2020 EDITION CROSScurrents Annual1 Newsmagazine of the UCLA Asian American StudiesCrossCurrents Center 2017 CROSSCURRENTS VOLUME 42 | Published December 2020 Cover Image: At the Opening Night Reception for the Asian American Studies 3230 Campbell Hall 50th Anniversary Film Festival at Napa Valley Grille in March (UCLA AASC). 405 Hilgard Ave, Box 951546 As the newsmagazine of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles, CA 90095 CrossCurrents keeps readers informed of Center activities, including www.aasc.ucla.edu academic programs, research projects, student achievements, and 310/825-2974 relevant university and community issues. CrossCurrents also covers important events and projects related to Asian American Studies and communities, but not directly sponsored by the Center. Past issues can be found on the Center’s website. EDITOR & DESIGNER BARBRA RAMOS [email protected] If you wish to support the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, please scan the QR code with your mobile phone or visit https://giving.ucla.edu/aasc. SUPPORT ASIAN Your donation, regardless of amount, has a powerful impact AMERICAN on the research and educational activities that take place STUDIES within the Center and in the greater AAPI community. We greatly value your help in making our work possible. Alumni and friends interested in making a gift to the Center by endowing a scholarship, supporting faculty research, making a planned gift or other major contribution, should contact: At the 2020 Lunar New Year Awards Reception at the CHRISTI CORPUS Bruin Reception Room in the JD Morgan Center on Director of Development, UCLA Institute of American Cultures February 8th: 1) awardee Michelle Wong, Marjorie Lee, awardee Zheyu Liang, and alum Julie Ha; 2) Melany De 310/794-2396 La Cruz-Viesca, Thu-Huong Nguyen-vo, Christi Corpus, [email protected] Mari Tamura, Susan Toy Stern, and Karen Umemoto (UCLA AASC). CENTER STAFF Chu Endowed Director’s Chair Communications and Publications Manager HANNAH JOO KAREN UMEMOTO BARBRA RAMOS SARAH SOAKAI Associate Director EthnoCommunications Director AMY ZHOU MELANY DE LA CRUZVIESCA RENEE TAJIMAPEÑA Undergraduate Student Assistants, Coordinators Chief Administrative Officer EthnoCommunications Assistant Director & Interns (2020) BETTY LEUNG JANET CHEN THERESA BUI Office Manager Collective Memories Coordinator SOLOMON CHANG IRENE SORIANO SAXON MELODY CHEN PHI PHI DO External Relations Coordinator Amerasia Journal Editor ANDREW DAWOOD MEG THORNTON JUDY TZUCHUN WU RAPHAEL GATCHALIAN KEANUSH HAKIMIAN Librarian, Archivist and Reading Room Coordinator Amerasia Journal Associate Editor MAYA HARRIS MARJORIE LEE ARNOLD PAN MIA KIM Library Assistant Coordinator AAPI Nexus Journal Senior Editor DAVID LEE AIDAN YUN GILBERT GEE GRACE LEE Information Technology AAPI Nexus Journal Assistant Managing Editor ASHLEY LEUNG TAM NGUYEN ANNA HING MICHELLE MURAKAMI Web Graphic Designer / Digital Media Lab Coordinator AAPI Nexus Journal / Research Projects Associate HUY NGUYEN IRENE YOUNGJI PARK CAROLINE CALDERON HUNG NGUYEN Programmer Film Festival Manager and Senior Programmer JESSICA PHAM DANIEL H. KIM LINDY LEONG MICHAEL DE LOS SANTOS HOPE SHIN Digital Curator Film Festival Events Coordinator and Director Assistant YUKINO TORREY SOO MEE KIM LAILANIE GADIA LINH VO Archival Assistant Graduate Student Researchers, Coordinators, & Interns (2020) JENNIFER YIP KELLY FONG LAUREN HIGA HADJI YONOCRUZ Research Fellow DANIEL IWAMA NAOMI YUNG TRITIA TOYOTA EMORY JOHNSON EDWIN ZHOU CrossCurrents 2020 2 LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR This has been a difficult year filled with both grief and hope. Grief over the loss of friends and family to COVID-19, over shuttered businesses and jobs, over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others on the long list of Black lives lost, and over the erosion of our democratic system of governance that was never perfect, but never subject to such blatant corruption. And there is also hope. Hope sprung from witnessing young leaders taking up the torch for justice and equality, the sacrifice of those on the front lines in health care and community outreach efforts, and the conviction with which millions cast their vote for reason and change. The UCLA Asian American Studies Center also stepped up to meet important challenges of the moment. As the campus closed down at the end of Winter Quarter, we worked with the Fielding School of Public Health Professors May Wang and Gilbert Gee to create the COVID-19 Multilingual Resource Hub, a website offering over 1,000 life-saving informational resources in over 50 languages. We also began producing videos on mask-wearing, social distancing and handwashing, now in 7 languages and counting. We hope you will share these tools available at TranslateCovid.org Center Director