When Phitsamay Uy first entered the
classroom 25 years ago, there weren’t many other Asian teachers
around. Now, the professor is giving back by launching a mentoring
network for AAPI teachers who need advice and support. With the help
of a new $50,000 grant from the National
Education Association and her colleagues Katie Li, Jean Wu,
and Yan Yii, Uy’s program has grown to approximately 50 new and
veteran teachers nationwide who meet each month on Zoom to discuss
topics ranging from combating racism and stereotypes at work to how
to be a more inclusive educator. Any teacher or education student
who self identifies as AAPI can join. The goal? To attract more
Asians to the field and give them the tools they need to succeed.
Uy (pronounced
Oy), a Harvard grad and the first refugee from Laos to receive
tenure as an education professor, kicked off the Asian American
Educators Mentorship Program (AAEMP) in 2019 with the help of three
other educators. We spoke to the Associate Professor of Education at
UMass Lowell and co-director of its Center for Asian American
Studies, about how her network also builds confidence, gives
practical advice, and offers a safe space for Asian teachers of
color.
What are some hot topics you discuss in the network?
We noticed that everybody was dealing with microaggressions and
feeling a lack of belonging, and invisibility. One of the things
members love is the community; the sense that they can come to a
space, get feedback, and feel proud to identify as an AAPI. It's
connecting with all of our members and teaching them to be proud.
Your members also get everything from history lessons to
practical day-to-day advice.
We discuss issues such as our Asian American identity, Asian
American history, and every day dilemmas that we face as educators
or as individual teachers. We even role play. One person would say,
“OK, I’m outside in the playground during recess and the kids are
playing COVID tag, and they're making all of the Asians kids say
you’ve got COVID” or “I'm in a faculty meeting, and they’re saying,
‘We really wish we had more diverse teachers, and the Chinese
teacher will say, ‘I'm right here. Don't you see me? And they're
like, ‘Oh, we don't think of you that way.”
How important is it for kids to see teachers who look like
them?
My 13-year-old son goes to school in Lowell, MA. For 12 years, he
only had one Asian teacher, who was a substitute teacher. I only
found out because he's like, “Mom, we had a cool teacher today.” And
I'm like, “Oh, what's cool about her?” He’s like, “She's Asian.” I
asked him what she did differently from other teachers and he said,
“She just knows. She understands.” So she gets him. She’s a person
who looks like him and understands him. In Lowell, 25 percent of the
high school students are Southeast Asians. We’re a quarter of the
population, and our student population is diverse, but the teacher
population is still 80 percent white. That's why we said we need to
try to encourage more Asian American young people to go into
teaching so they can see themselves.
When you layer on race, [as a teacher] dealing with a poor refugee
kid, you need to understand that they and their families might need
language support. There are 4.4 million English language learners.
The largest number of [ELLs] is Spanish, but the number two, three,
and four are all Asian--Chinese, Vietnamese, and then Hmong. For us
in Lowell, it's combined. They have this mentality that if you're
Asian, you're smart and you’re the model minority. What ends up
happening is Asian students who need help and support don't get it.
How do we attract more Asian teachers, especially men?
[Asians tend to] push our kids to become doctors, lawyers,
engineers. Teaching as a profession is not an honored and respected
profession, and it's also not well paid. Also, Asian male community
members are the face of the family so they need to be in powerful,
economically sound positions. Most Hmong families have six to eight
people. Imagine supporting six to eight people on a teacher’s
salary.
Can we change that perception?
We have to change the perception of teachers in general. When COVID
hit, we couldn’t believe how much teachers had to do. And then when
teachers refused to go back to classrooms because of medical
conditions, we started blaming them. Other places like Bermuda pay
their teachers $60,000 right off the bat. They value teachers.
Teachers here are struggling to make ends meet. It’s a systemic
problem.
What’s the benefit of having a mentoring network
only for Asian Americans?
