Box 68

Keva X. Bui is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and the Council for Race and Ethnic Studies at Northwestern University. They are a scholar of science, technology, war, and empire and hold a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Their research examines cultures of war in everyday life in the heart of U.S. empire, and how anti-war social movements offer visions of life beyond the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex. As a child of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, their life has been touched by war on multiple registers. These intimate encounters with the US war machine guide both their scholarly research and political commitments to the work of demilitarization.   

What about Asian American literature and culture inspires you?

When it comes to Asian American literature and culture, I’m inspired by its capacity for forging new worlds from conditions of violence and catastrophe and to reflect back onto the world that we live. As a scholar and researcher, I'm constantly stuck researching horrific violences—how war and empire have devastated communities, environments, and ultimately, people's lives. There's no singular Asian American literature or culture; it's not a monolithic category, but rather something that imagines and creates worlds—that is world-making and world-breaking. The central question that I think about is: How can we imagine better futures for ourselves and our communities?

I'm constantly inspired by how central art and culture was to the imagination of the Asian American anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of poetry, a lot of political cartoons were circulated in radical newsletters during that moment that developed a very poignant critique of the military industrial complex. Those kinds of critiques offer us a pathway to organizing, to reflect on the world that we are trapped in and make use of narrative tools to unravel logics of violence. Literature and culture's capacity for shining a light on the world that we live in is so important to the work of demilitarization, and there's a lot of power in narrative to shape how we understand the world.

You said that you’re “constantly stuck” researching horrific violence—what makes this the case? Is there a link between that stuckness and the inspiration? 

I think about that a lot, because I study weapons of mass destruction—things like napalm, herbicidal warfare, things that have caused horrific violence in our world. Obviously, it's not enjoyable work in a lot of ways, but I find it necessary; I do think we have to understand what led us to the violent conditions that we are mired within. How did we get here? How did weapons of mass destruction come to be normalized? There is a world before the military industrial complex—so how did this particular iteration of society become our norm? I think that's the tension between inspiration and stuckness that you're honing in on—that in order to be a scholar of demilitarization, to invest in anti-war social movements, I have to return to these violent moments to understand how they came to be. Reading the ways in which scientists and military commanders envisioned weapons—they envisioned this violence—sometimes it's so mundane how it's articulated in the archive, and it can be very jarring and painful to sit with those words and stories for long periods. But I also try to remind myself that it's in service of understanding the world, so we can build something better for our communities. To understand the anti-war movement means we have to understand the war machine that the anti-war movement opposed. 

Was there an early moment that you became interested in these questions in particular?

I did my undergraduate training as an English major, and a lot of my early work was reading Asian American literature, particularly Vietnamese American literature. As the child of Vietnamese refugees, my entryway into Asian American studies was through personal and family experiences, thinking about, how did the Vietnam War affect my family's life and my own life? How is that structurally connected to a larger system of the U.S. empire? 

And that led me to a specific interest in napalm; in Vietnamese American literature, napalm is a motif, a symbol, an idea that is constantly returned to. And oftentimes it would be this aside. It'd be mentioned. It would be a stand-in for something, a symbolic thing. For example, there was an interview that Ocean Vuong did with The Guardian where he talks about stories his grandmother would tell about the Vietnam War. He comments about how his grandmother would often mention napalm as an aside, such as “oh that came after the napalm,” but would never answer him when he would ask “what’s napalm?” I think there’s something significant about that exchange - napalm being omnipresent in these stories but lacking clear definition.

That interested me, so I began studying napalm’s history. The anti-war movement took up napalm as its iconic crime against humanity that the U.S. was committing in Vietnam. The infamous "napalm girl" photo that circulated in 1973 of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, for instance, catalyzed a lot of anti-war sentiments. But I also learned that napalm was developed during World War II and used in the Pacific Wars. It predates the atomic bomb. It was used in the Korean War. It was used in Israel's Six-Day War in 1967. For me, that posed a tension, in that napalm became this quintessential U.S. weapon used in Vietnam, but it stretches across all of these other histories of U.S. military intervention. 

And so what makes it exceptional in the Vietnam War and normalized in other wars? Weapons are not just neutral objects, but themselves are bearers of political and cultural significance that shape the world that we live in. The tension between its symbolism and its material history is what sparked a lot of my interest in how cultural narratives around weapons of mass destruction are constructed, and then the work they do in consolidating the military industrial complex that we live in. 

And what was your scholarly journey like, through Asian American Studies?

I was an English major at Dartmouth College, and then did my PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego. I learned about Asian American Studies when I was at Dartmouth in rural New Hampshire, an “elite” Ivy League university, very white, very isolated. There I met a group of Asian American activists who were organizing on campus to establish an Asian American Studies program. That's how I began my venture into the field. I took the very few Asian American studies classes that were offered on campus by professors who are no longer there. But it provided a moment for me to think about the political stakes of Asian American Studies as a scholarly field. It demonstrated how Asian American studies was something we as students had to fight for. It was knowledge and an intellectual community that we had to fight for. That's what granted it a lot of meaning for me, is how we had to fight for the space to even learn about Asian American history, Asian American culture, Asian American politics, Asian American social movements. Students of Asian American studies know that the field has a long history of student organizing, that it emerges from the Third World Liberation Front, the student strikes in 1968 at San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley that really established the field of Asian American studies and ethnic studies. I think that being in a place where it was something we had to fight for really was both a challenge but gave it, for me, higher stakes. And so I went on to do my PhD in ethnic studies and deepen my understanding. And so, living in San Diego, which is both a refugee city and a militarized city, it's very close to one of the largest military bases in the U.S., Camp Pendleton, and it houses a large refugee community of Southeast and also Southwest Asian refugees. Being at the Pacific borderland, as well as the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, creates this acute sense of living in a militarized city. Living there, doing a PhD in ethnic studies, really granted me a space of interrogating how, as I've mentioned before, war and militarization invades everyday life, because it was all around me. And at the same time, I began organizing with Vietnamese American communities in Southern California, with Viet Unity Southern California, the Hai Ba Trung School for organizing, and the Missing Piece project which is an artist-activist collective, and those organizations were important to my political development, especially how I think about the enduring impact of war on people's lives long after war “ends.” My scholarly study is informed by how I moved throughout society, and these political organizations; at the end of the day, I'm trying to understand how war invades our collective everyday life, and invades my own personal everyday life, how I constantly see war everywhere I move through the world.

