the fighter annalivia starkid chen
written by chelsea whitmore
It was a Friday at Graham Middle School, so there was clear restless excitement about the coming weekend. But beyond the surface glee, there lingered another sentiment, a visible disappointment worn on the young faces. The students dressed in black. It was 2008 and Prop 8 had just passed, eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry. At the center of the event was the young AnnaLivia Chen, just an eighth grader at the time, at the beginning of her activist career. She had organized Black Friday, to mourn the death of equality. The first time I really saw AnnaLivia in action was at the first GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) meeting of my senior year, which she led as president. She was wearing a shirt advertising the blog “Everyone is Gay,” an advice blog with
an emphasis on LGBTQ youth. She talked casually and easily to everyone as the club members, new and old, began to trickle into Mademoiselle Gres’ classroom. As the room started to fill, she and the vice president, David Acuff, talked photo credit to Hillary Eggers
about the purpose of the club and how things worked. She seemed natural if unrehearsed, but somehow able to keep the meeting flowing. The two began by introducing the wellknown acronym “LGBT” in case there was any confusion, playing off each other to keep things going. After some input from the small audience, they added to the acronym- “LGBTQI,” and everyone filled in the words behind the letters, which incidentally are “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual/Transgender, Queer, Questioning, and Intersex. They discussed the different spectrums of identity. They discussed the board games they liked to play after the meetings adjourned. Everyone had fun learning and getting to know each other, led by the charismatic AnnaLivia Chen at the head of the class. If you ask anyone around the Mountain View High
School campus, they are bound to know who AnnaLivia is. From her work to her approachability, her name has across the MVHS community. She’s recently won Homecoming Queen, spoken
at a panel, and is now organizing a school event for the GSA club. AnnaLivia is extremely and uniquely mature, aware, and ambitious. Where others would sit idle, she moves, more irritated by mediocrity than work. When you see her transcript and all her APs and honors classes, you’d think that she has her plate rather full. But she found something to be desired with the AP Lit class offered to Seniors. AnnaLivia didn’t want to be restricted by the AP test, to be taught to the test and what the College Board had decided was the right answer. Where most would muddle through the system and deal with it, AnnaLivia found an opportunityIndependent Study. She didn’t want to waste her time doing something important to her that she found farcical. She is instead doing an Independent Study on literary canon. “The term canon comes from the bible and it’s sort of this idea that there’s a specific set of works that are considered great,” she explains, “Um, so, I have two strands of my studies. One is looking at, sort of, canon formation as a whole and the [other is] American Literary canon.” “I don’t really like saying, ok let’s find the right interpretation that the AP board says is right. I’m much more of an expansive thinker- when I had my ASB (Author Study Project), I had like a ten page flow chart, in addition to a bunch of other smaller ones.” AnnaLivia has, throughout her high school career, been passionate. Even in eighth grade, she was so moved as to start up her own GSA where there was no conversation for LGBT youth. There, she encountered her first struggle with authority. Her principal put up every barrier to prevent a GSA from happening. When discussing it,
AnnaLivia said, “...I still don’t know if she was trying to help us and protect us, or protect herself, or whatever.” Eventually, she managed to get support from Outlet, but “none of the logistics worked out- we weren’t allowed to advertise because she was scared we were going to get bullying, [and I] still don’t know if that’s actually true or not. So, you know, it really ended up being me and a bunch of my friends, but I think what really is important from that whole situation is starting the conversation.” From there, she went on to actively participating in Mountain View High School’s GSA. During sophomore year she was the vice president, and junior and senior year she became president. From that position, she and the GSA held events such as the Day of Silence, Coming Out Day and the Ally Pledge. During her Junior year, she brought two speakers from the “everyone is gay” advice blog, where, for three periods, students would attend their seminar in lieu of English class. There, Kristin Russo and Dannielle Owens-Reid discussed “six things you can do to change the world.” “... they’re little things, like, volunteer, or be kind and smile to people. Stop cyberbullying when you see it-those sorts of things.” In addition to all of the GSA things she has done, she has also spoken at several panels; the STEP (Stanford Teacher Education Program) had one about queer teenagers and how teachers can play a role in their lives positively that she has attended three times now, and a diversity panel for Literature Mountain View that she’s attended twice. On top of that, she has written for the Oracle- the student newspaper for Mountain View High. Speaking of her work there, she
said, “I don’t like writing about things that I’m not passionate about or that I don’t have an interest in, so usually the articles I wrote about had something to do with social justice or equity or something along those lines.” Her confidence, she says, comes from kayaking. But no, AnnaLivia doesn’t do things half-heartedly; it was a 45-day long trip, one that she’s been working up to since she was eleven as part of an outpost program with a YMCA summer camp in Wisconsin. The camp was in Wisconsin, that isthe actual 45-day trip took place in the very very cold Alaskan wilderness. She and five other seventeen year olds braced themselves for the pinnacle of their journey, the climax of a six year long adventure. When I asked her to tell me a story from this extremely long journey, she had one in particular prepared already, because she immediately started in, like a new actor excited to get in their first line. It was necessary to cut out some of the story, but here’s the important parts: “It was like, gale force winds, like, twenty knot winds with gusts even higher, and I like telling this story, not because, you know, the most things happened, but because paddling in waves is a very distinct experience in kayaking for me,” she says, excited, “...Because the thing about waves is that for me it represents confidence, and it represents, you know, as long as you know what you’re doing, and you’re on top of it, you’re aware of your surroundings, you know, ok...” and she starts to simulate the waves with her arms: “...if the wave comes this way I’m gonna sweep it under my belt, I’m going to use my hips to go with the wave, I’m going to brace it. As long as you know, boom, boom,
boom, this is what I’m going to do, it’s really fun and you can really enjoy it and you can do things that before, you’re like- woah that’s really dangerous and I don’t want to do that at all!” “...So this experience is like that, where you really just gain a sense of confidence and competence in yourself, which then you can apply to here, where just, you know,” she says, “I know that- you know, doing ‘everyone is gay,’ or doing an independent study english thing right now, and there’s also been a lot of like admin stuff that I’ve had to deal with like that. It’s not that it’s going to be easy, it’s not that it’s going to be, you know, piece of cake, whatever, but I have the skills that I need, I have the awareness, I have the resources, and that’s what gives me confidence, not...” she pauses momentarily, but she picks up speed again quickly. It was best, I found, to give her a small inkling of a direction and let her go on as she would like. “So I think redefining what that word means [is important], because you know it’s kind of thrown around in our culture and society- ‘You have to have confidence!’ No one really knows that that means! And this trip really sort of gives you exact memories and exact things to pinpoint with all these abstractions.” I had met her that morning of that first interview at the tutorial center at Mountain View, where we both attend. She and I sat at one of the conference rooms. She carried with her, as always, her signature water bottle, covered with stickers and duct tape, peeling and new. She was remarkably accommodating as I fumbled with the digital recorder. When we began, AnnaLivia became animated.