Karen Umemoto to reach our most vulnerable communities. This is just one example of our commitment to serving moderating the opening night panel at the UCLA Asian American Studies our communities with the knowledge and resources available to us. We also co-published several 50th Anniversary Film Festival in policy reports and a special issue of AAPI Nexus on the impacts the coronavirus pandemic has had March. (Keanu Hakimian/UCLA AASC) on Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and communities of color. These pages of CrossCurrents highlight the extraordinary work of Center faculty, staff, students and alumni over this past year. Meanwhile, we prepare to bring AAPI voices into a new period of policy discourse in 2021 with community well-being at the forefront. With progress on all fronts, we look forward to the time when we can safely gather in person once again. Karen Umemoto Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair of the Asian American Studies Center SUPPORT FOR RACIAL & SOCIAL JUSTICE SOLIDARITY FOR THESE TIMES The Center, along with many other units As leaders of academic units at UCLA Our campus units have long been on campus and academics throughout dedicated to social justice, we stand in engaged in research and teaching about the country, reaffirmed its commitment solidarity with those in Los Angeles and these dehumanizing and unjust systems. to racial and social justice and the fight throughout the country fighting to end [...] For many years, we have fought for equity, especially in solidarity with state violence against African Americans, alongside Indigenous people, laborers, our Black colleagues, students, and Indigenous peoples, Latinx, Asian, and the undocumented, the imprisoned, and community. Leadership and staff co- other communities of color. The murder those seeking gender equity. We help authored and signed several letters of George Floyd at the hands of the shape policies and the enactment of in support of current struggles and Minneapolis Police Department as well legislation. And yet, there is much more demands for change. Here is an excerpt as the recent killings of Breonna Taylor, to do. from a letter by the UCLA ethnic studies Ahmaud Arbery, and Robert Avitia are We recognize that higher education research centers, departments, and other the latest manifestations of a structure remains implicated in such structures units who stand for social justice. You of white supremacy that has taken the of violence and dispossession. To that can read the full letter on our website at forms of genocide, slavery, colonialism, end, we renew our commitment to https://bit.ly/st4justice. incarceration, and exclusion, and enacting principles of abolitionism so extended beyond U.S. borders through that our endeavors of research, teaching, The Center also hosted a special imperialism. discussion, “Asian American Solidarity and service are not complicit with the from the Civil Rights Movement to Black In this historic moment, the coronavirus expansion of the police state. We offer pandemic is laying bare the dramatic spaces to discuss not only the past and Lives Matter” on November 20th. View inequalities that characterize U.S. society, the present, but to also work toward a the video at http://bit.ly/aasolidarity. disproportionately affecting communities just future. We remember those who have of color both through illness and come before us and seek to continue the economic effects. [...] unfinished work of liberation. 3 CrossCurrents 2020 In Memoriam | LANE RYO HIRABAYASHI 19522020 It is with deep sadness that the Center shared news about the passing of Professor Emeritus Lane Ryo Hirabayashi on August 8, 2020, at the age of 67. Professor Hirabayashi was the for Civil Rights and Redress), the Asian American Drug Abuse inaugural George and Sakaye Aratani Endowed Chair of the Program, and East West Players. Japanese American Incarceration, Redress and Community In 2006, Lane returned to UCLA as the inaugural holder (Aratani Chair) and served as a member of the Center's of the George and Sakaye Aratani Endowed Chair on the Faculty Advisory Committee. He retired from UCLA in 2017. Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community— The following is an abbreviated version of a tribute penned by the first endowed chair in the country to focus on the wartime Professor Valerie Matsumoto, current holder of the Aratani confinement of Japanese Americans. Mindful of the parallels Chair, in memory of her longtime friend and colleague. The full between the racial profiling of the Issei and Nisei during the version can be found at: 1940s and Arab Americans after 9/11, Lane said, “What I want http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/about/lanehirabayashi.aspx. to make sure is that people remember the past so that we can make better