Warrior Prose

By Tuyet G. Duong

Our life’s work is more fulfilling when it connects deeply into our own personal lives. As an immigration advocate, I find that these days, I connect everything to my recent and emerging motherhood and my deepest emotions as a wife and a daughter-in-law.

In keeping with the Asian American tradition, my husband and I invited his parents to live with us in Virginia and help raise our newborn Max Tina and Sam Nguyen. Two great American names. One great Vietnamese surname. So Tina and Sam packed up their lives in Portland, Oregon. Tina said goodbye to a 30-year stint as a housekeeper at the famous Benson Hotel. Sam is a retired Intel employee. They are both tired. And poor. We wanted to take care of them, and they wanted to take care of our baby. It worked out.

So every mother thinks that no person can ever take as much care of her own child. Simply put: who could ever love him as much? In Tina, whom I call ma, I found someone who meticulously loves my child. When I say meticulous, I mean every spec, every fold, every curl on his head, every eyelash, and every spot on my child’s body has been gone over, perused, washed, patted, kissed, loved, hugged, petted, and tenderly smoothed over. She bathes him like a monk would cleanse himself before an important rite. She feeds him like he’s an inmate partaking in his last meal. She soothes him to sleep with a high rhythmic toneless lullaby that is ever-patient and ever-loving. She plays with him deliberately, slowly, carefully, and with attention paid to every gesture and smile and giggle. You can see on this woman’s face that her greatest joy is my son. Oh my God, I love this woman who can love my child like that.

Then ma asked my husband, Bao, and me to promise to let her sister in Vietnam stay with us if she were to come to America, and to sign the Affidavit of Support and promise to financially support her sister for the rest of her time here in America — my husband balked. I am terrible with money, so I rely on his financial acumen in our joint household finances, and generally stay far away from that stuff. He bluntly told my mother to reconsider because we were already stretched thin having to care for five people already. At that point, my mother turned to me.

Tears streaming down her face, she said to me, woman to woman, “My sister, Y Lan, helped Bao and I come to America. When we had nothing left at all, she sold all of her gold jewelry to pay for our passage on a boat to the Philippines. She sacrificed her own passage to America to pay for both of us. Bao would not be able to be where he is or who he is if it were not for her. And I swore to her that until my dying day, I would make it my mission to help her and her family to come to America. That is the only thing I want in this world, to bring my sister and her family over. I owe them so much. We have been waiting almost ten years, and this is all I want. I swear it on Buddha, and everything I hold dear.”

As she said all of this, my heart cracked opened, erupted, and flowed over. I cried too. I cried over her sacrifices. I cried over how small and humble this request was to me, a woman who was now devoting her life to caring for my one and only son. I cried because I was a mother too. There was no way I could deny her. Her mission was mine: I would do what I could to help her sponsor her sister to America. And of course since I have veto power, my husband would have to as well.

The problem is, the family-based immigration system sucks in America. The backlog is 4 million applications long. Vietnamese siblings have to wait 10 years. And last year, the Senate tried to cut the sibling category. Siblings are in danger. Sisters and brothers around the world are in danger. Our very definition of “family” is in danger.

Luckily, Y Lan’s son came here a while back, and will become a citizen and can sponsor his parents soon. But they will still need financial support and backing from us, which we are more than willing to provide. But our story, their story, all of our stories – point to the glaring need for comprehensive immigration reform. And specifically, reform of our family immigration system. It is broken, it does not support families, and it does not support the reunification of families in a way that makes sense for any of us. My ma should not have to wait more than a decade to bring her sister to America. She has played by the rules. She has paid her taxes. She has worked hard for the hotel business for three decades. Her son, my husband, ironically works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). And he’s a good DHS employee. Our story is America’s story, and we need to make sure everyone knows that when the next battle in Congress happens. And we all need to rise up and be heard.

By Dinah Chung, Grace Lee, and Dawn Philip

Mallika Dutt is the Founder and Executive Director of Breakthrough, an international human rights organization using innovative high impact education, media and popular culture to transform communities and bring about social change. Mallika has authored several articles and essays and is the recipient of numerous awards including The Spirit of Asian America Award from the Asian American Federation of New York in 2003 and the Phoenix Service Award from the New York Asian Women’s Center in 2002.

NAPAWF: Hi Mallika, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview! Could you start off by talking a little bit about your organization, Breakthrough?

MD: Breakthrough is a human rights organization that uses innovative, high impact strategies through media and popular culture to talk about issues like immigrant rights, women’s rights, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS. We currently work in India and in the United States—two of the world’s largest democracies. Our tagline, our motto if you will is “We seek to build a culture of human rights.”

NAPAWF: Breakthrough has been really successful in using popular culture to educate the public. However, you received criticism from parts of the women’s movement for trying to use popular culture and going “mainstream.” Could you talk about your reactions to that?

MD: I’ve been part of the women’s movement for a very long time—for almost 25 years now. We’ve gone through various evolutions including a critique of looking at how mainstream media and popular culture has really objectified, trivialized, and undermined women in all these different ways—that critique has been a very important part of how our understanding of women and media has evolved. At the same time we’ve also had a strand within the women’s moment of seeking to mainstream our issues and make the work that we do resonate with larger audiences and reach larger numbers of people because ultimately gender based discrimination is only going to end if we are able to widen and deepen the base of constituencies that believe in women’s rights. I think of it as two parallel streams of feminist discourse if you will.

About ten years ago, I really began to question how we could use more mainstream strategies to reach larger audiences and how we can move out of a paradigm where we just talked to one another and engage different people in conversation. I started to explore the use of pop culture with the production of the first music album I ever did on violence against women along with a music video on domestic violence when I was living in India. The album and video ended up on the Top 10 and ended up on MTV and generated huge amounts of media coverage. In producing that album and video, I worked with many men—I had a male lyricist, I worked with a male music director and I also worked with a male music video director. Those were some of the pieces that some of my colleagues in the movement raised questions about. There was a sense among some of them that we should only work with women in doing this kind of work. Other people thought that using MTV and other mainstream media undermined women and because of that, we were selling out.

I took the position and continue to take the position that all human rights issues in order to be advanced need to have the constituency that is affected and impacted by these issues speak up and be empowered. But we will not see true change until a much wider constituency buys into that issue so for example lesbian and gay communities of course need to be mobilized and speak out but we need straight allies as well. Similarly, when we’re talking about violence against women or gender based discrimination, we have to mobilize men to really understand the limitations of patriarchy and how we can build a culture of human rights for everybody. So that is Breakthrough’s philosophy. When we say we want to build a culture of human rights, the vision is figuring out how to create a society where everybody who lives in it can enjoy a life of dignity. Part of this is looking at how we reframe our work and get the media to pay more to attention to our issues but I also think it’s important for us to be reflecting on how we can get more strategic and proactive in advancing a progressive agenda.

NAPAWF: Being proactive about creating and advancing a progressive agenda relates on some level to this idea of leadership. One thing NAPAWF talks a lot about is empowering young women, specifically API women & girls, to be leaders in the community and advance a progressive agenda. As someone who founded two successful organizations—Sakhi and now Breakthrough, what’s your understanding of leadership?