In 2021, you wrote the article, “Objects of Warfare,” and then in 2022, “More Than Human,” then in 2023, “Eugenic Ecologies,” in 2024, “Napalm University,” and this year “Incendiary War,” a talk I heard you deliver at the AAAS conference. All are related to this subject; it seems to me that you've really allowed napalm to guide you in this very beautiful, ecological way. For you, napalm is coming out of diasporic Vietnamese cultural production in particular, yet also, when you spoke of napalm and white phosphorous at the conference this year, where people were grappling with the ongoing genocide of Palestinians alongside it being 50 years since the fall of Saigon, you seemed to be proposing a way for the materialities and symbols of empire to map this more expansive solidarity, wherein napalm was figured as a “sibling technology” alongside others. That was initially why your work stood out so much to me—how can we think through this ecology? What does it mean to draw this filial connection between technologies of genocide and war?

Thank you so much. That question really gets to the heart of what I'm trying to think about. This past year, we've seen Vietnamese American communities really grapple with how the anniversary occasions a moment to think about solidarity. But the tension is that the anniversaries connote an end that we have to commemorate as other violence is ongoing. What my research tries to articulate is that violence is not only ongoing, but it's recursive. There is this ongoing Nakba, almost two years since the most recent Israel bombardment of Gaza began, but a genocidal campaign that's been ongoing for decades since 1948. In 2012, the Human Rights Watch published an article about white phosphorus, and they declared it the “new napalm,” based on the U.S. usage of white phosphorus in Afghanistan, as well as Israel's usage in Gaza in 2009 as part of Operation Cast Lead. This is notable because white phosphorus was invented prior to napalm, during World War I, and was used as an incendiary device in wars ensuing after. Once napalm was invented, white phosphorus was used as an ignition substance within napalm bombs - napalm is a gelled petrochemical that can burn hot and stay hot, but needed white phosphorus to provide the initial spark. White phosphorus is a pyrophoric substance, meaning it catches fire upon contact with oxygen. So napalm and white phosphorus have always been used together. But what happens after the Vietnam War, is that because of napalm's iconography, napalm and other incendiary weapons were banned by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons treaty in 1980. White phosphorus is mostly unmentioned because it doesn't rise to the same cultural significance in terms of its iconography, so it goes unbanned. Then, it is continually used in the U.S. and Israel's wars in the years after. So my question about this sequence of events then is: what happens when we exceptionalize a weapon like napalm as exceptionally inhumane in comparison to other weapons of mass destruction? We risk inadvertently normalizing other technologies of violence, rather than saying, actually this entire structure of the military industrial complex needs to be abolished. 

In this moment of the 50th anniversary, one of the things often unremarked about the radical anti-imperial, anti-war movements of the 1960s is that activists were making the claim that the U.S. was committing genocide in Vietnam. We're in a moment where there is a lot of debate over the term genocide. Who gets to claim the term genocide? But actually, the exceptionalization of the term obscures the ongoing structural conditions of violence that imperial nation-states continue to wage on colonized peoples. I draw a lot of inspiration from the 1951 Black Civil Rights Congress petition to the United Nations, “We Charge Genocide,” where a group of Black activists, three years after the UN Genocide Convention, which established the terms of genocide after the Holocaust, charged the U.S. with committing an ongoing genocide of Black Americans, dating through slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and all of these other forms of structural elimination. What this moment exposes is that if we allow genocide to be taken up at its full definition, then the U.S. would be culpable for all of these other imperial violences, from its ongoing structural racism against Black communities to its military interventions in Korea, in Vietnam, later in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as its support of Israel's genocide in Gaza and Palestine more broadly. These are questions to think about. Not to say it is or isn't genocide, but that the language offers a framework for understanding why the exceptionalization of the term obscures our capacity to understand how violence is connected in these expansive ways—not only in a way of analogy, like that Israel's genocide in Gaza is similar to the U.S.'s military intervention in Vietnam, but actually with material connections in the technologies that are created, used, and exchanged, and the ways in which those technologies enable new innovations across these joint military-industrial complexes to thrive. The severing of our capacity to recognize and map those connections across different moments of violence, is what leads us to think of war as an event rather than a structure, a one-time thing rather than a continuous structure of violence that we are living in.

That has to do with where you began—with forging new worlds, right? In and against the continuous violence of the world we live in now? How can we understand the structure of the current world?

Yeah. The world we live in is one of constant and permanent normalized war. People have this idea that war is a natural condition of human life, and I fundamentally disagree. War is manufactured, especially the way in which we articulate war in our current age. Contemporary war is completely different from pre-modern war, where you have clearly defined nations with clearly defined militaries engaging in combat on a battlefield. Now, war is very deeply seeped in everyday life. It's in our institutions. It's in our universities. It’s in our homes. It’s in our businesses, industries, corporations. People don't think of corporations like Google as a defense contractor, or a war company, but as recent campaigns like No Tech for Apartheid have demonstrated, Google has extensive contracts with the Israeli defense forces. And this is something that partially emerges in the aftermath of World War II, in the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where U.S. politicians and scientists were able to point to the “success” of the atomic bomb, of the Manhattan Project, as this collaboration between the military, the government, and scientists, and say, this is good for national security. And they consolidated that as the way in which we live. That's why we have the ballooning of defense contracts for the military and government funding for U.S. universities to conduct research that, whether directly or implicitly, aids the U.S. war machine. That's part of how the U.S. university expands in the post-World War II moment. 

So I think about this often—how do I reconcile my place in the academy with the immense entanglement that the university has with the military industrial complex? But at the same time, as I write about in my article in “Napalm’s University,” the university has also been a really important site of the anti-war movement, where students have been able to find intellectual, political community that radicalizes them into these kinds of organized anti-war movements. The 1960s was this early moment of both, and the sit-ins, encampments, and protests are reemerging in our current moment, as that relationship between the university and the military has only deepened. People get the sense that this is how it's always been, and therefore will always be, but if we understand that there is a history to this, that gives us a pathway to imagine otherwise, and to understand that this isn't a normal condition of intellectual life at the university, nor a normal condition of life. It can be contested. It can be abolished.

One of the differences between contemporary and pre-modern war is the invention and use of the weapons of mass destruction that you research—not only napalm and tear gas, but also herbicidal weapons like Agent Orange. Alongside the “genocidal,” I keep returning to “herbicidal” as a category that gestures towards the eradication, as you wrote, of an “ecologically-porous definition of enemy life”—the exceptionalism you discussed is also deployed in terms of the human, so I’m curious if you could tell us more about how the U.S. war machine involves and affects not just people, but plant matter, land and ecology.

