By Mandy Sun and Karen Mai
On Jan. 22, the Immigrant History Initiative hosted a workshop that addressed how parents, specifically immigrant parents, could talk about Asian American identity and racism with their children. The workshop emerged in light of Asian racism during the pandemic and the language inaccessibility that prevented immigrant families from understanding how this might not only impact their children but how they would handle it. “This sort of space is sorely needed,” says Kathy Lu, one of the co-founders for the nonprofit Immigrant History Initiative.
The nonprofit was founded in 2018 by two Yale law school alumni who are advocates for bringing immigrant history to public knowledge. For the past two years, they have been creating lesson plans about Asian American history, expanding their board, and test-driving their work at the Southern Connecticut Chinese School in New Haven.
At the beginning of the workshop, Lu and Julia Wang provided a foundational understanding of how society flips their perception of Asian Americans between the “model minority” and “perpetual foreigner” — stereotypes that gravely divert attention away from society answering Asian American struggles. As Wang remarks, “The CDC, a national agency, has statistics showing that Asian Americans actually face bullying at higher rates than other minority racial groups and this 2020 survey. One in four Asian American students reported experiencing racialized bullying, meaning bullying where they were targeted because they were Asian, and this has an additional far-reaching impact on mental health.”
Dr. Jenny Wang, mental health expert and clinical psychologist, believes that Asian Americans are uniquely positioned to change how they show up in conversations about race. She stresses that we must empathetically confront these issues and dispel the myth that Asian Americans should let subtle microaggressions and racism slide because they aren’t seen as awful. “This is one of the most dangerous stories told about Asian Americans in terms of race because it kept our community from accessing or asking for resources on how to talk to children about race but also it has kept us in the sidelines for the longest racial justice movement in America,” Dr. Wang reasserts.
Dr. Wang concluded this workshop with several trauma-formed strategies and tools in handling race and racism, providing ideas such as: racial storytelling, journaling, role playing, and debating. She believes that racial storytelling, “the stories that we tell about ourselves, our people, resiliency, our suffering. This is one of the most powerful tools we can utilize with our children because they love stories … We need to learn how to manage our own emotions to tell these stories to them … you may cry and that’s okay too. Showing your children that this is important information.”
This event was the first of its long series of workshops catered to handling Asian American racism, and it was translated into several Asian languages in order to create an inclusive and accessible environment. With languages of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, the workshop certainly provided the necessary tools for immigrant parents to speak to finally speak to their children about race. Dr. Wang ended by saying,“the reasons why we are holding this workshop today is because so many of us don’t have the language of the historical context to have these conversations with our kids.”
To read this article in Chinese (Traditional), please click here.