MD: I don’t know that I’ve really spent enough time thinking about leadership per se. I think what’s more important to me is how you locate your voice in advancing a progressive or human rights agenda. Locating yourself in advancing a struggle means that you understand that you are not only speaking as a victim—you have a responsibility to challenge the parts of societal oppression that do victimize you—but you also have a responsibility for speaking up and addressing other forms of victimization that may or may not speak to your reality. You need to understand that you may be a victim in one aspect of your life but you may have a lot of privilege in other aspects of your life. So for example to make this more concrete, if I look at myself and how I place myself as a leader in the progressive movement: I am Indian, I’m a women, I am from the global South, I am a lawyer, I went to extremely privileged educational institutions in this country.

So when I place myself in the movement, I can’t only talk about myself as a victimized women of color. I don’t think that if you only frame yourself as a victim, that you are able then to make the kinds of connections you need to make to other forms of oppression and also then to have a vision of what kind of world you want to inhabit where everybody has a place, everybody has a part. So for me leadership is about spotlighting oppression and articulating realities that may not be apparent. Most importantly, leadership is having a vision that really brings everybody along with you.

NAPAWF: Breakthrough does a lot of work around the stripping of due process rights in the criminal justice system and the immigrant raids that have been occurring. With the current state of affairs, both domestically and globally, how can we use the concept of human rights to combat what’s going on with respect to the increasing deportations, the war, and so many other important issues?

MD: I think one of the challenges that we’ve always faced in this country is that we’ve never really applied a human rights paradigm to what is happening domestically. It’s always civil rights on the one hand in the U.S. and human rights in the rest of the world. And we haven’t really developed the kind of power and organizing around what it means to have human rights in the U.S. Some of the challenges that we are facing today, particularly around what’s happening with Katrina and what’s happening with immigration now and poverty and other related issues, is paying the price for being focused on the civil and political rights paradigm and not constructing a more holistic human rights paradigm. Of course there are historical reasons for why that happened—the cold war, the place of slavery in our history, etc.

It’s only been in very recent years that you’ve seen the burgeoning of a human rights movement—all human rights movements evolve over a period of time. We’ve only started talking about immigrant human rights in the last three years or so and even then we focused so much of our attention on undocumented people coming over the border and not on the due process and the systematic stripping of all constitutional rights of communities in the U.S. So this framework is relatively new and we’ve already seen it getting more traction with communities in the general public. So I think that it’s an evolving movement. I hope we get stronger and better at articulating it especially because in a few months we will have a new president who will be held accountable for changing some of these positions.

NAPAWF: What would you say are some of the biggest lessons learned or some of the biggest challenges you have had?

MD: I see the production of Mann Ke Manjeeree (Rhythm of the Mind) and the music video as defining moment in my life for the following reasons. One is that it made me realize that if you put your mind to something, you can really do whatever the hell it is that you want. We’re taught all these things—that you if you get a degree in something and you follow a particular path, you can then do this or that and that’s the journey you follow. I think I can say with all confidence to everybody out there that you really should follow your dream—and it doesn’t matter what your background is or what your skills are because for me learning the process of making a music video was as alien as trying to get to the moon. There was nothing in my background or skill set that would have enabled me to do something like that but I really believed in the importance of looking at new tools and new ways of advancing women’s rights and I was determined to explore how pop culture could play a role in that. I met with enormous resistance to it—some in the music industry thought I was insane because it was a new idea and people didn’t really understand what I was talking about—wanting to do something about women and domestic violence.

The excitement and gratification came from it not just happening but that it happened and became a huge success winning several awards and I still run into people seven years later telling me they still use it as an educational tool. So for me it was a lesson around dreaming and believing and as jaded and as cynical and as down as one can get doing political work in this country and around the world—it’s really important to always hold on to that idea of finding a pathway to making the impossible real.

NAPAWF: And finally, a very serious question: If you could have one superhero power, what would it be?

MD: Hmm, I’ve never really thought about that. The person who I loved and watched growing up was Samantha the witch but she wasn’t really a superhero. There weren’t that many women superhero’s out there. I think if there was one thing I could do more easily and quickly, it would be to move from one geographic part of the world to another so I guess it would be the ability to teleport myself from point A to point B. Especially because increasingly air travel has become the biggest nightmare!

By Grace Lee and Dawn Philip

Lora Jo Foo is the author of Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns, and Responsive Human and Civil Rights Advocacy and most recently, Earth Passages. She is a native of San Francisco, born and raised in the city’s Chinatown. From the age of 11, Lora worked as a garment worker. She is an accomplished attorney, labor organizer, author, advocate for worker rights, and a nature photographer. She is a co-founder of the California-based Sweatshop Watch and served as its Board President from 1995 to 2004. She has also worked at the Asian Law Caucus and the AFL-CIO.

NAPAWF: We talk a lot about young women’s leadership at NAPAWF, so as someone who has been working in the community and doing political activism for a long time, what’s your idea of leadership and young women’s leadership especially in the API community?

LJF: Asian-American women’s leadership—one of the differences is the much more collective consensus building style that we have. It’s a strength, and sometimes it’s a weakness when we don’t call each other out when we need to and let people go off in directions that are not healthy for the community. But most of the time, I think the strength of Asian-American women’s leadership is its consensus style. In, I think 1999, when Barbara Phillips at the Ford Foundation asked me to write a report on Asian-American women that turned into a book, she started with the Asian-American women’s community, first because of her experience with what I was describing as that concessive, collective, type of leadership. One of the reasons she decided to give us a planning grant for what became the National Gender and Equity Campaign was because she knew our community would work together whether or not the Ford Foundation funded us. One of the weaknesses, among Asian-American women leaders, is not wanting to stand out. If there’s any reason why Asian-American organizations and women’s organizations are underfunded or less funded than other organizations, it isn’t just the racism in philanthropy—it’s also the assertiveness of Asian-American women in terms of their causes and not wanting to be seen as individualistic or selfish or whatever. I think I started this by saying that Barbara started with us first (well, she started with us first actually because we were friends and I was moving on from the Asian Law caucus and she wanted me to write this report ) based on her experiences with Asian-American women leaders.

NAPAWF: In your first book, Asian-American Women, you mentioned that you had to call up your “old girls network” for information. What did having this network mean for you when you were writing your book?

LJF: When I first started writing and researching the report for Barbara at Ford, I was pretty naïve. I had no clue that there was so little research out there on Asian-American women, so ten years ago when I started the research, I thought all I had to do was ask different organizations that were working on these issue areas to give me their reports and research and whatever they’ve compiled over the years. I figured that you can’t write a grant proposal unless you have facts and statistics and analysis. At the Asian Law Caucus, just to be able to do garment workers advocacy and low wage worker advocacy, I wrote law review articles, I did research, I wrote white papers, etc. Based on this, people would write grant proposals so I just thought everybody in every field—in health, and reproductive justice, and welfare reform—everybody has probably done this too. I thought I could just call everybody up and they could just send me their materials, but it’s not the case. There’s just very little research out there, and I’m amazed at how people get funded if you don’t have the facts and stats to be able to argue your case. A lot of it was research from scratch. Because there were so few studies nationally, I had to call on that “old girls” network to ask for local studies because ten years ago, you didn’t necessarily just find it on the internet with a Google search. Studies started coming in from different parts of the country, and that was one key way. Without that old girls network I would not have been able to write the report. Interviewing people on the ground in many different states was made possible by that network of activists that I had—it enabled me to make those contacts, do those interviews.