Definitely. When I write about herbicidal warfare, I'm particularly thinking about the history of Agent Orange, which is a chemical defoliant that was used in the Vietnam War to eliminate mangrove cover as well as cropland in rural and jungle areas of Vietnam. So part of the idea behind the chemical defoliant is that it could remove the plant cover that guerrilla fighters were supposedly hiding beneath and would become visible to U.S. fighter jets flying above. It was the idea that if you can remove the ecological life that the insurgents were embedded in, you could better fight the war. So war became a battle over control of land and terrain. 

Arthur Galston, who was a plant biologist, coined the term “ecocide” to refer to the destruction of the environment as part of military intervention. One thing we sometimes talk about is that the U.S. military is the number one polluter in the world, and the number one contributor to carbon emissions through ecocidal campaigns like in Vietnam, as well as the emissions produced by millions of fighter jets, hundreds of military bases. So it's important to put that ecological devastation alongside the obvious human devastation of it. What is happening in the shift from pre-modern war to the modern military industrial complex, is that all of society, technology, infrastructure, and resources are geared towards the inevitability of war and extracted from communities. The increasing cost of health care, housing, education, child care, the lack of resources for communities of color, low-income communities, those are all structural because they are resources taken from those communities to funnel into the war machine. War is ending our world in many ways, in terms of how it conditions us to think, and how it is ending human life, and how it is shortening the lifespan of our planet through ecocidal campaigns of violence and the destruction of our environment, and these are all entangled in terms of how the military industrial complex has this cascading effect on more-than human life across the globe that we will feel for generations to come.

You earlier mentioned the photograph of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, but in addition to images, you also write about novels and performance. Do you see these forms working differently in relation to fighting imperial violence? Perhaps emerging more prominently from your work is a sense of the solidarity and insights of a coalition of artists across different mediums intervening in the world as is and forging new worlds.  

It’s a big question that I'm still grappling with, because I think there's something intangible about what inspires us about art and culture. You know, sometimes we are moved by a particular piece, and only years later do we really identify why. Sometimes it's immediate. Sometimes we're like, oh, I know why. But I think that for me, part of it is its capacity to intervene into the world and make other stories visible and possible. A film that I watched recently that left a deep impact on me was “We Were the Scenery” produced and directed by Cathy Linh Che, Jess X. Snow, and Christopher Radcliffe. The film is about Cathy's parents, who were part of a group of Vietnamese refugees in a refugee camp in the Philippines recruited to be extras on the film “Apocalypse Now,” which is a very infamous, iconic Vietnam War film. The film centers on their experiences as background extras in the infamous napalm scene in “Apocalypse Now,” where a fleet of U.S. fighter jets drop tons of napalm bombs during the war in the backdrop, and in the foreground a colonel proclaims, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” This very militarized and masculinist portrayal of fascination with the violence of napalm has become an iconic and infamous depiction of the war. But “We Were the Scenery” uses that moment as a way to center the background actors and their experiences of how they made life in the refugee camps. What the film does is it takes this iconic moment of violence and turns it around to tell another story about it, that is hidden beneath, that is literally lurking in the blurred background of this soldier speaking about his fantasies of violence. What is in the background is people's stories of refuge that allows us to think, what lurks in the background of political and military violence? How can we use those stories to propel us to think about these larger questions about Vietnamese refugee communities, the military industrial complex, and the way in which military propaganda shapes how people orient themselves to war? It allows us to start asking questions about what we take for granted in the world. And in asking those questions, it gives us space to imagine other kinds of ways of being. 

Do you think, when it comes to narratives told about Asian American history or in Asian American Studies, war and the military-industrial complex are too often also lurking in the background? 

I don’t think that’s the case, actually. I think Asian American studies has been an important field for engaging counternarratives to war and militarism - both with its inception in the anti-war movements of the 1960s as well as really brilliant contemporary scholarship. My work would not be possible without this work coming to be—I am really inspired by the work that Asian American Studies and more broadly, Ethnic Studies scholars have been doing to ask critical questions about the military industrial complex and the war society that we live in. From scholars of the Cold War and Vietnam War to people critically analyzing the contemporary war on terror, anti-war scholars across the field are making really important connections that we need to grapple with. Anti-war scholarship is integral to the work that we're doing and how it can align itself with anti-war movements, both past and present. How do these visions for a world without war drive the kind of scholarship that we do? That driving impetus is important. I do think that we’re moving in a direction that will continually grapple with the multidimensionality of war. That’s what I'm really grateful to see, that we're grappling with the multidimensionality of war. 

Who are the scholars who inspire you in this respect? 

There’s far too many to name, because there are so many great anti-militarist scholars out there doing incredible work. Jodi Kim’s book Ends of Empire, published in 2010, was an important moment in the field for giving us a framework for understanding the Cold War as a structure, not an event. It helped establish a vocabulary for analyzing Asian American cultural production in the aftermath of the Cold War as a vector for understanding the racializing dimension of the war, and I think that opened up a lot of different modes of inquiry for understanding war in our everyday lives. Asian Americanist scholarship on war and militarism is extremely rich, and I’ve learned so much from the work of Simeon Man, Christine Hong, Yen Le Espiritu, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, and so many more. 

I have also learned a lot from my former colleagues at the University of Illinois - Junaid Rana, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Rachel Kuo, and Maryam Kashani who have all really helped me situate a lot of this scholarship on war and militarism within our present conditions of ongoing genocide and violence. And I also have a lot of collaborators and co-thinkers around the intersections of war, science, and technology whom I’m constantly learning from, scholars like Natalia Duong, Aimee Bahng, and Heidi Amin-Hong. And finally, I’d also like to give a quick mention to the Mundane Militarisms collective, which emerged out of one of Sunny Xiang’s graduate student seminars at Yale University. I use this resource all the time in teaching, to show students how war lurks in the background of our everyday life so seamlessly and invisibly. This model of scholarly inquiry is so important in our day and age, as we try to make connections that are not always otherwise apparent. 

Your attention to inquiry as a mode, even unconscious mode, is really striking in your work. For instance, you wrote about the deep imperial logic embedded in the asking of this question, “How can we make war more humane?” I’m curious, what better questions can we dwell with? Is it, how can we demilitarize? How can we forge new worlds? 

