FEATURE: PiA ALUMNI MAKING A DIFFERENCE

It was 1972 during the peak of the Cultural Revolution when Helen Zia, a senior in Princeton’s first co-ed class, landed in Hong Kong with a grant from Princeton in Asia to complete her thesis on the restructuring of China’s healthcare system. Change permeated the air, not only in the PRC, but also in the United States, where Zia had spent her high school and college years protesting the Vietnam War, fighting for Roe, and collaborating with her peers to establish a center for students of color at Princeton University.

“How do you really use a political philosophy of change—of revolution?” Zia had asked herself. “Back in the sixties and seventies, this is what students talked about,” she says. “We were all about trying to make significant changes in society. It’s kind of like today where people are talking about how to address systemic issues like racism and sexism.”

Zia, along with Bina Venkataraman (Vietnam ‘05) and Edgar Chen (Kazakhstan ‘97), have managed to incorporate PiA’s values of building cross-cultural bridges throughout their careers, whether that’s been through direct AAPI activism like Zia, establishing a news platform for conversations about race like Venkataraman, or applying legal knowledge to combat pandemic-induced hate crimes like Chen.

Although Chen had studied East Asian history at Princeton and worked as a PiA Fellow, it wasn’t until the pandemic that Chen began to see his own Asian American background as a core part of his identity.

“I think the pandemic and the hate crime wave brought into sharp relief that I do have an identity that is not just my schools and my government service,” says Chen. “I have a cultural and ethnic identity as well, and I think it was just a calling—to work in an area combating hate crimes.”

The surge in anti-Asian discrimination began in February 2020 when Asian Americans were scapegoated for causing the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China. In response, organizations like Stop AAPI Hate were swiftly established to track incidents of discrimination, which were only exacerbated by President Trump’s endorsement of the term “China virus.” Then, in March 2021, a white gunman in Atlanta murdered eight people, including six female massage workers of Asian descent.

“I think it was a galvanizing moment, especially for the legal community because, you know, what is happening is discrimination,” says Chen. “That is an issue that has a unique legal role for lawyers.”

In 2020 Chen joined the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), first as the policy director and then as a special advisor. One of his responsibilities was to match victims of hate incidents with pro bono representation from the Alliance for Asian American Justice, a consortium of the nation’s top 90 law firms created to combat anti-Asian crimes.

Though events like the Atlanta shooting provide grounds for prosecution, most reports fall under the category of non-criminal incidents, according to Stop AAPI Hate. For example, victims of racist verbal assault are generally unable to pursue legal action due to the First Amendment. To address issues outside of legal jurisdiction, NAPABA has allied with mental health providers to provide additional support.

This year, NAPABA, whose mission is to promote the interests of both its members in the legal profession as well as the AAPI community at large, backed two pieces of legislation in light of the recent hate crimes: one aimed to destigmatize mental health issues within the AAPI community, and the other aimed to increase Asian American studies in K-12 classrooms. Chen expects that education will help to break down the stereotypes that Asian Americans are both perpetual foreigners and monolithic. He also hopes that the curriculum will help people to see events like the internment of Japanese Americans not only as Asian American history but also as an integral part of the American story at large.

Venkataraman, a science policy expert and the Editor-at-Large at The Boston Globe, also saw a way to leverage her professional background to address social injustices after meeting with Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, in the summer of 2020. After discussing the effects that Boston’s 19th century abolitionist newspapers had on helping the public to imagine a future without slavery, the two decided to launch The Emancipator as part of The Boston Globe to encourage conversations about how to create a more equitable society today.

Venkataraman witnessed the detrimental effects of discrimination during her PiA year in Vietnam where she worked as a public health grant writer and strategist for an HIV/AIDS initiative