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

Zoom Interview on June 28, 2020

AH: Andrew Hahm (interviewee)

FM: Fumika Mizuno (interviewer)

FM:

The first question I wanted to ask is if you could tell me a little bit about the time you grew up and what it was like growing up there?

AH:

I was actually born in sort of downstate Illinois. My parents went to school at the University of Illinois there. That's where they met. They had me there, and I guess a couple years later we moved out to New Jersey, so I think I was about five and grew up there and have more or less stayed there ever since. Except for maybe one year as a teenager my dad had a job abroad so we lived abroad for a year.

For the most part I grew up in this small town in New Jersey called Ramsey. It's in the sort of northeast corner of the state. It’s predominantly white so it's in a county called Bergen County. Bergen County itself is a very sort of diverse county and interestingly enough, there is a very large Korean expatriate population there. My family is of Korean origin and that's sort of how I identified growing up, as a Korean American.

We went to a Korean church, we went to Korean school. They (my parents) sent me to Korean school, but the actual town in which I grew up was predominantly white, so I think that that's really maybe the sort of dichotomy between, you know, having to drive say 30 miles away to-- or rather 30 minutes away-- to places like Edison or Palisades Park that had a much larger Korean population or where the Korean stores and Korean supermarkets in order to go shopping for Korean goods or to go to Korean church or what have you. And then going to school in a place that was predominantly predominant white even more generally-- not very many people of color.

I think that kind of stark contrast is what I think was the genesis of my own kind of thinking around my own identity, how I relate to, in particular, Americanness and race again more generally in the American context. That was the sort of context in which I grew up.

When I went to high school, I went to one of those regional public magnet schools in the county, and there, again, the sort of racial and ethnic composition was a little bit different. Much larger Asian American population, and I think for the first time this was -- you know, you spend so much of your time growing up as a kid in school-- and I think this is the first time I spent so much time around other people who sort of actually looked like me.

But on the other hand, because I came from a town that was not predominantly Asian American or Korean American, I think there was also a little bit of a gap for me in being able to identify with other Asian Americans in that high school setting.

I think that would be the broadest description I can give of my time growing up and especially how it relates to race and Asian Americanness.

FM:

Did you feel more Korean at home and more Asian American in school and other places outside your home?

AH:

I think initially my parents, they tried to speak primarily English at home and I think even things like food. I don't think they tried to sort of go either way in terms of the kind of identity that they wanted to inculcate or develop in me.

I think as I grew older and as I became a teenager, I think maybe there was some kind of shift in their mindset, but it became more noticeable to me that they wanted me to appreciate my Korean heritage. And so yeah, they did send me to Korean school.

There was a little bit more speaking Korean at home and I think there was a greater sense, primarily in my older teenage years I suppose. Yeah, whereas as a younger kid, like in elementary school, it wasn't really as apparent to me.

FM:

How cognizant were you of your Asian American identity growing up?

AH:

For instance, there were a couple of very isolated racist incidents that I remember. The very few other classmates who were people of color, so there was a Chinese American classmate I think in my grade who I distinctly remember in the first grade, you know people calling her sort of racist names.

But I don't actually recall a lot of overt incidents, like there may have been several microaggressions that I just failed to sort of process or recognize but yeah, I think I didn't get as much of a sense of that kind of thing as a younger kid, and so I don't even think I identified as Asian-American per se at school.

I think it was when I went to high school, and there again, there was this sort of sense that I am Korean American, but there's a way in which I felt that I wasn't really... There was a Korean clique at school and I didn't really quite feel like I was part of it.

I hung out with people of other races and backgrounds. I didn't really try to think too much about my identity vis-a-vis Koreanness in relation to Americanness other than to say it seems like I don't really fit into this paradigm of Korean American in Bergen County and maybe that's something that's maybe just not for me.

All of that is to say perhaps that I don't even think there was a sense of Asian American identity that I had as a high school student as much as sort of Korean by blood but not really, you know, socially Korean, right?

It was more responsive to a particular ethnicity than it was to a broader kind of commitment to some kind of pan-Asian political movement.

FM:

Did that change when you got to Princeton?