Yeah, that question is one, as I write, that imperial militaries and nation-states like to proffer—how can we make war more humane, how can we innovate more precise technologies? Currently, we see the increasing usage of AI targeting in military campaigns to “lessen” collateral damage, and so technology is proffered as offering the potential to make war more humane by “only” eliminating “terrorists” and leaving “civilians” unharmed. But these are all constructed categories, and how they are defined and employed is very much deeply racialized in our current moment of the war on terror. And it also explicitly and implicitly ignores the very stark reality that war, in requiring the elimination of human life, is by nature inhumane. And if we move from that premise, then the question of how to make war more humane becomes obsolete precisely within asymmetrical conditions of imperial warfare and the structural conditions of racism that lead to it in the first place. The question more broadly we could ask is, how do we make society more humane? 

And that would necessitate the elimination of war altogether, the absolute abolition of the military industrial complex that exists to maintain a particular status quo of imperial power, and the prioritizing of human life, environmental life, ecological life, planetary life, and the relations that sustain us.

I’m also wondering about the structure of war in relation to a word like “peace.” There’s this injunction often used against war consciousness, “keep the peace.” I want to understand what undergirds such a phrase, and “peace” in relation to other terms, “liberation,” “revolution,” and “utopias” that may be impossible to fully imagine or define. What are the terms that sit together with, or are dialectically related to, the structure of war?

That's a good question, because I’ve always had conflicting feelings about the word “peace.” It is very much set up in this dichotomous relationship to war as an event - a singular moment in time. If we are not at war, then we are at peace. It is a language that was used in the post-World War II moment to say that times of peace are moments where all segments of society need to be preparing for war, for national security and future war. The sentiment is echoed in scientific advisor Vannevar Bush's document, “Science, The Endless Frontier.” This idea of peace is not necessarily the antithesis of war, but envisioned as a momentary pause, a ceasefire, in a perpetual condition of war. That's why peace can make me feel uneasy, because it is captured in a colonial imperial imaginary rather than an actual break, a break from the condition of a permanent world that we see as inevitable. That’s why I constantly return to the language of abolition and what abolition looks like. Of course, this is very much indebted to prison abolitionists who are imagining a world without police and prisons. Abolition gives us the language and framework to think about demilitarization more wholesale, that doesn't mean imperial nation-states putting down their arms and not fighting in a momentary pause from a permanent condition of violence. The end of war requires a radical reorganization of society, from the economy to industry to education, because society's resources are almost fully oriented towards continual and perpetual war. 

Earlier, you said you see war everywhere you go, and I’m curious where you're calling in from, and where you grew up—in these places, how have you seen war in your daily life?

I’m calling in from Seattle right now, it's where my parents live, but not where I grew up. I was born in Texas, first in Houston, then Austin, and then when I was about 10, I moved to Taipei, Taiwan. There, I attended Taipei American School, an institution originally founded by missionaries on the island who sought an “American” education for their children and the children of US military personnel stationed in Taiwan during the Cold War after the Kuomintang political party fled there. Not a lot of people at the school acknowledge this history or think critically about it, but in my years after leaving high school I often think about what it means for my education to have been routed through a circuit of US militarism - how military occupation laid the foundation for “softer” forms of US influence on the island that persist to this day even in the absence of “formal” US occupation. How did war shape what my education came to be? How does war lurk in the background of my own life, and how is my schooling fundamentally a product of violent war and Indigenous dispossession? These seem like large questions, yet they are relevant to us no matter where we grow up or live - precisely because the US war machine lurks everywhere. And part of my work is trying to think more deeply about these conditions. 

Our personal lives are very much inflected by war. My parents came to the U.S. as a result of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. That is what led to their movement from Vietnam to Texas. And then it was my dad's job in the tech industry that relocated our family to Taipei, Taiwan. This is a perfect example of how two transnational circuits - one of militarized refuge and another of global capitalism - move people across the world but still connected to the web of U.S. empire. These histories of war and mobility have fundamentally shaped my life and also the different privileges I was able to hold, attending an international school somewhere like Taiwan and the kinds of experiences and education I received as a result. War and militarization create these kinds of cascading experiences in how they invade everyday life. War brings about our world in particular ways. 

What about Chicago, where you live most of the year?

Chicago is—I mean, as everyone knows, a heavily policed city. The technologies of policing that are present in Chicago are very much militarized and about tracking the movement of certain populations—particularly for Black, Brown, and immigrant communities. At this very moment, we are witnessing ICE terrorizing our streets and invading our communities - this notion that “inner cities” are an important frontier of war is governing the regime of state violence against communities of color. So when we talk about war as a condition of our everyday life, it's not just about the battlefield, but it's the ways in which technologies of war and militarization are mobilized to police the movement of populations, as well as the increasing dimensions of immigration detention, the deployment of ICE, and the increasing ballooning budgets of ICE to identify the “enemy” and remove them from the country. At the end of the day, this is the prevailing racial logic of war: to identify an “enemy” for elimination. These practices are inherently violent and enabled by these increasing surveillance technologies that are products, particularly of the post-9-11 movement, of the Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Naturalization Services, the creation of ICE. We think these dimensions of society are normal, but are actually emergent in the post 9-11 moment of particularly acute Islamophobia and the policing of black and brown Muslim communities. It's war on the home front, as scholars of the war on terror constantly remind us. But Chicago is also a city with vibrant political movements, both historically and also in the present that have and continue to challenge this regime of oppression.

Seeing war everywhere, does that feel like a weighty experience? How do you hold and move with or through that?

It’s both weighty and I think we bear a responsibility to make it weighty, if that makes sense. War is so normalized in our everyday life, it lurks in the background in ways that most people don’t even notice its omnipresence. To make it weighty - to pause, reflect, comment, and challenge - is the work of untangling this constant presence that invisibly but indelibly shapes our movement through the world. And I think this is a crucial part of the work of demilitarization, to make visible what previously isn’t and to assert that war is not a normal condition of everyday life. And once that becomes our motivating thought, once that becomes our political compass, that gives us space to imagine something anew.

One thing I admire, during this interview, and in your writing, is the emphaticness of your sentences. I'm thinking of the way you closed “Incendiary War,” you said, “If napalm and white phosphorus are deemed exceptional, then that narrative only serves to inadvertently reaffirm a liberal narrative that there even exists an ethical, humane method for an imperialist nation state to wage asymmetrical wars against colonized others. I emphatically assert that there is not.” And then, rowdy applause throughout the conference hall. It feels like there's so much journey and substance behind or anteceding that emphaticness. It’s everything we’ve been talking about this past hour, but my last question is just—what is it like to arrive at this kind of emphatic sentence or emphatic voice? Where does it come from, how does one develop that kind of emphaticness? 

