The minor is part of Fordham’s new Asian American studies program, which faculty members hope to continue to expand.

“The student population is really diverse,” said Stephen Hong Sohn, Ph.D., English professor and Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature. “Not only do we want Asian American students and Asian students to have a place to explore their backgrounds and identities, but it’s really important for all students to take these types of classes because they need to learn about other cultures, other identities.”

Coursework

The minor will require students to take six courses: Introduction to Asian American Studies; four electives, such as Asian American Art and Representing Asians in Journalism and Media; and one course in another race and ethnic studies area such as African & African American studies.

Students will pay particular attention to themes such as race, gender, sexuality, capital, and empire.

Faculty said the minor will help provide students with skills and knowledge they can utilize for future graduate studies as well as careers in law, education, health care, government, journalism, and more.

“Being able to give students greater vocabulary to contextualize the things that are actually going on—and the currents that are going on with Asian American populations—and to think of them with more complexity, that’s the key,” Sohn said. “It’s always about thinking more broadly, thinking more expansively, so that you’re not in a rush to make sort of surface-level judgments.”

The program involves faculty from a variety of disciplines, including literature, journalism, and history.

“No one discipline, or even set of disciplines, is really adequate to understanding Asian America as a political project, Asian America as a social relation, Asian America as an identity,” said James Kim, Ph.D., associate professor of English and comparative literature, who helped lead the efforts to launch the program. “You need all these disciplines—and the conversations that get generated between these disciplines.—in order to have any type of understanding of Asian America.”

A New York Education

Kim said that New York City will be a large part of the learning experience for students, through partnerships and experiences with local organizations, like the Museum of Chinese in America or the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“One thing that’s going to make us distinctive is we’re in New York,” he said. “This is home to the largest Asian American population in the continental United States, so we’ll be able to create a bunch of learning opportunities for our students.”

Kim also said that they’ll be working closely with Fordham Law School’s Center on Asian Americans and the Law.

“One of the founders [of that program]is the Hon. Denny Chin [senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit], and he’s very eager to collaborate with the minor, do things like guest lectures, co-teaching, maybe event programming,” Kim said.

A Better Understanding of History and Culture

Faculty members who had been developing the program said it became even more necessary in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased discrimination against Asian Americans, as well as the 2021 shooting of Asian American women in Atlanta spas.

“There was a clear need on campus for spaces and conversations around Asian American identities and backgrounds,” Sohn said.

Kim said that having an Asian American Studies program is essential to helping students understand the “larger social, historical, and political forces that are producing these kinds of crises,” particularly because these types of “traumatic events change communities.”

Both Kim and Sohn said there was strong interest in and support for the program, both from current students and alumni.

“Asian American communities have been going through a pretty traumatic time for the past few years, and I would love for students to gain a sense of historical perspective that we have been here before, this has happened before,” Kim said.

“Asian American literature always responds to the historical moment, whether it’s Japanese American incarceration, whether it’s 9/11, Asian American writers always want to remind us that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge people based upon how they look,” Sohn said at the April 25 installation ceremony.

In this case, Sohn highlighted how the COVID-19 pandemic and its roots in China spurred a rise in racism and attacks against Asian Americans. But, Sohn noted, Asian American writers have to tackle the issue of racism against their community “every 20 years” or so, dating back to Japanese internment camps during World War II.

“It reminds us that we’re all interdependent, meaning that we all have to rely on each other to create a collective social awareness, that we need to treat each other with complexity,” he said.

Since 2020, more than a dozen books have been published by Asian American authors on the pandemic, and for his lecture, Sohn read all of them, aiming to find common patterns and themes. As he was reading, he said he was most drawn to the “life writings,” such as memoirs, essays, and autobiographies.

He cited three examples that provided a deeper understanding of the pandemic period: disability advocate Alice Wong’s Year of the Tiger essay collection; The Monsoon Diaries: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healing from the ER Frontlines to the Far Reaches of the World by Dr. Calvin Sun, who worked as an emergency room physician; and Laura Gao’s Messy Roots graphic narrative.

“[They’re] telling us that we have to be careful about the different vulnerable subjects,” he said. “And it’s not just Asian Americans, obviously, it’s lots of other communities, it’s disabled communities. It’s health care workers like Dr. Sun. And it’s everyday individuals like Laura Gao, who just want to be connected with their family.”

In Gao’s graphic novel, she depicts herself playing ping-pong with a woman in January 2020 who keeps talking about China in a racist way, until Gao gets fed up. At first, Sohn showed that it was just her dealing with this one instance of racial aggression, but later in the piece, Gao shows a multitude of examples from news coverage of Asian Americans being blamed for the pandemic and abused in response to it.

“It tells us about the social structure that has changed in that three month period, and ramped up, and it’s something affecting a larger group of people,” he said. “You can’t have this individual microaggression without that larger social structural overlay.”

A Connection with Tom Mullarkey

Sohn was officially hired to fill the Mullarkey Chairin January 2020, but with the pandemic, the official installation ceremony was put off. He recalled how when he first found out about the position, he felt a tug to apply due to some of the parallels between him and Thomas Mullarkey, one of the chair’s namesakes.

“I share a key affiliation with Tom as we’re both the children of immigrants who no doubt saw America as a land of opportunity and refuge,” Sohn said.

But Sohn also noted that their interactions with Korea overlapped—Mullarkey had served in Korea in the armistice period from 1954 to 1956, which was exactly what Sohn was researching for his book project. This “strange parallel” helped encourage Sohn to apply.

