Link to Audio Clip: https://www.bravevoices.fieldscenter.princeton.edu/princetonians-fight-for-asian-american-studies

Zoom Interview on June 17, 2020

AC: April Chou (interviewee)

FM: Fumika Mizuno (interviewer)

FM:

Could you tell me a little bit about your hometown?

AC:

Sure. I grew up in a small town in Ohio and actually I was born in Akron when my father was a graduate student. And he had been part of the post-'65 immigration and came here for his education, but my family story was very much intertwined with that period of Chinese history, which is that both sides of my grandparents had fled from China during the Chinese Civil War. My parents were both born in Taiwan and then my brother and I were both born here in the U.S. So I grew up, and I was born at a time when they were still graduate students.

My mom was waitressing. My father was a grad student and I was very much, I think, an unplanned baby. So for a long time, I was the only kid around a bunch of adults. And then subsequently I had a short period of time after he finished school, where we lived in Pittsburgh. Then by the time I started preschool, we were in a little town called Hudson, Ohio, partway between Akron and Cleveland and that's what I consider to be my hometown. In my elementary school class, there was basically one Black kid-- named Reggie-- a Jewish kid or two, I remember one of them named Ari, and me. So it was very small-town Ohio with a gazebo at a church on a green and kind of all those things.

I think part of my experience of growing up was a very bifurcated sense of identity. We were very Chinese at home. We spoke Chinese. We drove into Cleveland once a week so I could go to Chinese school on Saturdays. And so I had this very deep awareness in some ways of my heritage. And at the same time, I think a lot of my school experience was about trying to figure out how to fit in and how to honestly try to not be different. I think there was a lot of internalized shame and discomfort from that period of trying to understand how to fit in as a child.

And then, when I was in what we now call middle school -- I think back then we called it junior high-- we moved because of my dad's job to a small town in Texas called DeSoto. I think I was roughly around 12ish at the time. It was the year that I learned American history and the Civil War twice. And it was, I described it as like almost unrecognizable as the same event and it was, I think, one of the early periods of my life where I really realized there's two sides or more to every story and a real realization of the fact that the place that I landed was a very different place from the place I'd grown up.

I would say that community in Texas was much more diverse, but there were still not a lot of other Asian kids. So, a lot larger black population and then, what we call Hispanics or Latinx population, and then just a handful of Asian kids in my very large, comprehensive high school.

That's kind of the context in which I grew up and the town that I went to high school in was very much kind of a Friday Night Lights town, if you've ever watched that show or read that book or seen that movie. So it was very parochial in many ways and a very deeply religious place when I did not grow up with a religious tradition. A part of my journey to college was very much about wanting to get out of being in a small town and wanting to see the world. And I sort of saw myself as a city girl, but it was also part of this path of the role that education played, of my parents continually talking to us about the role of education and how important that is.

That's partly why we were here in the U.S. and really kind of internalizing that as part of my own journey.

FM:

You talked a little bit about how at home you're very aware of your Chinese heritage-- speaking the language. But then at school, a lot of the time there were very few other Asian students. Did you feel like at home, you identified more as Chinese, but outside of the home, you were more like Asian or Asian American?

AC:

Yeah, I would say, I mean, what was interesting about my high school years is that I actually was friends with many of the other Asians. I mean, there truly were not that many. But in particular, because my primary activity was music and being in the band, a lot of friends that I made through that included the handful of Asian kids at school. And there were very few actually in my grade. Many of them were a year older than I was in terms of my female girlfriends and then very complicated at the time -- and this was a big part of my high school experience-- I actually started to date a Japanese American boy who was a little bit older than me, which was also problematic from my parent's standpoint. But I remember it being quite confusing because I really had fallen in love with this person and had a lot of what I now know to be sort of almost like racial self hatred or awkwardness around the time, not wanting to be seen as someone who only associates with people who look like me. It was also of course, quite complicated because of the history between China and Japan. So part of my family's reaction was actually to the fact, not that he was Asian and that we were similar, but rather because he was Japanese. That was also, for many reasons, not really okay.

So I would say my sense of Asian American identity was really a huge part of my journey in my later high school years. Then going off to college and in particular, I think of that transition as a period of time where ironically, I went from this small town in Texas to Princeton, which at the time was not particularly diverse, but it was for me the first time where I was together with a critical mass of other Asian Americans.