My goal as a researcher and a scholar is to communicate my argument convincingly to an audience, and it always starts with the premise that it's emphatic, because my belief is emphatic. My belief in a world beyond war is emphatic. So I want to communicate that through with emphasis, a confidence in our ideas, but also not just confidence, a steadfast belief that this is possible, that a world without war is possible. The emphaticness that you are ascribing to my work is really a product that I want my work to offer a pathway into believing that something is possible. That is the first step to really envisioning these other worlds, is to actually believe it is possible to live in a world without war and then to find ways to bring that into being—through craft, through language that is about communicating the possibility to believe it is possible. That's one of the things that I strive to do in my writing, in my scholarship, is to leave no doubt that I do believe in this and that I believe that we can actually enact this world.

Winona Guo is a PhD student focused on Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).

Nellie Wong is a poet and activist living in San Francisco. She is the author of five collections of poetry that span from 1977 with the publication of Dreams of Harrison Railroad Park to her most recent collection, Nothing Like Freedom (2024). Wong co-founded and organized several feminist literary collectives, including Unbound Feet (with Kitty Tsui, Merle Woo, Nancy Hom, Genny Lim, and Canyon Sam) and The Last Hoisan Poets (with Genny Lim and Flo Oy Wong). A socialist and a feminist, Wong is also a longtime member of revolutionary socialist organizations, Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party.

I first learned about Nellie Wong at a poetry event in 2019, when, during a Q&A, an older poet lamented how no one seemed to know Nellie’s work. A poet from an earlier generation, Nellie seemed to be at risk of being forgotten, as Asian American poetry becameomes an increasingly prestigious and acclaimed body of work in the 21^st century.

I was one of those uninitiated, so I began to do some research: I bought a used copy of The Death of Long Steam Lady, ordered a DVD of Mitsuye & Nellie, Asian American Poets, and learned what I could about her life as a poet, an organizer, a feminist, and a secretary. All of these roles—poet, feminist, worker—came together in what I would describe as a poetry of lifelong commitment: to living a Third World, feminist, and socialist life, and to writing a form of poetry brought all these identities together.

I met Nellie in January 2023, where she generously invited me into her San Francisco home for an interview. Over hot tea, I spoke with Nellie about how she became a poet and an activist. A few months later, over Zoom, I spoke with Nellie again to continue our conversation about her political development through her involvement with socialist feminist organizations. We also talked about her close comradeship with other Asian American poets-activists like Kitty Tsui and Merle Woo, and her 1983 trip to China with Tillie Olsen.

Tell me how you got into writing poetry. What drew you into poetry in the first place? 

I was working already. I'd been a secretary, an administrative assistant, and an affirmative action analyst when I was working. I went to San Francisco State in the early 1970s, after I’d already worked many years. What got me to go to college finally were a couple of things. My younger sister, Flo [Oy Wong], an artist and poet, said that I should take up writing. I asked, “Why”? She said, “Because you’re kind of funny.” [laughs] “Your newsletters are really funny. You should take up writing.” In those days, we didn’t have computers or phones, so I would write to my siblings to tell them to bring this or that for Thanksgiving or Chinese New Years. 

Flo also said, “you also watch too much TV. You should get off your butt.” [chuckles] “Okay,” I thought, “Maybe I will do that.” 

I signed up for a class at Oakland Adult Evening School. It was on short story writing. The teacher liked what I did, and every week I would raise my hand, I would have something to say, and I was writing. One of the first things I wrote was about my father. I think I wrote it as a parable. At that time, I didn't even know what a parable was. [chuckles] Each week I would write and turn in something. The other students were all adults, and it was only five blocks from where I lived in Oakland. 

I was also working at Bethlehem Steel at the time. At work, there was an educational assistance program. The education assistance program was there to help us to do our jobs better at Bethlehem Steel. So I signed up, and my supervisor okayed all the courses I signed up for. I signed up for Asian American Studies. I signed up for Feminist Studies. I signed up for Creative Writing and English Literature. Here I was, already in my early 30s, and the classes that I took, I could only take at night because I worked full-time. That's what got me started. 

I also signed up for a poetry class. I was very naïve, and I thought, "I'm interested in what poetry is. I don't know anything about it. So I'm going to sign up for this class.” But then, I found out it wasn't to study other poets. It was to write poetry. I was too scared at that time to drop out, because I’d worked so long to get to college. On the first day, the professor said, “People with last names between A and D are going to read next week.” I said, “Read? Read what?” [laughs]. We were supposed to read our own writing! I’d never written anything. 

So I wrote. I was married at that point, and living in an apartment in San Francisco. I told my then-husband, "Leave me alone. I'm going to write a poem." [laughs] That's how I got started. I wrote some poems, and I took one to class the following week. My married name was Balch, B-A-L-C-H, so I was one of the first student poets to read. I read one on Miss Chinatown, USA. It’s called “Drums, Gongs.” It was in my first book, and eventually published in East/West [Chinese American Journal], an English language newspaper that came out of SF Chinatown.  

After I read, the teacher said, “Once you've written angry poems, you should throw them away.” I was just mortified. I wasn't speaking up in those days. I told some other students in my feminist studies classes, and they said, "You don't have to listen to him.” I was just shocked. "What? He's the professor!" Eventually, I showed them my poetry, and then I joined their group at SF State and started getting active and fighting for the inclusion of women and people of color in creative writing and other classes at SF State. I got active, and I joined the creative writing caucus. That's how I got started. I'm glad I mentioned it to my fellow students in the feminist studies classes. A couple of them were social feminists, and that's also how I met the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women at that time.

Your work at Bethlehem Steel, of course, makes it into your poetry. Tell me about how those things came together. 

It started with my late friend and comrade, Karen [Brodine]. She's one of the women I met in my feminist studies classes. We did a workshop in the creative writing caucus, and she said to me, “You have to write about work.” I asked, “Why? I'm only a secretary.” "Nellie,” she insisted, “You have to write about work." That started it. 

I found I had a lot of stories, and the poems started to come out, poems I didn't know were there. I think some of my best pieces are related to my life as a worker, as a woman worker, and being Chinese and a woman of color. Because there was so much racism and sexism that I encountered throughout my whole working life. What was really exciting is that there were all these possibilities opening up for becoming a writer, becoming a poet, that I didn't know [were available to me]. 

And then how did you get involved with Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party? 

Well, that was Karen [Brodine] and another person, Sukey [Wolf]—they were in my feminist studies courses. We got to know each other through the creative writing caucus, and we had started organizing. They were recruiting me, but I didn't know that at the time. I started reading Marx and Engels, and I was invited to go to a meeting that the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, their sister organization, were organizing. On the agenda, I remember, was the subject of divorce. I thought, "What in the hell does that have to do with the left and politics, and such?" That really got me going, thinking about it. Because I was divorced-- no, I wasn't yet, I was still married. 