AH:

A little bit. I guess the reason why I became invested and involved with Asian American Studies at Princeton was... So a lot of my peers, I mean, and I'm sure a lot of the other people you've interviewed have either come in with already some degree of thought or like formed a thoughtful kind of thinking about Asian Americanness.

For me, it wasn't it wasn't as much as having read Asian American Dreams by Helen Zia or I was really well-versed in the history of Asian American struggles prior to arriving. I think for me, it just felt like a community where I could just hang out. They all seemed like really cool people and nothing that they said seemed objectionable to me and I thought I could get behind it.

One of the things that I've been trying to reflect on in the past couple of years is like, to what degree is my thinking of identity this sort of feeling that I got snubbed in highschool from this group of people who I viewed in my mind as forming my own cultural heritage? And it's hard for me to do that kind of psychoanalysis.

I don't know that I can really give a good response in even verbal form of whether or not this is the case, but I think what I can say is that I didn't come into Princeton with a very sort of rigid mindset around what race meant and what my identity was, other than having a rigid kind of conception of ethnic Asian American identity was not something that I was especially invested in.

So I think that that left me more open to joining AASA than KSA. It just happened to be that there was this book club that they had where they were like, oh let's talk about Asian-American studies and I was like, oh I'm gonna go hang out with them so yeah, I think it was really a sort of organic and kind of almost chance matter than it was something that was really intellectualized or well thought out prior to my arrival at Princeton.

FM:

You were involved in the ASAM committee. How did learning from people who were seniors who had been invested for a long time, how did that shape how you thought about the movement?

AH:

I think it gave me first of all the kind of history and theoretical grounding because, again these folks like Evan Kratzer and Caitlin Hong and Emily to Rebecca.

I mean, they had already, I think, a much better sense then I did coming in about a lot of these things and I learned a lot from them in perhaps why exactly it was that I thought the way I did and why it was exactly that I found the kind of work that they were doing more interesting perhaps than than other, you know other kinds of sort of work that you could be doing in the grand scheme of things.

I think they also had a good sense of where the movement was relative to the broader arc of the movement for ethnic studies at Princeton whereas if I just sort of came up and said I'd like a class on on Asian American history, I don't think I would have had the resources without the older folks in the group and also my peers and those in the years below me, of how exactly it is that this fits in into other movements that have happened in the past and what kinds of tactics and strategies have already been tried before. What exactly about a given movement and moment makes certain kinds of progress possible.

There's a question of political tactic almost, that I think I learned from my contemporaries and I'm just repeating myself at this point, but to have both the abstract intellectual framework and also this sort of like practical political framework and of how to explore your identity broadly, right? Ultimately, this is in part what ethnic studies is aimed at and what Asian American studies is aimed at. Having either of those frameworks was just not something that I had prior to meeting these folks, prior to doing work in the committee. If I had to say anything it would be that it would be to have those kinds of resources and to be able to think about and to talk about with other people and find community around it I think was especially valuable to me.

FM:

Could you tell me about the day-to-day work that you and the committee were doing? What kinds of things were discussed at the meetings?

AH:

I have to say this probably goes to show the entire lack of thought from my end of things and how everyone else had already served lots of reasoning, but the things that come to mind to me are like, you know, during finals periods we'd-- there's a game called GeoGuessr.

So they introduced me to GeoGuessr and we spent like an hour one time playing this. This makes the kind of work that we're doing perhaps seem a little bit less serious than it actually was.

In terms of the actual work during the semester, I think that the way it typically went, especially in the beginning periods of when we were trying to figure out how it is we're going to present students interest and demands around creating an Asian American studies program, I think. It would vary upon where in the stage it was but, I mean more or less we'd meet I think once a week in one of the Frist classrooms.

When I started doing this work I was really primarily taking direction from Evan Kratzer who is a very, very methodical guy. And yeah, I mean, he would just sort of lay out, okay like what is our aim? And just sort of break down the work, right.

So when we're writing the big report we split up the work. I think part of it was to try and get, I think we had to reach out to professors at other universities at one point to sort of gauge their opinions on the the feasibility of an Asian American studies on the scale that we are considering at Princeton and interview them and you know, get their testimony to include in the report.