NAPAWF: Can you give a quick introduction of your most recent book, Earth Passages?

LJF: The book is about growing up in the inner-city ghetto of San Francisco Chinatown. The stories start from age three and end just right after high school. The last story is my trip to Alaska. I took off to Alaska to work in the salmon canneries after high school. The healing process really is shown through the photographs. I’ve had comments like if you were to just read the stories, you’d be really depressed, but reading the stories paired with the photograph is very empowering because the photographs are empowering. There’s just this healing process that people feel as you read the story and you go back and forth between the photograph and story. One of the reasons I decided to even publish the stories even before I thought of that combo of photo and stories, is that there’s v. little written on ASIAN-AMERICAN growing up in poverty. There’s lots of non-fiction, but there isn’t creative writing that gets into the nitty-gritty of growing up in the inner-city ghetto of SF Chinatown.

NAPAWF: Your most recent book, Earth Passages is a bit of a departure from the last one you were just talking about.

LJF: It was definitely a departure. The book is about growing up in the inner-city ghetto of San Francisco Chinatown. The stories start from age three and end just right after high school. I was working on both books at the same time actually, but Earth Passages book was a much longer process. I started that actually in 1989 with the first story that I wrote, and then I started taking the first images that I considered art in 1991. Before that it was just snapshots that had come back from backpacking trips or hiking trips. The stories are very short vignettes, but I wrote about one story a year because they were difficult to write, they were painful stories from childhood, and to be able to write, you have to be in this mindset, you can’t be running crazy in litigating and organizing. So I had to find chunks of time to be able to write, and usually that meant being gone for a month at a time.

NAPAWF: The stories in the book are paired with some amazing nature photographs you have taken over the year. What led you to choose this unique format?

LJF: At some point, I realized that the photographs were just as healing, in terms of childhood wounds, as the stories. I think it was in the mid 90’s that I put the two together and decided I was going to publish a book of nature photographs interwoven with childhood stories. I didn’t actually pair the photographs with the stories until the very end when all the stories were written, and I hadn’t even decided on what photographs to put in. I just laid out all the stories on the floor and laid all the photographs around, and started moving photographs around and pairing them with stories. It’s a very subjective process because what a photograph or a visual image means to one person means something completely different to another person. It was just my own process of feeling comfortable that this photograph just goes with this story. It works for some people and doesn’t for others. For some people it’s just two separate books—a book of photographs and a book of stories and the two just don’t meet. But others—they get it, they understand it exactly the way I presented it.

NAPAWF: Do you think these stories and these photographs, this means of expression, can be another form of activism?

LJF: I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve done three readings now. The very first reading was just stunned silence because they didn’t expect these stories. People just don’t expect these stories. They’re really intimate, they’re very personal. Comments I’ve received, not just from Asian-American women, but African-American and white women, have been that it touches them and moves them in the same way. I also realized that these stories bring up memories for people from childhood that they aren’t prepared to deal with. There’s a lot going on in people’s minds emotionally, after I’ve read these stories. That’s why there isn’t this immediate exchange. But I think what the book will probably do, (because people have told me that it’s really brave to put these stories out there) or what I’m hoping that people realize is unless you surface what is repressed, unless you really grapple with your childhood, the healing doesn’t start happening. I don’t know if it will spur people to activism more than an inner journey. For me, I think that having gone through this process of therapy, writing the stories, photographing, I understand what drives me to do the work I do, and I can do it from a healthy place, instead of a dysfunctional place. That’s a much better place to do activism. I think that maybe that’s the contribution of this book.

NAPAWF: If you could have one superpower power, what would it be?

LJF: Actually, what I think about is just physical health. If I had superpowers, I would reverse the aging process, not that I want to be immortal—by the time I am 90 I am ready to go! My mom passed away at 92, and at 92 it’s time to leave the earth. But I’d like not to be decrepit. After your 40’s you lose muscle mass, and I found that I couldn’t carry the camera equipment I used to carry. It started to be a burden to photograph because everything got heavy. I keep injuring myself anyway because I keep thinking I can carry this equipment, I can do what I used to do. Then there are all these injuries you get that you wouldn’t in your 20’ss or 30’s. I’m in physical therapy just to heal everything that I injured because I can’t slow down. So if I had superpowers I would be in perfect health in my 60’s and 70’s so I can keep hiking. So that I can hike the distance I used to hike in my 30’s. I would maybe slow down, but I would want to be able to continue hiking and carry a backpack. That’s what I would want, and then like I said, when I’m ready to go at 92, I’ll just go.

NAPAWF: What causes you outrage right now? What makes you angry?

LJF: What gets under my skin right now is climate change. The really wasteful way Americans live that is ruining the earth and sort of the imperialism of Americans whether they’re Republican or Democrat or Green. They’re not understanding that for the last fifty years or more, Americans have caused so much of the global warming but expect countries like China and India to take equal responsibility. People didn’t get rid of their SUVs and Detroit didn’t go downhill until gas prices went up. They’re not understanding that unless we live the lifestyle of let’s say the Europeans, it’s not going to change. It isn’t just white people— its black, and Asian-American, and Latinos that are so use to the American way of life and the wasteful way of life, that we’re impacting not just us but the rest of the world. That’s what gets under my skin. And actually, in 1998 or 1999, we were having a NAPAWF gathering and we were doing visioning and everybody had 2 min to write a mission statement for NAPAWF. I scribbled mine out in terms of economic, social, gender equality justice for Asian-American women. But you also have to understand that once we get to that position, you have the consciousness not to live like the rest of Americans so not getting an SUV because of its impact on our sisters across the globe. I think that if there’s any agenda that needs to be added to the feminist agenda , climate change is one of them and our lifestyle is one of them.

I want to work in the climate change environment now. It might be climate change and labor, making sure that the green jobs are good jobs or union jobs or high paying jobs, or it may be just directly tackling the global warming issues. I’m thinking that in the next ten years, that’s really what I want to be focusing on and not always worker issues, just sort of moving on. I’m thinking if we don’t have a healthy earth, then we’re not going to have economic justice or social justice or racial justice, or any kind of justice.

By Callista Bevans

Cindy Domingo began working for social justice as a college student. She helped lead solidarity movements on the University of Washington campus against the dictatorship of the Marcos family in the Philippines. Cindy is a NAPAWF founding sister and has been active in many social justice organizations in and around Seattle. In the past few years her interests have led her to Cuba. She has co-chaired the U.S. Women & Cuba Collaboration and has led many delegations of U.S. women to Cuba. She is currently Legislative Aide to King County Councilmember Larry Gossett.

NAPAWF: How did you first begin to get involved in Asian & Pacific Islander (API) issues?

CD: In 1974 I took my first trip to the Philippines and at the time the Philippines was under Marshall Law under the presidency of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. I was astounded by the level of intimidation and military presence throughout the Philippines. So for me it began a greater awareness of what was going on internationally and especially in the Philippines. When I came back they were forming the Seattle chapter of Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), a radical Filipino organization that organized in the U.S. around anti-discrimination issues for U.S. based Filipinos, but also was working in the United States for the cutoff of U.S. support for the dictatorship.

NAPAWF: How did your work branch out from Filipino issues to the broader progressive movement?