That was really kind of a kick in the butt to me, and I started understanding and reading more. The reading, the writing, and the activism all started to come together where again, my consciousness—I realized I didn't know a lot of stuff. That is how that all came about, and I began to look at my life as a working person. A lot of what I wrote, I wasn't really aware of what was coming out. I just wrote what I was going through. Do you know my poem, “Toss Up”? 

You call meinto the hall. Standard procedurefor a conference. 

You ask me: 

if we had a fight, whose side would you be on?

His because he is Chinese, or mine because I am a woman?

That came from an actual experience with a supervisor who said that to me. Of course, that's one poem that I’ve memorized because it's short enough. 

Actually, it was several years before I decided that that's what I wanted to do: to be an activist. All the ideas of socialism, Marxism, and the ideas of feminism—all those were a part of entering my body and my brain. That's what happened. 

The topic [of the meeting] also had focused on the late Clara Fraser. She started the Freedom Socialist Party along with some others, when the party broke away from the Socialist Workers Party. Some of the issues were on feminism, on China, on the woman question, as we talk about it in socialist politics. That became a real draw for me and really excited me. I thought, “Maybe I shouldn't just be writing about family, being Chinese American, and being a working woman, et cetera.” That all started to enter into my life with what I wanted to do as a writer. Although I still have never really said, "Oh, you're a writer. You're a poet.” I always think about, "If I say all those things, then there would be too many expectations for me to fulfill those ideas or positions." That's when I began. 

When I joined the Freedom Social Party, I was just really thinking about how I could contribute to making change, and what kind of a society we live in when we have racism, sexism, and class oppression. It all started to gel for me as a place where I wanted to be and where I wanted to work. 

Now, as an older or a more mature person, [chuckles] hopefully, there was more to poetry than just expressing myself. There was a connection to other people of color, to women, to family, whether chosen or not. Those kinds of issues all came up for me. I would say that was what really kicked everything off. Then, of course, my husband was very angry that I was becoming radicalized and socialized, though he appreciated my publishing and getting a few poems out. 

What were some things you were reading or encountering at that time that motivated you to embrace socialism and feminism?

It was really looking at the conditions of women. Radical Women is an organization that still exists and is a sister organization of the FSP.  Reading The Radical Women Manifesto was very instrumental in helping me to think more and to understand historical materialism. I began to learn how these concepts connected to my own life, the life of my communities from which I have come. 

Since I was a feminist, I thought I was unusual, because in the classes at SF State, there weren’t a lot of people of color or women of color. I got very excited when an instructor in Women's Studies introduced a new anthology that came out that had the writings of women of color. Many of them were radical women of color, some of them were lesbian. But there was all this social and political context in their works.

I was very excited and at that time, I still saw myself as a beginning poet and writer. But I still thought, "How come I'm not in that book?" [laughs] I just didn't know why that seemed really important to me, but I also was looking for stories, poetry, and essays on people of color, women, and feminism.

When I began to read a lot of these books and booklets on feminism and socialism, it really began to make sense to me. I'm just not living and growing up as a personal person. [chuckles] I began to develop an understanding of dialectical materialism and how it relates to me and what I was doing. I began to understand all these wars, like what World War II was about, or what happened in the Vietnam War, which got me thinking about the social and political aspects of life that were connected to the personal. Why did I always think that my life was my life, and if something didn't happen, it was my fault? Or if something did happen, I'm somehow responsible? I wasn’t understanding those connections, living as a human being.

One of my experiences as I was beginning to learn through books and activism—there was a bookstore in San Francisco's Chinatown or Manilatown area. I think it was called China Books. I was so curious, I used to go in there and start looking at books. I started talking with one of the owners, and I was interested in what happened with China, because my parents were from China. The China they came from was a small village in Guangzhou or in Canton. I was totally curious and interested, so I began to go to that store and pick up some books.

At that time, I didn't understand what Maoism was, I didn't understand Trotskyism or Stalinism. Freedom Socialist Party also had a lot of documents and books and publications that I began to read and absorb. But I think the key was feminism. That drew me to the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. We were all women who are a little bit older. Not in their late teens or early 20s, but in their 30s and 40s and up. That was something that drew us together, as well as ethnic studies, or women's studies, or LGBTQ [issues] and labor and such. 

I already mentioned that Karen encouraged me to write about work. That was another opening when I began to see. I didn't know what class was at all and so those were part of what I see as my stepping stones into joining and being active. I changed personally, and it was because of the political that I was able to read, understand, examine, analyze, and question everything.

You were most active with FSP in the '80s and '90s. Looking back at those years, a lot of people would characterize them as counter-revolutionary or reactionary times after the Civil Rights Movement. What were some of the struggles you and FSP faced?

For me, I love what we were able to do. It's not like everything is a victory, because it's not easy being a revolutionary feminist, let alone a revolutionary feminist of color. [chuckles] Not to mention being a little older. Because you're going against the current. If I keep on writing and if something gets produced or published, that's of course not the end-all be-all.

But I also see writing as activism. What kind of a country do we really have? Is this the kind of United States that we really want to build? I want to be a part of that change if I can. My work is related so much to seeing the possibilities of a changing world, that we need to build for a society that does not chase after profits or money for military and arms manufacturers.

The whole concept of leadership is a part of what we work on and think about. What is a leader and who is the leader? I can't explain it all in our interview, but leadership is a relationship. Leadership comes with what we think we can do, and the vision that we have for building a society that would eliminate so many of the things if money, profits, and domination weren’t a priority.

I've also been baited for being a red or sticking with the FSP. One time, a friend of mine told me, “Clara Fraser is a racist." I said, "What?" This friend of mine, she was a co-worker at the time, and I said, "You think I would join a movement or an organization that was racist?" She couldn't answer me, and I thought, "Now why would she think Clara was a racist?"

She obviously didn't know the work of Clara Fraser, who's a Jew, whose parents were socialists and union organizers. There are a lot of battles we have to fight, just because we're of the left. Other times when people say, "Oh, you shouldn't join that organization," or, “you should stay away from those women because of what they're doing." I would say, "you know what? I'm one of them."

Then the conversation doesn't go further, because of a lack of time or whatever the circumstances are. Or there's little respect you have of me, because I'm doing something different from what you're doing and what you're thinking. It's about being open, if you can be, to the ideas, to the vision, to the work, and to our global reality.

