Asian American Research Journal

List of all works.

To the community,

The Asian American Research Journal (AARJ) is honored and excited to share our fourth issuewith you, “The Space Between Oceans.” Our journal was founded in 2020 as the first AsianAmerican research journal at the University of California, Berkeley. Through our publication,AARJ hopes to further the pursuits of the student activists of the Third World Liberation Front(WTLF) by providing an accessible platform for students to produce and engage with academia. .Thanks to the incredible support of our faculty, peers, and authors, we have grown from our rootsand maintained our goal to provide Asian American and Asian voices with a place to share theirstories.The theme of our fourth edition “The Space Between Oceans” seeks to explore the changinglandscape of Asian American identity and heritage through the scope of immigration, livedexperiences, and historical representation of cross-cultural identity. This volume is a testament tothe fluctuating state of Asian American identity throughout history and today.The Asian American Research Journal would not be possible without the incredible work of ourauthors, editors, designers, faculty, and community members. This volume is the culmination ofthe invaluable work of our board; we’d like to thank our executive editor and chief designer SeoLee, our executive editor Cynthia Rahman, and our communications and finance and operationschair Amy Lee. We’d also like to express a special thanks to the eScholarship team and ourfaculty sponsors Professor Khatharya Um and Professor Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez. Finally,we’d like to thank our outstanding authors and editors for their contributions toward furtheringAsian American academia and for their dedication to AARJ.“The Space Between Oceans” has been an incredible and rewarding experience. We hope youenjoy reading as much as we have.

In Solidarity,

Julianne Han and Grace Huang

Chief Editors 2023-2024

The cover of volume IV, The Space Between Oceans, was illustrated by our chief designer SeoLee. The woman is outlined with minimal lines, accentuating the negative space, to give thefigure an inclusive silhouette that any reader can project themselves onto. In order to emphasizethe theme of this year’s topic of fluctuating heritage and the fluidity of cross-cultural identity, thecover features motifs of waves. The tea poured by the woman from the traditional pot serves asthe medium through which the white stripes of the American flag bleed into the Japanese-stylewave art to capture the exchange of tradition and communities overseas. The American flagmotif continues on the back cover with the blue moon speckled with white stars. The red, white,and blue color palette encompasses both the famously “American” colors and the lucky shade ofred that many Asian cultures recognize. The woman, or anyone part of the Asian Americandiaspora, is claiming agency over the flow of her cultural heritage as she contributes her story tothe ocean of cross-cultural experiences.

With this paper, I will attempt to shift the focus of the Counterculture of the 1960s and1970s from the Global North and examine how it affected cultural norms and perceptions in theGlobal South. My presentation will look at the ‘Hippie Trail’, a colloquial way to refer to a travelroute taken by many European and North-American youths to the East at the height of thecounterculture movement. The East served as an allegory of varying meanings but travelers oftencame by land from a European center like London and Amsterdam to anywhere relatively east,often ending in South and Southeast Asia. In this presentation, I try to understand the perceptionsof the trail in the Bengali cultural milieu through the literary representation in Satyajit Ray’sdetective Novel, Gangtok-e-Gondogol.

Elderly Vietnamese immigrants experience unique stressors and healthcareincompatibilities that demand an examination of the quality of their physician-patientinteractions. Previous studies on Vietnamese American health disparities demonstrate concernsover stroke rates, heart disease, and reluctance to communicate with health providers. Particularstructural, political, cultural, and behavioral effects resulting from forcible immigration from theVietnam War and communism have exacerbated healthcare complications. To study the depth ofthese effects, I surveyed and interviewed Vietnamese individuals sixty years of age or older whoimmigrated to America. These surveys and interviews allowed participants to rate their primarycare physicians on different metrics to demonstrate their level of satisfaction with theirpatient-physician interactions holistically and to connect these ratings to their personal levels ofintegration within American society and ability to navigate American healthcare systems. Theresults surprisingly demonstrate an overwhelmingly positive response towards Americanhealthcare,highlighting not the challenges that Vietnamese elderly face in regards to achievingsatisfactory levels of healthcare, but rather the means through which they have overcome thedifficulties of acculturation and gained access to quality healthcare. My findings indicate successstories in traversing the difficult realm of healthcare for these Vietnamese elderly individuals,whether through their education and information seeking or through caretakers who are capableof providing for them and provide insight into how we can extend this success to others stillstruggling to find quality healthcare. To expand upon these findings, I suggest conductingsimilar surveys and interviews, but with a larger sample of Vietnamese Americans, includingdiversity in education, income, class, employment, and family/home life, as this study was mostlimited by its small and non-diverse sample.

To many immigrant students and students who speak a language other than English athome, ESL (English as a second language) programs are all too familiar. There is muchconversation surrounding the benefits and drawbacks of ESL programs but, historically, theestablishment of programs aiming to provide supplemental English resources to public schoolstudents has overturned students’ equal opportunity for education. Specifically, the 1974 Lau v.Nichols case reinforced the ruling of the Brown v. Board of Education and placed AsianAmericans at the forefront of education. This case occurred during a complex time: theChinatown community was struggling to balance cultural and language preservation with thedesegregation of schools and integration of Chinese students into majority-white schools. Thispaper examines the historical significance of the Lau v. Nichols case and its effects on Englishlanguage programs and Asian American stereotypes.