CD: Well the KDP also worked with other organizations on the programs that they had—we worked with other solidarity groups here in the United States. During that period of time the U.S. was supporting dictatorships around the world, and there were also liberation struggles around Vietnam and in Africa. So we got to work with other communities. Also, in terms of student issues, I was also very active on the UW [University of Washington] campus with the struggle to get Asian American history courses and Asian American language courses. So we [the KDP] worked with a fairly broad Pan-Asian, international community on all of the issues we focused on, and then we also supported their issues. Along the way I worked very closely in Seattle and also in the San Francisco area with the Korean, Latin-American, and African-American communities around those issues.

NAPAWF: What were some of the most valuable lessons you learned from your early work in the progressive movement?

CD: I think there are really two valuable lessons. One is that women do matter, even though a lot of the time women are behind the scenes in the work that goes on in the progressive movement and in society. There is a saying that women hold up half the sky; well I think women hold up more then half the sky! Without women and women’s leadership this movement would be nowhere. Women are a crucial and essential part of moving our issues and struggles ahead and organizing our communities around them.

The second issue is that people often underestimate the power that we have. My brother was murdered in 1981 by the Marcos dictatorship here in Seattle, Washington. We were all in our 20s, and we faced powerful forces that opposed our work—including the U.S. government, the Marco dictatorship, various intelligence agencies, all the way down to gangsters in our community. But a small group of young people who were committed and had good organizing skills were able to overcome this and were able to achieve certain victories. We can never underestimate the power people have when they have commitment and organizing skills. We can do almost anything.

NAPAWF: Why did you feel it was important to attend the U.N. Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995?

CD: Well you know at the time, in 1995, I was at a period in my life where I was kind of burned out. I had gone through a ten year struggle around my brother’s case, I had put off my professional life, and I just had two children. I was beginning to question my commitment to the movement. A good friend of mine, Jan Cate, really encouraged me and other women who were in the Seattle area to go to Beijing. She said it would really open our eyes. She had been to previous U.N conferences on women. We organized a delegation of women to go from the King County area. That whole conference changed my life, and I am so glad I went there. I was amazed at the organizing women were doing all over the world, and the circumstances in which they did their work, the life and death issues that they faced, and how long some women had been struggling for successes in the women’s rights arena. Since then I have made a commitment and have focused a lot of my work on moving a women’s rights agenda both here in the United States and internationally.

NAPAWF: When did you begin to use a human rights framework for you work? Why do you think a human rights approach is valuable?

CD: It was really at that Beijing Conference that I began to look at the human rights framework for my work. The theme of that conference was “Women’s Rights are Human Rights.” So it naturally made the link that unless you use the human rights framework all of our struggles were going to be in silos. A human rights framework really created the umbrella and the intersections you need to connect all our movements, whether it is the labor movement, the women’s movement, the anti-discrimination movement or the people of color movement. Those are all encompassed in a human rights framework.

NAPAWF: Why do you think there is still a lot of resistance or misunderstanding of what human rights means in the United States?

CD: Our movements are very separate from each other because of the particularities of U.S. society. The powers that be would like it if our movements were not intersected and not connected because people are separate. The power that we all can have if we work together is diminished. We have been taught that we all need to do is fight for our own piece of the pie and that piece is very small. We never look at the entire pie and see that the entire pie should be all of ours. So it’s been a struggle to get people to use the human rights framework. That is why we have people who are against free housing, free food, access to quality healthcare, because it’s all about an individual’s rights and not a societal right, which a human rights framework provides.

NAPAWF: How do you propose groups like NAPAWF and other groups in the progressive movement incorporate human rights into their work and also encourage more human rights in America?

CD: Well that’s the million-dollar question! I think obviously education is needed. But I also think people need to travel abroad, and not in the sense of a vacation. But they need to go and see in terms of educational experiences and even to work in different countries the conditions people face around the world. A lot of times, and even in NAPAWF, we are so comfortable in our lives, so its easy to advocate for certain things, but we are not willing to give up our own privilege so that other people can have their human rights. I mean, people in other places sacrifice so that we can have our privilege in this country. And until people here in this country understand that I think it’s going to be very difficult for people to understand why it is so important that we approach our work from a human rights prospective.

NAPAWF: How did you begin your current work with women’s issues and Cuba?

CD: I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba and had not been able to. In 1999 I got a phone call from the same friend who encouraged me to go to China. She wanted to know if I knew anyone who wanted a scholarship to go to Cuba, and I said, “well I do.” So I went with this national women’s delegation sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Because it’s a socialist country we were hosted by the Federation for Cuban Women who represent probably 80% of women in Cuba 14 and older. They took us around the different parts of Cuba and talked about the advances of the women’s rights agenda in Cuba. That experience crystallized for me that everything I had been working for all my life could actually come to fruition. While Cuba is still a poor and developing country, they have been able to, at some level, ensure that all people have housing, food, healthcare and free education, even though they don’t have as much as we do in this country. From there I wanted every woman I knew to go to Cuba and experience and be educated in that way. That’s how I began to do delegations to Cuba for a few years until our government would not renew our travel license to Cuba.

NAPAWF: What do you think are some of the strengths or weaknesses that are facing the progressive API movement today?

CD: I think that there is a lot of exciting organizing going on in the API community. When I went to the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta last year I saw a number of API community leaders, individuals in the labor movement, the housing movement, and in the youth movement. I was inspired by some of those individuals. That is a strength. Leaders are coming out of communities and are intersecting with the broader progressive movement.

I think a weakness is that, back in the 60’s and 70’s there were a fair number of radical API movements and organizations in our communities. There has been a significant break in that history for different reasons. Just in general there is a lack of continuity in our history of various progressive movements. So we need to have more continuity with the more radical elements in our history. We also need to build more intergenerational work and exchange between the generation that came before and those that are coming after. We need to figure out how we can build multi-generational leadership. From my perspective, because I come out of a more radical wing of the API movement, I’m hoping we can develop a more radical analysis of our immigration analysis; we need to go and work around a more radical perspective in terms of our communities.

NAPAWF: So how can we encourage more young women to join the movement and how can we take a more multi-generational approach?

I’ve always been so glad that I grew up in the generation that I did because I was part of organized movement and organizations that really helped me develop as a leader. I had the experience of working with some more experienced leaders, and especially ones that came from the Philippines and had a more radical tradition with them. So I was very fortunate that way.

NAPAWF: Is there anything else you want to add in this interview?

CD: I have always been glad to be part of NAPAWF. I’ve met a lot of inspiring young women there. I think it speaks to the power of NAPAWF to be able to harness the energy and leadership of young women. I hope other organizations, especially in the women’s movement, would look at NAPAWF and how we have been able to do that. I think a lot of women’s organizations in the United State need to develop the next generation of young women as leaders.

By Bonnie Chan

Helen Zia is an activist, journalist, writer, and NAPAWF founding sister. She was born in New Jersey in 1952 and graduated with Princeton University’s first female graduating class before becoming a community organizer and award-winning journalist, as well as executive editor of Ms. Magazine. She is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a personal and historical narrative of the Asian American experience. As an activist, Zia has been outspoken on topics ranging from women’s rights to queer rights to API visibility. She and her partner of 16 years, Lia Shigemura, were recently married in San Francisco in 2004 and again in May 2008. She lives in Oakland, CA.

