1 10 91 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/e3b28ca5d3fd96f48cb1435cad5cf783.pdf 96c80aa89c07f819548a41935ffbdf9a PDF Text Text Trent Chen, Feng YingZong, Bae Chang Seong Final Project AAS-POL 307 Professor Christoff SECTION ONE Person interviewed: Nancy Wang Interviewee’s title or position: Social Worker, Dancer, Storyteller Date, time, and length of interview: April 13th, 2018, 04:00 PM EST, 00:00-34:10 Your objective in conducting this interview: To learn about the life and career of famous AsianAmerican social worker, dancer, and storyteller: Nancy Wang. SECTION TWO Conducting an interview on Wang was a bit easy and simpler. There are some of the things we did before conducting this kind of interview on her. First, we had to do a research on her life; the way she lives, her background and the mode of life she is used to. We expounded on the internet research and the sources that are trusted and supplied from the base of her relation. We found that Wang is a lady with respect since her tender age. She had been raised in a family whose parents take mere responsibility and have a lot of work to do, apart from raising their kids. We also found that the character of Wang is a bit more social and responsible. She is used to taking responsibilities each and every time. The busy schedule of her parents makes her not prone to living in a single environment for long-she keeps moving to different schools because �her parents also keep shifting homes. The questions we had for her were connected to the kind of work she wanted, since her background had a persuasive influence too. The interview questions we prepared are below: 1:Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? 2:How has being a woman affected your career? 3:What stories do you try to tell your audience?Do you think your performances are universally relatable? 4:What do you think are the biggest cultural differences between China and the United States? 5:Who are your influences? What inspired you to start a career in the performing arts? 6:What title do you like the most, Storyteller, Dancer, or Playwright? 7:It says on your website’s mission statement that you want to “heal the divides between us”, do you think there has been progress in bringing people together? 8:Additionally, your mission statement also says that you want to “reveal universal truths”. What do you think some of these “truths” are? 9:We know you’re well-traveled, what Korean stories are you familiar and impressed with? 10:Do you think there should be more female storytellers? SECTION THREE 1) Due to the time limit of the interview, we didn’t finish all the questions we want to ask to Nancy Wang; However, on the kind of response and answers we got from her, we had all answers aligning to our research on her. She made clear points that showed that she was a true person who could just lean on mere truth. All the questions we asked went answered and she never hesitated even a bit. She made clear answers which came out exactly the same as the research we had conducted on her earlier, so we can say Yes, we got complete answers to our questions. �2) Our interview was structured because we came prepared with predetermined questions that we asked Mrs. Wang to answer for us. However, once we asked our questions the interview was relatively unstructured. Mrs. Wang even answered questions that we didn't get a chance to formally ask in her responses to questions that we did get to ask. For instance, we wanted to formally ask Mrs. Wang how she met her husband but she ended up telling us how she met him in her response to the first question: “Could you tell us a little about yourself and you career?” 3) We didn’t get a chance to ask probing questions but there were instances throughout the interview where one of us made probing statements. During one section of the interview, Mrs. Wang tells us about her experiences being a first generation Asian American and one of us responds by saying “I’m third generation myself”. This let Mrs. Wang know that we’re listening and also opened a path for further dialogue. Additionally, at a later point in the interview, Mrs. Wang talks about a Korean folktale that contains the lesson to judge people individually. One of us responds by saying, “the mission statement on your website says that you want to reveal universal truths and that definitely seems like a universal truth: to judge people individually and not as groups”. Mrs. Wang agrees with our interpretation of her mission statement and then elaborates on it. 4) The team approach during the interview was quite simple, because we asked only five questions although we prepared about 10 questions. We divided 5 questions into three parts. First, Trent Chen started interview with the question of introducing her and influence of being a woman on her life and career. After that, YingZong Feng and ChangSeong Bae asked some specific questions about her. YingZeong Feng asked the difference of culture between China and USA. ChangSeong Bae asked about the Korean story that Mrs. Wang was familiar and impressed with. Because there is no time to ask another specific questions after that, Trent Chen �ended interview with the questions about her final goal of her career and appreciation. Because interview was not so long and most of her talking was audible, we did not record interview by hand but just record her voice with Skype. 5) Unfortunately, she didn’t mention any article or document to us during the interview, but she did mention her husband Kikuchi when she was talking about her career and working inspiration. She works with her husband and created many kinetic stories. Many of the stories they made focus on the topic of immigration history, Asian Traditional folktales and her own life stories in this country. Nancy and her husband always use their great wisdom and life experience to combine the music, dance, theater and the storytelling together to present for many Asian communities in U.S and audience outside the U.S. SECTION FOUR 00:49 / 34:10 Transcript Summary: Interview with Nancy Wang (Edited for clarity) 00:49 Okay well you know I was born in New Orleans 00:56 Louisiana because my father had just 01:00 been promoted to Consul General he was 01:05 Vice Consul in Chicago and became a 01:07 Consul General for the country of China 01:11 at the time and stationed in New Orleans 01:16 and my mom was a nurse so they both 01:20 had similar values in terms of serving 01:23 the community and my father, as a 01:26 diplomat, was in charge of all the 01:27 Chinese Americans who lived in the south 01:30 and any needs they might have and so I 01:32 was kind of brought up in that kind of 01:35 value system, 01:38 and in philosophy, that one's life is 01:43 about serving others and then especially 01:55 (Inaudible) 02:00 with the communist takeover he did 02:05 not continue with the Kuomintang in 02:09 Taiwan and instead started work 02:12 in the United Nations representing China 02:14 but then he got his citizenship 02:19 and 02:22 moved to Chicago and in Chicago he 02:24 continued to do his civic service in 02:28 Chinatown, and so once again 02:32 it was about how you serve others and so it 02:36 became natural that when I was in 02:39 college I was going to be a nurse, then I 02:41 was going to be a medical technologist, 02:42 and then I finally 02:45 settled on psychology, and that's how I 02:48 �got my Masters in Social Work so 02:51 again, once again that was like, you 02:54 know, that's about serving others, but then I 02:58 worked as a social worker for 03:00 many years but I always not-so03:03 secretly wanted to be a dancer so I 03:06 became a dancer and I finally found a 03:10 teacher out west 03:14 in San Francisco and she was my 03:18 mentor and taught me not only dance but 03:23 theater and choreography and staging 03:27 and I danced in her company and I taught 03:29 for her and so that continued until I 03:35 had a private practice in 03:37 psychotherapy and one of the things 03:41 I'm very proud of and still proud of 03:43 today is that I would do 10-week 03:45 sessions for Asian Americans so that 03:47 they can understand “the Western 03:49 perspective” versus “the eastern 03:51 perspective” and how important it was not 03:53 to see yourself through a Western 03:56 perspective or you would not think very 03:58 highly of yourself or your culture and 04:01 so that was really really important, I've 04:08 written articles, I do workshops, but 04:10 always the dance and theatre 04:13 called me and so that's how I met my 04:16 husband, he was the music director for 04:21 the Asian American theatre and then I 04:24 was a dancer in one of them it was 04:29 called “the Avocado Kid” 04:33 (Inaudible) 04:38 and then we were going to work 04:41 together, (Inaudible) 04:43 how we went from teaching and having the 04:49 first company and first school of 04:52 cooling tongue which is a (Inaudible) 04:54 of Southern Philippines which is 04:58 now a huge phenomena thanks to Robert 05:01 and myself for bringing that to 05:04 California and we, being the people 05:10 we are, community minded and naive at the 05:13 same time, someone wanted to be part of 05:17 our company and we unfortunately let her 05:19 do that against our own good feelings 05:21 and ended up stabbing us in the back and 05:26 taking away that organization but if it 05:29 weren't for that 05:30 we would not have created Ethnohtec 05:33 which has taken us very far in terms 05:36 of touring around the world, throughout 05:40 the country, 05:42 you know performing for Clinton's and 05:45 then Obama's inaugural celebrations and 05:49 it's been really an honor to do this 05:51 work because folktales have a built-in 05:57 value system that they teach, so it really 06:03 spoke to us in terms of not only the art 06:07 and the form that we created which is a 06:11 very stylized unique way of telling a 06:15 story, we use movement, and gesture, and 06:17 music, and the spoken word, but also it 06:20 had those values already in it, that 06:22 we could impart to 06:27 people that still need to know 06:29 about and learn about in terms of living 06:32 a good life again, and be at the same 06:37 time entertaining, so that became our big 06:43 way of performing for thousands of 06:46 people, so that's what we still �06:50 do and now we've gone on to do 06:55 personal stories, I've written the story 06:57 of an atom bomb survivor and his 07:02 journey from revenge and hatred and rage 07:06 to forgiveness and reconciliation, I've 07:09 also written a story about my Chinese 07:11 mother that's called “Bittersweet” 07:15 and Peggy knows, she's interviewed 07:19 my mom, and my grandma, 07:21 and also the most recent one is a 07:25 piece called “Red Altar” which goes back 07:27 to 1850 when my first family members 07:32 came to this country on a junk boat, they 07:35 were just teenagers, they crashed into 07:37 Carmel Bay and started the fishing 07:39 industry there 07:42 and they passed San Francisco and 07:45 never got there and that's on my 07:49 mother's side, and 07:52 it's all through the women so that piece 07:56 is really about immigration and racism 07:59 and legal discrimination that was going 08:01 on in the late 1800s and 1900s and how 08:07 the Chinese had to leave early and did 08:12 successfully reinvent themselves each 08:15 time a new law was passed such as the 08:18 “Chinese cannot fish during the day” and 08:20 the “Chinese cannot fish offshore”, no more 08:24 drying fish so that it kept constantly 08:27 trying to make the Chinese 08:33 leave to Asia, and we didn't leave, so 08:38 that's why I'm still here today, I'm here 08:40 today because we succeeded, it was, you 08:44 know, pretty horrible but still we 08:46 succeeded, and that's how it happened, 08:54 generations in our family in America 09:04 (Inaudible) 09:10 me neither, it's really bad 09:41 well, you know, I think we're gonna dance, 09:49 I mean, in a dance company it'll be 09:52 mostly women it's hard to get men so I 09:56 don't think actually being a woman has 09:58 made too much of a problem, same with 10:01 social work, mostly at the time it was 10:04 women there were few men and you know 10:06 not that I ever wanted to run a 10:07 department but it would always be the 10:09 men who were hired to to be the 10:12 department head and not women but 10:15 that didn't affect me because I never 10:17 wanted to be you know doing that, I think 10:21 women were 10:25 there I never had a hard time and then, 10:31 let me think, in psychotherapy it's the 10:36 same thing, it's a lot of female 10:38 therapists and also at the time there 10:41 were very few Asian therapists so I 10:46 didn't have a hard time with that, 10:48 I also, let me think 10:53 I will say that as we have been doing 10:59 storytelling since 1987 11:03 we pretty quickly became 11:05 nationally known storytellers and yet I 11:09 can walk down the street at a festival 11:11 where everyone, you know, 11:14 knows each other sort of you know and 11:16 and we're on the stage but they 11:19 don't know me unless I'm with my husband 11:23 so I don't know if he’s more 11:28 recognizable or what, but you know it 11:35 really has an effect, I mean I'll pick it �11:36 up when they say Robert and his wife 11:38 rather than Nancy and her husband but I 11:45 think the only way that it has 11:52 affected me is that, 11:57 I don't know if this is because 11:58 I'm chinese-american, and a 12:02 minority (Inaudible) 12:06 or because I'm 12:10 a female that I wasn't always the first 12:15 to speak up or even if something 12:17 happened I wasn't the one to speak up, I 12:20 always held myself back but 12:23 I think that's a female thing, but 12:26 it's also probably an Asian thing 12:28 because we're more of a collective 12:30 orientation, so there are ways that we 12:34 kind of check with each other to see who 12:36 wants to talk, rather 12:38 than the European American way which is 12:41 to just immediately raise your hand 12:43 because you know you're right to do that 12:45 and usually first you 12:47 know, they're the first out the door and 12:49 first in the door, you know I don't 12:54 know because it's what they call whether 12:56 it's a new word now where you, 13:00 I can't think of the name when you're 13:03 (Inaudible) 13:04 trans something-or-other 13:06 you know crossover, you know is it.. 13:09 because there's stuff that goes 13:11 on as a female, there’s stuff that goes on as 13:14 a minority, just as an ethnic group of 13:17 color, and then there's ageism, 13:20 and like all these 13:22 ways that they criss cross each other 13:24 and you don't know which is 13:28 affecting what.. thank you, yes.. that's the 13:34 word, so I don't know if it’s just being a 13:39 female because my mother was pretty 13:41 outspoken, it used to embarrass the hell 13:42 out