A lot of times people don't understand that being Asian doesn’t mean
we’re the honorary white person. We're all so different. Some
Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders have lower economic outcomes
than some East Asians. So what our network does is it lets them
connect with other people who understand that there's much more
complexity about being an Asian person in a black/white United
States. Some people will say, “You don't understand what it's like
to be oppressed.” And we’re, like, “Really? One of our teachers is a
sansei, third generation, Japanese-American whose parents
were incarcerated [in American internment camps during WWII]. But
people don't know that history. So now our members can clap back and
talk about that. There's so much education of themselves in our
meetings that they’re able to do that. Our members don't get that
from the K-12 system. Because of COVID and because of the anti-Asian
violence, there is the complexity of being racialized in this day
and age. So we provide them with the historical context to
understand the anti-Asian violence and hate--but we also provide the
safe space to explore their identity in that white space.
So there’s a camaraderie among Asian American educators
that’s not otherwise available in the workplace?
In a white space or in a community of color, it’s either black or
brown focused, not Asian focused. We don't have to explain the
feeling of invisibility to one another because we feel it. We don't
have to explain this lack of sense of belonging. We also have a
growing multiracial population where people are half white and half
Japanese or half black and half Khmer. But people have forced you to
choose your identity, which doesn’t allow you to be your whole
multi-ethnic self. So the difference is understanding the nuances of
the world we live in and even understanding the microaggressions,
such as “Oh, you speak English so well!” Well, of course, I speak
English. Whereas if you’re not Asian, you might not get those
comments.
Do you discuss the bamboo ceiling?
Yes, the bamboo ceiling, especially for our veteran teachers, they
get looked over for many leadership positions. People are biased and
say, “Asians don't make good leaders because they’re so quiet.” We
help by asking them, “What do you envision for yourself, and how can
you get there?” We’re very strategic about it.
What’s the goal of your network?
Creating a safe space for teachers to come together to be seen and
heard--and also to just connect as human beings. Some of the younger
students are like, “Oh my God, I've never seen an Asian teacher
before.” During COVID, what ended up happening was we provided
social-emotional support and professional support. We all leaned in,
opened up our classrooms and shared resources and teaching pedagogy.
You launched in 2019, right before the pandemic. Was it a
blessing in disguise?
We realized that during the first year of the pandemic there was a
rise of hate. One of our meetings was in [Boston’s] Chinatown, and
people were not frequenting Chinese places. And so we said, “We need
to support them.” Part of the grant is to connect community agencies
that serve Asian American families and students so they can learn
from each other.
What kind of changes would you
like to see in the teaching profession in the next decade?
I would like to have more Asian teachers, and I would love to have a
more robust Asian American curriculum so that Asian American history
is American history. People should know about the laws that have
been impacted by Asians, like Lau vs.Nichols, a [1974] Supreme Court
decision that required English language support for non-English
speakers. Not many know that Yuri Kochiyama was the one holding
Malcolm X’s head when he was assassinated. Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom is also Asian
American. How do we as a community address the fact that we're so
invisible?
We have been standing up for a long time. It's just that the media
hasn't been covering it. Our vice president [Kamala Harris] being
half Asian is a reason why we've gotten more attention around the
anti-Asian hate and the fact that President Biden just signed into
law the Commission
to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of Asian
Pacific American History and Culture Act at the Smithsonian.
Asians are always the ones that people forget. Unless you have
someone who can advocate at the national level, then you don't see
it and you don't hear it.
Do you wish you had a network like
this when you were starting out?
It brings me to tears when I talk to people who tell me how
wonderful the space is. This is the reason why we helped create this
because it’s the space that I wish that I had when I started my
teacher education program in 1994. At the time, there were two
students of color, one black student and myself as the Asian
student. And the white male professor in our diversity class said,
“You guys are diverse so teach the class.”
Do the participants tell you what
impact the program has had on them?
One of the teachers said she was going to create her own network, so
she ended up taking a leadership role and created a group for
teachers of color for her state. She said, “I feel like you've
provided me with so much support and a structure and a framework, so
I want to do this for other teachers." During COVID, another teacher
said she stood up during Black Lives Matter and confronted people
who thought they were woke, but they were actually being racist
against Asians. She knew the history and language to say we were
oppressed. The first Asians were Filipinos who set foot here in the
1500s. So she was like, “Don't tell me that we haven't been part of
the fabric.” She was able to give incidents of anti-Asian hate and
discrimination from the history books. Another teacher was having
difficulties at school and no one was supporting her. So we
brainstormed with her to explore options, like who can you talk to?
