Being an Asian American educator during Teacher Appreciation Week and API Heritage Month in the midst of global pandemic
I woke up last night in pain; my body in all its cyclical regularity waited an additional two days this month to align with the full moon, and the cramps have been difficult. I fell asleep, and woke up at two am with the full force of a bright moon in my face through the blinds, exposing me under its searing spotlight. When I finally got out of bed for good around 11, it had felt like days had passed by.
But then I opened up my bullet journal and the month of May startled me; I remember the last day of classes at school in March like it was just a week ago. April has slipped out of my fingers so quickly.
It has been one of those weeks where everything aches, a sort of pain between thudding and dull. I have to become reacquainted with these parts of me: the left side of my head, the lower half of my belly, the groove between my shoulders, my heart. Like they’re each taking their turn crawling their way onto Ma’at’s scale, demanding I know their full weight.
There’s really no point to this bit of writing other than that the title “being an Asian American educator during Teacher Appreciation Week during Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the middle of anti-Asian racism and a global pandemic” came to me the other day, and I felt like those words deserved a little bit of time.
It was also Day of Remembrance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Day on Tuesday. And I saw posts online about the joy of Taco Tuesday aligning with Cinco de Mayo that same day. Meanwhile Carlos Escobar-Mejia, may he rest, died in a detention center on Wednesday, after being detained by ICE back in January and ICE is refusing mask donations. Meanwhile Native health centers in Seattle are being sent body bags instead of protective equipment. Meanwhile community members are building mutual aid networks, doing what they can to support Navajo Nation, slammed with the impact of COVID-19 exacerbating centuries of US violence, defunding, and dehumanization. And I am thinking about how Pacific Islanders in Southern California are being overlooked as they too are falling ill int his pandemic.
And this week there was a flood of media around Ahmaud Arbery, may he rest in possibility, who has been dead for three months now and I am afraid the media has swallowed up his name in the matter of three days. I have not known what to say, if I should say anything, only reading and sharing what moments of grief I can with those around me. I am remembering what it felt like to be nineteen in college, weeping in my bedroom over winter break when I first read about Trayvon Martin, may he rest in possibility. I am learning of Nina Pop, may she rest, a Black woman who is the tenth violent death of a trans woman of color this year. I am remembering all those lives in between.
It is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, as designated by George H.W. Bush in 1992, extended from API Heritage Week initially proposed by: US House Representative Rep. and Norman Y. Mineta of San Jose, California, survivor of the Japanese internment camps; and Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga of Hawai’i, veterans of the renowned 442nd Regimental Combat Battalion. I was just about to teach my unit on Japanese concentration camps and the range of Japanese American responses to Executive Order 9066 before schools in San Francisco closed. We were going to learn the term ‘仕方がない/ shikata ga nai’, watch the Drunk History episodes on super-patriot badass Daniel Inouye and anti-US badass and No-No Boy Frank Emi.
After that we were going to talk about the Cold War through its impact on Korea and Southeast Asia. I was actually going to flesh out my curriculum on the US War in Korea, and ask them, how could we possibly have a ‘Forgotten War’? Who is doing the forgetting? Whose bodies still remember? I wonder now if I would have had the time to watch Crash Landing on You, which ended up spurring a long Youtube dive into experiences of North Korean defectors and the country itself, and has deepened my understanding of how to teach this historical period as a teacher.
I was going to tell them, I want you to know that before Vietnam is a war, it is a country, a people, a history. I was going to assign the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” where he called for an end to US imperialism and solidarity with Vietnamese brethren, a speech that ultimately alienated him from many in the Civil Rights Movement. I have a clip in my slides where Muhammad Ali says “My conscience won’t let me shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me n — — -, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what?”
And I was going to show students the famous photo of Thích Quảng Đức, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest the mistreatment of his people by Ngô Đình Diệm’s regime, who sat in the lotus position in silence as people screamed in shock at the charring of his body. Tell them how important this moment is to me as a Vietnamese-American woman, to remember how fiercely all my peoples were trying to determine liberation on our own terms.