HZ: So if I say anything ungrammatical or bad or whatever, you can edit it, okay?

NAPAWF: That’s fine, because I’m liable to do the same thing. So, what have you been up to lately?

HZ: I was in China for six months. I was there on a Fulbright Fellowship. I was over in Shanghai doing research on my next book project.

NAPAWF: What’s the book project?

HZ: Well, generally it’s about Shanghai at the time of the 1949 Communist Revolution, and the exodus— the fears and concerns of people at that time. Shanghai was one of the major port cities, and in 1949, lots of people, thousands and thousands, left and ended up here in the U.S.

NAPAWF: What inspired you to take on this next book?

HZ: Oh, I’ve been hearing about these stories all my life. My mother was one of those people [from Shanghai], and different people I’ve run into would say, “Oh, my parents came on the last plane or last train out of Shanghai.” Their experiences are very different from the Cantonese or the Toi-San experience. A lot of these people are dying off now. There aren’t many of them alive anymore, and it’s a piece of American history that’s being lost. We’re talking about the late ’40s and early ’50s, and people who were alive at that time are now in their 80s or older. The collective memory of it is really gone or going, and that’s one reason why I wanted to do it. The Vietnam War was also an exodus, a story of exiles and refugees, and all of these major historic events in Asia actually have a lot to do with U.S. or Western imperialism, which created different waves of exiles and refugees and migrants. The broader American public really doesn’t understand the lives of the Vietnamese who ended up being dispersed, or the Cambodians, or the Lao, or the Indian or Pakistani people after the Partition. And the more those stories can become part of the history or narrative of America, the better it will be, because our communities are complex. So my interest in this story isn’t completely motivated by, say, a political agenda. It really is just that I think these stories have to be captured. But ultimately, if they’re told and if people can understand, “Oh, well, okay, the people from Shanghai and the people from Southern China really are different and come from a different social class and cultural background from each other,” then I think we’ll improve understanding of Asian Americans. So that’s what I’m hoping will happen with this book.

NAPAWF: Sounds like a project of love—contrasting that with a project of anger, which is another powerful motivating factor but coming from a different place.

HZ: Well, in the way you distinguish the two, [my first book] Asian American Dreams was probably more motivated out of anger, just being fed up with the way Asian Americans were being treated and vilified in the 1990s. Now here we are at the end of the first decade of the 2000s and I don’t know that much progress has happened.

NAPAWF: Do you think anything has changed since you first started writing Asian American Dreams?

HZ: Some things have changed. I think the community is even more organized than it was then. I mean, look at NAPAWF. Its founding was in 1996, and that’s when I was writing Asian American Dreams. And besides NAPAWF, there really are a lot of other organizations. The younger generation of Asian American activists is really sharp, active, involved, sophisticated. And compared to ten years ago, I think our communities have grown— just physically grown, but that also means that they’ve grown more complex, and so there are more subtleties, more things that people within the community know, and they add to the challenges of organizing. So I think a lot within our communities has changed. As far as how the mainstream views our communities, I don’t think that’s changed. Actually I think it’s gone backwards quite a bit.

NAPAWF: In what ways?

HZ: Like the Patriot Act I and II. Like September 11th. Like all the anti-immigration stuff, all the deportations, things like that. Terrible, devastating. And those specifically impact our communities directly. In general, just the Bush regime, and all the right-wing fundamentalism coming out, especially in Washington, D.C. Supreme Court decisions that have been so backward, and those things also hurt our communities a lot. Health care, the terrible economy—these issues disproportionately affect communities of color, including Asian American communities. Though of course everybody thinks that Asian-American communities are rich, so the whole impact becomes hidden, invisible. So there’s two things going on: The communities themselves and the evolution, which I think has been advancing because they need to, and then at the same time, the negative forces overall— the world, political, economic trends.

NAPAWF: What then do you think is the point of NAPAWF? What is your vision for NAPAWF?

HZ: You know, this whole idea of “What can young Asian American women—whether they’re born here or whether they’re born abroad—what vision can they have here in this country?” I was born here, and I didn’t see anyone like myself when I was growing up, and that made me feel very alienated. A whole generation is still feeling like they don’t know, “What is it in this country that I can feel positive about, for myself? And to give me a sense of politics and that I can change things and that I don’t have to just go work for Google and make a lot of money to feel like I’m somebody?” So if NAPAWF can do that on a nation-wide basis, and not only give people a sense of empowerment but also that they can do something with that and change things in a progressive way, and have some power and control over the direction of their lives, that would be huge.

I really think that, back in ‘96 at [the Beijing Conference on Women], we had a list of things—politically, where we asked ourselves where we stood on different issues? But really, when you get down to it, the actual politics will change from year to year and decade to decade, what the issues of the day are. Who could have anticipated all these ICE attacks on our immigrant communities, or that they would be talking about internment camps, or that we’d HAVE internment camps? The actual issues of the day may change, but the idea that every one of us in our communities can do something about it, that feeling has to begin in elementary school. If high school students knew that they could go volunteer at some organization like NAPAWF, go hang door-knocker tags about immigrant women’s rights or something like that, that would be great. And to be there as a vehicle so that they can go organize on whatever issues of the day are the most pressing for their own generation.

NAPAWF: What I heard in your vision, in terms of empowerment, was also “civic engagement.” In terms of the November elections, there’s been a lot of talk about civic engagement and voter mobilization, especially in communities of color. Do you have a vision for what civic engagement looks like for the API community?

HZ: We have to be seen as part of the body politic. The thing is, when I was young and organizing and thinking about all this stuff, I really felt that the powers-that-be would have to recognize us, we would have to GET them to give us political power. Now it’s very clear to me that nobody is going to give up political recognition or power at all, we’re just going to have to stand up and insist on it and pound our fists on the table and be there, and let them know that if they ignore us there will be consequences. They will pay the price, and that will be in the form of votes and of money. And that’s the main thing, that’s all they see— if they ever see Asian Americans, they think it’s a big dollar sign. So we have to make it clear that they’re not going to get that, our communities are not going to support anybody who doesn’t see us. Now, we have not been good at that. Whether it’s about getting a streetlight or about education or about getting Asian languages taught, our communities really haven’t been very vocal.

NAPAWF: Do you think that’s complacency?

HZ: Maybe, but I also think there are plenty of people who are trying to beat their heads against the walls, and are treated badly or ignored. I don’t think everybody’s complacent. We have to have militancy, but not everybody has to go around and carry a banner and get arrested or have a demonstration. It’s okay, not everybody has to do that, but we have to allow some people to do that and not think, “That’s great, if they do it, I don’t have to!” People have to stick their necks out. But we’re getting there. NAPAWF is part of that, of being there and doing that kind of grassroots organizing. Because ultimately that’s what it takes, person by person. But I think we’re still at a stage where nobody ever thinks there are any consequences at all— “Ignore Asians? That’s fine.” And I do think that’s the prevalent view. “Oh, they’re all model minorities, they’re all doing great. So what if they’re not? Not my problem.” Well, we have to make it their problem. So I think that’s the big challenge.

NAPAWF: Switching topics, how’s married life treating you?