We'd spend the meeting like looking up professors and then we'd say okay, well, Caitlin you you take these people. Andrew you take these people. For the rest of the week we'd call them and we'd sort of reconvene and then move on from there.

There are these big milestone things, right, like the big report, the survey and various other things. The journal for instance and again, I'm sure I'm forgetting other things but they're also sort of more one-off events so I remember we-- the student committee-- actually had a role in bringing certain professors to campus for them to give a talk so like a good amount of that work I think was done by Professor Cheng. She, as an academic right, coud have a little bit more maybe authority and power and funding to have speaker series and have professors give workshops and talks, but I think we were involved to a certain degree with that.

We also attended certain job talks for candidates who were potential hires and I think we went to those. And then we'd afterwards regroup with Professor Cheng to give our feedback. Yeah, sorry.

I know that this is a vague answer because I think what the day-to-day looked like, really, invariably it would depend on at what stage we were in. Different committee chairs had different leadership styles. I didn't really have a leadership style so to speak, and so things were a little bit more fast and loose than when you know, let's say Evan or when Becca was chair.

And again, we had fun along the way. It wasn't all just working all the time but we'd hang out during finals. We'd make it a point to hang out during times when there wasn't something going on which is, I think, in any movement that kind of thing is important.

FM:

At what point did you know that the goal was within reach? Was it a surprise when the university did vote to implement the certificate?

AH:

I don't know that there was an exact moment. So Professor Lew-Williams in the history department was hired. It was in the middle of the period when we were doing a lot of this organizing, and I think Professor Cheng was selected to be the chair or co-chair of some committee working on American studies, which also because she was on the faculty and really the driving foresight, I think that boded well for the eventual success of of getting some Asian American studies in some form on campus.

I don't think there was any particular moment. I think one of the things that we realized and that I had learned from hearing the ways that other members of the committee talked about the issues, there was actually a very fortunate confluence of a lot of different people and a lot of different spaces supporting this in a way that that could make sure that Asian American studies in some form could happen.

One of the big selling points I remember when we were writing up the report which I think was directly given to President Eisgruber is that this was actually, it was when we finished the report at the end of his first year as president or summer or maybe the very beginning of his first year. In terms of timing, when you're a university president, you want to think about all your priorities and sort of set them down in stone and then implement them over your tenure.

I think the very fact that we we started this when it was roughly the beginning of a new university president’s tenure along with the fact that we were getting alumni support and actually alumni financial support, I think probably indicated to the potential for success that the just on the basis of student interest alone would probably have been difficult to pull off.

FM:

I'm wondering if you can also talk about Professor Anne Cheng’s role.

AH:

Right yeah. I mean, it's difficult to get academic curriculum or to have courses offered if you don't have actual faculty members and I think Professor Cheng really, she was behind the movement to get Asian American studies at Princeton and she was the person who invited faculty.

I mean, just untiredly. She made sure that there were actual faculty members on the ground who could teach classes and I think if you don't have that, then you can have all the student interest in the world and if you don't have an administration that-- it’s just not invested in bringing Asian American studies or any form of ethnic studies or any kind of curricular offering, you're just gonna have a cycle of adjunct professors who can't build the kind of institutional support.

That's really the most important thing that Professor Cheng did and also I think she was one of the people who really understood and underlined the need for students and alumni to support faculty. She understood really how things worked so to speak and how to make sure that the proper stakeholders were in the right place at the right time which is no small task.

I mean, not to reduce this to an exercise in real politic right, but this is how things get done absent again, just like a massive sort of outpouring of support that perhaps even the survey and different competing interests probably couldn't bring together.

It would probably have to be those two things: making sure that again, there are faculty members who are teaching courses. I'm certain she played an instrumental role in Professor Lew-Williams’ hiring. And then also, you know, again giving us a clear sense of how things worked on the faculty end of things so that we knew as student activists where we can most efficiently and effectively dedicate our attention and resources. I think those would have to be the two things.

FM:

How was being part of ASAM a part of your Princeton experience in terms of your friendships and also the way that you thought about your own identity at Princeton?