of us when we were young but I 13:46 do that myself now and my daughter's 13:51 learning to do, I don't know, you know 13:55 Japanese are more implosive and Chinese are 13:57 more explosive so here we are in San 14:02 Francisco if I was living maybe in 14:05 Kansas City or I was still in New 14:08 Orleans or if I lived in Florida or 14:10 Nebraska it would be very different 14:14 because in San Francisco, the people of 14:17 color are the majority, so it really 14:21 makes a difference in terms of how 14:26 comfortable we become because everywhere 14:29 we look we're there, 14:32 which is very different growing up in 14:34 New Orleans, in Chicago, and then going to 14:36 college and graduate school in Wisconsin 14:41 but it was definitely something that I 14:44 had to learn having come from New 14:49 Orleans, Chicago, 14:50 Wisconsin, once I got here I learned to be 14:55 comfortable in my skin as a person of 14:57 color, instead of wanting to be white 15:00 like everyone else so I don't know so 15:04 much of being a female, I mean being a 15:07 second daughter did make a difference, 15:10 my sister was much more you know I was 15:13 always my sister's younger sister my 15:15 brothers younger sister so 15:18 �so you know it's hard to 15:20 say sibling position, gender, ethnic 15:27 group, age... 15:52 Yes, you want to know what 15:58 the difference is? 15:59 Oh, huge difference, 16:04 China (Inaudible) 16:06 for so long was not open to the rest 16:11 of the world so you've got to maintain 16:13 and contain your beautiful philosophy 16:17 and your cultural behaviors and you 16:23 know respecting elders 16:26 although the Revolution kind of 16:30 did that one so the difference is here I 16:35 think in China the 16:38 Chinese are more comfortable in their 16:40 own skin 16:41 here the Chinese were not 16:43 comfortable in their own skin, and it 16:47 still goes on today because even the 16:50 young people coming up they have the 16:52 same issues as I did when I was young 16:55 and that was decades ago they 16:59 still have the issue of not feeling 17:04 they are being heard or that people 17:09 keep coming up to them and asking them 17:11 “where are you from?” 17:13 I mean I heard that, “oh, your 17:15 English is so good” I never could 17:18 understand that because it was the only 17:19 language I knew, and I was born here but 17:21 they didn't (Inaudible) 17:24 to hell 17:24 you know European Americans just assumed 17:27 that you are from another country 17:30 that we're not Americans so we always 17:32 feel like we are outside of the 17:36 mainstream whereas in China you are the 17:40 mainstream, so I think you're more 17:43 comfortable in your skin and you have 17:45 issues about other things 17:48 but in America we have our own issues, 17:50 I think the other thing 17:56 is that Chinese 17:58 and I think it probably goes for 18:00 Japanese and Koreans and everyone, that 18:03 you don't realize how much you are still 18:05 of your ethnic culture because you no 18:09 longer have context for it, or words for 18:12 it, I get so lost in translation I mean 18:16 as it goes down from generation to 18:17 generation we lose what it's all about, 18:22 so for example, my parents would 18:25 always say “oh you know no she's not 18:29 smart, she 18:32 could be better, like she should be more..” 18:34 like, shut up. 18:35 and I know that happens in 18:38 China but it still happens here but we 18:40 don't understand it because we hear our 18:43 counterparts in the European culture 18:46 saying about their children and 18:49 how wonderful they are, they do this and 18:51 they do that at all ages, so what about 18:53 you, so cute and we never heard that 18:56 and there's a reason for that, there's a 18:59 cultural reason for that, but even my 19:02 mother probably didn't know it as a 19:04 fourth generation, maybe my grandma knew 19:08 as a third generation but I don't know 19:10 that for sure, 19:12 �but maybe more so because she doesn't 19:15 even know English that well she still 19:18 lived in her little fishing village and 19:20 then in San Francisco Chinatown all her 19:22 life so the culture was still intact, 19:27 I think once we're here for many 19:30 generations that whole comparison that 19:36 you can't help make about who you are, 19:38 about how they are, and how they're 19:43 so much more confident that we 19:46 seem so much (inaudible) but it's not 19:48 because 19:52 that we’re less than them, although we will 19:54 interpret it that way because we have a 19:57 Western perspective, oh she says 19:59 she's stupid, she doesn't know what to 20:05 say but really it's because we've been 20:07 brought up not to speak out, 20:11 in Japanese 20:16 there's a saying that “the nail that 20:18 sticks up is the one that gets pounded 20:20 down” so we were taught that in a 20:23 collective you don't try and make 20:24 yourself better, it doesn't mean you 20:26 aren't competitive, but there's a 20:29 humility about it that's not in the 20:32 European American culture, humility does 20:35 not exist that way so it's very easy to 20:38 start looking down at yourself, 20:41 whereas in China that wouldn't happen so 20:44 we still have our own culture but we 20:48 have no name for it unless you 20:50 study about it 20:53 but, you know I think that's 20:57 what you mean in terms of 20:58 what it is to be Asian 21:02 and Chinese in America versus Chinese in 21:04 China (Inaudible) 21:41 one of our very first stories from 21:44 Korea was called: “the man who 21:47 planted onions”, I don't know if you've 21:49 heard it before, 22:03 that's one of my favorite ones, it's 22:05 about a time and a place when people did 22:10 not see people as people but people saw 22:12 people as cows and so people would get 22:17 confused and asked “is this a 22:19 person or a cow” and so sometimes they 22:21 would end up eating each other, 22:25 do you know that story, it's a 22:37 Buddhist story but what happened was 22:41 this one man ended up eating his own 22:43 brother and so he was so upset that he 22:46 decided to travel around the country 22:48 looking for a cure, but no matter 22:52 where he went people still saw people as 22:54 cows and not people as people, 22:56 until one day he met 22:59 an old man 23:00 and asked the old man 23:04 “where are you from” and “where are you 23:05 going” and he realized “huh, you see me as 23:07 a man?” and so he said “well of course” 23:11 and he said “well how did you do that?” 23:14 (Inaudible) 23:16 and that was before we discovered a 23:20 wonderful treat with onions, he asked, 23:21 "what are 23:26 onions?”, so the woman explained to him 23:30 what onions are and he takes the seeds back 23:32 home, he plants them and he goes to tell 23:35 �all his old friends who good news but 23:36 they still saw him as a 23:39 cow so we ended up eating those 23:40 accountable, then after a while I 23:43 realized what the old (Inaudible) 23:45 another they know his harvest come up 23:47 they began to eat onions and from that 23:49 point on people now see people as people, 23:54 so that's an origin which is sort from 23:58 Korea, yeah they think well because we do 24:11 it a little bit with humor, 24:13 you know the point is that, 24:17 I think the end goes, no matter what 24:26 always eat your meat so now 24:32 people see people as people and cows are 24:35 stir fried with onions but Bill 24:41 do not take this for granted so there 24:44 are some people who still see people as 24:46 just a piece of piece of meat, 24:48 so you know it's what we've taken and 24:51 made the message in the story, “not 24:57 to see people as just a piece 24:59 of meat” and don't treat people like 25:01 they're just a piece of meat, that you 25:04 know that we are people of heart and 25:11 soul and value, and be kind to each other, 25:15 people like the journey at first 25:19 they're a little like, “what? you're 25:21 telling children about eating people?” but 25:24 by the end it's fine, and actually kids 25:27 love it, 25:29 teachers 25:32 get it at the end, so you know 25:59 folk tales have that already, but 26:02 you have to sometimes read a folk 26:04 tale that's been written by missionaries, 26:05 but thank goodness they did do it 26:08 because it might have been lost by now, 26:10 but still they are doing it from their 26:12 perspective a lot of times you have to 26:13 read several of the same one and then 26:16 try and make sure that you get the 26:20 essence of it and then you find the 26:22 message, and so yeah 26:25 so we do that with all our folktales and 26:28 find really wonderful ways of imparting 26:32 messages that are universal, 26:58 I've written the story, the 27:04 red altar of my, you know the fishing 27:08 villages in Monterey 27:09 started in 1850, so I've written a book, 27:12 there's one chapter that I want to 27:13 insert a small still doing that about, 27:16 what was going on in China that there 27:19 were so many people willing to leave and 27:23 it was you know there was a plague, and 27:25 there was a drought, and famine, and 27:29 Taiping rebels and so I 27:32 wanted to get some context to that but 27:35 yeah I want to finish that book, I want 27:36 it to be in all the schools, 27:39 I want it to even become a movie, 27:41 I just need our history to be 27:44 out there, that we've been here in this 27:47 country a long time, and it's a bad time, 27:50 you see me as an American, and so I want 27:54 that done, and I just got a grant to do 27:56 my grandfather's story which is another 27:58 story of how this man comes over from 28:01 China at age 12 and he becomes this 28:05 amazing kingpin of very high-class, 28:11 �Chinese restaurants in Chicago 28:14 catered to the European American 28:18 carriage trade, he died a very 28:21 mysterious death, he fell down his own 28:23 elevator shaft and people think maybe he 28:26 was pushed, (Inaudible) 28:28 and who knows what wasn't 28:31 happening, 28:31 so I'm gonna be doing that story and 28:36 maybe that'll be when I stop, well I have 28:41 to then perform it so yeah so there are 28:45 always things, make sure that all 28:47 our focus should be children's books so 28:50 that might be something that 28:54 once we don't perform them 28:56 there's not much that we can really 28:58 concentrate on, and really you 29:12 should see, it's very telling you 29:15 you can't come to it unless you're 8 29:17 years and older so it's mostly adults 29:19 and adults absolutely still love these 29:23 folktales because they're really not 29:25 just for children, 29:29 is the children love but it's the deeper 29:31 messages and the metaphors that the 29:33 adults get that have much more meaning 29:38 you turn 29:51 on television it's really pretty 29:53 disgusting, 30:01 it's really sad, yeah, we do this one 30:05 piece that’s called “monkey moon” and 30:07 it's about following our 30:10 “following foolish leaders” and we used to do Notes: 30:14 it for Bush now we definitely do it for 30:19 Mr. Trump, yeah we'll probably be 30:28 doing a lot next as we have 30:34 a mayor mayoral election in November, 30:38 one we have new Congresspeople, oh 30:43 don't follow foolish leaders, vote, 30:51 this is exciting that you got guys are 30:53 there talking to females about how 30:57 it is to be a female, 31:09 (Inaudible) 31:24 yeah what are you gonna do with that?, are 31:27 you all going to be teaching 31:29 Asian-American Studies? Because 32:01 women still make less than men at the 32:03 same job and in China they abandoned 32:08 all their little girls, that's still 32:12 happening and 32:15 the girls are 32:16 always much less appreciated in Chinese 32:19 families, 32:26 but my mother was a second daughter so 32:28 she made sure I didn't become a typical 32:34 second daughter, there's still a stigma 32:40 in many cultures 32:43 which I could 32:47 never understand because without us how 32:48 could you have your son? 33:14 Thank you, yes, 33:36 definitely will always always be our 33:40 mission, 33:49 yep, have a good weekend. Thank-you, bye. /END �Tell us a little about yourself and your career? · Born: New Orleans, Louisiana · Father – Chinese diplomat – instilled values of serving others · In College, going to be a nurse, natural part off serving others, master’s in social work · Secretly wanted to be a dancer · Mentor in San Francisco taught her dance, led to a private practice in psychotherapy. put aside some time to work on Chinese cultural perspectives. · Husband was a director of an Asian American theater. Started working together. Eventually created Ethnohtec. · Folktales have built-in values. Good source of storytelling and at the same time entertaining. · When Mrs. Wang talked about her experiences as a second generation Asian American, I reaffirmed that I could relate by telling her that I was third generation Asian American. How has being a woman affected your career and how has that played a role in how you have performed and written your plays? · Being a woman hasn’t made too much of a problem. Mentions how head department positions usually go to men. “Never had a hard time” · A lot of female therapists but few Asian therapists.~dhkt · Nationally known, but most people don’t recognize her unless she’s with her husband. 