So I literally remember my first week when all of the student organizations are having open houses and walking all the way down Prospect Street, which felt very awkward to me because I did not feel any sense of belonging around the club scene or anything like that. I'm going to the Third World Center for my very first AASA meeting the first week of school and ended up getting pretty involved in AASA, was our sort of freshmen class representative head. I remember so cutely being in an election with this other woman who subsequently was a friend and I've lost track of, but, we ran for AASA class representative.

The beginning of college was really a deepening of my awareness of like, what does it mean to be Asian American? What is that? The history of that term and how it came to be, and how to see our experiences in a way that was very much linked to the history of people of color in this country and seeing a lot of those common threads.

So my Asian American identity, I think actually came alongside my political activation. Now I think of it as my period of political radicalization, if you will. That really happened a lot as a young adult after I first got to college.

FM:

Could you tell me a little bit more about your transition to Princeton? How did you feel when you first arrived on campus and how did you adjust?

AC:

Yes. So I'm going to take you back a step and describe that my situation with my parents is that they had always said, if you work hard, you can go anywhere you want for college. My father had gone to graduate school here, but we really knew very little about how the U.S. education system worked. I had a great high school counselor who was very well intentioned, but also we were in this town where like a handful of people left for out of state college every year. So she was really good, but also just did not have a lot of pattern recognition for applying out of state.

What happened when I applied to college is that I actually really wanted to go to Columbia, and I got into Columbia and I really, I remember I had said I was trying to get out of these small towns and go to the city. So I was ready to move to Harlem, go to Columbia, was super excited about it. And my parents, I mean, to this day, it's probably the biggest conflict we've had. My parents said no, and they wouldn't let me go. I felt like it was a huge, like I just felt like I had been misled. Actually ironically, part of the reason I ended up at Princeton, which has since become a huge part of my life, is because they wouldn't let me go to Columbia because they did not feel comfortable with me as an 18 year old going to live in New York city by myself. Especially in the area where Columbia is located, which at the time, it had not had sort of this incredible renaissance that it has now, but they felt like it was unsafe and they wouldn't let me go. So that was a huge conflict in our family. That is how I ended up at Princeton because I mean, while I had applied and I had been excited about it, it was not my first choice.

I think my experience with Princeton actually began with the interview when I was a senior. Because I was in this very parochial small town, we had to drive to a town also in the Dallas area that we had not been to much. I remember being super intimidated because I went to be interviewed at the now the ASC interviewers house, but it was just in a neighborhood I was not familiar with and a very large house.

I remember even then being incredibly intimidated and kind of feeling like maybe this is not for me when I subsequently got in and, and there was a welcome party hosted by the Princeton Club of DFW or something like that. It was in a very posh club, like a private club with wooden walls and very rarefied. I think, honestly it further reinforced, maybe I don't belong here.

Then I got to college, and I mean, this is part of the incredible experience of being at Princeton, but my three roommates my freshman year, one of them was already a television actress who had been on a show that I watched when I was in high school. One of them was an all American softball player. The other one was this beautiful Black woman who subsequently became a model and an actress also, actually. So yeah. So, not only was there this sort of like, maybe I don't belong here. And then I got into my roommate situation and we had, in the end, great relationships, but very much feeling like I really don't belong here.

I think I was very lucky in the sense that my way of pushing through discomfort is just to engage more deeply instead of drawing inwards. So it pushed me to walk down Prospect to go to the AASA meeting. It pushed me to get really involved in my residential college. In many ways I felt a sense of being kind of an outsider or other and at the same time, I just gravitated towards finding connection with people, which ultimately I feel incredibly grateful for. I actually feel like my long standing connection and involvement with Princeton has really been around trying to really enable anyone who has ever felt othered at Princeton to claim the full experience as their own. That's still what motivates me now.

FM:

So you were saying you were drawn to the third world center, which is now the Fields Center. Were there other activities or communities where you felt really pulled to?

AC:

Yeah, I mean, radically, I think my whole Princeton experience was this, again, this very dual experience of trying to immerse in the mainstream and also very much kind of active with the Asian American community in particular, and then by extension communities of color.

From the very early period, I got involved in our residential college because I was very passionate about musical theater at the time, and very much wanted to spend time going to Broadway shows. So I think fall or whatever time in my freshman year, I ended up running for the trip's role in my residential college. I ended up planning football games and trips to the ballet and trips to Broadway and met a lot of people naturally through that.

As I mentioned, I got very involved with AASA very early on and by the time my sophomore year rolled around, I was co-chairing that year's Asian Pacific American heritage month with some folks and had gotten really engaged in that.