HZ: Well, my spouse and I have been together for 16 years, so our day-to-day life has not changed at all. It does feel different, but as far as day-to-day, it hasn’t. What changes is how the rest of the world and how your family treats you. My mother has known Lia for 16 years and that we have a life commitment to each other, but the fact that we are married now makes her happy. She feels it’s more of a stable thing that she can also explain to people: “Yes, my daughter is married.” Lia’s father is now an in-law to my mother, you know? So it has changed the relationships, which is a little weird, in a way that I never thought about before. I have a niece who’s going to be a junior in college, so she’s known Lia since she was two years old and only known her as Auntie Lia. So when Lia and I got married the first time in 2004, she said, “Now you’re really my Auntie!” So marriage isn’t just between two people and their commitment to each other, it’s also a bonding of an entire family structure.

NAPAWF: Congratulations to you and Lia! Does it feel different than in ‘04, this time around?

HZ: Yeah, very much. The Supreme Court of California even sanctioned that anything less than marriage is discrimination. I mean, it was really quite an incredible judgment, similar to what the Supreme Court of the U.S. did in 1967 about interracial marriages. Who would’ve dreamed it? I mean, actually, we all knew that this decision was going to be happening sometime this year, but most people I know—Lia and I, certainly—we didn’t dare to hope that it would be in our favor. Because we were just ready to be disappointed, like what happened in Hawaii. The court in Hawaii said it was discrimination [to not allow same-sex marriage], but then they immediately shut the door and they allowed this stupid ballot measure to happen just like what’s coming up in November [in California], and then that completely shut the door. In California, people are a little bit more ready for this. Hawai’i was the first state that had this huge vote, more than 10 years ago, and people weren’t ready for it. They thought something terrible would happen. So, alright, now Canada, Massachusetts, Spain, Vermont, and in 2004, here [in San Francisco], and the world hasn’t blown up over it, nobody’s been struck dead by this. So I think people have had a little more time to think, “Okay, what’s so bad about it, how does it affect me? Zero.” Why should my marriage affect anybody else’s life? The Chinese and Asian language news covered the weddings. There’s a difference in their coverage.

NAPAWF: What is the difference?

HZ: Well, in 2004, it was, “Oh, how weird.” [Laughs] “And look what these white people are doing,” you know? “This doesn’t affect OUR community.” This time, there were actually a lot more Asian couples that they could talk to, they could speak to them in Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese, so I think their coverage was a lot more open and accepting, and not like, “Euugh! Yuck!” which was pretty much what it was before. And people are getting married and their children are there, so they could see, “Oh, these are couples and they have children too.” I think it’s making people think a little more before they make a judgment.

NAPAWF: Congratulations again, and thank you so much for your time, Helen!

HZ: Thank you!

By Dinah Chung, Grace Lee, and Dawn Philip

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer, and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement include working in the Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women’s and Environmental Justice movements. Grace is deeply connected to Detroit, Michigan, where she has lived for the past fifty years and is actively involved in empowering the city’s youth. Her Living for Change: An Autobiography is widely used in university classes on social movements , feminism, and Asian-American studies. A strong advocate for being the change we want, Grace Lee Boggs continues to resist, create, and inspire.

NAPAWF: Hi Grace! Thank you so much for talking with us. You have been a leader in so many social justice struggles. At NAPAWF we are always trying to inspire young girls and women to be leaders. What is your definition of leadership?

GLB: Well, this is a subject that I’m very interested in, and I think probably because of my very long life and experience in leadership. I have some things to say about it. What’s been happening over the years, I would say, is that the idea of leadership which was very dominated by a patriarchal society is being challenged and male leadership is very vertical, very top-down and that was very much the nature of leadership during the 60s and prior to that. In the period since the 60s, the women’s movement has challenged this process of patriarchal leadership. And, women have emerged much more in the leadership of grassroots organizations and they bring a very different kind of leadership, which is much more nurturing and much more horizontal, and this has coincided with the emergence of the internet, which also makes possible a very much more horizontal type of leadership. Young people, for example, of the millennium generation are connecting with each other 24/7 all across the country, all across the world and this has also coincided with a need for a more participatory democracy, as contrasted with the vertical leadership of industrial society.

I think, that in order to go into this next period of struggle, which I think is going to be a very exciting period, we’re going to have to do a lot of re-thinking about what we think leadership is.

NAPAWF: Does that concept relate to this idea of a “radical revolution of values,” which is something you talk about in relation to Dr. Martin Luther King?

GLB: Yes it does. I’ve been spending all week writing a new introduction to the book my husband and I wrote back in the early 70s called “Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century” and it’s going to be reprinted with the original content but with a new title, “Revolution and Evolution in the 21st Century.” I’ve written a new introduction and a lot of it has to do with MLK’s concept of love. King said that the concept of love is not some sentimental weakness but somehow the key to ultimate reality, and I’ve been looking at his concept of love, and this concept of love he’s talking about is agape. He said there are three kinds of love, there’s Eros, there’s Philos and that’s friendship, and then there’s Agape. And, agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore a community. I think about this in terms of a kind of leadership we need. How do we arrive at a kind of leadership that is really from the community and I think that’s our challenge. And I think that’s a challenge that is particularly complex for Asian-Americans b/c our community is so complex. What folks don’t realize is that up to 1968 the concept of Asian American didn’t even exist. We all thought of ourselves as Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans or Japanese Americans. Then when the black power movement emerged we decided we were not going to be the model minority anymore and we re-named ourselves Asian-American. And we did that at a time, when being Asian-American was not so complex because the new immigration laws hadn’t passed and the huge migration from Asia had not yet occurred.

NAPAWF: What was it like to be one of the only non-African American woman in the Black power movement when you were very involved in this movement with your husband?

GLB: That’s the question that I’m always asked. People want to know. I think that some people feel that it’s a terrible risk or danger and so people are fearful about it. I didn’t feel any fear about it at all. One thing was that in the ‘50s when I became part of the African-American community, Black nationalism had not yet become such a dominant force inside this country. So, many of the people that I met were people who were born down South and while they were very conscious of racism, they had lived next door, actually just a block away from White people, they had not known many Asian Americans or Chinese Americans. Mostly they had only known African Americans so to them I was kind of a novelty. And so I found it very easy actually because my husband Jimmy was so much a part of the African-American community. He was a writer, speaker, activist, and worker. And so I just fell into it very simply. I was quiet for a while because I knew I had a great deal to learn and it wasn’t until I had been a part of and lived in the black community for eight years that I became active in the black power struggle.

NAPAWF: Some of the issues we are working on at NAPAWF relate to the increasing rates of detentions and deportations and the way immigrants are being treated. You frequently write about humanity and re-defining our understanding of humanity—how do you think this relates to immigrant rights issues?

GLB: First of all I think we have to redefine this country. We have to understand that this country was born in a revolution, and one of the founding principles of the country is to form a more perfect union. The idea of a more perfect union has constantly been extended, expanded and enriched by the struggles that have taken place over the last 200 years. I think we have to understand that this country has the legacy and responsibility to represent a more perfect union and greater diversity, and that you always have two tendencies within the country. One is what I call a counter-revolutionary tendency to limit the idea of the country to White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. The other is to constantly expand and enrich the concept of what it means to be an American. And I think we have to approach both the question of what it means to be an American and what it means to be a human being from that point of view. People think in terms of evolution mainly in terms of anatomical things, like the opposable thumb. They don’t think of the expansion of humanity or the evolution of humanity in terms of our acquiring and evolving into more human qualities of creativity, imagination and social responsibility. So we have to think differently about evolution, think differently about humanity. We have to think differently about being an American, and approach the whole question of immigration from that fundamental philosophical point of view.