There was so much left to teach in US history class: revisiting the overthrow of Hawai’i’s government and its forced annexation; the Black women and queer activists of the Civil Rights Movement, from Bayard Rustin to gender-pushing Pauli Murray, predecessor of Kimberle Crenshaw on legal intersectionality; the solidarity of Filipinx and Latinx migrant farm workers in the Delano grape strike; the American Indian Movement and the occupation of Alcatraz; the Cold War and the ‘War on Drugs’ which led to CIA-backed coups all over Latin America, how that led to the refugee crisis at the US Southern border today.
All this to say that I feel most Asian American when I am a teacher. Because my children see an Asian American woman teaching them this curriculum, expressing gratitude to MLK and Muhammad, expressing anger at the lies made in service of US imperialism. I am an Asian American woman when I remind children that grades are never a measure of our worth or opportunities for success, that trying to fulfill the model minority myth nearly led me to an early end. When I teach Health class to the ninth graders, I am a young Asian American woman who lovingly laughs when they are grossed out by masturbation, and answers their questions about anal sex or STIs or the pronunciation of epididymis or a/sexuality with aplomb, encourages my Samoan student to share videos about faʻafafine during our sex and gender lessons online, knowing that her leadership in our API Club at school is immensely valuable and necessary when so many spaces use the census designation of API to suppress and undermine Pacific Islanders.
Because they see an Asian American woman when I wear my áo dài every year to graduation — in fact the first year I attended graduation, Vietnamese mothers I had scarcely met came up to me and asked for photos with their children and their grandmothers, so excited to see me sit onstage celebrating their children and our culture. I am Asian American when I am the only person of color on an interview panel for new teachers. (Yes, even here in multicultural San Francisco, often I am still the token Asian.)
All this to say it is Asian American Heritage Month and I am afraid of being in public (yes, even here in multicultural San Francisco) because three months ago a woman literally pulled her plate away from me in a restaurant when I had a coughing fit, and two months ago a man screamed “CORONA! CORONA!” at me when I was walking down the street, and in addition to the spike in anti-Asian racism, the numbers are showing that Asian women are experiencing these crimes at a rate three times that of Asian men in this country. And I feel weird that for so many years I leaned into the privilege I knew the model minority myth afforded me to push harder for structural changes and undo white supremacy where I could. And suddenly I feel anxious when I leave my house? It seems silly, with all this going on and what Black and Brown folks go through every day.
All this to say it is Teacher Appreciation Week and I don’t really feel like a teacher this week, in any meaningful way to be appreciated. All I do is play Animal Crossing, make mango sticky rice at midnight in strange manic spurts of energy, wake up in pain under a full moon. Wednesday morning began with an enormous anxiety at the idea of being on Zoom for a meeting, for office hours, for check-ins with students. I felt bad for feeling anxious during a thirty minute check-in where we were supposed to give information about students, and pushing back when other adults kept saying “they’re not showing up, they’re not doing any work” as if that’s a metric for a child’s wellbeing in the midst of global pandemic, anxious that I know fellow educators in the district keep losing former students to violence and that my own former students may be involved in the taking of lives as well.
All this to say it is Teacher Appreciation Week and I can barely do basic tasks this week, but I am still angry my coworkers are underpaid and overworked, that my school district is crying about a projected 82 million dollar deficit when we are in one of the wealthiest economies in the world, that the governor would irresponsibly say we can open schools this July, and they probably are expecting us to go back to large classroom sizes, tedious and dehumanizing bell schedules, a lack of support for students with disabilities, no proper framework on the trauma our communities have already endured and are persisting through right now.
All this to say we are witnessing the passing of a supermoon, a Flower Moon, a full moon in Scorpio.
All this to say I wonder if flowers feel pain, unfurling in the dark.