11:43 “Robert and his Wife, rather than Nancy and her husband”. · Only way it has affected her: She wasn’t always the first to speak up about things. Always held herself back. Possibly a female and Asian thing. Stems from the collective values of Asian cultures opposed to European/American individualistic values. Talks about intersectionality but couldn’t think of the word until one of us mentioned it. Considers this a big part of her experiences. Living in a majority POC city (San Fran) has probably played a part in how she has experienced living as a female poc. What do you think are the biggest cultural differences between China and the United States? - Feng · In China, the Chinese are more comfortable in their own skin compared to ChineseAmericans. Here, they get questions like “where are you from?”, “your English is so good”, 17:00. It’s still assumed that Asians aren’t American. Also, in America, Asians aren’t the mainstream. Europeans brag about their children Whereas Asians don’t. This is because Asians are brought up “not to speak out”, taught in a collective you don’t want to be better than others, “humility about it”. Not as prevalent in European cultures. What Korean stories are you familiar and impressed with? - Bae �· “the man who planted onions” – about a time and place when people didn’t see people as people but people as cows. Buddhist story. Judge people as individuals not as pieces of meat. “That definitely seems to be a lesson that you allude to on your website, you talk about your mission statement and how you want to explore universal truths, that definitely seems like a universal truth: to judge people individually and not groups, like you said.” We appreciate your time talking to us, Mrs. Wang, one last question, as far as your career goes are there still things that you want to complete, stories you still want to tell, plays you still want to write? · Yes, a story about what was going on in China that made people want to leave in the 1950s. Wants it to be in schools, become a movie. “There’s always things”. Adults still love folktales. Adults get the deeper messages. · And once again they reveal universal truths that need to be revealed every once in a while. · Definitely, “you turn on the tv and it’s really sad”. We can’t follow foolish leaders *alludes to Trump* “Vote”. This is exciting that you have guys in a class around women” “Are you guys gonna be teaching Asian American studies?” · It’s been 33 minutes, we appreciate the time, Professor Christoff appreciates it, I hope you continue trying to “heal the divides between us”. You have a good weekend, bye. SECTION 5 Interviewing her, one of the interesting aspects was that being a woman did not affect her life unlike anticipation. In the interview, she said that “I do not think actually being a woman has made too much of a problem neither in a dance company nor in a social work.” This is because in a dance company, most of the members were women and it was hard to get men. When it comes to social work, although most of the department heads were men, Nancy Wang said that it did not affect her because she did not want to do that. Also, when she worked as psychotherapist, she did not have any disadvantage by the reason of being a woman, because there was a lot of female therapist at that time. Only way she was affected by her gender was that people do not know her unless she is with her husband. Mrs. Wang said that she held herself back and that it may be a female thing. But overall, it seemed that being a woman did not have �an influence on her life. So, it was interesting aspect but it was not useful to figure out U.S women and Asian relations through her. Another interesting aspect was that she paid attention to human-centered issues as a storyteller. In the interview, she said that Folktales have a built-in value system that they teach, so it is good resource of storytelling and at the same time of entertaining. Mrs. Wang said that she wanted people to learn about living a good life through the stories. Also, we asked her about Korean stories that she was the most impressed by, because we found that Ethnotec has an exploring program to Korea and China to learn about their folktales. The Korean folktale she impressed by was about a person who planted onions. The story is that once upon a time, in a village, people saw people as a cow so they ate each other. One man in this country who ended up eating his brother was so upset that he decided to leave his village. Traveling around the country, he found a village where people saw each other as people, so he asked an old man in this village how they did not eat each other. The old man said that onion made them see each other as people. So, the man brought onion to his village and made people harvest it. Even though he ended up being eaten by other people, after eating onion, people start to see each other as people, not cow. Mrs. Wang said that this story can be inappropriate for kids because it included cannibalism, but she was impressed by this story. This is because this story had a message that people should not see each other as a piece of meat, that is, a method for something but see each other as people themselves. Considering these aspect, we were able to find that she focused on human-centered stories and well-being life. She told us a lot of things within just thirty minutes including her life, her career, her life as a female, and her final goal. Her story was very interesting, so there were little things to ask more about her. But if choosing just one thing we wanted to ask was her thinking about the �difference between western and east folktales. Because western and eastern culture has a lot of differences, so their folktales also have some differences. When it comes to other groups’ presentation, the most interesting presentation was about Elaine H Kim. According to EunJeong’s group, she was born in New York in 1942 and she was Korean American. The interesting and useful aspect of her was that Chinese and Japanese who she met in California and Hawaii were protesting the United States in Korean War. This is because U.S had a big bomb that can kill most of the population of Busan, the second biggest Korean city, and Philippines in Korean War. The reason why this was interesting was that Asian, especially Korean usually focus on their situation in Korean War, so most of Korean do not know that there was protests against Korean War in U.S. Moreover, it was interesting that Japanese and Chinese in U.S also protested against Korean War. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180413_nwang_doc_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chen, Trent YingZong, Feng Chang Seong, Bae Wang, Nancy Title A name given to the resource Nancy Wang Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-13 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women’s contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library’s digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women’s social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/6b324366a6cd5b6151a2546f1aa7d633.pdf 64f2f3655e11205ed9dd58240ef63d0e PDF Text Text Melissa Yanfen Huang & Tenzin Kunsel AAS 307 Final project 05/01/18 SECTION ONE (5 points) Person interviewed: Nancy Yao Maasbach Interviewee’s title or position: President of Museum of Chinese American (MOCA) Date, time, and length of interview: April 10, 2018 at 2:00 PM. Length of interview: 1 hr 3 minutes. Your objective in conducting this interview: To learn and understand the role of Nancy Yao Maasbach as an influential woman in the U.S-Asian relations and how her enriched experience in different Chinese communities shaped her goals as the president of MOCA. SECTION TWO (10 points) Description of the pre-interview research (What did you find out prior to the interview about the person and/or place with which she is affiliated? How did you prepare for the interview?) List your interview questions. Before the interview, we searched the name ‘Nancy Yao Maasbach’ on Google, in hopes of finding out more information about her. We read her biography on the MOCA website, which gave us a general idea about her accomplishments in life and experiences she had prior taking the role as the president of MOCA. We learned that she was the perfect representation of the U.SAsian relations as she had many years of experience both living and working in Chinese communities. Then, we moved on to her linkedin account to see her education background and professional experience. We found out that she had attended Hunter College High School and moved on to Occidental College where she earned her Bachelor's in Diplomacy and World �Affairs. Then, she moved onto Yale University where she received her Master of Business Administration from the Yale School of Management. During her undergraduate years, she was involved in research in China studies, which most likely gave her the exposure to the field that she was truly interested in. She moved on to working overseas where she was constantly involved in different Asian communities. After this in depth pre-interview research, we could not wait to find out more about her and how her experiences shaped her as the influential woman she is today. In order to prepare for the interview, Melissa and I decided to first check if our laptop was functioning properly to avoid any technical difficulties while conducting the interview. After checking, we agreed to equally split the questions that we were going to ask. Thus, Melissa asked the first 8 questions and I asked the remaining 7 questions on our list. After splitting the questions, we practiced our own parts on our own. Later, we came together and did a quick rundown of what our actual interview would run like. While doing the rundown, there were times where Melissa and I would pause and not know what to say. During those moments, we agreed to exchange encouraging words to prevent awkward silence when conducting the interview. This strategy allowed for our actual interview to run smoothly without any confusion among us, and the interviewee. Interview questions: 1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Ethnicity, education, languages you can speak, hobbies,etc. 2. How was your childhood like growing up in New York City as Asian American? 3. Did your childhood have an impact on your professional career? 4. Were you the first one ever to attend college in your family? �5. How was your college experience? 6. How did your college experience shape you into who you are today? 7. Do you believe your major/minor played an important role in becoming the President of MOCA? 8. Why did you want to take that major/minor? 9. Was there ever a time where you were in denial of your Asian ethnicity? 10. Have you ever been treated differently as a woman with Asian background in the professional field? 11. Did this apply into some of your professional pursuits you’ve taken such as in Goldman Sachs? 12. Can you describe your experience working in Hong Kong after you left Goldman Sachs? 13. What were some of the challenges you faced while transitioning? 14. Now that you are the President of MOCA, what are some future goals that you would like to accomplish for MOCA and the greater Asian community? 15. Is there anything else that you would like to add? SECTION THREE (10 points; 2 points each) 1. Did you get complete answers to your questions? Explain We got complete answers to most of our questions. We started off the interview Skype call by asking her to “Tell us a little bit about yourself, including your ethnicity, education”, which was an open ended question. From this question, she gave us a very thorough response. She told us about growing up in NYC where she faced racism as a young girl and went on to other topics from there. Since she was very well spoken and provided us with a lot of information, she even answered some of the questions we had on our question list as she was �telling us about her experiences growing up. There was one question that we felt she did not fully understand, which was when we asked her “Have you ever been treated differently as a woman with Asian background in the professional field?”. In the process of answering this question, she had to pause a few times to think. She told us about some of the story of her ‘cheating the system’ by not paying for metrocard fare when she would go on the subway with her father. She felt that it was wrong and confronted her father about it, but her father saw it as her being rebellious because “no one was looking” anyways. We felt that her story related to another question we asked her earlier, which was related to her being in denial because of her Asian ethnicity. Though she did carry on to tell us that there were circumstances where men would tell her inappropriate things at the professional workfield, we were looking forward to find out if she faced any discriminties working as an Asian American woman. We felt that she could add on more information to it. 2. Was your interview structured, unstructured, or mixed? Explain Before conducting the interview, Melissa and I thought the interview would be structured since we had practiced earlier before the interview. However after interviewing Miss Nancy, the the interview turned out to be a mixed interview. Melissa and I agreed that it was a mixed interview because Miss Nancy was able to provide answers to questions that were asked, and also gave additional information which answered some of our other questions that were yet to be asked. This prompted us to formulate and ask follow-up questions on spot, and also actively listen. These follow up questions paved the way for the next set of questions that were yet to be answered, and it also helped guide our conversation. 3. What probing questions did you use? Explain �Many probing question ranging from Miss Nancy’s ethnicity, childhood growing up in Flushing, Queens, her college and work experiences, to her current position as the president of Museum of Chinese in America were asked. Of them, we asked Miss Nancy, “Can you describe your experience working in Hong Kong after you left Goldman Sachs? What were some of the challenges you faced while transitioning?”. When asked about her experience in Hong Kong working for Goldman Sachs, and the challenges she encountered after quitting her job and making the new transition, Miss Nancy answered saying that while living abroad, “you have a lot more time by yourself...to observe and process” things. After discussing about the “alone time” that Miss Nancy had while working in Hong Kong, Miss Nancy connected it back to her time working in Goldman Sachs where she felt like she had to “prove” herself. Moreover, she wished that she was more mature at the time. These were good probing questions to ask because we were able to truly understand her motive behind why she decided to quit her job at Goldman Sachs, and how she was able to recover and find herself during the “alone time” she had. Overall, her intriguing responses truly influenced the course of our interview and the follow up questions that we asked after. 4. Explain your team approach. That is, who did what? Our team approach was by splitting up the work into half between Tenzin and Melissa. Melissa met with Professor Christoff to obtain interviewee’s contact information and confirmed the interview letter that was sent to the interviewee afterward. Then, Melissa reached out to Nancy Yao Maasbach and maintained communication with the interviewee via email while Tenzin sent out email reminders to the interviewee before our official interview on 4/10/18. For the list of questions we asked Nancy Yao Maasbach, Melissa came up with the first 8 questions, meanwhile Tenzin came up with the remaining 7 questions to finish up the Skype Call interview. �When the interview was done, Melissa typed the transcripts for the first half of the interview, meanwhile Tenzin typed the other half of the transcript. In preparation for the presentation slides, Melissa uploaded the complete interview video to her google drive and shared it with Tenzin so each of us can find specific clip from the interview that answer the question to each of our slides. Melissa was responsible for the ‘Content’ slide and Tenzin was responsible for the ‘Process’ slide. Lastly, for the final report, Melissa and Tenzin split up the questions evenly again. This time, Melissa answered the questions relating to the contents meanwhile Tenzin answered the questions relating to the process of the interview/presentation. 