This paper explores whether an equal protection challenge to Los Angeles’ motion banninggas stoves in all new residential and commercial buildings is legally viable. Although themotion makes no specific mention of race (making it facially-neutral), Asian Americans haveraised concerns about the potential disproportionate impacts on their communities, due to thecultural significance of gas stoves in Asian cuisine. Stimulating the two-step process forevaluating whether unconstitutional discrimination has occurred from a facially neutral law, Idemonstrate that such litigation would not be legally viable at this time for three reasons.First, the unique circumstances surrounding the affected population make establishingdisparate impact, the first element, much more challenging than similarly situated cases.Second, political processes protecting the pseudo-right of government employees todiscriminate increase the burden of the challenger to prove discriminatory intent, the secondelement. Third, the Los Angeles’ motion would likely survive the “narrowly tailored andcompelling interest” requirement of strict scrutiny review—the final step in an equalprotection challenge. The courts’ rigorous standards for proving unseen forms ofdiscrimination reflect a failure to recognize legacies of systemic inequities appearing underthe guise of neutrality. This is certainly the case for Asian Americans, whose longtimereliance on gas stoves is influenced by Western colonization, exploitation, and theindustrialization of their home nations. Any environmental legislation—howeverwell-meaning—must consider the economic realities of climate policy on the livelihoods ofAsian Americans, which are inextricably intertwined with the climate crisis. In this regard,legislatures can play a powerful role in balancing the state’s decarbonization goals whilesafeguarding marginalized communities from policy’s unintended consequences.

While homeland activism among the Burmese diaspora in the United States experienceda decline in momentum throughout Myanmar’s democratic transition period (2011-2021), therehas been a discernible shift since the 2021 Myanmar Military Coup. The junta’s attempts tothwart the formation of organized resistance proved unsuccessful against the rise of a newtransnational social movement—the Spring Revolution. With the 2021 Myanmar Military Coupcontinuing to unfold, this study seeks to discuss how modal and ideological shifts influence thediasporic and transnational dimensions of homeland activism among Burmese Americans.Existing literature on Burmese diasporic and transnational activism has largely focused on socialmovements responding to the 8888 Uprising (1988) and Saffron Revolution (2007). WhileBurmese Americans have traditionally played an active role in delivering political and economicremittances to Myanmar’s pro-democracy forces, the U.S. Burmese diaspora has not beenoperating on the same modality of precursive social movements. This study explores the U.S.Burmese diaspora’s responses to the 2021 Myanmar Military Coup, closely examining the goals,visions, tactics, and strategies that U.S. Burmese activist organizations operated under. Usingsemi-structured and in-depth interviews, the findings of this research suggest three key sites ofadvocacy within the U.S. Burmese diaspora: 1) networking and coalition-building across ethnic,religious, and political boundaries, 2) political lobbying to shape U.S. foreign policy onMyanmar, and 3) cross-border assistance through economic remittances and on-the-groundcoordination.

A comparison of the San Francisco Chinese Hospital’s Community Health NeedsAssessment (CHNA) from the year 2019 to 2022 reveals striking transformations in top-reportedcommunity health concerns in San Francisco Chinatown during the COVID-19 Pandemic.Thesurvey reports skyrocketing mentions of mental health, community safety, and linguisticallyappropriate health information. These concerns emerged as pressing unmet needs during thepandemic. The spread of the COVID-19 virus alone is not enough to explain these shifts, rather,the sudden change in community health needs highlights the interrelationship between the healthof the individual and their environment. Major changes in social stigma, politics, andcommunication had a direct impact on health during the pandemic. This literature reviewsynthesizes recent literature to uncover how the influence of historical, social, and global factorsduring COVID-19 catalyzed these shifts in health priorities among a vulnerable population. Iargue that historical scapegoating, exclusionary policies, anti-Asian ethnic violence, and novelhealth communication framed and contributed to the greater concerns in safety, mental health,and in-language education, reiterating the embeddedness of health in the social sphere.

Trauma is primarily understood as a personal experience in which an event occurs andleaves long-term psychological distress. However, historical trauma exposes that trauma does notexist in isolation. Historical trauma is defined as “distressing or life-threatening events whichmembers of a group with a shared social identity experience together and pass on to theirdescendants”. This shift from direct survivor to descendant is very nuanced because it can 1manifest in genetic and psychological ways. Historical trauma has been studied in Holocaust 2survivors and Indigenous communities in North America, yet research is lacking AsianAmerican experiences. In this paper, I study historical and intergenerational trauma from the 3Japanese Incarceration Camps and the Khmer Rouge Genocide. This paper does not aim toequate or compare these two dissimilar experiences, but rather, learn from their differingcircumstances. In particular, I focus on the interactions between survivors of these traumaticperiods and their descendants in the United States, using these two perspectives to explorepathways to intergenerational healing.

To contextualize these experiences, I synthesized several sources regarding the Japanese American and Cambodian American experiences. For the Japanese American experience, Iinterviewed Evelyn Tanaka (real name omitted for confidentiality), who is a Yonsei(fourth-generation) Japanese American woman and social worker in the Bay Area. To capturethe Cambodian American experience, I utilized Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So, a collection.

By exploring these two ethnicities’ nuanced experiences, I seek to investigate howdifferent generations can build compassionate relationships through emotional understanding. Iask, How can the development of emotional literacy between survivors and descendants helpcommunities rediscover their identities and relationships with one another, within and beyond thecontext of their trauma? How can Asian Americans heal in community with one another?

Names and biographies of everyone who made this journal possible.