fermented futures await?

¹ For more on Operation New Life, US military empire, and Vietnamese refugee settlers, I recommend the work of my friend/colleague, Dr. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi: https://asianam.ucla.edu/person/evyn-le-espiritu-gandhi/

² “The land that is now Irvine was seized from the Acjachemen and Tongva first by the Spanish military and the Catholic Church, then sold to Californios Don Jose Andres Sepulveda, and then purchased in 1865 by an Irish immigrant named James Irvine, along with his two business partners, Flint and Bixby.” Source: Toxic Legacies of War: the Irvine Case (walkshop on October 26, 2019) Statement prepared by Jennifer Terry, Convener and Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies, UC Irvine.

On Buffalo, Atlanta, and Racist Love

Like many of you, I'm mourning the 11 Black lives who were killed by a White supremacist gunman in Buffalo over the weekend. I'm also mourning the 3 Korean American women killed earlier in the week in Dallas's Koreatown. The past week has definitely felt heavy with these & other state-led violations of bodily and territorial sovereignty.

In reading & watching the news about Buffalo, I noticed something...troubling. Driven by the White gunman's use of the "Great Replacement" theory, some writers & pundits have linked the Buffalo shooting with other race-based mass shootings: Charleston, Oak Creek, Pittsburgh, El Paso. When I saw the sadly long list of cities, I was a bit surprised to see the omission of Atlanta. Why isn't it included, I wondered?

At first I thought, it makes sense if they're focusing on those mass shootings where the White supremacist shooter was a known subscriber to the "Great Replacement" theory. In short, a focus on shooters driven by "hate": hatred of Blacks, Sikhs, Jews, Mexicans. There's usually plenty of evidence to support such a charge, typically offered by the gunman's own performative archive: manifestos, social media posts, live-streams of the massacre.

Atlanta, on the other hand, seems a bit more ambiguous. From what I know, the shooter didn't subscribe to the "Great Replacement" theory. He didn't belong to any known white supremacist groups. He didn't post racist memes to 4chan. In fact, he frequented the very spaces he targeted & interacted with the very women he murdered--an interaction he described as a "sexual addiction."

It should also be noted that East Asian Americans in particular are sometimes generalized as accomplices to White supremacy, including by some of these Great Replacement murderers (the Buffalo shooter apparently praised East Asians as worthy partners in a White-dominated world). What does it means when some on both the right and left agree that all East Asians & East Asian Americans are "honorary Whites" or enjoy a "proximity to whiteness"? Because, as the Atlanta Spa Massacre showed, the 6 murdered Korean women were low-wage, immigrant sex workers vulnerable to state and individual gendered violence. They didn't seem to reap the model minority benefits from any "proximity to whiteness." In fact, they seemed to be violently exposed to a different kind of proximity to whiteness, one wrapped in an intimate form of institutionalized racist love*.

This is the problem with the frame of "hate," as others, most notably Connie Wun, Ph.D., have powerfully argued. "Hate" depends on an individualistic, narrow, & limiting understanding that excludes how other racialized feelings, such as desire, pleasure & even love are in close, deadly proximity to hate. What I'm talking about is "racist love," coined by Asian American Movement writers Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan in 1972 to describe the process by which stereotypical "model minority" figures of Asian Americanness, such as Charlie Chan, invite "positive" feelings such as admiration & attraction. Returning to the Atlanta shooter, his gendered & sexualized "racist love" of the low-wage, immigrant Korean women who were reduced to the fetishized objects of his attraction doesn't fit a neatly-consumable, neatly-reproducible narrative of "racist hate." And so, Atlanta, the 6 murdered Korean women, and by extension, (East) Asian Americans are excluded from who counts as viable targets of White supremacy.

This is why we need a deeper, more expansive understanding of violence--violence that includes a range of feelings, even those that seem "positive," that are shaped by dehumanizing notions of whose lives count as worthy, and thus, grievable. Because racist love can easily turn into racist hate as quickly as a trigger can be pulled.

(*For more on “racist love,” check out Dr. Leslie Bow's new book, which I just started reading: https://www.dukeupress.edu/racist-love)