5. Did the interviewee give you any documents or references to articles to read, or did she mention other people for you to talk to (or research)? Explain The interviewee did not provide us with any articles to read, but she did mention at the end of the Skype Call that if we ever needed another woman to have an interview on, she would be happy to provide us with the names and contact information upon request. SECTION FOUR (30 points) Insert your interview notes/write up here. Remember to be accurate and concise. Consider what was said, any emerging trends your interviewee mentioned, different interpretations, and recommendations for follow up interviews. Interview Notes Nancy grew up in Flushing, NY, in a bilingual family. Nancy speaks mandarin, she is Shanghainese & Chongqing descent. She felt that she had the “Soft image”, but she did not want to let her soft looks deceive others and take advantage of her. There was a time when her classmates on the school bus randomly made fun of her for being Chinese, she fought back by �cursing them out with the ‘F’ word. This was her very first encounter of racism.That was when she realized the power in her, that she is not willing to settle and let boundaries confine her.” She also mentioned how people would group her with other Asians in her class, and said how “Kenny Lee was destined to be with her.” She Went to Hunter college high school, president of student body, soft ball player, had a role in theater (got the script she wanted) but she had to give it up because her priority to get into a prestigious college like Harvard. However, she got rejected from Harvard. Rejection from Harvard allowed her to realize that she was not mature enough. At Hunter, she felt mediocre because she was not performing well academically. In middle school, it was easy for Nancy to get good grades which is why she said that her middle school didn’t prepare her enough because she had to compete with people who were not first generation immigrants. At Occidental College, her English professor pulled her out and asked her if Chinese was her second language. She felt targeted and unintelligent. She said this was due to reason that Hunter didn’t educate them on grammar. That’s why she felt like she wasn’t able to write at a college level, and often time she finds herself messing up her grammar while talking. However, she corrects herself when this happens. At Occidental, she minored in theater. She said that mentorship from an early age would’ve helped her to discover her career path in theater. This is why she truly encourages Asian Americans to have this relationship because it is important to get guidance and find what you are �passionate about. Moreover, she wants to inspire Asian Americans born in the U.S. and Asia to pursue careers that they want to pursue. When applying for jobs, Nancy was looking for a company that was well known and had prestige. That was Goldman Sachs. Nancy said getting accepted to work in Goldman Sachs was sort of like a redemption to get back at not getting accepted to Harvard. When they hired her, they thought she was a “China Hire”, but she had to confront them that she was not from China. Even though she was fluent in Chinese, she was not from China and thus did not have any relationships with other investment bankers in Shanghai or Beijing that will help promote the company. Her encounter with a coworker at G.S. made her realize that she doesn’t want to work there. Also, Nancy felt like she was a minority when working in Goldman Sachs. Nancy’s father worked for the first airplane company “Pan American” that gave them free tickets for international travel. This gave nancy the exposure to international relation from a young age. This also allowed Nancy to enjoy travelling and enjoy the process. Nancy’s mom went to college in Taiwan for a year, but never finished, and came to U.S went to bilingual school in New York. She remembers helping her mom with her college essays when she was 7 years old, and told her mother to improve her English. Thus, she did by subscribing to a magazine that had essays, and her mom would read it and translate it. Nancy used all her Chinese new year red pocket money ($60) and applied to Yale theater program, but did not get accepted. She realized she did not try hard enough, and said she “winged it” without enough practice, and was not mature enough for the program. She also �talked about the disadvantages being an Asian women. For instance, there were a lot of uncertainties about her potential, and inappropriate jokes were made in the international relations field that she was pursuing. Nancy briefly talked about the modesty of Asians and Asian Americans through her parents experience when they attended her 2nd grade parent teacher conference. She can resonate with this modesty when people praise her for her accomplishments. When people compliment her, she finds herself being modest with the compliments. Thus, her husband encourages her to accept the compliments when people compliment her. Furthermore, Nancy mentioned that she puts the museum first and cares more about building a positive reputation for MOCA than receiving an award for her service. As a result, she finds it hard to balance being a good wife and a good mother, and often feels like her professional and personal persona are different. “In China’s development, the markets were really beginning to form and I love the macro, the macroeconomic, the macro political components of living it and breathing it. I mean before I worked there in Hong Kong was Goldman starting in 1999, and I had worked there in 96’ and 97’ in two instances with CNN. I had followed the pre hand over and then the handover coverage for CNN. I love it. I was such an observer in that space...If you meet me in person, people are always like “oh” you’re so outgoing and all this, but I think in the core I really do like to research and study what is happening in the dynamics. Like I’ve had a lot of time alone. When you live abroad in international settings you have a lot more time by yourself and that's something I’ve learned to appreciate and I do appreciate. There’s a lot of that time on the plane, when you’re by yourself. There’s a lot of that down time when your family is not living with you because you’re 10,000 miles away that you’re by yourself and you’re having a cup of coffee by yourself. And �there’s a lot of that time in Hong Kong when you’re an expat or whatever you want to call it where you have a lot of time to observe and take down things so because I’ve had that very international sort of random places, I just feel like I’ve had a lot more time to observe and process some of those experiences. And it was good It was a very good time I did theater on the side as well there And it was difficult I felt like I had to prove myself In a somewhat tricky environment where There were assumptions about me. I felt like they hired me because they thought I was the China hire and I kept like saying Look I'm from Flushing, Queens Like born and raised. I speak Mandarin But I'm not your China hire I don't know anyone in Shanghai. I don't know anyone in Beijing And I mean my Mandarin is good but i'm not a native speaker. I’m catching up with myself a lot and my professional career, I kind of always feel like there are pockets of things I didn’t get exposed to. I feel like I wish I was a little bit more mature when I was working at Goldman. There weren’t a lot of people I knew who were investment bankers at Goldman and so I was really trying to figure out a lot of that by myself and also as a woman. You think about some of the people you may know. There are like generations of bankers, and some of them are White Anglo Saxons or they’re Jewish Americans and their parents and their grandparents are all bankers or their uncle was a banker. I really didn’t have anyone I knew who was a banker. I had to trial and error a lot of stuff.” “Everything after [Goldman] seemed easy after that. I wanted to leave Goldman because to be honest I felt that you know I paid back my loans that was a big part of my comfort level. And I kind of felt like my personality was changing a little bit, and I didn’t like that about myself. That was one thing. You know I’m Christian. My parents aren’t but I am. I went to church on my own from a very young age and I think fundamentally I was always seeking how I could be a more loving person. And I think for some reason and I’m not blaming Goldman. I don’t think it’s a �Goldman culture persay because certainly there are people who are god fearing good people working at Goldman, but for some reason the culture was affecting me in a way that I felt like I wasn’t being the best person I could be, and so like the moment sort of woke up to that and I think it was some interaction I had with a stranger where I wasn’t too sure. I was unhappy with myself in just that interaction, and it gave me a quick wake up call and I thought maybe my time is done in this institution. Then, getting myself right with who I am and how I want to interact with people on a daily basis regardless of where I worked. I think that was really important for me to sort of understand and recapture that. Everything else after I feel like it’s been pretty straight forward and really wonderful and special.” “ I was trying to redeem myself in a lot of ways… Goldman was a little bit of my redemption path. I’m good enough and I’m gonna look for the most difficult job that is the most competitive at the best firm. I felt satisfaction from getting it… it was something that I needed to accomplish to… it was making up time for something that I have not accomplish or didn’t live up to my potential.” SECTION FIVE (25 points) Your analysis: What aspects of the interview did you find to be particularly meaningful? What aspects were not useful? What more would you like to know? What other in-class presentations did you find particularly useful? Explain My partner and I found the actual interviewing aspect of the interview, being able to see her emotions through the videochat to be particularly meaningful. When our interviewee, Nancy Yao Maasbach, talked about growing up being pushed into certain roles because of her gender and the constant pressure to be a successful woman, we could see that it was a time of uncertainties for her. There was a lot of pauses when she thought back to this part of her memory �and all the things she could have done to pursue acting. Preparing a bunch of questions for the interviewee to answer was not useful because she answered most of the questions as she talk about her childhood, education, professional agendas and family relations. I would like to see the different roles she has in her daily life. I would like to know more about how Yao Maasbach’s days goes in a work day as the president of the museum and how she spends the remaining time with her family as a wife and mother. From the many excellent in-class presentations, I found the presentation on Sarah Park to be particularly useful because it portrays the life of a traditional Asian woman. The in person interview at Ms.Park’s laundromat makes the whole interview more realistic and relatable. At some point when Ms.Park mentioned about saving up money for her children’s education by not having a cellphone, it was very touching to see how much a mother can give up to contribute for her family. When she describes her strong devotion for God, I see a similarity between the missionary women we learned about earlier in class and their great dedications to missions motivated by their religion. Overall, the class itself and the readings provided us an in depth analysis on women and their international relations. We learn to appreciate and understand the works of women more than before. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180410_nyaomaasbach_doc_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Yanfen Huang, Melissa Kunsel, Tenzin Yao Maasbach, Nancy Title A name given to the resource Nancy Yao Maasbach Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-10 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/4588caf40f05d228fc370f668db399ea.pdf 68b151a16662a02ae8025afc1b549c5e PDF Text Text Image Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/monicawang/2016/07/25/from-goldmansachs-to-nonprofit-nancy-yao-maasbach-and-the-museum-of-chinese-inamerica/#3150960b1c2d �What is your interviewee’s mission or goals in life and how is she/he fulfilling this? How does her/his mission or goals relate to women’s roles in US-Asian relations? What did you learn from the interviewee that 1) reinforced things we learned in class and 2) provided new information? - Nancy Yao Maasbach is the president of Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) and her goals in life is to bridge the gap between Chinese Americans and Americans by providing the platform for individuals who struggles with fitting into his/her communities to explore their imaginations. Nancy struggled with expressing herself as she felt confined by social norms and expectations to do certain things in certain ways. Nancy shared with us her immense passion for theater, in which she was a theater minor when she attended Occidental College. - Nancy had spent all her “hong bao” money from Chinese new year on Yale’s application fee for their theater program, but only to be turned away with a rejection letter. She thought she wasn’t good enough. Luckily, Nancy was able to redeem herself through other areas of work when she received her masters in business administration and gained a job as an investment banker overseas at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Recruiters thought Nancy, ‘China hire’ where people expected her to have connections with the China market. She struggled for a long time to redeem herself through hard work to show that even though she was not a China hire, she was still capable for the job. It was �this job that challenged her to work to her full potential and eventually come to the realization that she wanted to help others who struggle with expressing themselves like her. - Nancy’s role as the president opened up doors for her to help those who struggle with being confined to certain ideas and stand for themselves. Programs at the museum allow people in the community to better understand the historical background of the Chinese communities in America and some of the struggles they faced. Nancy’s goals relates to women’s roles in US-Asian relations because Nancy was able to overcome the barriers that confined her thoughts and constantly trying to improve her role as a woman, which can really motivate other women in U.S-Asian Relations to follow the