The first period of time where I got to apply for a work study job instead of just be assigned to the cafeteria, which is where I started, I ended up working in the admissions office on minority recruitment with an incredible man named John Templeton, who subsequently went to go later on run admissions at the graduate program for Woodrow Wilson School and really was known for how much that institution became much more diverse at. Anyway, we worked for him to try and encourage more kids of color to apply and then to attend Princeton. Through this whole period, I was getting very politically activated in relation to admissions, to ethnic studies and Asian American studies in particular and kind of all these things along the way.

Part of the work through the heritage month, we called APAHM at the time, was around bringing in guest speakers, guest professors from other places, and really trying to get visitors. I worked with others on getting a visiting professor to teach an Asian American studies course because we didn't have anyone on campus who could, and so got pretty engaged all around during this time.

I was in the orchestra for my first year, chamber for my second year to kind of scale it back a little and then ultimately ended up being a residential advisor and that being a very core part of my Princeton experience of welcoming and sort of trying to shepherd people through their early Princeton experience. Those were some of the other things that I got involved with along the way.

FM:

Could you walk me through a little bit about planning API heritage month?

AC:

Yes. Oh, I mean, one more funny thing, just in the realm of doing mainstream things and things on the side, I was also an Orange Key tour guide and I loved giving tours of the campus. I had this very, like complicated relationship with Princeton, right? Like I embraced so many of the parts of it, and yet I was a continual critic of all the things that could be different or better.

So just to bridge though, to the question you just asked, which is how did I get involved? I mean, partly I think even as early as my freshman year, when I first got involved with AASA, there was an emerging group of people that had been working on a set of political issues as it related to Princeton, specifically such that by the time, I think this would have been the spring of my freshman year, because it came out in 1993. I was part of this task force combination of upperclassmen and underclassmen and a couple of graduate students. We wrote a white paper, a taskforce on the state of Asian Americans at Princeton that touched on everything. It touched on ethnic studies and Asian American Studies in particular is one thing. It touched on admissions and the questions around admissions. It touched on the diversity, diversity of the faculty, sort of a lot of these core issues about the student experience, student life, things like that. And I think that working on that together with a bunch of folks who had been in the work for longer was very much a window into some of these issues.

From that began a pretty continual effort to meet with faculty and really try and follow if you will, all of the formal and official channels to try and make change happen. So by the time I was sophomore, we knew so much about an FTE, a faculty line, what it takes to create a tenured professorship, how the departments hire, how the certificate programs work and how they work with departments.

We were having meetings with the different administrators, meaning like the department chairs, as well as like, Dean of the Faculty. We were deep in trying to make change from within and trying to make the case about the field, about the state of affairs in the field, about why Princeton was behind other Ivy institutions, if that's how they saw their peer set.

That process also really revealed --and I think you're probably finding this now, as you work on oral history-- that our work was really a continuation of work that had started 20 years before us, where the first batch of Asian American students fought to get Asian American Studies, visiting professorships, had been student activists against the war in Vietnam and then subsequently divestment in South Africa and all these layered things. Part of what we came to realize is that the institution and universities in general take a long time to change. Student life, in the scheme of things, is very short in terms of the university's memory. We really came to realize our time is going to run. They can, by doing very little, run down the clock and then we're not going to be here putting this pressure on.

So the series of things is really what led us to deciding to take a stand and to pursue the sit in. It was really a recognition of like, we've done everything within the rules, which if we'd all been taught to do, we'd activated sort of all the influence that we felt like we had and we knew it wasn't enough.

There was some moment, I mean, it's hard for me to pinpoint, but there's some moment where we sort of started to realize, if we don't do something more, like some more direct action, that nothing is going to change. And I think to be fair, this came from having done a lot in terms of our own learning of the Civil Rights Movement, of the Asian American movement, of like finally having a visiting professor around that we could ask questions of and understand things more deeply and really feeling empowered to say, we need to do something more.

Then at that point when we decided that it was, you know, I would say we were in loose coalition before with a group of people that were simultaneously trying to advocate for Latino Studies. African American Studies at that time was already pretty established. The center as it exists now was not there then, but there already was a program and you could, one could get a certificate. Cornel West was there. Toni Morrison was still there. I mean, it was a reasonably strong program already. And so we had this moment where we realized if we're going to take direct action, it has to be a much broader coalition.