AH:

Yeah, so I mean, like I mentioned before, I think the Asian American Studies Committee and its members, I mean, they were really some of my closest friends at Princeton. So I was a math concentrator when I was in undergrad and so there were not a lot of people in the math department who were really interested in this kind of thing. I guess it gave me a community that shared the same kinds of like political commitments, roughly speaking, that I do and are willing to think and engage in the same kinds of political dialogues that I found to be an integral part of my Princeton experience that again, I wouldn't have otherwise had, just given my disciplinary home.

In terms of thinking of my own identity,I guess it's pretty easy at a place like Princeton to not really... I'm kind of struggling to put this thought into words. Again coming from the math department, a lot of people who think about identity really think about it in terms of a matter of pure self-interest, not that this is necessarily a bad thing, right?

I mean, I think one of the most important reasons why we should fight racism and discrimination and oppression in all forms is because it's just, innherently bad for the self-interest and utility or whatever of the individuals who experience that oppression, but I really think that there's a much bigger sense of community that needs to play a role in in the way we think about identity.

The way that the committee was structured, it was a community in which we found shared meaning not only in each other but in the things that we believed in. And I think I'm not so sure that I would have had this almost sort of communitarian view of identity were it not for the committee.

I have all the respect in the world for the other AASA members who were not as involved with Asian American Studies. But not everybody was really interested in talking about politics or in talking about organizing or talking about political theory or you know, these kinds of things.

Perhaps I wouldn't have developed an interest in political philosophy, for instance, if it were not for the support and the kinds of community that I found in the Asian American Studies Committee specifically. I feel like there's probably other ways in which the experience of being in the Asian American Studies Committee changed my view of identity that's more concretely connected to Asian Americanness obviously.

Of course, as I mentioned before, I really came in like the sort of broad framework of thinking about Asian American as this sort of political identity, which I think I now have and also connecting it to both the history of Asian Americans in the United States, but also the experiences of the relationship between America, Asian Americans, and Asian Americanness and for instance feminism or or African-American Studies, I think, or queer studies -- like I don't think I would have really had much more than a surface level understanding of intersectionality, for instance, had it not been for the work that we did because in a sense movement building requires you to interact with and and appeal to groups that lay claim to different kinds of identities and appeal to the ways in which these identities are salient and important, and I think it's really important to be able to distinguish between the black experience and the Latino experience, right?

But it's also important to figure out the sort of grounds of commonality, the ways in which both experiences lend themselves to organic collective political organizing. And I don't want to say that this is the case with any student group.

I think at Princeton we're all basically older teenagers, right? We're inevitably going to make mistakes along the way. But I mean, we weren't these sort of paradigms in reaching out to other groups on campus but I think this was certainly something that we talked a lot about and we made an effort to to address in the organizing and work we did. That's the additional thing that I’ll say is that I think I have a better sense and appreciation of the ways in which Asian American Studies is not just its own sort of isolated identity or way of thinking or philosophy or what have you. But it's very much interconnected in the ways we think about a lot of other different spheres of life and a lot of other different identities.

FM:

I know you graduated in 2017 which was right when the certificate was being officially recognized and the course code ASA came out. I’m wondering if you remember when that was announced and how you felt after all of those years of work?

AH:

We all keep -- at least the core group of folks that graduated around 2017-2016, around those years -- we all keep in touch and in a text chain or Messenger group. We're all very aware. I don't want to speak for everybody of course, but I think that the general vibe was positive.

The first ASA course actually came out the year after I graduated, so I had already been out for a year and was sort of hearing something second hand but I remember the folks in the year below me were saying like, oh I literally just graduated and I can't take any of these courses and then there's the inevitable sort of idea that you know, of course when you're working in an institution where you're time-bound to leave it, of course, you have to be working for the posterity.

In some sense it isn't an exercise in self-interest and it really is in making the institution better and making sure that future generations have the opportunity to take these courses. I think there was a little bit of confusion on how exactly the certificate program would work. My understanding is that it's a track within the American Studies certificate and I think there was a little bit of confusion as to you know, is this very clear that this is an available option.

I think this is relatively trivial but you know, we were thinking about like well, what is the course code even going to be? It can't be AAS because that's already African American Studies and so. We were glad that it is relatively clear from ASA that it is Asian American Studies. I think again, it was a sort of hodgepodge and jumbled because I think a bunch of us were working at the time and some of us just graduated so it felt a little bit more salient. But yeah, I think overall the reception was fairly positive.