same path. Even though she still struggle with how to be a good mother, good wife, and good daughter, Nancy allowed us to see what it takes to be a woman in her position. Nancy shared similar goals as many other women we have learned about from our class, which is to take actions on matters that we value on. Just like the missionary women who went oversea to spread Christianity, Nancy was able to raise awareness in understanding one’s culture or identity before confining them to a certain specific norms. We were able to learn the importance of self-exploration and perseverance from Nancy. She allowed us to realize how important it is to speak up for ourselves and go with our intuitions when we are pursuing our interests. The process is what matters the most because what we learn from the process will be major factors that determine what we would like to do in the future in life. �How did the questions you asked your interviewee influence the type of information you received? If working in a team, explain your approach and provide an example of your active listening. Also, what were some of the verbal and non-verbal cues? Refer to the “How to Conduct an Interview” discussed in class. We asked Miss Nancy a variety of questions ranging from her ethnicity, childhood growing up in Flushing, Queens, her college and work experiences, and about her current position as the president of Museum of Chinese in America. The questions that my partner, Melissa, and I asked definitely influenced the type of information we received. For instance, in this one minute video, we ask Miss Nancy about her work experience in Hong Kong after leaving Goldman Sachs, and the challenges she encountered while making the transition. When questioning about her experiences, Miss Nancy answers saying that while living abroad, “you have a lot more time by yourself...to observe and process” things. After discussing about the “alone time” that Miss Nancy had while working in Hong Kong, Miss Nancy connected it back to her time working in Goldman Sachs where she felt like she had to “prove” herself. Moreover, she wished that she was more mature at the time. This response influenced the course of our interview and the follow up questions that we asked after. Before interviewing Miss Nancy, Melissa and I (Tenzin) had decided to equally split the questions that we were going to ask. Thus, Melissa asked the first 8 questions and I asked the remaining 7 questions on our list. Miss Nancy was able to provide �answers to questions that were asked, and also gave additional information which answered some of our other questions. This prompted us to actively listen and formulate new follow-up questions on the spot. These follow-up questions enabled us to move our conversation forward, and Melissa and I were both able to add our remarks in between conversations to avoid any awkward silence. While talking to Miss Nancy, her tone helped give meaning to her spoken message. When discussing about her childhood experiences growing up in Flushing, Queens she sounded very enthusiastic and happy to reminisce and talk about her past. This cue was expressed in a “Rate” way. However she also expressed her regrets and sorrow while in Hunter high school. She felt mediocre and not at the same level as the other kids because of her test scores and her GPA. During this conversation, we could tell that her tone and pitch of her voice was decreasing. We could also tell that her high school experience was not as great as she hoped it would be, which became increasingly evident through her facial expressions, eye behavior, and posture. Her face looked more serious, eyes were down, and her posture was not as straight. These were a few among many of the verbal and nonverbal cues we captured. Overall, this approach proved to be very effective and we were able to have a very interesting and enriching interview with Miss Nancy. The Interview lasted for an hour and 3 minutes. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180410_nyaomaasbach_ppt_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Yanfen Huang, Melissa Kunsel, Tenzin Title A name given to the resource Nancy Yao Maasbach Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-10 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Yao Maasbach, Nancy Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/487a24118a373306d299a46a4831e003.pptx b3db25f6c5d9aeb07186ca946f174b0f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180410_nyaomaasbach_master Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/ppt Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Yanfen Huang, Melissa Kunsel, Tenzin Title A name given to the resource Nancy Yao Maasbach Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-10 Type The nature or genre of the resource interactive resource Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Yao Maasbach, Nancy Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/d5b49951d241916f31d9cc3df2909333.pdf 4544d1625dc047adec39332625856065 PDF Text Text Nancy Wang and Her Career/Goals The women we interviewed is Nancy Wang. First let me briefly summarize the basic information of her, her job, her career, her mission goal and the relation between her and the women’s role in US-Asian relations. Nancy Wang is an Asian American. She was born and brought up in Louisiana, and now she is living in San Francisco, California, with her husband. Her father was American while her mother was Chinese. During her life, she desired to work in areas where she would serve people. Later on in life, her desire was to work as a dancer. Based on the interview, we know that Nancy’s father used to work for the State Department of security, he served as a common general in New Orleans, and her Mother was a Nurse. Due to her Parents job and the daily life influence of her parents, she said she was brought up with a good values and morals. She always knew that everyone has a duty to help others and serve for the community, the societies. Nancy’s first job after school was as a social worker. In there she helped different kinds of people by counseling them. According to what she said, the majority of the clients she took care of are all similar to her -- Asian American women. Her major work is to help them understand the difference between the western and eastern cultures, and how to balance these two. Later on, after finishing the career of a social worker, she become a dancer and contributed to spread the ancient Asian tale, myth and some other cultures by the 1 �traditional dance performance. Being a dancer also finally caused her to meet her future husband. See this man, he is Nancy’s husband, Robert Kikuchi. He is a Japanese American, same as Nancy, he also devote his life to be the Asian traditional dancer and a storyteller. Career/Goals and Her Mission and How She Is Fulfilling Them When we asked about her mission goal, Nancy claimed that her goals in life were to help people. Although later she changed her career from working with people to working for people. She was very successful in achieving and fulfilling her goals on helping people. Like what I just mentioned, she started a counseling organization where she worked as a social worker. During the years she worked as a social worker, she helped many people especially the younger women realize their potential. Her main aim was to blend the gap between the western culture and the eastern one, especially teaching them how they ought to regard either of the cultures. As a dancer, she travelled different places inspiring people through music. She was able to overcome the stigmatization of Asian and American and taught others the same. As a storyteller, she works with her husband Kikuchi, they created many kinetic stories, and many of them are focus on the topic of Asian folktales, immigration history, and some stories relate to her own life experience and the other Asian’s daily life in this country. This couple always use their great wisdom and life experience to combine those things, combine the music, dance, theater and the storytelling together to present for many countries audience. Like this picture, it’s in San Francisco’s Asian community, and they were performing opera which is about the traditional folktale in ancient China. Relation between her goals and career to that of women’s roles in US-Asian relations Finally ask about the relation between her and the women’s role in US-Asian relation. She conclude that In her life, especially her mission and career, relates greatly with that of Asian Americans women in US. Many of them struggle to feel at home without being isolated or discriminated against. They focus on building their career and helping others. That is what the life of Nancy is all about. Dancing, helping other, trying to feel accepted, studying, are some of the roles supported by the majority of Asian American women. 1 �After introducing ourselves and thanking Mrs. Wang for allowing us to conduct the interview, we began by asking an open-ended question: “Tell us a little about yourself and you career?”. This followed by more open-ended questions such as: “How has being a woman affected your career and how has that played a role in how you have performed and written your plays?” and “What do you think are the biggest cultural differences between China and the United States?”. These questions really provided us with an enormous wealth of information and even covered some questions that we didn't get a chance to formally ask Mrs. Wang. During one exchange, Mrs. Wang talks about how being a woman has affected her career and elaborates that although being one has had an impact on her experiences and career choices, she felt that her experiences couldn't be reduced to one characteristic about herself. She says that this is “what they call…” “I can’t remember the name”,” something about a crossover of things, as a female, as a minority, as an ethnic person of color, and all these ways that they crisscross each other and you don’t know what’s affecting what”. I respond by saying that that’s what you call “intersectionality” and she responds by saying “thank you, yes, that’s the word”. This was one of the best examples of active listening in the entire interview. (Top Audio) Because our interview was audio only, we could only pick up on nonverbal cues. 2 �During one part of the conversation, when talking about the differences between Chinese and American cultures, Mrs. Wang talks about how Asian Americans appear less confident than European Americans because of some of the cultural differences between the East and West. She explains that this appearance isn't so much a product of Asian Americans actual being less confident than other people, but rather a display of humility that is more prevalent in Asian cultures. For a brief instance she talks from the perspective of someone who mischaracterizes Asian people. From the way that she talks during this part of the interview, it was clear to me that she doesn't appreciate people who do this. The tone that she uses expresses a genuine sort of contempt for these attitudes. (Bottom Audio) 2 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180413_nwang_ppt_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chen, Trent YingZong, Feng Chang Seong, Bae Title A name given to the resource Nancy Wang Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-13 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/791348006feebe0082959efaf671c5d3.pptx fb779e9045e6f83566759ab39cd9da69 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180413_nwang_master Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/ppt Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Chen, Trent YingZong, Feng Chang Seong, Bae Title A name given to the resource Nancy Wang Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-13 Type The nature or genre of the resource interactive resource Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/5274572317668ae10c8aa91259c80802.pdf 81696177ebd98f3f95372edd580d12db PDF Text Text Flora Ho and Aashishpal Singh Final Paper Section 1 Person Interviewed: Sarah-Ann Smith Interviewee’s Title/Position: Ex-Foreign Service Officer in U.S. State Department, Author of Trang Sen, Public Speaker and Ex-Professor at the University of North Carolina Date, Time and Length of Interview: April 23rd 2018 at 4:00PM. The duration of the interview was approximately 52 minutes. Our objective in conducting this interview: Our objective was to learn more about Ms. Smith and her multitude of experiences throughout her career. We focused a lot on her work as a foreign service officer because at the time she served as one, it was extremely rare for a woman to obtain that job and title. Since her mission with the State Department was based mostly in Asian countries, we hoped that she could share with us her experience being a woman link between Asia and the United States. Section 2 Background information about Ms. Sarah-Ann Smith could only be found with detailed searches. Sarah-Ann Smith was a common name, therefore we added her book name, Trang Sen, and she was immediately found on Pisgah Press, which is known for their publications of books that provide insight into human conditions and the world around us. She was also found on LinkedIn, where we were able to get some educational and professional background on her. We became well aware of her tenure as a foreign officer for the U.S State Department and the great deal of time she spent at the American University studying International Affairs. �The real introduction to Sarah-Ann Smith began when we were connected through Professor Christoff. She immediately provided us with a copy of Ms. Smith’s most popular book, Trang Sen, and we contacted her through email. Ms. Smith provided quick responses and was very helpful. She provided us with her bio form from a previous interview, which gave us a broad overview of her most notable experiences and accomplishments. The bio went into detail about her duties in the state department, especially in Hong Kong, and her role in the triangular relationships held between China, Taiwan, and the U.S after the Vietnam war. Her exposure to the war had a big impact on her career, which actually inspired her book. She also speaks Mandarin and worked as a professor in the U.S, China, and Southeast Asia. Reading Trang Sen really gave insight on Ms. Smith’s view of life and her profession. The concepts of harmony between countries and understanding of each other’s culture are prevalent in her writing. This is mirrored through her work in foreign service and her international missions with the Presbyterian church. She saw herself as a bridge between the U.S and China. Through this background search, we learned so much useful information about Ms. Smith which allowed us to formulate the