So we very intentionally started working with the colleagues who were working on Latinx studies, a handful of them. There were literally only a handful of indigenous Native American students. Then we were like, we need to enlist white allies. By the time we came around to planning the direct action, it was very intentionally a very diverse group of students who were involved.

These were all done through late night meetings at what is now the Carl A. Fields Center, but was then the Third World Center, of meeting together with people and really planning thoughtfully about, what are we willing to put on the line? So once we shifted from the, okay, and honestly, this is one thing where I still, this is like on my perpetual to do list. I have a box of files that I have been intending to work to get into Mudd Library. And I a few years ago was back and forth with an archivist in it, but I still have them because I could not extract enough from my life to send all these things on. But there's like memos and memos that are printed out on dot matrix print sheets--which is like, laser printers were barely becoming a thing--of all the emails, you know, all the efforts, all the memos we'd written.

We were like, you know, these are just words. It's not enough. So the question of, what are we willing to put on the line? And I remember specifically, we talked about, okay, well, would we hunger strike? And what would the consequences be?How long could we do it? Are we willing to sacrifice our health? In all of this, it's sort of like how our, how our family's going to react. Many of us were-- it was a real mix of students from different backgrounds, but a lot of first gen students. So it's sort of like, what are we able or willing to sacrifice?

And finally, we came to, it's probably not a hunger strike because we might not sustain it for long enough for it to have the impact that we need. What other nonviolent forms of protest are there? When the notion came to do a sit in, it was just an incredible thing. I remember we met one night, we decided that might be the path.

The next night, into the meeting-- I have some photos of this-- someone had gone to Firestone and found the blueprints for Nassau Hall. So we literally laid out the blueprints and we were like, okay, if we're going to do a sit in, where are we going to do it? What are the rooms? What's the layout of the building? How is all this going to work?

It was super tactical. It's so funny because I've done some kind of community organizing and learning much more formally about organizing since then, and I feel like everything I actually learned, I learned through this period because it was like, how do we build a coalition?

How do we do this with intention? Who are going to be the people in the room and who are going to be the spokespeople who negotiate?

Then we were very intentional about thinking about the timing, and in particular, we planned the sit in for April hosting weekend because we knew there was going to be a lot of attention on campus. A lot of not only freshmen, but also visiting parents who are dropping off their kids, et cetera. And we tipped off the media. We had coverage ready and all these things. So actually in the end, when it all happened, there was both TV coverage and New York Times coverage. But unfortunately, our events coincided with the bombing in Oklahoma city, which ended up being all over the front page the next day.

Anyway, all of this to say, once we decided to do it, it was a very planned, intentional, deliberate effort. It was not one of these like, oh, we're just going to do it by the seat of our pants kind of thing. We were like, okay, if we're going to do a nonviolent protest, how do we do it right? How do we hold ourselves so that we have this whole training where it was like, we're not going to use physical force. So if pushed or if whatever, we keep our arms to ourselves-- the whole thing. So anyway, that may be a longer version than intended, but that's part of the story of how things led up to that.

FM:

That was really, really interesting. I'm also curious about how the demands were decided and how that discussion unfolded.

AC:

There was a lot of logistical planning and a lot of like drafting of what we were gonna ask for. Then there was, very intentionally, there were four negotiators who were prepped and you know, we had this whole back and forth about what are we willing to negotiate on or not?

There were some very comical parts of this too. Oh, the one thing I'll say is, I'm sorry, I promise I'll get to the demands part of it. But I would say it was a process to figure out what we were going to put a stake in the ground on. Then there was a negotiation process. Then there was a, like what got stated or memorialized after the fact.

But what was interesting is when we decided to do the sit in, at the time, President Shapiro had almost like a ceremonial office where he received guests and it's got a nice desk and chairs, but it's not the actual office, the nerve center.

Remember, this is the time before everything was digital. The nerve center was actually his secretary's office, like the scheduler. So that's the office we actually took over because we were like, we can shut down the activity of the normal life of the university. And so I remember once we did the initial rush, kind of barricaded ourselves in the room, the first thing the university was like, we need the scheduling book, you know. And there was already a whole thing.Then we were like, okay, we need to discuss. And I'm sort of like, are we giving them the book? Because if we do it, we're going to lose a lot of leverage. We ultimately gave them the book.