NAPAWF: In the 60’s it seemed like there was a much bigger political movement going on where people did seem to share some basic principles and it seemed like a revolution was happening. Do you think that can still happen now?

GLB: It’s very important to see the difference between the ‘60s and today. In the ‘60s, we were very adversarial. We were claiming our rights in relationship to our lack of rights and the people who were denying those rights. We talked a lot about power. Our concept of what we wanted to do with our rights and where we wanted to go was still very superficial. For example, for many people it was to be just like White people. We never stopped to think about how White people behaved and how sexist they were and how what we were putting forward was another way of living. And I think that many of the things that have happened since the movement of the ‘60s, which achieved a great many rights, have come out of the fact that we did not have a clear enough idea of what we wanted to put in place of what existed. And I think that in the present period because some of those contradictions that emerged from the ‘60s, we are now finding it much more necessary and possible to think about what kind of society we want to create. What kind of America do we want to create? What kind of world do we want to create? That would, of course, help us because so many terrible things have happened, particularly in the last 20 years, that we have become conscious of. I would say the planetary crisis makes it necessary for us to think much more profoundly about what it means to be a human being and how we want to live. Are we going to have a nearly car free society or are we still going to drive all the SUVs we want and not give a damn that the whole thing may go up in smoke?

NAPAWF: What you just said sounds like this amazing phrase you often say–“We must live simply, so others may simply live.”

GLB: Yes, I think that is such an important concept. I think that what we have to think about these days is how to become - we never talked about this in the ‘60s - how do we become the change that we want to see in the world? How do we live more simply so that others may simply live? We saw solidarity in terms of how black people were fighting in Africa, and people of color were also fighting in Asia. But we didn’t think of how much our development and our over-development had taken place at the expense of the development of other people. We have a consciousness of that today, fortunately, that we didn’t’ have back then.

NAPAWF: I think we would be remiss if we had an interview with you, and had not asked you about your relationship to Detroit because you’ve done so much work around rebuilding Detroit. Could you talk a little about that?

GLB: I came to Detroit 55 years ago and I’ve lived in the same house most of the time since then. When I came to Detroit, the population was 2 million and the auto industry, while it was beginning to introduce a level of high technology, was still employing a fair number of people. But as a result of introducing technology into all the industries and the development of globalization, Detroit came to industrialize. So I began to challenge very early about what we should do about the de- industrialization. Do we look at the vacant lots just as blight or do we see them as opportunities for creating another kind of city? Unfortunately, in 1988 the mayor, Coleman Young, who was our first Black mayor was desperate and didn’t know what to do because there was so much crime because of the unemployment and he proposed casino gambling. We organized/mobilized to defeat him, and were able to do that, actually. But during the struggle he said, “What is your alternative? You’re just a bunch of naysayers.” He challenged us to begin thinking about another kind of city. How would we rebuild and redefine the spirit of Detroit, and to do that we created a program called Detroit Summer which involves young people in community gardening, painting public murals, cleaning up neighborhood parks and rehabilitating houses. We saw gardens not only as a way to provide food but a process and as the city responded to this movement of young people and older people, an agriculture movement began to develop in the city. That has become a movement that is growing faster all over the country everyday and also a way of beginning to look at a 21st century city in a period when we can’t constantly be importing our food from 1500 miles away, where we need to be able to walk more to neighborhood stores instead of buying at big box stores and shopping malls, and when the whole world has changed and made another kind of city both possible and necessary. This has given my whole life in Detroit and my ability to think, in terms of 50 years I’ve been here, a lot of meaning.

I think we need to create another American Dream. I think the old American dream of a higher standard of living has to be replaced by a dream of a higher standard of humanity.

NAPAWF: We would like to ask you a question that we, at NAPAWF have asked each other. Can you describe a politically defining moment for you?

GLB: Oh, I need a couple moments to think about that. I have so many politically defining moments. This week, for example, has been a politically defining moment because I’ve been really struggling with Martin Luther King’s concept of love - what that means for organizing, how that begins to introduce us to a whole new way of thinking about our relationships between people, and how that’s become necessary because we have been so consumed with producing and consuming things and have neglected our relationships with one another. It was a politically defining moment for me when I began to look at Detroit not as blight but as opportunity, and that happened when there was so much violence and so much crime in the city and these gardens began to open up a another possibility. A friend of mine who’s an urban planner says that this garden is not only for food but it’s a kind of quiet revolution. The idea that gardening could be a quiet revolution is amazing.

NAPAWF: We thank you for your time and on behalf of NAPAWF we would like to wish you a happy belated birthday!

GLB: I enjoyed it very much and I hope you did too.

By Consistent Transition

So I’m talking to this pseudo-suitor today and he tells me about people who interdate (AKA “Internet Date”). Apparently, some guys freak out about “angle shots” where women (”fat” women) post photos of themselves that make them look “thin” so when they go on their actual date the guy is devastated because the female made no mention of an extra 100 lbs. This made me think really hard about body image and the way that we are supposed to look, how we are expected to be sexy, what “sexy” means and how we see ourselves as sexual and attractive beings.

Really, you can’t fault individuals for who/what they do or do not find attractive. It may hurt sometimes, and yes, some folks are seriously shallow and that’s the truth but there’s a combination of factors that drive our desires. I think some of it could be that biological mess that tells the human race to procreate (choose the healthiest mate, etc etc.). I also think it has to do with how each of us was raised, culturally, and what we find “normal” or “exotic.” These ideas are also rooted in institutional oppression so it’s important to acknowledge that sexual desire for an individual is more than just biological and more than just cultural–it’s a combination of the two.

But really, I think thick folks need to wear it like they own it. Be healthy, find that balance of being happy AND healthy but also bring it like you feel sexy, desirable, wanted and all those other things that people mind you on. I’m having this totally nonchalant conversation about body image and I think back to being in middle school when so many people tried so hard to be white- lightening their skin, wearing Abercrombie, straightening their hair- all trying to be this image of white when inside it was hurting them. And yes, it hurts someone’s spirit to be told day after day that “YOU ARE NOT BEAUTIFUL.” I’ve seen the most gorgeous people turn cold because someone told them that they were too fat or too skinny or too dark or too pale or their hair was too kinky…”oh you’ve got a pretty face, though.” Wow… if someone said the same thing about race or religion, the statement would sound as harsh as it is. (I really think about this story and say, “why do you have to call someone names anyway- it’s not like they don’t already have their own internal thing happening every day. All it takes is one look in a magazine and one look in the mirror- we all have that). It makes me beyond sad and disappointed that this “fat” dialogue means so much to folks, and can lead to so much hurt.