Even on the left, among socialist groups, we have a lot of differences. But as Trotskyists, we talk about the need for a united front, where we can join and work together. We can raise our own banners, but we have to understand that we share a goal of what we want this movement to be. What are our possibilities, when the neo-fascists come riding into town, or the anti-abortionists come into San Francisco every January? Usually, those who are protesting are small in numbers. There's also a larger question of how the left has to organize. So that's part of what I'm trying to do as a member and activist within the FSP.

I want to go through some of your friendships and collaborations with other Asian American poets as well. We can start with Merle Woo. How did you meet Merle?

Well, I was going to SF State at the time, and I was in a class. Then I had a friend in the class who was taking Merle's class. She was teaching at SF State, and I didn't know her. Because I was only going to school at night, I said, "Oh, I can't take it.” But she was doing a class on Asian American women. I said to my friend Mimi, "Why don't you find out from Merle Woo if I could talk with her or meet her? Because I can't take the class." 

Well, then she brought back a tiny piece of paper, and it had Merle's phone number on it. I called her, and that's what started our friendship and we started collaborating a lot. Then I was in the Women's Caucus in Creative Writing at that time, which became the Women Writers Union at SF State. I introduced her to the caucus, and she met Karen and we all started to do stuff together.

The first time I met Merle was at a reading for my first book. It was Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park. She came with a fellow teacher of hers. I think she also brought her son, Paul, who was only 11. Anyway, we met and that's when I met her. That's how we started our friendship. Then I introduced her to what became the Women Writers’ Union, and she joined it.

We were two women of color, two Asian American women that were the only—No, there was a Black woman. There was a Black woman also involved, but all the other women were white. Many were lesbians, and Merle is a lesbian. It was just fascinating, the encouragement and the push came from women who were radical and women who were gay. 

You've also collaborated a lot with Mitsuye Yamada.

Have you seen the film, Mitsuye and Nellie, Asian American Poets?

Yes, I have.

Oh, good. I'm glad you saw it. That's also connected to SF State. Allie Light [the director] was a teacher. Allie is actually a neighbor of mine. She lives right here in Glen Park. She and her husband [Irving Saraf] were filmmakers. Allie was teaching a class called the Woman as Creative Agent. When I saw the class, I said, "I'm signing up for that." She and this other woman taught the class. That was one of the most exciting things I've ever gone through. We learned to write in dream journals and such…

Allie knew Mitsu. I didn't know Mitsu at that time. I had heard of her, but I didn't really know her. I knew what she had written, and I had gotten her book, Camp Notes. To cut to the chase, Allie talked to both Mitsu and me, and she said, "I'm going to make a film, and I want you guys to be in it." She knew us older Asian American women who were poets and who were feminists. What pushed her towards that was that there was a film festival going on in SF State, and there were films on Black women and white women, but none on Latinos or Latinx, nor on Asian American women. She evidently got the bug from that. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to be in a movie." [laughs]

She didn't really write a script, but she submitted an application for the National Endowment for the Arts. Even before she got the grant, she started filming us. I was living with my then-husband in Oakland in a Victorian that his grandfather built. She started filming me there. That's how the film got started. Then she got the grant, then we went to--which camp was it? Because of Mitsuye’s experiences from the concentration camp when the Japanese Americans were sent to the camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

What do you remember about the very first time meeting Mitsuye? 

Our filming experience together, and the fact that I really liked what she did in her writing—I think that there was that connection. She and her brother, Mike [Yasutake], in particular who was a priest—they were activists and supporting political prisoners, particularly the African American men who were imprisoned. I was getting another opening to what was going on with people of color, and that was all through Mitsu. You know, she's 99 now, I just received a Christmas note from her. We talk now and then, usually through email or a text, but we still have that connection. The filming really brought us together so much closer.

And how did you meet Kitty Tsui?

We formed Unbound Feet, which consisted of Kitty, Canyon Sam, Merle Woo, Nancy Hom, me, Genny Lim. I never knew who started it exactly, but I think we found each other through the community, the movements, and feminism was a strong part of that. We were together for about a year and a half, two years. It wasn't very long, from the late '70s to the early '80s.

What did you do together?

We wrote, and then we shared our writings. We didn't do workshops—well, maybe we did with each other. Then we said, “We have to read this to the community, we want to read our work.” Nancy Hom did this poster, and we did a performance. She's a great graphic artist, a community artist, so this is how we started. That's how I met Kitty and then I got to know Nancy, and that's when I really got to know Genny, Merle, and Canyon as well. 

Do you know of a poet by the name of Stella Nanying Wong? She was a little older. She was very well known in the Chinese American community. When we started though, she wasn't a part of the group. We actually started with Stella, but we weren't Unbound Feet yet. We were just getting together to share our writings and to perform. 

Most of us in Unbound Feet were either Cantonese-speaking or Taishanese-speaking. I’m part of the Last Hoisan Poets, with Genny and my sister Flo. Kitty is Cantonese, she's not Hoisan speaking. Her background is really fascinating. Her grandmother was an opera star. I think she even said that her grandmother was a lesbian, because they never really talked about it. That was just really fascinating. Anyways, that's how Kitty and I worked together for a couple years.

In 1983, you went on a trip to China, the US Women Writers Tour to China. It was right around the time where China was reopening again—

Yes, because China reopened after Nixon in the ‘70s. You want to hear about how I got into that? Sometimes it's just by chance and by luck. 

I knew Tillie Olsen. I think she liked my writing and knew of me, although I didn't really know her well. One day, she called me up. I was already divorced then, and I was living alone. She called me and said, “Nellie, there's going to be a trip to China with the US-China Peoples Friendship Association, and there are no Asian American or Chinese American women on this trip. Can you come?” 

The trip was in 1983, so in 1982, I was still working at Bethlehem Steel. However, we had already been notified that Bethlehem Steel was shutting down. I knew I would be out of a job at the end of December. When Tillie sent that, my first book was out, and that's all I had. I used my severance pay to finance my trip. 

That's what happened there. I was delighted that Tillie called and asked me to go. I said, “Wow, I'll try to go to my father's village,” which I did. [laughs] By luck, I got to go to my dad's village in Guangzhou. It was in the Taishan area around the Pearl River Delta. Our village was the Taishan-speaking village. 

What was that like for you, visiting your dad's village?

It was really exciting. We met members of the Chinese Communist Party. We discussed feminism. The writers' tour had maybe a dozen of us or so. I was the only Chinese American on the tour, but there was also an Indian American poet. The rest were white women, both gay and straight. It was mixed. Alice Walker was a part of that, so was Tillie. And I roomed with Tillie. 