And then the other thing was, there was all this stuff of like, if we barricade ourselves in the room, how are we going to go to the restroom? We had, I kid you not, we were like, we'll have kitty litter and garbage bags. And they were like the first point, the first thing they wanted to go through, they wanted the book and they wanted to negotiate such that we wouldn't use our kitty litter. Like, you know, then we wouldn't basically create our own restroom inside the office.

So one of the other points, these were all like in the first hour or two. Right. And they were like, we'll let you come out and go to the bathroom. We promise we will not forcibly remove you when you come out to use the restroom. So those were like the first points of negotiation before there was any substantive discussion.

The reason it ended up taking the 36 hours or however long is because there was a lot of back and forth. There were bounds of negotiation and then our negotiators would come talk to us.

And ultimately, I remember being so incensed because we finally came out because they agreed to talk further about a set of things. And then the minute, you know, a few days later, there was very much a walk-back or an attempt to walk back on. So part of the reason, I don't know if you've seen this in the archives. Part of the reason we almost immediately wrote a letter in The Prince to write out what was agreed to is because we felt like for the historical record, it was very important for there to be a written account of what they had agreed to before we removed ourselves, even though they very much tried to walk that back the minute there was no longer the pressure.

So, you know, I would say it was like a principled process of writing out the things that we think needed to happen and then getting really clear on like, what are the things that we have to see, like some commitments to professorships and courses, library holdings, all the things that make up the infrastructure for a program.

FM:

I'm wondering if you could also talk about the emotional side, what emotions are going through, like being in your early twenties and being involved in such a big event, just like, how did that feel?

AC:

You know, I think going into it, I think many of us felt very resolute that it was the right thing to do. I mean, if anything, the period just proceeding, there was both sort of excitement and anxiety. We were sort of like, okay, well what happens? Like, could we get arrested? Maybe. Could we get suspended? Maybe. Could we get kicked out of school, and what are we willing to stand for?

To be fair, there were people who decided they were in support, but they did not feel comfortable doing it. And I, I think in those moments, there was probably within the community, a fair bit of judgment, but honestly, I was like everyone has to just decide for themselves, like where are they comfortable? There was a lot of that going in a lot of persuading, trying to create a critical mass. But also, I remember just feeling very clear and during, I would say there was a sense of like, I think in the beginning of this, I can't believe we actually pulled this off. And then there was a period of time that was almost celebratory.

The best way I can explain it is like, there was a window in the office that looks back out into the back of Cannon Green area. And that window was where the reporters came to interview us. And then, I remember that Saturday morning we had some friends who set up a grill and they were making pancakes for us. There were protesters with signs outside. So there was definitely a period where it felt like this was such ,--what's the right word-- sort of like where you're standing up for what we believe in and there's people rallying behind us in support. Clearly there were a lot of people who did not believe in sit-ins also saying things, but I think what we felt in the room was a sense of relief that we'd pulled it off, kind of hopefulness around the negotiations that were ongoing during the time.

I think there was a real sense of connection of what we were doing back to all these previous battles that others have fought before us-- like Asian American movement, Civil Rights movement, all of those things. Like we were singing Civil Rights songs. We were singing and locked arms. And so there was like a very sort of celebratory and sort of honoring what came before us feeling to it too.

And then, I remember coming out, it felt really, I mean, I think we were physically exhausted, but also the sense of like cautious optimism about hopefulness, about what might be possible, that taking a stand could actually advance things. And probably some relief that, you know, there might be some set of consequences, but no one had to call my parents to tell them that I was in jail or anything like that, which we had real-- we just didn't know, you know, we didn't, we weren't sure before that.

There was a period after where there were all these academic and disciplinary things taking place where there was a hearing, and we had to get character witnesses and all these things. It was a hearing, like people had to speak on our behalf. So that was a little weird. Although by then, we sort of felt like, okay, we might get suspended or we might get something on our permanent record, but we're not going to get kicked out of school.

So yeah, I would think it was like a very intense set of emotions that really ranged throughout the different stages of the process.

FM:

After the sit-in, you said that the administration walked back a little bit on their demands. What was the post sit-in negotiation process like?

AC:

Well, it's so funny because I'm realizing how much I remember clearly and how much it's fuzzy.

I remember doing a lot of writing in the period afterwards. So drafting the piece that went into The Prince. I wrote, I think, something in The Progressive Review a year later, because there was, I definitely, I don't know if everyone had this. I definitely had the sense of like, we have to capture and document because by documenting it will give people some things to hang on to later to come back around to.