FM:

How do you feel about returning to Princeton for your graduate studies?

AH:

I have to admit that when I graduated, my general reaction was, or my general relationship, if you could call it that, to Princeton was on more on the negative side but that primarily had to do with personal… I'll just be honest, I struggled a bit with mental health, in particular my third year there and I think this was around the time the USG Senate started a mental health initiative. I think there were very nascent conversations about, in particular, Asian American mental health and I think Calvin Chin is still the director of CPS there, and I think he was fairly new at the time. There were again very sort of tentative conversations about, you know, how can CPS or improve and how can it be more culturally responsive and be more responsive in general?

As you alluded to, I'm coming back to begin graduate studies in the politics department and one of the big stumbling blocks for me in deciding, you know, is this the right institutional home for me, again primarily had to do with personal mental health.

I actually, I'm not quite sure that that particular component has changed. I remain sort of very wary of it, although I'm willing to conceive that perhaps some of it had to do with a not so great departmental environment in math, though it may have been personal to me.

But I think I have a better sense of how this institution works. I have a better sense of the ways in which even the built environment at Princeton is at times conducive, at times not conducive, to things like mental health and I'm obviously willing to give it another shot, so to speak.

I think maybe to speak a little bit more to the topic at hand though. I was quite discouraged and one of my regrets, I think, is not being as vocal about this as a lot of my peers were but and especially, my peers in the Black Justice League, I think. The way the university handled it, you know around the time of the Ferguson uprisings, the conversation around race and anti-black racism at Princeton, I think I would echo the criticisms that are circulating now where you know, of course it is moving in the right direction to change the name of the policy school.

But I mean, one really has to to wonder and perhaps even cast suspicion on the ways in which the university has even advanced, created, or made the African American Studies department and created a niche American Studies certificate program, well one has to wonder like, what is the intent there, right?

I mean, if you truly cared about the claims that the BJL were making in 2015, one wonders why the name change didn't happen back then instead of now, because police brutality against African Americans was just as salient of an issue and just as urgent of an issue then as it is now. There is also a hesitation for me in thinking, you know, in the fact that I'm returning to this institution that seems like there is a broad shift in the public discourse around of course specifically anti-block racism, but race and difference and diversity in general, but one wonders how dedicated the the university actually is about these these sorts of issues. And by choosing to come back, am I in some way complicit in the kinds of rationales that the university administration puts forward in taking a more generally conservative tone around these issues?

I don't know, it's something that I've been trying to think about recently. My thinking is not-- it will never be complete of course, but it continues to evolve around this kind of issue so yeah, it remains very tentative.

I will say, the Asian American studies folks with few exceptions were the only really close friends that I I felt like I had during my time there, so you know when I look at the institution now, but again besides professors like Professor Cheng or Professor Williams, I don't know that I can look there right now and say yes, I remember my good memories with like, you know professors, right.

FM:

For sure. It's difficult to have feelings towards Princeton that are not very complicated. There are some things it does right but also so many ways that it delegitimizes students. I think one of the reasons why ethnic studies is so important is because it gave me the tools to see where Asianness fits within like a black-white binary and I think Asian American studies classes have never been more relevant than now, trying to figure out what Asians’ role is in America and where we fit in and how we can be better allies. I'm wondering whether all of your work doing research about the Asian American movement, whether that has affected your thinking post George Floyd and around when everybody else in the country is talking about race.

AH:

That's a tough question. I mean to one one degree, because perhaps again somewhat embarrassingly, my grasp on a lot of the histories is starting to get a bit fuzzy. The one thing that I will say is that what comes up a lot is like when I go on Twitter every now and then and I see people sort of talk about the legacies of Asian American activists, like Yuri Kochiyama or Grace Lee Boggs without really a deep understanding or appreciation of what exactly their ideas were and really just describing them in relation to their black counterparts. I think what that indicates is two things.

First, I'm perhaps not so willing to question as maybe other Asian Americans are as to whether there is a role for Asian American allyship -- to use that term-- and that sort of allyship needs to be unequivocal, regardless of whatever people say about well, do Hispanic individuals support Asian Americans when push comes to shove.