Tillie and I got to know each other more. Also, she had invited me one time to meet Ding Ling, the very, very prolific, well-known woman writer of China, a novelist. I was supposed to meet Ding Ling in San Francisco, when she visited the United States. But Tillie gave me the wrong date. [laughs] I didn't get to meet her. But on this trip, I got to meet her, finally!

Her translated writings inspired me, even though I’m US-born, just in learning more about the feminist women in the movements here and in academia who were publishing her stuff. 

Today you're part of another poetry collective, the Last Hoisan Poets. How did that come about?

That got started, Joe, because we were writing using hoisan-wa in our poetry and other writings. Flo, Genny, and I were reading at the Chinese Historical Society one time a few years ago. However, I got sick and I couldn't go. Flo and Jenny did it, and they both didn't know that their poems had these Hoisan phrases. They clicked on that. Then another time, we were going to do a reading and then this time I wasn't sick. We came up with the name, Last Hoisan Poets. We're not the last, but we just thought it was a good thing to name ourselves. 

We presented at different places, like the Chinese Historical Society and elsewhere, as well as a couple of events at the de Young Museum, where we did a tribute to Hung Liu. She was a well-known Chinese artist, and her background was just fascinating. She came to the United States in the ‘80s. She taught at Mills College, and her paintings are just monumental. She became very well known. Flo knew her and I met her, but Flo knew her well. Just recently, we also did a tribute to the African American artist, Faith Ringgold. We would write poems, especially around their lives and their art, and then we also then include Hoisan phrases.

I've written some poems entirely in Hoisan. I would write it, and I would sound it out phonetically. When I was younger, I thought, "Oh, we don't need to speak the dialect, we're Americans.” But I started to write at night, after I lost the jade heart my mother gave me when I was moving. I'm really mad for having lost that. My mother was already gone, so I decided to tell her [in writing], but what I told her came out in the Hoisan dialect, because that's what we spoke when we were kids. 

What are you reading these days? Do you keep up with much contemporary poetry?

I don't buy every book that's come out, but I think I'm very, very interested in novels and other writings. I read a lot of poetry, but some of the poets that really stick with me have been people like Mahmoud Darwish, a Palestinian poet. I have about a dozen books of his that have been translated into English.

Well, some of the recent books I've read—I really love Min Jin Lee, Pachinko. I've read that two or three times. Did you watch the series on Apple?

No, I don't have Apple TV.

I thought they did a good job. I have read the book several times, and it doesn't do exactly what the book does. It never does, but it's well done.

There are some very well-known Korean actors in the series.

Yes. I'm also a nut on Korean drama. Taiwanese, too. I don't watch Japanese dramas so much, but I'm a huge fan and student of Japanese cinema. I love [Yasujirō] Ozu, [Mikio] Nakuse, and Kenji Mizoguchi. I love film and I watch a lot of international films, but I'm a huge fan of Korean and Chinese dramas.

Do you have any favorite dramas?

Well, Winter Begonia is one I just watched, and it's about the Peking Opera. Winter Begonia might be 40-something episodes. Winter Begonia is just terrific. There are others I like, but I think I'll take up too much time talking about it. [chuckles]

Well, those are all my questions. Nellie, thank you so much for your time today. It was wonderful being in conversation with you.

Joe Wei is an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia. He's currently working on his first book, Asian American Literary Organizing, 1970s to the Present, which investigates the role of Asian American literary organizations—from Kearny Street Workshop to Kundiman—in realizing and sustaining models of literary production outside of mainstream literary institutions. 

Since 2022, the Asian American Literary Archive has been offering courses in Asian American studies and literature to the public. What started as an experiment and proof-of-concept has leapt into ongoing opportunities for working adults to access not only information but expertise around Asian American issues and art. I look forward to announcing an exciting slate of offerings for Winter 2026 in the next few weeks.

However, the intention was never to stop at courses. This is an archive, after all. Naively, I first thought that I could scan some ephemera, put it up on a website, and call it a day. Copyright issues came up immediately and I had to give up the idea of scanning and sharing (and yes, if you’re an archivist who wants to give me advice on all this, I would love to chat).

With the same naïveté, I pivoted those grand plans to a literary journal instead. On this end, the limitations of time, money, and, in the case of out-of-print works, copyright, came into play. I wanted to pay the contributors and the staff even at nominal fees. Given these limitations, after discussing it with assistant editor Winona Guo, it just didn’t align yet to build a magazine that had no budget.

When I was recovering from top surgery, I read interviews with artists voraciously in The Paris Review. I was hungry for artists’ intentions behind their own work; tidbits of who they were as people and also how they found a way to write in their moments in history. Outside of the literary world, I read interviews with academics to better understand their theories and, again, to understand who they were as people, not just theorists. Soon, Winona and I landed on interviews as a genre especially aligned with the Archive’s purpose as a community gateway to Asian American literature.

Introducing Box 68: Interviews in Asian American studies and literature

Box 68 is so named for the year in which the term “Asian American” was coined, the activist movements it came out of, and the boxes of materials one requests from archival collections.

In its first iteration, as a newsletter and archive of interviews with scholars, preservationists, Box 68 will be delivered as special editions of the Asian American Literary Archive newsletter, which you are already subscribed to if you received this directly.

To that end, I am excited to announce that you can read the inaugural interviews right now!

I’m always searching for something, for something larger where there’s no answer, no solution. No one’s even going to talk back to me. There’s no response. It’s literally the void. But I am searching. It’s metaphysical, philosophical, it’s something bigger.

—Poet Victoria Chang on With My Back to the World

I didn't notice the usage of the phrase until you pointed that out. I was thinking about how some of this work, labor intensive work, whether it's from activists on ground or activist storytellers—has a method of messiness. All of that is happening simultaneously, at the same time, because often when we are trying to understand politics—and I mean the ideological work that we do, inside or outside the university—we often are unable to reconcile with contradictions. Certain people think as if politics needs to be pure. Just because one person is supporting one cause, they also have to support, you know, the other X, Y, Z. 

—Scholar Rajorshi Das on Messy Trans and Queer Storytelling

Over the fall/winter season, we be publishing the rest of our initial interviews with archivist and librarian Sine Hwang Jensen, scholar Keva X. Bui, and poet Nellie Wong.

Like with all new things at Asian American Literary Archive, Box 68 is an experiment I intend to grow for sustainable longevity. This marks the first leap for the Archive beyond courses since its inception, and I’m really excited to see what possibilities and connections can come from it in the years ahead.

In solidarity,

Yanyi
Director, Asian American Literary Archive