There were definitely follow up meetings and the like, but I remember feeling just a sense of like, this is really, really slow and it's not really clear how this is all gonna play out. And then to be, and I feel like there were some sort of token-like things that happened, maybe related to library holdings and the like. But the reality, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but it took like 20 years before there was a tenured professor who, you know, had a specialty in Asian American Studies. And then it took her-- even with a bunch of alumni behind the scenes working to support her-- another five years to finally get courses that were actually permanently in the course catalog and to get this sort of diaspora studies under American Studies.

I mean, and I will say this: part of what I shifted my attention to one more year as a senior. And then when I left, like part of what I got really motivated to do, so around the time I graduated was Prince's 250th. And at that time, there was a woman who wrote a little bit of a history about Asian Americans at Princeton for whatever celebratory things happening there.

And I ended up working a little bit with her and subsequently really trying to relaunch the Asian American alumni organization. It had been started in the seventies, 1979 ish by a guy named David Wu, Kelly Kuchiyama, who's class of '40, and a bunch of others. And then it was dormant. You know, it was active sort of through the early part of the eighties through a lot of the admission stuff that Regina Lee led and was written about in The New York Times in 1985.

And part of my motivation for activating, or reactivating, really, I felt like it took a solid 10 years of building that alumni association into a really strong institution that was going to outlive and outlast any one of our involvement. So my real belief was, we have to put in place the leadership and the structures and all of the systems so that it can outlast any wave. I mean, same thing as the narrative when we were students, right. We only had a four year life span of students. What can we get done during that time? And I was like, okay, now we're alums. We get four years on campus as students, but we get, if we're lucky, you know, 50 to 70 years as an alum. So I was like, okay, well, if this is going to be a prolonged fight, then we're going to build this body of people to stand behind it and be the source of institutional knowledge and history throughout whatever remains.

And so, you know, it's crazy to think about, but we built the infrastructure of that Asian American Alumni Association now called A4P. In the 2000s, like we worked with Anne Cheng to do another round of petitions. There was fundraising behind the scenes for that effort, trying to get people on board again. What's been interesting is over the last, call it almost 30 years, and if you add on all the activism from the seventies-- there was always, there was either an argument that this is not a robust enough academic discipline. There's not enough qualified professors. There's not enough student interest or there's not enough alumni support and financial support. So it was always those four things. And in different eras, there was different weight put on different ones of those pillars. Part of my belief is that it took way too long, but in the end we had all of those pieces lined up. So anyway, that's a little bit of reflection on what happened after.

FM:

I think what you said a little earlier about the importance of documenting is so key because I remember in my Asian American History class, in the pequod, one of the documents is like the demands that the sit-in protestors used and all of the names and clippings from newspapers and The Prince. So it's definitely still being learned at Princeton.

AC:

That's cool. I'm glad to hear that. And I should be even more motivated to get all of those documents into the archives.

FM:

Yeah. That would be really cool. Yeah. And what you said about the administration having the power to wait out students. That was something that was also said by alumni who graduated in 2015, who worked on the 2013 task force report. She was saying how the university can just wait four years for students to stop being active. So I think having that alumni support really pushed that up.

AC:

Yeah. The one thing I will say, just remembering back, I mean, in that period.

When we were in the sit-in itself, it was really cool to hear from alumni that we had no connection to prior. Like Sally Frank, who had been the woman who brought the suits against the eating clubs and forced the university to make those open by gender, you know, a bunch of alums who had protested in the seventies. It was a real moment of feeling very connected to the broader Princeton community, beyond people who were still on campus.

FM:

You were also saying how your community organizing was also affected by everything you learned from putting together the sit-in. Could we transition to post-Princeton now and how that experience touches other things that you've done since graduating.

AC:

Sure. I mean, in many ways, The things that I'm doing now, probably more than ever, feel very full circle to the things that I was most engaged with when I was a student, you know, I would say it's been a journey back around because after college, I initially went to work in the private sector and spent many years with McKinsey and Company and about--I'm trying to count how many years-- maybe like 17 years ago or so now, I made a transition into working full time on public education.

For me, that all feels extremely connected because it's really all about not only these sort of deep seated family values about education, but also my own family's immigrant experience and the power that I believe education ultimately has. to fundamentally transform the trajectory of an individual's life, but also by extension a whole family's experience.