I don't know that, in so far as we conceptualize Asian Americans as a political group, that the ways in which we act with respect to anti-black racism or movements against oppression in general should be conditional in this kind of reciprocity. So I just off the bat I want to say that I don't think that that's true.

But I do think that there is a sense in which some people go too far in the other direction and they sort of, they do exactly what you're alluding to before which is to reduce in some ways particular ways in which Asian Americans’ political identities are constructed in the US to precisely the same thing as the ways in which Black identity is constructed in the US, or Latinx identity is constructing in the US. They say in fact, there is actually no such thing as an unprivileged Asian American identity, and I don't think that's quite true either.

I guess all of which is to suggest that there needs to be more work done, of course and more Asian American Studies courses. But it calls for a certain kind of imagination in the moment and in terms of what can Asian Americannes be today, it's important to have an appreciation of the past and to understand the ways in which our historical narratives shape who we are today.

But I think it's really important not to discount the ways in which we have agency in the current moment, and we have the creative political imaginaries or however you want to describe it, to take the concepts and symbols and terminologies and identities that we have now and shape them into something new.

Again this may be an overstatement on my part, but I do question sometimes when I see Asian Americans who are famous who post things on Twitter or write essays or create forms of media, if there is that kind of drive to create and to create a positive identity for Asian Americans -- one that isn't chained too much to either the historical narrative of being an immigrant or purely just a reflection of the ways in which Asian Americanness is defined vis-à-vis white identity or vis-à-vis Black identity. I think perhaps that is the project that I think I would be most interested in.

Although again, I don't know that I have the sort of conceptual resources at hand to fully articulate beyond what I've just said what this identity could look like.

FM:

I'm also curious about how you got into political theory from math.

AH:

It's a little convoluted. I'm not actually sure why I studied math. I barely scraped by. I found a couple of the courses interesting but then like some of them I completely bombed and I just shouldn't have stayed in the department but I think it was just a purely personal thing of wanting to give myself a sort of intellectual challenge and like not giving up and whatever.

But I think in the middle of it, I sort of realized this isn't for me and one of the reasons why I wasn't for me is because it was just so far into the other extreme. I mean, like what is a five manifold? Like what is a five-dimensional like sphere? I still don't know, and I'm not trying to say that there's no value in studying this kind of thing like there surely is, but it was so far divorced from anything that I could possibly be interested in that I realized like I need to do something that's a little bit more grounded.

I ended up taking a couple of logic classes at Princeton but weirdly, at Princeton, logic is -- not weirdly but perhaps somewhat uniquely -- at Princeton, logic classes are taught out of the philosophy department, not out of the math department. I ended up taking a little bit of philosophy and then I ended up talking to some folks in philosophy who did the kinds of argumentative methods that philosophers take from mathematicians and end up getting applied to certain forms of social philosophy.

There's a lot of contemporary work in philosophy of race that uses these analytic methods to try and understand what does race actually mean? What does gender mean, you know, what is a social category and how do we sort of fill out its contents then? So Sally Haslanger has this paper about whether or not we should aim for the elimination of categories like race and gender.

And I ended up getting really interested in this literature and I thought oh, you know, maybe I'll study philosophy. So then I ended up coming to this masters program here at Queens intending fully to study philosophy of race. I ended up taking a bunch of political philosophy courses in my Fall term because that was the only thing that was on offer, so that the philosophy of race course was in the spring.

I think it hits the sweet spot for me in terms of how I think about the world, or maybe not the world, but how I think is probably more mathematical than it is narrative perhaps or experiential. But at the same time, I'm deeply interested and curious about how do we live collective lives together. How is it that in a democracy like the United States, how is it that we can not only coexist but live and create shared meaning together; create collective lives together?

And I think that's really important to understanding that even the current moment. I think we have lost sight of the ways in which politics is not only an exercise in the exercise of power. It's not just about passing laws and policies and blah blah. We care about politics because we care about other people. I think political philosophy for me is a way in which to study that subject using the methods that I'm most familiar and comfortable with. And so, I mean a very circuitous route but, I think that's sort of how I landed on saying look, maybe I will study political theory for a bit and if it doesn't work out, then it doesn't work out.