most appropriate questions for her. We wanted to learn what inspired her to get involved in foreign relations and what it was like being a woman in such a male dominated field. These were the questions we asked in our interview:       Tell us about growing up in South Carolina. Do you think that going to an all-women’s college influenced you to want to begin a career in international affairs since at that time, it was not encouraged for women to go into that field? What caused you to focus on Asian countries in particular? o What was it about these Asian men that really influenced you? What experiences did they share that really stuck with you? (Active listening - Probing) How did you begin your career in foreign affairs specifically within the US government? Was there any battle between getting involved in foreign policy vs. your faith in the religion, or do you think this went hand in hand? (Active listening) Do you think that while you were working in the embassies of other countries, you were treated differently because you were a woman? �  o So that invitation for tea that the general gave you. Do you think he would have given that invitation to a male officer? (Active listening – Probing) Do you think that the governments of other countries [Japan and Hong Kong] incorporate more women into their governments and embassies? Did you have some underlying goal in telling the story of Trang Sen? Section 3 Sarah-Ann Smith was a seasoned interviewee – it was clear that we were not her first interviewers. She was comfortable with anything we asked and provided detailed responses filled with interesting and useful information. We did our best to create a comfortable environment where Ms. Smith could speak as freely as she liked. Most of our questions were open-ended, allowing Ms. Smith to basically tell a story for each of her answers. This gave light to aspects in her life which weren’t covered in our list of questions. For example, our opening question simply asked what it was like to grow up in South Carolina. Her response gave us insight on her ideology which was influenced by a very “conservative and racist” area since the South was in mayhem during the time of the Civil Rights Movement. She explained how her upbringing is what influenced her to become involved in the Christian church. We had no prior knowledge of her faith in Christianity, however, we learned that her involvement in the church is what inspired her career in international affairs. We gained a lot of information by asking “why” and “how” questions to understand Ms. Smith’s reasons for her choices and how they influenced her career. We planned a structured interview for Ms. Smith, however, the open-ended questions created a more unstructured environment where we began probing to stimulate conversation on an unexpected topic, which she passively mentioned in her answer. For example, her unexpected mention of her devotion to the Christian faith reminded us of missionary women throughout history who saw Christianity as a means to spread Western influence and “save” people throughout Asia. We asked her to expand and it was nice to hear that her mission was not about �saving or transforming anyone, but rather to get people with differences to understand one another. We worked very well as a team. We were both on the email chain with Ms. Smith and worked separately and together on our pre-interview research. We were responsible for coming up with our own list of questions, from which we collectively picked out the best ten. Something that was very beneficial was reading Trang Sen before our interview. The book was relatively short and provided great insight on Ms. Smith’s views of the Vietnam War and ideology in life. It also helped us understand specific scenes Ms. Smith referred to in our conversation. Since we conducted our interview though the phone, and not video chat, we found it would be best for one person to do a bulk of the talking so that Ms. Smith could get comfortable with answering to one person. Flora handled this role and was great at probing for further explanations, allowing Aash to speak when he thought of something interesting. However, we both stayed active in the conversation to ensure her we are on the same page. Section 4 Interview Write Up (concisely) Sarah-Ann Smith grew up in Columbia, South Carolina in the 1940s and was surrounded by a “very conservative and racist world.” It was when Smith started working in Richmond, Virginia and attended a sit-in movement when she realized how wrong she grew up; this motivated her to begin to try and teach herself to think a different way. She gave us a little lesson about United States history to explain what she meant by these statements in case one got the wrong impression or interpretation. She explained that the South had been majority Democrat in the 1940s-1950s and later became Republican after the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s. �Therefore, the environment in the South was somewhat “racist” because of their Republican/conservative views during that difficult time. Smith attended a small all-women’s college in Charlotte, North Carolina. However, international relations had not always been the field of work that Smith intended to be involved with because she actually already had a career as a director of Christian education in a Church. In 1965, Smith moved to New York to work for the Presbyterian International Mission and Relations Commission during the Vietnam war and surprisingly, this is what caused Smith to be interested in international affairs. There, she met many intelligent young men from Asia who were students brought to America on scholarship by the Presbyterian Church that impressed Smith and after speaking with them, she learned how different their perspective was on U.S. policy was than those of Americans. This caused her to want to be more open towards other people’s points of views on American policies. This resonated with us because we learned in class this semester about the stark differences that Asian-Americans and other minorities faced growing up in America as opposed to White-Americans because they needed to learn how to assimilate into mainstream American culture while still being exposed to their native Asian cultures at home. We learned about how important these differences are when examining how a person grew up and the kind of impact it continues to have on him/her as an adult. In addition, many people in our class agreed that people from other countries often believed that Americans had a superiority complex that caused them to try and impose their superiority onto other nations which may have become clear to Smith at this time. After quitting her job in New York, Smith returned to school to obtain a master’s degree in international studies at American University in Washington. She had originally planned to do some work relating to international affairs education through some Church or non-profit �organization, but she soon became interested in foreign policy within the United States government. She took various exams for the government, including the foreign service exam and was later asked to join the foreign service with the class of 1973, which she, of course, accepted. At this time, she was only the fifth woman in the State Department’s history to to become a Chinese language officer and thus, she faced an enormous amount of discrimination during her time there. She even informed us that the reason she did not pursue a full 20-year career in the State Department, like most officers do, is because of how hard it was to be a woman diplomat at that time. To our surprise, Smith did not have a hard time relating to the Chinese or people of other embassies as a woman, but faced the most discrimination from her own American colleagues. One example Smith shared with us was when she was told that she needed to attend the tea [party] that the general’s wife had for all of the wives of the officers. Another highly inappropriate example of the discrimination that she felt was when she was the only officer to not be invited to a stag dinner for a Japanese diplomat who was actually a friend of hers. In regards to how she thinks the world is now on incorporating more women into their governments and embassies, Smith feels that “it’s a mixed bag but it’s not good. It won’t be good until its fifty percent-fifty percent.” She also believes there is still also a long way to go for us in the United States because we haven’t even had a woman president yet, like many other countries have! Although Smith went on to explain that she has long parted from her Church connections and now identifies mostly with Chinese Daoism, her experience with the commission still greatly impacted her career. The mission that she worked with was not like a typical American women’s mission where they went to other countries in hopes to save “the heathen” there and cleanse them with Christianity. This touched upon a theme that we learned in class in which many commissions believed they were doing something for the people of other countries instead of �trying to accomplish missions with those people. This may be due to the superior complex of Americans that we touched upon earlier. Instead, her mission had an open concept and philosophy; it understood that they needed to be in dialogue with not only indigenous churches in various countries around the world, but also with various faiths. This was similar to the ideals of Reischauer, who believed that missions in countries abroad, such as his in Japan, needed to be approached through assimilation to really understand them, and not criticism; he never saw himself as superior to the Japanese. This open mindset helped Smith during her work as a foreign officer by giving her the ability to stay neutral in times of conflict. For example, during her service, Smith worked a lot on the triangular relationship of Taiwan, China and the United States during the Taiwanese opposition movement. She felt that she had a better understanding of Taiwan than most Chinese foreign officers because of her experience with the commission since she was able to be more neutral, not pro-China nor pro-Taiwan, but to see Taiwan as an entity that is important on their own. She believed that the people of Taiwan had the right to their own space and political system (during a time when Taiwan was under the control of China). This triangular relationship of China, Taiwan and the United States, in which the United States stood as a guarantor of Taiwan to guarantee [to the UN and China] that they were only using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, seemed to be very important to Smith and her career because even after she left the State Department, she conducted several studies on the Taiwan opposition movement for the State Department since she knew how little the government paid attention to it. She even went around the United States interviewing leaders and asking them questions on what they thought they were doing. Clearly, Smith had an influential role in the relationship between the United States and China but she did not have much experience with women specifically in this role and thus, her �work actually did not involve “women’s work for women” much. She had made many connections with women in the consulates of other countries such as Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Iran, but she did not do any hands on work like report on women’s issues to the State Department or anything on that official channel. However, she did share with us that she often interviewed women who were active in the women’s movement, such as Diane Ying, who is the publisher of a Chinese newspaper and would have discussions with other Chinese women in power about women’s roles in the United States and China. Smith is also unmarried and does not have children so she was not subject to the ideals of “manifest domesticity” or the typical roles bestowed upon women by society, allowing her to be focused on her successful career. In our interview with Smith, she also shared the way that she came up with the idea of writing her book, Trang Sen. Surprisingly, she had not even been to Vietnam yet when she first got the idea. She was parked outside of a movie theatre in northern Virginia where she was watching dozens of Vietnamese immigrants wandering back and forth through a small shopping area when she decided she would write a novel about a Vietnamese girl who immigrated to America. She made it clear that she wanted to write it from the girl’s viewpoint and not from an American’s standpoint, exemplifying her understanding of other cultures. Smith’s style of writing is intuitive, and she often knows a general idea of what’s going to happen but none of the details along the way. Something interesting is that after she has come up with a scene or a series of scenes, she reads an anthropology book about the location of the scene, such as ‘village life in Vietnam’, and modify what she had wrote in order to be more accurate. Although she had never intended for Trang Sen to become a historical novel, she has found that it has come to be one after meeting with multiple book groups. She said that “once you write them, it is up to the readers to determine what they are.” �Lastly, Smith shared with us that her goal in her life is to help people better understand each other. This mostly involved trying to broaden Americans’ understanding of the rest of the world and the “others” in our own society. In her work as a diplomat, she saw her goal as serving as a bridge between the United States and China, by both explaining U.S. policy to others abroad and adding depth to her own colleagues’ understandings as well. Even now when Smith works as a public speaker and teacher, she continues to add to Americans’ knowledge of parts of the world where the U.S. is deeply involved. We think that our interview went very smoothly. Sarah-Ann has accomplished so much in her life and career that it was difficult to really ask all of the questions that we had for her with the amount of time we had set for our interview. We were so fascinated with her work abroad and as a foreign agent that we did not have much time to discuss her book and how it has influenced her since that is what she is most involved with in her work today. Sarah-Ann is just as brilliant as the women that we wrote about in our midterm papers, except we had the opportunity to actually speak with her and discuss her role in U.S.