My work in education is very much all about that, about enabling people, and in particular students who might not have access to high quality schools, to access better schools and therefore better opportunities. And I think it's very much threaded through, I mean, even in this letter, so, you know, I would say interestingly, I had this very much activist experience as a college student and stayed connected, but had also kind of fallen away from being actively engaged in Asian American activism. And I feel like that has come back around because one of the things I've been working on over this past year in education, is organizing these very senior executives in education around the country who are Asian American, so that we have both an affinity group for support and a collective voice and power.

And so this Black Lives Matter letter that I just sent you is very much an expression of that. So many of the themes I think that I did believe deeply in our, like, embedded in the kind of commitments that we've written about in that letter. So to me, it feels all very connected.

The other thing I'll say about Princeton is I've stayed involved, organized the alumni association and led it for over a decade, maybe a decade and a half. And then over the last 10 years have very much sort of, not backed away a little bit-- like I'm still active and engaged. I'm still doing things with the organization, but I'm not leading. I'm an advisor, but I'm not a governor of the organization.

In addition to that, I continued to push into places where I could be active with the university more broadly. So when I was the leader of A4P, there's a by extension, you sit on the alumni council. So I was active with that for a number of years. And then, I think now it's been like a handful of years, but I was active also on something called-- so after you've become this active Princeton volunteer, one of the things that you might get invited to do is to participate in this thing called the Committee to Nominate Alumni Trustees. And it is the volunteer body that is connected to the alumni council that names the people who show up in that election ballot every year. And to me being involved with that was incredibly important because it was also very much about who has a seat at the table. Who has a seat at the table on the board, who gets seen, because while the university has many luminaries, both political and financial icons and all this stuff on the board. There are also a bunch of regular people who might not be known to the university because they're not donating big dollars or they're not the CEOs of big companies. And part of our job as the Committee to Nominate Alumni Trustees is to help those people be seen by the alumni body and to get them elected onto the board.

I'm really proud of that because if you look at the board, many of the people of color, and frankly, the young people and the women on the board have all come through that process over the years. So to me, it's all connected. It's really all about the same thing in terms of whose stories get told, whose voices get heard and who's at the table making decisions.I think those are very much a set of the things that I'm continuing to work on. I mean, now it happens to be in philanthropy and in education but those themes are constantly on my mind in my work.

FM:

I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about going through recent events and how you felt the past several weeks and whether your views on your own identity have changed.

AC:

Yeah, I mean, what's been interesting during this period of time for me is both, I think tapping more deeply into that sense of agency and reconnecting. I mean, part of this organizing and facilitating the process of planning. You can imagine group editing is not how any of us would necessarily choose to do things, but I really believed in creating an inclusive process that enabled all of the issues to come to the forefront and for us to work through those conflicts and to land at a place that people could stand up for.

I really believe deeply that ultimately, it's not that I'm indifferent to what we say, but we have to say something. Part of what mattered to me that it was a letter and commitments is that those commitments will live beyond this moment. It's the same, I mean, back to the sit-in and it's like making sure those things were written so that when Anne Cheng, 20 years later, it was like, these were the commitments. We still have not met them today. She had something to point to.

So this set of commitments in this letter, it's like, well, this moment. I hope, hope, hope it is truly a great awakening moment in the way that Van Jones has talked about, okay, but this group of people has gone through and made a set of their commitments public and those commitments that they've made to themselves are gonna continue. We can hold each other accountable. So for me, I guess I've channeled a lot of that sense of this moment into that action in particular. And then in particular with the philanthropy work, I'm doing both with the clients that I'm currently working with and with a group of funders that I am around the table with really working on changing the way we work and driving racial equity through the work. I literally am in the midst of drafting a document that's like here's the principles that we would like-- racial equity principles that we want to adhere to. Here's the data that we believe we need to gather going forward.

So we actually know who our money is going to. Is it going to diverse led organizations? What about their boards? What about their leadership? What about the teams in addition to whoever students and families they're serving? Are dollars flowing to these organizations that are community based? That are leader of color led? All those things.

So I feel like you're catching me in the moment of trying to organize now this group of funders and philanthropists, where there's a lot of power and privilege and they have a lot of influence. So how do we get them activated in a different way. So that's all sort of, for me on the work-related front of how I'm activating.

On the personal front, I mean, I have two children now who are teenagers. I have a 14 year old and a 12 year old. A lot of the conversation on the home front has been around these every night dinner table conversations and in particular, what it means to be an anti-racist. And you know, pretty incredibly my 14 year old, even before the George Floyd murder, had chosen his end of year, end of eighth grade capstone project on anti-racism. And he was already in the middle of it when all of this hit, but he and his group ended up creating a site and an Instagram account, all this stuff called Project Racism.