I once did a workshop where people were asked, “What do you think people notice first about you?” There were tons of words on the wall- race, sex, gender, religion, neighborhood, class, ability, etc. But I chose body type. I chose this category for several reasons. I think that body type is a combination of people’s assumptions. People can look at me, and they may try to guess my race, but all they’ll see is a woman of color- maybe Native, maybe Latino, maybe Middle-Eastern, who knows? But most likely, not Black, not Asian and certainly, not Japanese- no matter my actual heritage. I think it’s because of the body and demeanor that we, as the American public, typically associate with Asians/Asian Americans, and I don’t fit within that category- both in terms of height and width. And let’s be honest, when talking about race and assumptions based on race, we really can’t distinguish those from gender. In other words, there is a certain text that is written on the Asian Male body and an entirely different text for Asian Females. This text is further skewed depending on my choice of clothing- can we tell from a no name brand what someone’s class is or if they are queer?

I’m 25 and I still haven’t learned to voice my opinion about this topic. It just seems so difficult to talk about it without offense. My family has been riddled with body issues. My siblings and I watched our mother battle a constant hate of her body. And throughout the quest of accepting and loving ourselves there is a steep learning curve for all of us. I want to be sensitive to folks’ needs and supposed desires, but truth be told- I also don’t find unhealthily overweight partners attractive. Am I doing bodilyharm to these folks by not giving them a chance?

By Dinah Chung, NAPAWF Law Intern

Pixar has done it again and captivated the hearts of a mass audience. Wall-E is a strikingly poignant movie that not only entertains but educates, as well. With an environmental consciousness as the movie’s backdrop, this little hero embodies a loud and simple message: one person can make a difference.

This movie is about an unassuming robot, whose sole purpose is to clean up after a consumer-driven society—he is relegated to a somewhat futile existence, however, when left behind and forgotten on an Earth abandoned by its inhabitants. Having consumed all of Earth’s resources and driven by its ever-increasing desire for more things, the human race deserts its natural home and relocates to a spaceship somewhere in the outer galaxy, where they do nothing but consume more. As a stark contrast to the desolate and melancholy city he cleans up, Wall-E represents a symbol of hope. This dichotomy is remarkably illustrated in the first forty minutes of the film in which there is no real dialogue and all that is shown is a diligent robot hard at work. He picks up trash one bundle at a time, while finding pure joy in discovering random knick-knacks along the way. Despite his lonely existence for hundreds of years, he never gives up, but remains inspired to fall in love by a Hello Dolly video and ever so earnestly cares for his only companion, a resilient cockroach.

The movie traces Wall-E’s journey from a lonely beginning to falling in love to ultimately saving planet Earth. The beauty of this movie is not just in the endearing love story, nor is it in the incredibly heroic ending, but it is in the infectious ability of Wall-E to invoke hope in those around him. By the end of the movie, he unintentionally inspires a gang of robots and all of human kind to yearn for a new life. During the movie, I could not help but examine my own lifestyle and how I have participated in the current downward slope of our environmental situation. Inevitably, I too, was inspired to take action and change my life to be part of the solution, and not the problem.

The movie does a great job in conveying an environmentally conscious story that both inspires an urgency to save our planet before it’s too late, and reminds us that we all can and must be agents of change. Ironically, the movie uses an unlikely hero in Wall-E to convey a very humanistic message and a sense of optimism that one person can, indeed, make a difference in the world. Whether it is recycling, growing one’s own vegetables, or riding a bike instead of driving a car, each person carries a responsibility to ensure the survival of our planet. I left the theater amused, inspired, and ready to make a change in this world. I think most people in the audience felt the same way because really, what is more inspiring than two robots falling in love?

By Grace Lee, NAPAWF law intern

Deciding to become a vegetarian was not a difficult choice for me, after learning about the cruelty of slaughterhouses, farms, and animal testing. I found it fairly easy to alter my favorite recipes to be vegetarian. I receive negative reactions sometimes, but most people respect my decision. Something that I do struggle with as a vegetarian, though, is that I meet so few fellow vegetarians of color. The majority of the vegan/vegetarian community seems to be white and privileged.

I had the most difficult time as a vegetarian when I lived in Seoul, South Korea. Korean food actually features lots of vegetables and tofu, and there are Buddhist vegetarian restaurants in South Korea. The popular perception, though, is that Koreans are a barbequed meat-obsessed community. When I went out in Seoul, Korean BBQ was what the people I was with most wanted to eat and what was most popularly offered at restaurants. Trying to ask waiters about vegetarian options became a task I dreaded. Although I would ask for meat to be taken out of a dish, it would often still appear, and I would be told to just pick it out. Even my relatives would try to sneak meat into dishes that I ate. While in Seoul, I was also repeatedly asked to justify my decision to be a vegetarian and told that this choice was unhealthy. My aunt, for example, frequently let me know that I would have a difficult time finding a husband if I didn’t eat meat or if I wouldn’t cook meat for him. My mother has also said this to me at home.

These types of comments made by my aunt and mother angered me the most and made me begin to think of feminism and vegetarianism together, instead of as two distinct issues. I became more aware of the way the feminist and animal rights movements intersect. The violence in meat consumption echoes sexual violence against women. Both women and animals are also exploited as consumable objects by patriarchal culture. Just as women are oppressed, animals are exploited as a source of food, entertainment, or some scientific breakthrough at whatever cost to the animal. This overlap is clearly displayed in images of animals portrayed with “female” characteristics and as happy to be eaten:

(Image from Suicide Food)

I have come to the realization that all oppressions are linked, and for me, being a vegetarian is a part of achieving a revolution against patriarchal culture.

Vegans/vegetarians of color are mobilizing together. There are many blogs online by vegan people of color, such as Vegans of Color. Although I still feel like I am one of few, hopefully this will change.

By Dinah Chung, NAPAWF law intern

The National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights (NCIWR) kicked off its first in-person convening on June 12, 2008. As part of the steering committee, NAPAWF, along with the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) organized this historic convening for people to share information, network, and collectively begin to develop a proactive immigrant women’s rights agenda.

Over thirty participants attended the Convening and engaged in a comprehensive discussion around the Coalition’s objectives, past and upcoming immigration legislation, current issues regarding detention centers, and potential next steps for the Coalition. One exciting discussion focused on NCIWR’s plans to launch a “Liberation Campaign” that would raise awareness around the specific issues (such as sexual assault) that immigrant women detainees face. The guest speakers were one of the highlights of the gathering—they included Noelle Lee, health staffer for Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.), Michelle Brane from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, and Pabitra Benjamin from the Rights Working Group. Ms. Brane, for example, gave a compelling description of visits to detention centers where she handled sexual assault complaints and documented accounts of inhumane treatment towards pregnant women and separation of mothers from their children.

Overall, the attendees agreed that the day was productive and informative. Everyone especially appreciated the chance to come together and learn about how their own organization can take on a significant role in carrying out the Coalition’s agenda.

Having just started my summer stint with NAPAWF a week before, I could not fully appreciate or understand the depth of such a Convening at the time. The different member organizations included immigrant rights groups, women’s rights groups, and faith-based groups. The power behind such an intersection of race, gender, and religion was beyond me, and needless to say, I had much to learn. After a solid six weeks of being here at NAPAWF, I am beginning to piece together the importance of such a meeting. What I have come to appreciate is that NCIWR is not just another coalition; it is a movement among social justice groups to recognize the power of organizations with sometimes different objectives and goals coming together to support one purpose. Consequently, there is a stronger voice, more resources, and a greater pool of people ready to be mobilized. All of this combined with everyone’s energy and passion is a potent stimulus for change. NCIWR represents a united front and an effort to acknowledge immigrant women’s rights as human rights.