-Asian relations. We were lucky that she was so open with us and wasn’t hesitant to share personal stories from her life. Section 5 Sarah-Anne Smith has such a wonderful story and we have learned meaningful lessons through her experience. For example, Ms. Smith made it clear that she had no idea her career would take the path that it did since she originally wanted to work with the Church and not foreign affairs. She provided solace in letting us know that careers are filled with unexpected realizations and opportunities. She had become unexpectedly drawn to foreign policy while getting her masters at the American University, leading her to take various tests to work for the �U.S government. She went on attempting to get her PhD when we was asked to join the foreign service and her whole career trajectory changed. She went on to tell us about the discrimination she faced as a woman foreign service officer. It was such a surprise to learn that a majority of the sexism came from within her own department when we expected the U.S to be tolerant while foreign countries might take women less seriously. Yet, Ms. Smith states that the gender inequality prevented her from pursuing a permanent career in in foreign service. We did not find that Sarah-Ann said anything that was not useful to us in our interview. She made sure that everything she said had substance and related to the question. Even if she got off topic, it would lead us to a new fascination for us to ask about, not a roadblock. She would tell us about points in history that were important to her work and if we did not know much about it, she would explain it thoroughly to us and this would actually help us understand her life better. She stated mostly facts about her life and told us stories while trying to give as little of her personal opinions as possible. We do wish we could have learned more about her personal ideologies and views, but did not want to pry on aspects that she preferred to keep private. The thing about interviewing successful people is that we had to be careful of taking up too much time. Ms. Smith had so many interesting information to share with us that we didn’t get through every question we wanted to ask. We were prepared to speak more about Tran Sen, however, the information about her career and why she got into foreign service gave us more insight into her ideology and way of life. We also wanted to ask her about her personal life – family, friends, influences, and what she was up to now. A few of the in-class presentations really stood out to us and some that presented before us ended up being very useful when we were designing our own PowerPoint. One pair spoke about their interviewee, Eileen Lui, so highly because they were actually friends with her and �that stuck out to us because they truly wanted to spread her message and work. We realized that we needed to exhibit this same enthusiasm in our presentation as well. Another presentation was that of Rosemarie Barnett since she is an attorney in New York and we both want to be lawyers. Her advice to women about having to “borrow from the men’s playbook” was interesting; she feels that women often need to know how to brag about themselves like men do and it is not enough just to get the work done well anymore. We regretted that we did not ask Sarah-Ann about any advice that she would have for women hoping to enter the foreign service field; perhaps this is something we would like to ask in a follow-up interview. We also recall a presentation in class about a Chinese woman who owns a Laundromat and this pair stood out to us because they had actually gone to the interviewee’s place of work. We believe that they were the only pair to have interviewed their interviewee in person and was able to see firsthand what they have accomplished. We wish that we could have done the same with Sarah-Ann if she lived in New York. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180423_sasmith_doc_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ho, Flora Singh, Aashishpal Title A name given to the resource Sarah-Ann Smith Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-23 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/9e7f626041b8df67cf327c78e0f3a6ce.pdf 036087aa9b38b3d714953c7106ac29b6 PDF Text Text 1 �2 �Took turns asking questions We asked a lot of active listening questions and asked for more specifics based on something she said Open-ended questions Words of encouragement “right, wow that’s interesting” Very long interview – 52 minutes Non-verbal cues – unable bc skype issue but she was smiling a lot while we were on and joking She was very professional – cautious of giving too much of her own opinions, stuck to facts, answered with examples Duration and date of interview What did our questions center around How were the answers we received 3 � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180423_sasmith_ppt_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ho, Flora Singh, Aashishpal Title A name given to the resource Sarah-Ann Smith Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-23 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smith, Sarah-Ann Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/60477a3d3f295962c1cefd4167417489.pptx c6dad29d686fd007072c241557d8f144 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180423_sasmith_master Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/ppt Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Ho, Flora Singh, Aashishpal Title A name given to the resource Sarah-Ann Smith Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-23 Type The nature or genre of the resource interactive resource Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Smith, Sarah-Ann Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017 http://exhibits.library.stonybrook.edu/WUA/files/original/bae8ca61295de91d5130a010135d8df2.pdf ea3b5f02b52d7246b4f38d89b8d1b15d PDF Text Text 1 Joshua Kim & Yawen Tang AAS 307 Final Report SECTION ONE (5 points) Person interviewed: Sarah Park Interviewee’s title or position: Manager of a Martin’s Cleaners in East Setauket Date, time, and length of interview: Apr.12, 8:00 am, 35mins Our objective in conducting this interview: 1. Getting to know Sarah Park’s background: How’s her family status? How’s her childhood? How many years she has been lived in United States? 2. Getting to know Sarah Park’s work: Why she works at the cleaners? Does she own the store? What she does for her work? 3. Getting to know Sarah Park’s personal life: Is the married? Is she a religious? How’s her husband and children? 4. Getting to know the role that Sarah Park plays in the U.S.-Asian relations. We wanted to know whether Sarah Park ever met any discrimination against her. Also, we wanted to figure out how Sarah Park different from American women, and how she build up the bridge and understanding between American and Asian Women. �2 SECTION TWO (10 points) Before the interview, we only had her name and the name of the cleaners’ she works at. We wanted to find her on Facebook but failed, then we figured it is possibly because her store was not that well known. Then we found her store on the google map, with all the necessary information. For an example, we had discovered that her address is at 170 NY-25A, SetauketEast Setauket, NY 11733 and the dry cleaner place was called “Martin’s French Cleaners.” Moreover, we had discovered that her workdays and work hours were 8:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m. every day of the week besides Sundays and Mondays. Then, we started worked on the questions. Moreover, our original questions mainly focus on her work and the woman’s role she plays as a Korean American. With the help of our professor, we wrote the interview request for her in a letter, and we gave it to her in person. However, she did not reply to the letter, the most probable reason was because she was so occupied with her work. Thus, I (Yawen) went to her store again to schedule the interview time because of the lack of communication. When I talked to her, we found out that she has Korean accent, which means she immigrated to United States instead of being born here. Therefore, we changed and added questions about her immigration, and the life she had before she came to U.S. In preparation of the interview, we had fully charged our phone for recording and prepared a camera for photos and videos the day before we took the interview. We had also wore nicer clothes than usual to give off a professional attire and had practiced the interview questions beforehand so that we do not seem unprepared and as if we were reading our questions aloud for the first time. Our friends drove us to the interview site. �3 List your interview questions. What do you do on a daily basis for your job? How did you attain your current career? What was your early childhood like? Were you ever discriminated against racially? How does your career affect your family and what is their stance on it? Do you think that White Americans work harder than Asians or vice versa? How does your religious beliefs affect your life? SECTION THREE For the interview project, we got complete answers to our questions, despite Sarah Park not being fluent in English. She tried to the utmost of her abilities to give us answers that were not curtailed, but instead longer and more descriptive, in spite of the language barrier. For an example, one of the interview questions that we had asked her was “when you had came to American, what was your hardest challenge?” Her reply paraphrased was that she had arrived in America in 1982 because of her job in an airline company named CPA and worked there for a decade before quitting. Then she had gotten involved in real estate for four or five years. During that time span, she had met her husband married him, giving birth to two sons in 1986 and 1988. She also stated that they had finally opened up their dry cleaner’s store called “Martin’s French Cleaners” in 2002. As demonstrated in this example, she had answered other questions as well without us having to ask them at all to her. The questions that she answered in addition were �4 “Were you into any other career before you have attained your current job?” and “When had you first come to America?” The primary reason she had talked for a lengthy period of time was partially because we had given her positive verbal and non -verbal cues. The structure of our interview questions was mixed with simple yet specific questions and general questions. If we had simply done simple questions, we would have gotten very specific dates, nevertheless it would be meaningless without the actual content. On the other hand, if we had attained just broad questions without any specific and simple questions, our presentation would seem very vague and not professional. The simple yet specific questions were meant to complement the broad overview attained from the general question to make our presentation look professional and assert us being very knowledgeable about our subject. An example of a simple question would be that “What year did you attend your university that you had went to?” For a broad question, an example would be “please describe your early childhood.” The probing questions that we had used was “How did you do attain the current job you have presently” and “how does your job affect your family and what are their stances on this issue?” Because each of the questions covered a lot of additional information, it is considered an open ended question or a probing question. The answers to these questions were not specific, thus it had given considerable freedom to the interviewee to state information that is correlated with the issue. Since the question is not an easy question, the answer would inevitably be a complicated one covering many subtopics to answer the primary topic of the question. For an example, “how did you attain the current job you have presently.” The process that Sarah Park had used in answering this question was to mention what college she had went to which was �5 In- cheon college in Korea as well as the previous jobs regarding her as a real estate agent and a travel agent. She could have just said that I had married, and me and my husband in 2002 pooled our financial resources together in order to buy the dry cleaner store, however she had mentioned the whole backstory of the process getting there. Regarding our team strategy in completing our final interview project, Yawen and I had split the work. She had done the first slide called the “content slide” of our presentation regarding how our interviewee’s goals related to US- Asian relations and how our interviewee accomplished those goals. Also Yawen had to state how the information regarding Sarah Park related the information we have learned in class and also in terms of new information or additional information pertaining to Sarah Park. I had to do the “interview process slide” in which I had to describe the interview process such as emailing or calling the interviewee to schedule the interview as well as the interview experience. In addition, I had to mention specific verbal and non- verbal cues that we have to give Sarah Park, as well as verbal and non- verbal cues which we thought Sarah Park would express and thought we had to wary about and take into great consideration. Some of these cues were facial expressions, voice volume, voice inflection, eye contact, sighing, nail tapping, ect. Regarding the interview questions, roughly half of the questions that were used came from me while the other half came from Yawen. The interviewee did not give us any documents or references to articles to read, but she did mention how we could also interview her husband. However, since the project was only about one person and since they both worked together as co- owners of the dry cleaner’s store, we had politely refused. The husband was busy working in the back of the store, and we would have genuinely felt guilty if we had hindered the business any further with our presence making the customers feel a little uncomfortable and making the room more crowded than it had to be. �6 SECTION 4: Regarding emerging trends, Sarah Park mentioned how feminine power was weaker than today in the twenty first century. She had said how in the early 1980s she was the only female member of her family that attended college, and how it was a big step for her. Instead of discouraging her, her parents had encouraged her to do the best she can do without having any regrets of the results if they turn out to be as not as good. Sarah Park then mentioned the new academic trend which was about how even more women today attend college, and making up now over fifty percent of the total populations in colleges throughout America, outnumbering the percentage of males in college by a small degree.. Sarah Park also mentioned parents’ different interpretation of sacrifice for their offspring between Asians and Westerners. Parents making ultimate sacrifices for their children tended to be more prominent in Asian culture rather than Western culture. In other words, American