Sohn also shared with the audience some history about Mullarkey, who was a double Ram—graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1954 and Fordham Law School in 1959. He served on the Board of Trustees for almost 10 years before he passed away in 1993.

“The legend goes that [Mullarkey] originally planned to major in business, but a Jesuit tapped him on the shoulder and told him, ‘No, you should probably go into the humanities. It would be better for you,’” Sohn said. “He ascended the ranks of Wall Street and was very successful in finance. But what you might not know is that he was always well known for his abilities to write and speak eloquently—skills no doubt cultivated in part by his time as an English major here at Fordham.”

This inspired Mullarkey to want to give back, Sohn said, something continued by his wife Theresa, who received an honorary doctorate from the University in 2005.

Sohn said that becoming the Mullarkey Chair has been “transformative.”

“I’ve been able to travel, go to archives, do the kind of research that I’ve always wanted to do without some of the obstacles that we would traditionally have,” he said. “So it means everything to me to have this opportunity.”

“I think that part was the most painful for her. When I think about it, it’s really painful for me to think that something had happened to somebody I love, and nobody would stand up,” said Park-Taylor, an associate professor of counseling psychology and a director of training in the Graduate School of Education.

Park-Taylor shared this story as a part of a virtual community convening on anti-Asian violence and racism on March 24, which brought together more than 200 members of the Fordham community. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian bias, attacks, and harassment have been on the rise. Stop AAPI Hate, a nonprofit, documented almost 3,800 hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from March 2020 to February 2021. Most recently, six Asian American women were murdered in Atlanta.

Members of the Fordham community, including Park-Taylor; Mary Balingit, associate director for diversity initiatives in the Office of Admissions; Arthur Liu, a Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomore and president of Fordham’s Asian Cultural Exchange; and Stephen Hong Sohn, Ph.D., professor and Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature, along with moderator Rafael Zapata, chief diversity officer and special assistant to the president for diversity, reflected on the impact of anti-Asian violence. They discussed ways to build community and heal, and talked about possibilities for interracial solidarity.

“I think what’s a little bit different about this moment is just the level of fear that I’ve heard communicated,” Sohn said. “It’s been higher than I’ve ever anecdotally seen before, and the circumstances coming out of COVID make the experience slightly unique as well.. But I think it’s important for us to realize this is part of a longer historical genealogy of anti-Asian sentiments that has reemerged in light of these circumstances.”

Liu, who is originally from Hong Kong, said that he “thinks fondly of the United States,” but that he had to convince his friends back home that many Americans weren’t like the political leaders who were making anti-Asian remarks.

“The political rhetoric surrounding COVID-19 and what Donald Trump has said—what he said was incredibly hurtful,” Liu said.

He also said he had friends ask him if he was considering taking martial arts classes to learn how to defend himself in case he was attacked.

“You shouldn’t have to feel the need to know how to defend yourself in a civil society,” he said. “And so I was taken aback by that initially, but honestly, I’m kind of buying into the idea, because I just feel a heightened sense of awareness and being scared.”

That sense of awareness is something that Park-Taylor said she has personally grappled with.

“When I think about the experiences of racism I’ve gone through throughout my life, I can think of it as this duality—sometimes I feel really invisible. I feel like I’m not seen at all, I’m not heard and silenced,” she said. “But then there are times when I feel hyper visible. There were (times when) I’m the only Asian person in a classroom. Or instances where I’m particularly targeted because I’m an Asian woman and [because of]the stereotypes about Asian women.”

Balingit said those negative stereotypes, which have been perpetuated throughout history, were on display when the Asian women were killed in Atlanta.

“That shared experience of being an Asian woman—the negative stereotypes that say that we’re docile, and that we’re quiet, we’re apolitical, and that we are weak—I think that played into that, and to what happened last week in Atlanta,” she said.

Park-Taylor said that she hoped people now have a better understanding of microaggressions and intersectionality.

“There’s a unique positionality that an Asian woman occupies in this place and space,” she said.

Balingit said that solidarity between minority communities is essential to combating these acts and other types of racism and white supremacy.

“I think what’s important is look at the history—we have to look at the history of our solidarity first, and to Rafael (Zapata’s) point is how everything is rooted mainly in white supremacy and how this perpetuates the pitting of minorities against each other,” she said. “Let’s not let this divide us even more, especially at a time like now where we’re also very isolated already.”

Zapata also stressed the importance of bystander intervention, and noted there are trainings on the topic, such as the one offered through Hollaback!, a global movement to end harassment.

“We had been working on a panel on this issue just as the murders in Atlanta took place, which was especially devastating, and made clear for all to see what far too many AAPI people in the U.S. had been experiencing at higher rates since the beginning of the pandemic,” Zapata said. “It also made participating in the panel more of a challenge, because of the emotional toll it could take on participants. I’m so grateful to the panelists for all they shared.”

For students, staff, and faculty, who might be struggling to handle anti-Asian hate and violence, Fordham’s Counseling and Psychological Services put together a resource sheet.

Jeffrey Ng, Psy. D, director of Fordham’s Counseling and Psychological Services and a licensed clinical psychologist, encouraged those in attendance to be there for their friends, families, and colleagues who might be dealing with acts of discrimination and racism.

“The immediate thought that comes to my mind is just to take the time to listen is so important, to try to be present and to be attuned to what your POC students or colleagues or peers might be sharing with you,” said Ng, who will be moderating a second community convening on March 29. “The validation and the affirmation is so critical for the healing process.”