WAAt is WAA?
Founded in 1994 by members of the Wellesley College Asian Association (WCAA), Professor James Kodera, Sue Wang ‘88, and seven other Asian organizations, the Wellesley Asian Alliance (WAA) has been dedicated to fighting for Asian American Studies at Wellesley and Asian and Asian American communities on and off campus. In our almost 30 years history, WAA has been committed to being a space for Asian and Asian American students to increase awareness for political issues of importance to the the Asian and Asian American community, to fight for the development of Asian American Studies, and to build community among Asian and Asian American students on campus, with an emphasis on our commitment to effecting institutional change. We were founded with the commitment to doing right by all members of the Pan-Asian community by decentering East-Asian narratives and centering the narratives of underrepresented communities (in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, religion…); constantly educating ourselves; ensuring that our space is one in which others feel welcome to speak up and participate; being cognizant of our actions both towards the members of Asian and Asian American communities as well as towards other communities; and being careful not to be American-centric. While this mission statement is updated yearly by our eboard, these are values that we consistently work towards.
Since our founding, WAA has done so much to further student activism on campus. With the help of Wellesley faculty, WAA led the movement in protesting the denial of Professor Elena Creef’s tenure; demanding full time cultural advisors and a cultural space for students of color; increased recruitment and retention of marginalized students, faculty, and staff; and increased support for Ethnic Studies. After rallies, sit-ins, teach-ins, letter campaigns, meetings with the administration, and their protest published in national media, the administration promised to address students’ grievances. Since the original WAAM-SLAM (Wellesley Asian Action Movement-Siblings Leading Action for Multiculturalism), and a second wave of activism we’ve called WAAM-SLAM II, WAA has been able to attain advisors for students of Asian descent (Dean Karen Shih) and students of Latine descent (Dean Maren Alicea-Westort); establish Asian American Studies and Latinx Studies minors; obtain a cultural space for students of color (Acorns House); and help get a tenure-track Asian American Studies professor hired (Professor Genevieve Clutario).
As a current eboard member of WAA, our founding values and history of activism is always at the forefront of my mind. In our brief history, WAA has taken several different approaches in order to use media to mobilize action. Through the many projects and campaigns that WAA has worked on, one tool that we have used consistently throughout the years is using media to share the lived experiences of Asians and Asian Americans. Ranging from the video campaign that we created to demand that the Wellesley administration hire a tenure track Asian American Studies professors to our movie screenings in media club, WAA has utilized film’s relation within the public sphere to educate the student body on issues impacting Asian and Asian American communities in the hopes of garnering support from the wider community.
Student Media creation
Through WAA’s history of activism, there have been several student-made videos made to help raise awareness of the lived experiences of Asian and Asian American students on campus.
Be Yellow features clips of students protesting the college’s apathy towards the Asian and Asian American student body. As a result of the dying Asian American studies concentration, the lack Asian/Asian American cultural advisors, and the lack of space for Asian/Asian American student organizations on campus, WAAM took to staging a sit-in in academic buildings, as well as a protest through the academic quad, as seen in the video. While Be Yellow worked to raise awareness for Asian/Asian American student activism on campus, as well as the college’s clear lack of support for students of Asian descent, it also highlighted many issues within the movement. Several students of Asian descent noted that at times the movement was demoralizing and disempowering at times. Other students noted a cultural clash with regards to white students, saying that they had never seen many of the students before, and that now “they were talking about having a revolution.” As one student shares, WAAM was so crucial to many students of Asian descent because it was the first time that “[they] were able to define [themselves] for [themselves].” The student continues that
“it was started by a group of people that has grown up hating themselves for the curves of their eyes, their last names, the golden hues of their skin, the foods their family eats, for the languages that their families speak. WAAM was a small taste of the power to be the one in control. A small taste of having the privilege to be the one defining. We were shaping our own movement, our own identities for once, and it was that power that made WAAM so very personal.” -unknown
While they continued that they needed the support of the rest of the student body, they should have still been able to empower themselves. Another student says that it was a classic white, liberal agenda. Another asks, where were these students before?
Jumping 16 years later to 2017, WAA began organizing to demand that the Wellesley administration hire our first tenure-track Asian American Studies professor. In an effort to raise awareness of the importance that Asian American Studies (AAS) holds for so many Wellesley students of Asian descent, WAA put out a video addressing Provost Andrew Shennan and the Wellesley Advisory Committee on Academic Staffing, sharing the experiences of Asian and Asian American Wellesley students. Students were asked to share their experiences with AAS at Wellesley, why now is an important time for AAS, and why each student needs/cares about AAS. In response to these questions, many students voiced their love for the department, sharing that taking AAS classes has allowed them to contextualize and understand their own identities. Many shared their own frustrations with the college’s general lack of acknowledgement and resources given to Asian and Asian American students. One student shared their disappointment with the lack of professors speaking to the Asian American experience, particularly when speaking about voter choice and immigrant experiences. Another student shared that
“Since the [2016] election, a lot of professors and other older people have been telling college students, like me, to engage with other people; people who don’t share your histories, your experiences, or your background. But I find that that’s a very difficult thing to ask of students who might not even know their own histories, or even understand their own identity, and how their experiences shape the way that they view the world.” -Emily Natori ‘17
When asked about why AAS matters to them, one student (Linda Zhou ‘18) shares that the most important thing they got out of AAS classes was that their voice is supposed to matter, and she stresses that the systemic silencing of Asians and Asian Americans needs to stop now. In a world that has, and continues to systemically silence the voices and experiences of people of Asian descent, this video campaign was so powerful in its mission to share these experiences on a much wider scale in an effort to garner support for the Asian American Studies department. Using video and social media’s position within the public sphere, both Be Yellow and WAA’s video campaign were able to share the experiences of students that are too often left behind to show people that people of Asian descent are not model minorities and that our experiences are as diverse and multifaceted as we are.
