Teaching as an Asian Woman in the #StopAsianHate Moment
“Every day as a teacher, I am fighting for a world where my students get to explore and live in their wholeness.”
“Ms. Phan, to be honest, lately I’ve been scared to even go outside to take out the trash.”
Even after a whole year of distance learning over Zoom, nothing really prepared me for the gut punch of reading that recent comment, which was sent to me privately from a young Chinese Filipina high school student in my U.S. history class.
I was pretty juiced this year to use the pandemic as an opportunity to revamp my entire U.S. history curriculum, and all things said, it’s gone pretty well. I shifted from a purely chronological approach to a curriculum with a hybrid thematic and chronological approach, and it was the first year that I was able to talk more seriously about the 1980s. Given how trendy the ’80s have been on social media platforms like TikTok, students have enjoyed learning about daily life and cultural aspects of the United States during that time period. We’ve talked about Reaganomics and the impact of the 1980s recession and ensuing economic decisions made by the U.S. government on various communities.
It was in this context that I felt it important to teach them about the murder of Vincent Chin and make connections between Chin’s death at the hands of resentful white men — a scapegoat for the economic tumult plaguing Detroit at the time — and what’s been happening to Asians in the United States today. So of course we spoke about the stabbing of two Asian women in early May in San Francisco, and we had previously checked in about the attack on Xiao Xhen Xie, who donated the nearly $1 million raised on GoFundMe to anti-racist efforts, along with many other stories of Asian people being attacked.
In my time teaching, it’s pretty evident when students disclose fear or complex emotions to me because I make myself available as a human being, and they feel connected to me in shared identities and shared struggles. That moment with this Chinese Filipina student certainly felt that way, and it wasn’t the first time Asian students this past year had expressed fear or concern to me, either for their personal safety or that of their family members. We shared similar moments this time last year, and I’ve written about my mixed emotions as an Asian American educator during Teacher Appreciation Week and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Many young students were also nervous about the pandemic and didn’t want to return to school. In fact, Asian Americans were most likely to opt in to remote learning, because they often live in intergenerational households and have justified concerns about the bullying and violence they may face in school.
And it’s not like Covid-19 has generated completely new anti-Asian prejudice out of nowhere. I teach health education in addition to U.S. history, and in health, we are on our last unit of relationships and sexuality. We have completed anatomy, menstruation, pregnancy, STIs, and the generally more medical aspects of the unit and have moved on to the sociocultural side. We spent a recent week discussing how patriarchy and the male gaze shape perceptions of gender and sexuality in society. Students talked about objectification in film and video games, as well as catcalling and the sexual harassment they had experienced in middle school. The conversation ultimately intersected with race, and we touched briefly on racial fetishization.
A young Asian student shared, “Before the pandemic, a boy I liked told me that he couldn’t like me back because of my race. Looking back, the worst part of it all is that I wasn’t even surprised when he told me.”
On the one hand, it’s really precious to have connections and relationships in the classroom where students can share such painful stories. On the other hand, they’re really fucking painful stories. And it reminded me of my own experience as an Asian American teenager, figuring out desirability and how to live in my own body as a survivor of sexual violence while the rest of the world relentlessly objectified it.
So here we are in May, and I’m wrapping up my fourth year of full-time teaching in the San Francisco Unified School District. Even though SFUSD actually boasts a significantly large Asian educator demographic, I am the second-most senior Asian American classroom teacher and the most senior Asian American general education teacher at my school. Each year, I’ve had maybe one or two Asian American colleagues, and I’ve watched them leave our school or leave teaching by year’s end. We have more Asian support staff at our school site, like the friendly and kind custodians who speak to each other in Cantonese and Teochew, and the Filipino after-school worker with the dope graffiti skills. But overall, being an Asian American woman in K-12 education has been deeply isolating, and community is hard to come by when there is such a dearth of educators of color, Asian educators included.
Some examples come to mind:
- Difficulty in establishing classroom safety and boundaries — and young men refusing to listen to me as the only adult in the room — has everything to do with me being an Asian woman.
- I have at times been fetishized by students and didn’t know where to turn when students said uncomfortable things about my body or perceived attractiveness. Among other incidents, a student became obsessed with me during my first year of teaching, alternating between adoration and hatred. It reached the point where I honestly grew concerned for my safety. The counselor, however, simply told me, “Boys just need to learn how to express their feelings.”
- A former co-worker at one point told students—yes, you read that correctly—that I was the woman he would most want to date.
- I constantly get reprimanded or scolded like a child until the adults realize I am, in fact, not a child, having coded my race and gender and presentation as a minor.
- Despite my experience and expertise on a number of things like curriculum and community building, I am constantly dismissed for being naive, but I am also constantly asked to take on the most difficult teaching schedules and extracurricular roles.
All these things I know in my gut are rooted in how I live in the world as an Asian American woman and educator. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of what happens as an adult outside the classroom or what I experienced as an Asian American adolescent. These experiences are not things my white co-workers or administrators have ever understood or been able to hold when I experienced them. In fact, they have repeatedly exacerbated the issues or minimized my feelings. The relentless racism that I have directly felt and the moral injury inflicted when I am made complicit in institutional racism and anti-Blackness has made me fantasize about quitting teaching every year.
Yet I cannot express enough how deeply I love being in classrooms with young people.
I don’t know where I’m going or who I need to be next, but for now, to be an Asian American educator in this moment is being that daily presence in the classroom for all my students, Asian American or otherwise. It’s about teaching everyone’s histories and taking care of everybody’s sense of wellness. It is choosing to reckon with silence, being honest and transparent about my journey with mental health as the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants and refugees before and during this pandemic. It’s finding solace in a digital community like #miseducAsian, curated by fellow Asian American educators. It is recognizing that the struggle for deep justice will not come from outrage over representation or media attention that spans only a year of a much longer and uglier history of anti-Asian violence. It is dismantling the anti-Blackness that the model minority myth upholds and tearing down every myth of meritocracy that persists within the school system. It is demanding the disaggregation of AAPI, recognizing that some Asian ethnicities are privileged over others, and Pacific Islanders are most often left out altogether.
Every day as a teacher, I am fighting for a world where my students get to explore and live in their wholeness. My students are doing the same, and every day I am so grateful for their persistence, their resilience, their memes, and their joy. It is an honor to navigate this perilous world alongside them.
Frankly speaking, I don’t connect with the #StopAsianHate hashtag. I do want the violence to end. I do want to imagine a world without hatred.
But my students and I are already working to build a world where we not only stop Asian hate but also dream of greater things, like joy, solidarity, and deep justice.
I hope others join us, and soon.
