Asian American Studies in Introduction to Sociology

Rose Kim, Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY)

Keywords: Empire, militarism, refugee

Course: Introduction to Sociology

I applied to the 2016 Building AAS summer workshop, motivated by the desire to step back from teaching, to catch up on recent scholarship, and to meet faculty from other CUNY campuses. The workshop certainly met these expectations, introducing me to exciting new work and stimulating colleagues; but, unexpectedly, and more importantly, the workshop led me to critically reflect on my teaching practices and then to change them.

My biggest takeaway from the workshop was the realization that I had not included any formal assignments on Asian Americans in my Introduction to Sociology course. This realization was shocking to me; and, led me to eventually include multiple works on, and by, Asian Americans in the following semester.

The new readings included two chapters from Tarry Hum’s Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park (2014), and Rachel Aviv’s “The Cost of Caring,” a New Yorker article (4/11/16) on Filipino domestic workers in the U.S., both works read in the workshop. Furthermore, I assigned Grace Cho’s essay, “From Harvard to CUNY: taking refuge in the public university (2015), and Arundhati Roy’s essay “The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin” (2001). [For the entire syllabus, see here.]

Along with the new readings, I invited anti-war activist Will Griffin to visit my class to discuss protests against the THADD missile defense system that the U.S. is trying to install in South Korea, and screened “The Weather Underground,” a documentary film on the radical group that opposed the Vietnam War and sought to overthrow the U.S. government. Students also attended a conversation between Asian American writers Jessica Hagedorn and Viet Thanh Nguyen moderated by BMCC faculty member Nita Noveno, an event organized by Building AAS.

All the assignments were intended to help students develop a “sociological awareness,” i.e., the ability to “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society” (Mills 1959 6). The class work also sought to help inform the students in developing a final paper, in which they would apply the “sociological imagination” to their personal and familial history. [For assignment details, see here.]

Some of the reoccurring themes (or “keywords”) I wanted students to consider throughout the various readings were empire, militarism and refugee.

In Keywords for Asian American Studies (2015), Moon-ho Jung cites Arundhati Roy’s definition of empire as “this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them” (2015, citing Roy, 70), and argues that the study of “empire” should focus “on the historical and cultural processes through which different people, including Asian Americans, have become subjects of imperial rule” (2015, 70).

Militarism is critical to understanding empire, since the threat and use of physical force is central to maintaining imperial power. Considering both empire and militarism sheds light on how the flows of people to this country have been greatly influenced by U.S. wars, whether in the past, such as in World War II, the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam, or currently, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

Such an awareness raises questions on the nature of “immigration”, and whether one is a voluntary immigrant or a refugee pushed out by forces beyond one’s control. During the workshop, I, myself, came to reimagine my parents, who came from South Korea to the U.S. in 1959, as war refugees rather than “voluntary” immigrants.

Here is some more information on the previously mentioned readings:

In “The Cost of Caring”, Rachel Aviv tells the story of Emma, a Filipino domestic worker in Queens, NY, who immigrated to the U.S., because she was barely able to support her family, despite having a college degree and a skilled, government job. Since the 1970s, the government of the Philippines has promoted labor exportation as a strategy to alleviate poverty and to deal with the national debt; currently, a tenth of the nation’s population works abroad, supporting nearly half of the country’s households.

Tarry Hum’s Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood: Brooklyn’s Sunset Park considers a single neighborhood to examine the influence of transnational capital and gentrification on urban, postindustrial neighborhoods. The second chapter provides an excellent overview of the neighborhood’s history, by focusing on the economic forces that shaped its growth, decline and present situation. The book highlights how working-class Chinese and Latino immigrants are working together to protect their interests.

Grace Cho’s autoethnographic essay, “From Harvard to CUNY”, considers the various life experiences that influenced her education. She begins her story in Busan, South Korea, where she was born to a Korean mother and a white, American father. The essay details the psychic oppression suffered by her mother, and explains how Cho’s educational path was influenced by a desire to hold society accountable for her mother’s mental anguish.

Arundhati Roy’s “The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin” examines how multinational corporations are reaping enormous profits and devastating millions of people’s lives in India, as the Indian government privatizes public resources, contracting with U.S.-based energy companies, such as Enron.

Overall, I was very pleased with how students responded to the new material. There were interesting classroom conversations. I especially recall when a Caribbean American student said Asians did well in school because they had the privilege to just spend all their time studying. A Filipina-American student challenged the statement, describing the health and work issues she struggled with, and the economic struggles of her family. Another student shared how her parents had immigrated from the Philippines to seek more profitable work as public school teachers, and to help family back home; she discussed the racism and abuse she herself had encountered in middle school because of her language skills. The voicing of these thoughts seemed productive.

Also, individual students expressed their appreciation for the Asian American content. One young, Vietnamese American student said she had never realized how significantly the Vietnam War had figured in her family’s history, even though both her grandmothers were Vietnamese and had married U.S. soldiers.

While such a lack of awareness initially stunned me, I remembered my own shadowy knowledge of the Korean War, an unspoken-about-event in my family that I had never really critically considered until I was in graduate school in my mid-30s. There seems an all too troubling pattern of erasing and obscuring this nation’s military activities.

I look forward to incorporating more Asian American perspectives into future courses.