Movie Waatching
Since its founding, WAA has also utilized movie screenings as a tool to help share Asian and Asian American experiences. Looking at one of the more recent films that we’ve screened, Far East Deep South, which we showed in December 2020. Far East Deep South is a documentary produced by Larissa Lam and Baldwin Chiu chronicling the story of Charles Chiu, a Chinese immigrant living in the deep south, as told through his children. As written on their website,
“The film provides a window into the lives of the Chinese in the South and the discrimination they faced in the midst of segregation. The film not only highlights the struggles and perseverance of the Chinese, but explores the racial dynamics between the white, Black and Chinese communities and the added challenge of exclusionary immigration policies, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, many families faced at that time.”
In looking to find a common thread in the reasoning as to why WAA has chosen to screen the films that they have, I turned to WAA alum Christina Lin ‘20 to ask why she chose this movie in particular. While she told me that there wasn’t any specific reason why she was drawn to this film in particular, she said she ended up choosing this one because of the experiences that it shared. She told me that through exposure to these stories and lived Asian and Asian American experiences, she hoped that people could learn about the history of Asian and Asian American identities.
Jumping back to 2009, WAA held a screening of Alice Wu’s Saving Face and had a great turnout! Personally, Saving Face has always been a really important movie as it shares the love story of Wil and Vivian as they navigate their identities as queer Asian Americans. In a world with such little Asian American media, and especially queer Asian American media, this film holds so much power in both sharing the experiences of an often silenced group, as well as creating community for those watching it.
This year, we created WAA’s media club in an effort to create community among students of Asian descent. Although my relationship with my mom is kind of rocky, connecting with her over Asian/Asian American content was always something that really stuck with me. Regardless of how unrepresentative of Asian and Asian American populations the movie actually was, I will always remember going to see Crazy Rich Asians with my mom, and the feeling of comfort and belonging being in the theater with my mom. Keeping that in mind, I hoped to create a similar environment for our general members, and thus WAA media club was born.
One of the movies that we screened this semester was Saving Face. While we had a much smaller turnout than there was in 2009, I think that the smaller gathering created a different, but equally important, experience. Although we only had a few people in the auditorium, one person wrote that they felt a sense of comfort being in a space with other students of Asian descent, regardless of whether they knew the other people very well. In response to other films that we screened through the semester, there was a consensus on a sense of vulnerability and connection that viewers felt when watching films in this space. In response to our screening of Drive My Car, one person wrote
“I felt really comfortable around the people in that room while watching the movie. I think that if I were with non-AAPI students, I would have been hyperaware of everything that was going on in the film and worrying about what others would be thinking about the characters, their plot lines, and their cultures. However, this hyperawareness did not ~exist~ for me, which was really nice because I got to just relax and watch a really cool film with really cool people.”
Not only did people share that they felt safe and comfortable watching these movies in this space, but one person shared that they were able to
“dig more deeply into the nuances of conversation with my fellow Asian American spectators because of the level of trust I was able to place in them – there was no one I felt I needed to “explain” my Asianness to, and I was able to freely share my thoughts and work through how the art impacted me while also dialoguing with peers who were doing the same thing.”
why does this all matter?
Beyond being aware and learning more about the Asian and Asian American experiences, you might be asking, why does this all matter? In “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Nancy Fraser proposes the importance of subaltern counterpublics, alternatives to the idea of a singular public sphere in which members of marginalized groups could “invent and circulate counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.” (14) She writes that not only can these counterpublics act as a space for withdrawal and regroupment, where members of marginalized communities can go to for comfort and support, but they also act as “bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics.” (15) Until these topics of concern are discussed within these subaltern counterpublics, she writes, can they become a common concern of the general public.
From my research, it becomes clear that WAA has functioned, and continues to function as a subaltern counterpublic for students of Asian descent to discuss topics relating to their identity, while at the same time mobilizing action. It is so essential that we have these spaces, not only to allow students of Asian descent to rest and to exist in identities that those around them can understand, but also to continue to educate members of these communities on the expansive experiences of Asians and Asian Americans. No matter how much systems of power continue to place Asians into one category, it is so important that we continue to prove that wrong. Using media to share the expansively different experiences of people of Asian descent with the greater Wellesley community, I, and the rest of WAA, hope that through awareness and exposure, the struggles that Asians and Asian Americans have, and continue to suffer through will one day become common concern of the greater public.