families did help out their children financially, but perhaps not to the extreme degree in which Asian families sacrificed for their sons and daughters. She then stated how her family made sacrifices financially by saving every bit of their hard earned money to send her to college. Examples were that they did not go out to restaurants as often as they once did, they bought more cheap fast foods, instead of the expensive organic food products, and stopped shopping for new goods such as clothes and new cellphones altogether. This in turn, affected Sarah Park, when she became a mother of two sons who were ready to go to college. She had said how she gave up her own cell phone to save income, because there only needs to be one cellphone between her and her husband. Another example was how she said “I don’t need three meals a day, I can just eat two meals a day.” Despite this, she did not cancel any of her sons’ cellphones, which meant that �7 she still had to pay their phone bills and did not want to upset them by taking away their phones. Her sons realized this and appreciated it. In terms of her recommendations of future interviews, Sarah Park had stated how it was extremely helpful that we had sent her the interview questions beforehand, so she was prepared to answer the questions more easily and said to keep doing that from now. She had also appreciated the fact that we had come early in the morning which was the time she had said for us to come visit her. This was because during the early morning she was not very busy and had the most time to spare for the interview. Perhaps this was the reason why she did not show any negative verbal or non- verbal signs to us to leave or end the interview sooner. The fact that we had adapted to her preferences immediately due to our flexibility with time was appreciated by her as well and was she said to us to apply that to future interviews as well. Interview notes: What do you do for your job on a daily basis? Basically the cleaner’s work in our store is separate in two areas workwise. I am covering the front and my husband is covering the back. We have a tailor and presser and my husband and myself. So what we do when the customer comes in, they bring a bundle of clothes for cleaning, then i made the ticket and tag an after the cleaned garment is I take it over and inspect if it is good enough for the press, after I start it bag it and load on the computer. My husband inspects it again after it is bagged, if there is something wrong with the clothes I talk to my husband personally. Cleaning is divided in two ways, wet clean and dry clean. Some of the garment is not good enough for dry clean. The closest explanation of wet cleaning is like handwashing. �8 What was your early childhood like? My father was a banker so for that year we have to move around, because at that time, many areas did not have a bank, so my dad established a bank. We have to move towns for that year, it was when was really young in elementary school. It was a countryside, but I have that memory which was beautiful, there were rice fields, farms, and a lot of children my age who would play all day long until dawn. It was a really bright and happy experience. But by middle school my family and I had to look for the college, so I had to study a lot. “Were you ever discriminated against racially in America?” I expected it and I did not care much about what other people thought of me and the attitudes of strangers meant nothing to me. I did have a few rude cases here and there, however there was not much instances of racism here in America. “How did your career affect your family?” I could not take care of oldest son who was in ninth grade. I understood that he was not a baby, however it is was the first time that I could not take care of him because I was busy with work. My philosophy was to suffer as fully as possible and as much as possible. When my sons were in the second and fourth grade –that was the first time in which I could not take care of them. My life exists to suffer for my children. When I had arrived home, it was already dinner time. Before, I used to always be with the children twenty four hours a day besides them being in school. “Do you think that White Americans work harder or do Asian immigrants work harder?” “The circumstances that the first generation immigrant lived life differently from the Americans. America was on the top and it is economically different for white Americans versus Asian �9 immigrants. There is not much free time for us (first generation immigrants), that is the way we had lived, and of course work is different, because we have to work in order to survive. Our attitudes are also different than Americans, because we feel like we don’t belong here. How do you think that your religious beliefs affect your life? I think that religion is different based on your personality. My personality is always asking questions such as “where did I come from ?”, “why the world is not treated equally?”, it bothers me a lot. My family in Korea was not rich but I have no memories or experiences in which money was a big issue. Everything was in my hands, whatever I had wanted, in other words I’m not that greedy and not much I wanted because we are not rich. I never felt any shortages financially . However later we had financial crises two times. The first time the store caught on fire and the second time is when my husband broke up with his partnership with his friend in business. However, I never experienced financial crisis until that moment. It was already early 40 for my age and the first time I thought about it. When I was in first or second grade, the pastor came over and my mom and pastor came out from the living room to the garden, my mom gave him something, I knew it was money. Then pastor in Korea was not that financially stable. I wondered why my mom gave money to him, is it not better that money goes in the offer, my mother was a Christian so I grew up in church and learned about ethics, but because that kind of question, my husband became baptized and married me and went to church. For the time of the financial crisis it was suffering and I could not spend enough time with my children, and I wanted to do something else besides making money. I just need basic housing. Three meals a day? I can make it two. We also thought about bible and church and religion. Though my husband and I are two totally different people personality wise, our Christian beliefs connect us and make us one and make us closer in our relationship. �10 SECTION FIVE (25 points) What aspects of the interview did you find to be particularly meaningful? There are many aspects of Sarah Park we find to be touching and interesting. The first thing is that Sarah Park helped us to know how a mundane Asian woman can have such strength and determination for her family. Sarah Park’s father was a banker, therefore, even though Sarah Park’s origin family was not incredibly rich, she grew up from a middle upper class family in Korea. Moreover, Sarah never had a memory of lacking money in her original family of the past, and she went to college to pursue her dream, which is an opportunity that is very challenging to acquire in Asian countries back in the 1970s. Growing up in such a family, Sarah Park is not a weak woman or a spoiled one. She tried her best to save money for her family, especially for her two sons. The resilience and resolve from her have been showed from her experience. We also found Sarah Park’s religious belief is very important of defining her. Even though she is occupied by her work, she still tries her best to go to the church as frequently as she can. As a businesswoman, she has so many questions to ask herself, but none of these questions is about money. She wants to know “where did I come from ?”, “why the world is not treated equally?”. Her religious belief makes her care about not only herself or immediate family, but also others and the whole world. Her daily work routine at the cleaners does not stop her being someone that thinking of philosophical questions. Of course that she is not like a famous political figure, but she serves as an epitome of thousands of ordinary Asian women who live in US who are trying their best to support their family and keep their own faith. �11 What aspects were not useful? What more would you like to know? We find the interview as whole is very meaningful, and each question does lead us to somewhere. However, if we have to say, we think her daily work routine is not very useful to our interview. We spent three mins on how she does her work, which is neither interesting nor defines her character. Also, we think the specific information of her sons is not very useful either, such as when did she give births to her two sons and how they spoke Korean. These details are not very useful to the interview. Sarah Park is a very interesting lady but we did not have enough time to talk with her. We want to know more about her personal life. We want to know questions like “Does she have time to hangout with her friends? ””Are they mostly Korean or American? ” Because she is a highly-educated woman, we also want to know how does she think the political environment in Korea compared to in U.S.? We are also curious about does she ever feel depressed or disappointed of doing her current job, for she went to college but ended up with doing some profession that does not require high education. What other in-class presentations did you find particularly useful? Explain The presentations which I (Yawen ), had found useful and interesting were about Eileen Lui and Grace Young. For the first presentation, Eileen Lui is the Founder of “Soyai” which is a social enterprise whose purpose is to help the youths in underdeveloped areas of countries such as Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, etc. She had used to work at Cambodia, and volunteered for children with the disease HIV at orphanages. Many of these children were without hope, because they knew that they were gravely ill, however Eileen Lui gave them hope and happiness by playing with them, talking to them, and simply being with them. In addition, she supported a monastery in Cambodia and financially supported them, however the people in charge of the �12 monastery continuously asked for more and more money. Thus, she had to ask her friends in Malaysia to sponsor a youth center there. In that youth center, she had encouraged teens who were old enough to work stating to them that they were the oldest out of the kids and needed to step and take responsibility financially wise, though Eileen would keep supporting them for a while, she could not do it forever. Moreover, at their request she helped them learn basic English and learn how to use computers. As a result, they had attained jobs such as interior designers and programmers who now could use computers to help them work. Eileen Lui really left a lasting impression on those in need in the Asian countries she had visited and helped, through her social work. She did not have to be as an Asian immigrant to comprehend the hardships people are enduring and suffering through, as a Asian American she wanted to uplift these impoverished people in Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar. Though at first, bombarded because of the financial demands of the monastery, she established a permanent youth center mentioned previously to establish a sustainable and permanent way of life for the teens and children there, not simply a temporary way of life receiving her money, however not working or having no way to work. Another presentation which I found useful was Grace Young. She is a cookbook writer who has integrated storytelling and traditional cooking to her books. Grace Young was a Chinese immigrant and learned traditional cooking techniques from her parents. She had visited chefs in China to see how they cook and if she could learn new additional recipes from her native culture. When she was arrived there and was in the Chef’s kitchen, she noticed that he used a different type of sugar from rock sugar for the recipe of pork belly, which consisted of the ingredients of rice wine, soy sauce, cinnamon, ect. Also regarding her personal life, her own shyness was her main obstacle. Her goal was to bring the Western World and the Eastern World together and keep Asian tradition ongoing in the ever changing world. My personal opinion regarding her �13 goal is very positive, and I admire how she is working in her own ways no matter how small to uphold traditional values and gain acceptance from more and more Westerners of all native Chinese dishes through the work of her cookbooks which introduce such dishes to the Canada, America, United Kingdom, etc. Her desire to combine both worlds and be a bridge between them can be compared to Pearl S. Buck, though a smaller scale which involves cultural foods. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Women in US-Asian Relations Student Oral History Project Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context aas_2018_20180412_spark_doc_dis Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kim, Joshua Tang, Yawen Title A name given to the resource Sarah Park Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-04-12 Type The nature or genre of the resource text Description An account of the resource Every fall, students at Stony Brook University in class, AAS/POL 307 (Women in US-Asian Relations), set out to interview women who are committed to enhancing US-Asian relations. Women's contributions occur at many different levels of society and encompass a variety of occupations. In conducting oral history interviews, students prepare documentation for the Stony Brook University Melville Library's digital collection and, in the process, acquire deep knowledge about women's social, cultural, political, and economic roles in the United States and Asia, which includes those in Asian American communities. Each interview consists of multiple files, including: a text document and Powerpoint slides, which were converted to PDFs for this digitization project. The project is a joint effort between the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and the University Libraries. Subject The topic of the resource Asian Americans--Study and teaching Women social reformers--Asia Women social reformers--United States Oral history Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted (URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-EDU/1.0/). Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Christoff, Peggy Spitzer -- Senior Lecturer, China Studies. Director of Undergraduate Programs: Asian And Asian American Studies. Relation A related resource AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject AAS_POL_307_OralHistoryProject_2017