It's like a youth-led movement, all this stuff. So at the same time that I was working on this letter, trying to figure out how to activate professionally, he was doing his 14 year old version of this in a really profound way. And then they had a situation at school where their school was trying to do something to respond and the students who just didn't land--well, it was about like, how do we celebrate Black lives? But it ended up being about like, write a story and take a picture with a friend or something that they felt really landed in a way that was too much tokenism. So he organized his class and they wrote a letter to the principal and they had a town hall and they, you know, talked about it.And ultimately there was some misunderstanding and apparently they had done it in conjunction with some Black families and you know, all of that is fine, but I felt so excited for him that he really felt a sense of agency and empowerment through all this.

To some degree felt... sometimes it's hard. I know this might seem very far away for you, but sometimes it's hard as a parent to know, how much are my kids getting from the environment that we're raising them in? How much are they getting from the things that we say, how much are they getting from the things that we do? And it was really special to see all of that playing out in the way he was showing up.

Then at the same time I have a younger son who is 12, and we've been watching, I had made them watch the Asian American PBS series and we watched the Bruce Lee documentary and we've been watching stuff on the racial wealth gap and all that. And one night we tried to watch 13th.Turns out it's not really that age appropriate for my younger child. There's like in the first five minutes, all these photos of these horrific lynchings and Emmett Till and all this stuff, and it was not appropriate. I had this moment of like, okay, I, I have these beliefs I want to impart on my kids. And there's a pace and a way to do this that is developmentally appropriate. And I was not really holding that line so that was a really unfortunate but important realization.

The other thing is my kids are mixed race and it's a reminder-- they're half white-- and I've had several moments of being reminded, like this is my experience in my identity. Their identity and experience is different from mine. I want them to know and fully embrace their heritage. And I want them to have the part of our belief system, which is very much about becoming and still working on like becoming anti-racist, and at the same time they have a different experience and they have a different-- many different layers of privilege, both related to their own background and experience and related to growing up in a lot of privilege and a very comfortable environment. So anyway, that's a long winded answer to your question, but I think I've been trying to process it both in terms of what we're doing at home and then what I'm doing out in the world.

And, you know, we made choices to not-- I really wanted to be on the streets and we didn't go protest because we've been sheltering for three and a half months, and we didn't want to break that bubble even though emotionally and psychologically, I think there would have been real power in being out there, but we, we didn't march.

And even today it's Juneteenth. And I was looking up all the Black Lives Matter, like all this stuff and I'm like, I want to be out there. We're not out there today.

FM:

I think it's really exciting to hear, not only that change is happening across all sectors, but also across all generations. Being more involved in my high school community and seeing what people at the middle school level are doing. It's really exciting and hopeful.

AC:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why, I mean, not just come back fully around to ethnic studies, but the reason why the study of history and experiences matters is because, I mean, even this, the whole conversation now around Juneteenth is like, how can we really move forward when we have not reconciled with our past?

And frankly, if we don't even know our past, how can we reconcile with it? And so I am, if even anything, I mean, so funny Fumika, the conversation I had in a meeting this morning with a friend, and we literally were talking about culturally responsive curriculum and materials for children in schools. We work in public education so it's actually all the arguments for ethnic studies all over and even with a deeper underscore. I just believe more than ever how important all of that is.

FM:

That was actually going to be my last question. Why is ethnic studies important and why does it matter? Why does that matter to you and to Princeton and to have it on a university level?

Yeah, and I think it's very much about knowing ourselves, knowing our history and our collective history and learning from, hopefully, the mistakes of the past and reconciling and repairing where needed so that we can collectively move forward. But there's so much misunderstanding and misconception that I think needs to be rectified.

I mean, even, you'll see when you get a chance to read this letter that I sent, you hear me talk about Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X and Larry Itliong and the grape strike and all these things that people don't really know about. And those are just very specific examples of people working in solidarity, but there are many. We just never learned about them.

FM:

Thank you so, so much for your time, taking time out of your day and your Juneteenth to talk with me. It was really interesting and inspiring to talk to you, and I'm excited to talk to more people who were involved in the movement.

AC:

Thank you. And thank you for inviting me to talk with you. I am, and as you get deeper into it, and as you try and track down folks, if I can be helpful to you, I'd be more than happy to be.