It was unlike anyone I had ever interviewed, who seemed shy, stiff in the face of a microphone. But she was comfortable, keen, ready to answer anything thoroughly, even at eight in the morning. She was passionate. And what I was really interested in was what made her that way. What was the motivator behind the one who was the motivation for so many? She cites a blog called “Everyone is Gay.” “‘Everyone is Gay’ is an advice blog on the Internet which started out quietly on a blogging site called Tumblr. It has since touched many, and one in particular sent in a fan letter. This is fairly typical, but what was unique was how it ended. “I am the unknown. And you are important to me.” The line became popular and the blog held a contest on designing a shirt with the slogan. The winner was an illustration of a silhouetted cityscape, the windows lined with the letters spelling out the words. AnnaLivia owns such a shirt. Whenever she wears it, people always seem to ask what it means, and she would say, “it’s supposed to be interpreted for yourself, whatever it means.” But as the questions persisted, she began to really think about the significance for herself. So she explains to me, almost casually, “Really, what it is, is that, we all are the unknown.” “We all have this dualistic existence where we have the power to help people and to inspire them and to... but we also all need guidance at some point in our lives. and the real catch is, because we’re all unknowns in that dimen-
sion, we don’t necessarily know that those unknowns exist, but we have to know that they do in the back of our minds because- it’s like that definition of integrity, where someone is always watching. Someone is always paying attention to you-even if you don’t realize it.” She ties this motivation in with her GSA philosophy. She says she doesn’t really care if that many people go to the GSA (“I know as a club president i’m not supposed to say that,” she laughs), but rather that people know that it exists. It’s more important to her that the rainbow stickers and pink triangles are around, that the community is accepting, than to have a popular club. It’s true that GSA’s in schools have helped LGBTQ students feel more comfortable. While only 15% of schools reportedly had GSA’s in schools in 2009 (about 3000 total), the number is steadily increasing as support from teachers and administrators go up. The blueprint for
the GSA was created in the late 1980s, when a student with a lesbian parent approached Kevin Jennings, a gay teacher, to form a GayStraight Alliance. Since then, Jennings has created the GLSEN (Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network), which has helped with the creation of GSA’s across the nation. At GLSEN leadership training, teachers and students learn how to hold events like “The Day of Silence” and “Coming Out Day” to raise awareness, like AnnaLivia does. (Caldwell) “...it’s really easy when you’re at Mountain View [High School] to think that everyone is LGBT friendly and open and all of that and we have all these rainbow stickers, ... but at Graham there’s none of that, there’s no safe space, there’s no pink triangles, there’s not even a mention of anything LGBTQ related other than, oh, “that’s so gay,” and “bluh bluh bluh you’re being such a faggot,” AnnaLivia remarks, and it’s astonishing how much it’s true in the world. Violence against LGBT people across the globe is very real- in Brazil from 1997-2007, over 2500 men were murdered for their homosexuality (Mollmann). She continues, “... to start that conversa-
tion was really the important thing for me. And one of the student teachers here at Mountain View, Gerald Smith, is now working at Graham. Naib and I visited her a week, I think, ago, and she’s thinking about starting a GSA again there. So we were working with her on that, and so that’s awesome.” The only uncertainty she seems to have is about her future. She doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do. She’s considered work in politics, but she decided she wasn’t interested in being the candidate- she’d rather work behind the scenes. Becoming a teacher has also been an option; her mom and her mom’s partner are teachers. “I can get really fired up about education reform,” she says, and working on a community level as opposed to global. She’s accepted the fact that she doesn’t really know what she wants to do, career-wise, but she knows that she wants to keep getting involved, doing what she does. She’s definitely interested in going back to Camp Manitowish and leading an expo for the kids, starting again with the one day trips and working up the climb again. In terms of LGBT work in general, she seems frustrated by the fact
that “queer civil rights movement has been kind of hijacked by gay marriage issue.” There are problems that have had their spotlight stolen by the issue, but she says she hopes gay marriage be resolved within a few years, so that other things, such as school safety, workplace/housing security, and immigrant rights for LGBT people can be given attention. AnnaLivia exudes workmanship. She has an absolutely overwhelming resume and a completely full schedule. There’s no wasted timebecause she knows she’s put herself out there for people, for the unknown. “What I care about is that there’s the rainbow stickers and that there’s the events, like Day of Silence, where people know that the safe space is there if they need it, the activism, let’s-do-something group, is there if they want empowerment. And to really just know that there are places where they can be if they need it.”