Those are the different ways they felt empowered to step away from
that work experience that was harming them.
It sounds very empowering.
We had a South Asian woman and she said she’d never talked about her
Asian identity. She never thought she was Asian. She thought she was
Indian. She had an ethnic identity, not a racial identity. But then
she realized that people saw her as Asian, and so she's learned to
then self identify as an Asian. She's an older woman who has been
teaching for 30 years, and this was the first time she talked about
her identity.
Your own story is fascinating. I
understand you came to this country as a refugee.
I
am a refugee from the Secret War, where Americans dropped over two
million tons of bombs on Laos. It was the equivalent of a planeload
of bombs dropped on my country every eight minutes for 24 hours, for
nine years. So because of that, we have a quarter of our country
still littered with bombs that have not detonated. Next year is the
50th anniversary of the last bomb that was dropped, which made my
family refugees.
I left when I was four. I was in a refugee
camp in Thailand for two years, and then came here when I was six.
We first settled in Connecticut, then I went to high school in
Vermont, then did my college years in Boston. As a child, I
didn't know about the Secret War. I didn't know I was a refugee. I
thought I was just poor. Then I took this class in my sophomore or
junior year where I read Ronald Takaki’s Strangers From a
Different Shore, which talks about the Secret War. My
professor gave us an assignment to interview our family and to find
out our history, if we were immigrants or refugees. Because of that
course, I didn't want to go into business anymore and wanted to go
into education. If I didn't take that course, I wouldn't even know
that about myself. I wondered, “What else don’t I know?” So I wanted
to go and teach other kids so that they could learn about themselves
and not have to be like me and not know about my identity or my
family history.
I can’t believe your parents never told you.
There was trauma. They had post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
and some families have a culture of silence. They think if I don't
talk about it, I won't inflict the pain on my children. So I had to
learn about this in class.
Are your parents willing to talk about it now?
My father passed away, but he used to be triggered by it. My mom
will tell stories to everyone else, but she still doesn't want to
tell stories to us. She's like, “If I don't tell you, then you won’t
have those memories.” But little did she know that I got triggered
during Trump's administration when they put children in cages. I had
images of us being caged. I was diagnosed as an adult with PTSD, and
I'm working with my therapist now, unraveling some of those
memories.
Where can we learn more about the Secret War?
There is a great website called Legacies of War that I helped create
the curriculum for. It was during the Cold War, and the U.S. was
worried about the domino effect of communist countries. So they
bombed the areas from southern China to Vietnam, saying they were
stopping the military supply to the Vietcong. But in Laos, it's a
Secret War because it broke the Geneva Accords. Laos was not supposed
to be involved in any battles, but the U.S. and France signed off on
it, and that’s why it was kept secret
How did you leave Laos?
My dad helped the U.S. government during the Secret War, so when the
U.S. pulled out, the Laos communist government were killing American
sympathizers. My father had to leave, so he left with my two
brothers first. A month later, my mom bribed a cargo ship captain to
take her, my sisters, and me. He smuggled us across the Mekong River
to Thailand, but we fled without papers. When the Thai military
police asked for our papers, we didn’t have them so they put us into
box cages. That's what I remembered--the images of being put into
this sort of cage box. We stayed there for a couple of months until
there was room in the refugee camp, where we stayed for two years.
To get refugee status is a long arduous process, but thankfully for
us, in 1965 the U.S. passed the Immigration and
Nationality Act, which was a family reunification act. My
uncle was already here in 1978. He reached out to churches, which
helped reunite families, and they were able to get paperwork for us.
Also, one of the colonials that my dad worked for, who didn't go
back to the United States and stayed to volunteer with the Red
Cross, helped connect him with his family. He helped start the
process at the camp in Thailand to connect us to my uncle through a
church, which then brought us over in 1979.
Does your son know this story?
My son’s father is a survivor of the killing fields in Cambodia, and
his mother is a refugee of the Secret War. The majority of the
teachers don't know this, so my son had to educate them. My son
knows about it because I purposely teach him about his history so
that he doesn't have to wonder. It’s so important to know where you
came from and the struggle.
Interview edited for length and
clarity.
